Forecasts of genetic fate just got a lot more accurate
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
I find that comparison highly misleading, height was always a reasonably 'simple' trait with very high heritability that is (in our society) relatively uninfluenced by environment. Here's a 2009 paper showing that you can predict height reasonably by averaging the parents' height (the 'Victorian method'). https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg20095
It's one of the few traits where you can do that well, so why would you use that as an example as to why genetics-based tests are getting better? All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
>When they built a predictor for coronary heart disease, for instance, Kathiresan’s team discovered that the people it predicted to have the very highest risk, the top 2.5 percent, had four times the average chance of developing clogged arteries.
So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
I think it's this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3914 As the scientists correctly pointed out, they only looked at Europeans, so who knows how this fares with Asians or Africans (likely: not well). None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
Why this matters: In countries like Australia, unlike Germany, there is no protection by the law from insurance companies who don't understand genetics. People can and have lost life insurances due to the results and questionable interpretations of genetic tests. I can only hope politicians don't read this article.
The point of the height GWAS example is that because it is so very obviously, even to the naked eye of the layman, genetically influenced and objective (you can't argue height doesn't exist), it serves as a simple test. If GWASes can't predict height, they probably can't predict anything else. And this was exactly how height was used back in 2009 or so when the 'missing heritability' debate was still going: if all these traits are genetic and additive, why aren't the GWASes able to find anything for height (back then)? The answer turns out to simply be that there wasn't enough data and the linear model analyses were lousy. Now there is enough data and better algorithms are being applied, so as expected, height prediction works much much better.
> All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
No, not really. That sort of polygenicity is the norm. Look at, for example, Shi et al 2016 which attempts to model the distribution of effects & thus polygenicity of 30 human complex traits: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/14/035907 . Height doesn't exactly pop out of any of the charts.
> So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
...coronary artery disease should be quite obviously a higher base rate than 0.0005%. In any case, I believe the referenced study is Inouye et al 2018, in which case the extremized prediction is ~8% vs ~30% lifetime risk: https://www.gwern.net/images/genetics/2018-inouye-cad-riskpr...
> None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
It's the total that matters.
No rational human being should consent to their genetic information being correlated with their IQ. This kind of data is a surefire way to convince otherwise entirely capable people that they should give up on life. It's abhorrent that anyone could conceive of trying to make money out of such a test.
For me, it would help to have a somewhat accurate prediction tied to my Fitbit that shows me right now the benefit of my hour cardio every day. My doctor could look at my physical activity vital signs pulled from wearables during my physical and give me personalized advice “You’re going to die 6 years earlier because of your genes+your diet+your excercise with 20% margin.” Is a lot more effective than “your diet and excercise suck, it will have some unquantified negative impact. But you might be fine, who knows.”
But the idea that you have absolute risk/gains from just genetics is a little unreasonable in the world of health rather than disease. For example you might have a predisposition for being incredibly stubborn and single minded (a mental trait) and utterly overcome any slightly weak cards nature dealt you for your physique. I think almost everyone can relate to that concept. We all put effort into our weaknesses most of the time, and then become highly proficient almost in what we are worst at innately! If you were told somehow your IQ is genetically average... so? IQ is a sliding scale constantly normalised as time goes on. Average IQ now is relatively much higher than a hundred years ago. The same is true with sporting achievement we have seen linear improvement in almost every sport since records started. At some point we will reach the limitation of sports science and brush up against genetic hard realities about physical muscle or oxygen transport. But not yet, and not for most people wishing to become fit and healthy. It's a genuine mix of genetics and what you are doing with your life, not some block thats genetic and then lifestyle both influence each other. You can live your life slightly abnormally to maximise your genetics. That function is very complex and personal. To talk of average risk change with genetics is almost to completely go against the whole point of the technology!
While I agree that genes aren’t absolute, but 1) sometimes it’s pretty close and 2) it doesn’t need to be absolute if it results in improved rates of behavior change.
I’m familiar with a condition with really high penetrance. So while not absolute it’s really high and almost a certainty. If computing could tell me how different risk factors or behaviors could offset or mitigate in understandable terms, that would be useful.
I’ve looked at sites and they all seem to reflect pretty blah guidance that isn’t specific enough to be able to model personalized changes. But I expect that to change with all of these large genetic data sets and trials going on.
Being fit and healthy would be great for everyone. But 60% of the US isn’t oversight or obese because they are stupid or lazy. It’s just hard and made harder by a very disconnected feedback loop.
Your reality is better than the test predicted? You beat the genetic lottery! Go show to those correlations and the whole world what you really have in you.
Your reality is worse than the test predicted? You are not making full use of your genetic potential! Work harder on yourself and you could improve tremendously. If only you had known sooner that you were born for greatness.
