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Comment by copsarebastards | Hacker News Reader

This brings up a number of problems with the current approaches to gathering signal from the noise of DNA, but it's making the deeper argument that DNA may not contain much useful information. I don't think it met the burden of proof for that argument. It's a popular argument: we want to believe that our attributes aren't predetermined, that we have free will, so we want to believe anything that downplays the role of nature in the nature vs. nurture debate. But really this is still a big unknown. I very much doubt that the difficulties we currently have with gathering useful information from DNA are unsolvable.

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DNA is just a small part of what makes up the functioning whole of an organism. The Transcriptome, Proteome, and the Metabolome are just as important to determining the outcomes of genes.

It's like understanding what parts are in your car but not knowing how much gas is in the tank, how far the pedal is pressed, or even what gear you're in. It's still an incomplete picture.

Disclosure: I studied cancer metabolism in grad school so I'm a little biased to think that the Metabolome is the functional endpoint of genetics and all its associated modifiers.

Well, in the nature vs. nurture debate I'm not really interested in taking a side; I want to figure out the truth. I'm relatively certain that it's a split. I just want to caution against a common human bias in favor of nurture, which this article seems to be affected by.

I think one of the problems is that the sequencing boon has led to a shift in grant funding and research direction towards global hypothesis generating studies rather than hypothesis driven studies. These may find statistical associations between DNA variations and phenotypes but tend to avoid doing the difficult detailed characterizations that will help us understand the functional / molecular context.

True. You do have to generate hypotheses before you can use them to drive studies, though. Those statistical associations enable the detailed studies by telling them where to look.

> we want to believe that our attributes aren't predetermined, that we have free will, so we want to believe anything that downplays the role of nature in the nature vs. nurture debate

Who wants to believe this? It seems pretty lop-sided to accuse the "nature"-skeptics (or "nurture"-proponents) of falling prey to confirmation bias, when our history is littered with much more evidence of the atrocities committed by eugenicists.

Even today, it seems that many people who are successful are desperate to find out how much it is their innate destiny, due to genetics. It certainly provides great justification for providing solely for yourself and your offspring instead of for caring for a big social safety net and whatnot.

> Who wants to believe this? It seems pretty lop-sided to accuse the "nature"-skeptics (or "nurture"-proponents) of falling prey to confirmation bias, when our history is littered with much more evidence of the atrocities committed by eugenicists.

Ugh, eugenicist atrocities have literally nothing to do with the science. Believing that nature is the leading cause of characteristics does not justify eugenics. And even if this did, how on earth does this disprove that nurture proponents are experiencing confirmation bias?

I'm not a nature proponent (or a nurture proponent). The fact that many nurture proponents experience confirmation doesn't prove them wrong; I'm merely saying that they're believing what they believe for the wrong reason.

> Even today, it seems that many people who are successful are desperate to find out how much it is their innate destiny, due to genetics.

This does not in any way disprove that some nurture proponents are experiencing confirmation bias.

Overall you've made this gigantic logical leap that because a small subset of nature proponents did bad things, nurture proponents must not be experiencing confirmation bias.

And before you make yet another logical leap and assume I'm talking about all or most nurture proponents experiencing confirmation bias, I'm not. I've said "we" to talk about a common human motivation, but I'm really talking about what I think the motivation of the author of the article is. I'm not making any claims about other people.

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