Sure, that's no different than astrology, but lots of people are quite happy about taking advice from astrology. Genetic testing would have the additional advantage of having at least some relation to reality.
Life is not binary. I will never be a pro athlete yet I can enjoy doing sports.
Sure, but what if someone did a genetic test at this point and told you that your genetics would have made you a world class something-or-other? You missed your calling, how would that make you feel? For others it might help justify a failure and cause them to give up.
For a lot of people, life is a journey of discovery and pushing limits. We've seen that telling people they're inherently good at something can make them underachieve due to reduced effort. Giving people preconceived notions of who they are can be as harmful as giving them false hope.
>For others it might help justify a failure and cause them to give up. / For a lot of people, life is a journey of discovery and pushing limits.
Yes, people are different. It would help some, it would bring other down. It's not an obligation so I don't see the harm there.
Instead of choosing partners based on short term metrics and hoping for the best, people would be able to select with more confidence that their children with someone would come out the way they like.
To me this kind of tech is a great way to leave a dent in our universe. A world filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer children is a world that is eventually filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer adults, who then go on to have even better offspring and accelerate the evolution of mankind into a more civilized species. Perhaps then we can finally see the end of war and ridiculous squabbles over matter.
I personally may take a stab at creating a dating service like this if the pieces are all there someday, but I’d hope by then someone else will have beaten me to it.
In other words, a eugenics profile.
Why stop at dating apps? You could put the data mortgage applications, insurance profiles, and more. I can imagine some of the conversations wouldn't be too far off this:
"I love you, but with a 22% chance of our kids having brown eyes and a 56% chance of high cholesterol, I have to end the relationship."
"The bank denied the application, because you're at a higher risk for a myocardial infarction by the age of 50."
"My car insurance rates will go through the roof if I put you on my policy because you're genetically predisposed to drive more aggressively than me."
To overcome local minima though you need large sources of perturbation while looking for solutions to approximate anything close to a "global minima".
Evolution also automatically focuses it's attention on traits that survive better as the environment changes. Will our assessments continually assess the environment and make changes based on that? Can that ever be truly representative of gene expression that is definitely better for survival?
So long as there is constant conflict around this and one side doesn't outright win, I'm ok with it tbh.
Evolution is not optimal for social fitness because societal factors change much more rapidly than what natural selection alone can respond to.
There may be some conflict over this at first, but humans born in a post-eugenics era will not share your view and will likely dismiss it.
Huh? Evolution produces social organizations of all sorts. Do you think the complex social systems of higher primates come out of their reading Derrida or something? Evolution doesn't operate on social organizations directly, but it can certainly select for the brain structures and personality traits that tend, over time, to result in successful organizations. Why would that not be the case? Any time you have descent with modification and some selection function, you get evolution.
This sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. Any sources?
[1] http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/167win10/Hamilton64b-thegene...
You could argue that the opposite of what you describe is happening. health tech means that many selective forces like congenital diseases and birth defects have less of an effect. Online dating also seems to have increased interracial dating.
What _is_ happening and has scary ramifications for society is called assortative mating, which normally happens along educational and financial lines: https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595972-how-se...
Anecdotal but as an Asian male this hasn’t been the case for me at all. I posted my stats on HN a few months ago but from thousands of profile interactions I’ve had practically zero mutual interest from non-Asians. That’s not an exaggeration either, I literally have a zero percent approval rate from white women, the majority ethnicity in my current city.
Every single Asian male friend that I know of didn’t meet their non-Asian SO online dating, but met them in person from work/school/group events. Likewise, every non-Asian female I’ve ever dated I met offline first.
When I was dating, it seemed like anyone interested in me was either an otaku or a weeaboo :p
However, the data regarding interracial dating says otherwise: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609091/first-evidence-tha...
Note that the future may not have arrived in all places equally at the same time.
I could go on about my (Belgian Shepherd purebred) dogs who suffer from an insufficiency of grandparents, but life is short. I love them anyway, but in future will be looking for crossbred puppies.
The skeletal problems are 1 - not the most common factor of reform, and not really that common 2 - not hereditary most of the times but come from housing and such. The average is certainly not 3 years but a bit higher, around the double actually, as at 3 years you barely had the time to end the first lactation, which is the worst one for milk production. Antibiotics are needed because of the environmental pressure and modern breeding methods more than genetic factors, by far.
Honestly you just threw a bunch of non-sense about a field you clearly don't know at all. I really would like to know how people can have such vigorous claims about things they don't know an ounce about.
As for your dog you're proving my point : hereditary diseases are a big thing in purebred and you sadly got one that wasn't from a very clean pedigree (honestly Belgian Shepherd are by the way really far from the worst breed in that aspect btw so either you're unlucky or you didn't search too much for a good breeder before acquiring your pet). But good breeders now are systematically testing reproductors and offspring for well known diseases in each breed and it helps reducing their incidence.
see for example : https://www.petmd.com/dog/care/evr_dg_purebred_dogs_complica...
We could do the same with humans, if two people want to have a child but have high risk genes, it would be cruel and irresponsible to conceive a child, perhaps even criminal. No child should have to endure a lifetime of suffering with a bad quality of life under a crippling genetic disease because of their parents ignorance or apathy.
But of course, we have Anti-Vaxxers and whatnot in this world so maybe some people will just do it on purpose anyway because it’s “the natural way”. Sickening.
However, in the long term, it might not be a good idea to select, and likely reduce the human gene pool, because you can not know what will be useful in the future. For example, the Spanish Flu of 2087.
On the other hand, it is possible humans will become that good at genetic engineering that a small gene pool won't be an issue because we will be able to update and adapt it easily if new conditions arise.
As for production animals it has been going on for even longer, especially in cattle. And we've got good perfomance there too on mesurable metrics.
But real survival characteristics are small, hairy, lazy, put on fat easily, avoid danger wherever possible, etc. So what are you actually optimising for?
They're very different. The most obvious example here, and one that goes all the way back to perplexing Darwin, is peacocks. Male peacocks (which is a tautology - 'female peacocks' are peahens) have absurdly enormous tails and their entire body screams 'Hey, I'm here - come eat me.' And predators do just that with much greater ease than they do for peahens. But ladies dig the peacocks with the biggest, loudest, most absurd set of feathers - and so that's what we get.
Evolution is fundamentally not so much about survival, but about passing on genes - having babies. Surviving longer generally correlates with this, but evolution would happily pick for shorter life expectancy in exchange for a greater probability of passing on those genes.
Right, it’s partly a trope because it looks good on screen, but also because it superficially seems to make sense. But it’s what killed off the Spartans...
Gattaca
To me this is good, and is basically what happens now only a lot less efficiently.
Genocide is completely unnecessary, and is basically for governments with bad agendas and impatience to wait for genes to improve naturally.
Improve relative to what?
The ideal human in 12,000 BC was a furry mess who would hunt mastodons with their nails.
The ideal human in 4,000 BC was a farmer that could bend double in their waist to plant and pick produce from the ground.
The ideal human in 1,200 AD was a bow legged hugely muscular chest that would stand being on a wet saddle for a week at a time.
Maybe we can build a site like that, but you've ignored the question of whether we should build it.
I’m not going to lose sleep over debating whether I should or shouldn’t build it: I’ve made up my mind, I will build it if the necessary services all exist and no one has done it well yet.
When you’re trying to change the world there is always going to be resistance from people who want to preserve the status quo. In this case, you are that resistance.
This train of thought never terminates. People say this and then someone does the thing and then people keep saying it because it sounds good.
The problem with this Jurassic Park question [1] is it says nothing. If you think we shouldn’t, say so and give your reasons. If you think we should, but with limits, suggest those limits. If there is a group whose needs are not being thought of, state that and proffer a solution.
[1] http://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/jurassic-park/397/
I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.
If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).
Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).
The other thing is that the way I like to think of our brain is like a muscle. Our DNA drives much of the range in which we can develop our muscles, people born with a certain body type will never be an athlete, but even if you are born with good muscular capacity, a KFC-eating couch potato will never get to the olympics. What one does with this capacity matters a lot. Only science will tell but I like to think that the brains works in a similar way. Some kids will never be geniuses but there is still a wide range in which they can evolve so there is no reason to corner them in a box.
So the idea that people in general aren't going to mistreat and over-interpret the information gathered is a little ambitious.
Scientific facts about ourselves, both general and specific, are among the most painful. We go through lives deluding ourselves. That's why modern scientific introspection is so important and why it'll ultimately lead to a better world.
It's not my reaction I'm worried about, it's the reaction of the companies I interact with that want to make a profit off me.
It's certainly possible to charge people more or less based on whether or not they won the genetic lottery. It's also a really shitty thing to do.
Despite it being fiction, it goes pretty deep into eugenics and genetic discriminationin a modern society.
Answering my own question : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenic_score
Are you meaning moral blank slate, intellectual blank slate or some combination of them?
Do you want to know what impact genes have (lots and lots with current knowledge)? Or pretend it doesn’t?
Knowing will let us take steps as society to equalize fairly (improve below mean hopefully).
Otherwise you're depriving some people of potential and help.
Remember that mean is not the determinant.
I specifically meant the average intelligence, not the median human.
Although I assumed that the mean would be higher than the median since IQ has a lower boundary of zero. If median is higher than mean then I agree with you.