Directional dominance on stature and cognition in human populations (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Directional dominance on stature and cognition in human populations (2015)

nature.com

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Please don't editorialize titles - this is in the site guidelines: ""Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." -https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Of course it's a good intention to help explain the content of a paper, but you should do that by posting a comment to the thread, so your interpretation is on the same level as everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

(Submitted title was "The further apart your parents were born, the higher your IQ and height".)

Thank you, dang for all that you do! The title resonated and was consumed when it was more accessible, but now the scientific name makes the conclusions inaccessible to most readers, and it went quickly below the fold. The question is do we communicate the insight or let the sophisticated language burry the information. You can change it to anything you like, as always, but I think it would help to make the title more accessible.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the interpretation "the scientific name makes the conclusions inaccessible to most readers". It's not that abstruse, and if instead of editorializing the title you had posted a comment to the thread explaining the paper's findings and what's interesting about them, that might have worked fine, and would have stayed within the site rules.

Of course no handful of simple rules can cover the nuances of all cases and I don't mean to say they work perfectly.

Had to think about "homozygosity" for a bit. The science jargon makes my brain turn off. I thought the original title was translating, not editorializing (maybe clickbaity to leave out the [small] effect size).

The study was done in Japan, which in addition to the usual considerations about populations that may have a confounding bias with regard to educational attainment and cognitive performance, is magnified considering that we have a fairly homogeneous society generally averse to immigration, so finding subjects with geographically distant parentages within this population is going to yield a cohort that is unique in a lot of ways perhaps not accounted for in this model.

On the other hand, scientific data that seems to assert a positive correlation between finding a mate outside your local prefecture or even country, and smarter taller and more successful kids, could be an extremely sly way of trying to influence a reversal of Japan's abysmally declining birth rate.

Yeah, it seems like parental genetic distance in Japan would obviously just be a proxy for social mobility and "get up and go"-ness.

And get up and go types are obviously taller since they have a tendency to get up.

Height correlates with a lot of traits that are generally considered desirable, including IQ, rated romantic attractiveness, social success, and income.

This paper is about genetic “distance,” not literal geographic distance.

I imagine those would be highly correlated too.

And how does one not imply the other, or are you suggesting that one parent born in County Cork of its native stock, and the other born in Hokkaido are going to have just as likely a chance at the same genetic distance as both parents born in the same geographic region?

We’re reliably informed that race has no biological basis and differences are greater within groups than between them, so isn’t the answer obviously yes?

That's true if you include Africa, but it's not nearly as true if you exclude it. But "race" of course doesn't cause this, as it can't cause anything.

(And people living in Japan aren't genetically homogenous of course.)

Race is a self-described proxy variable that correlated with genotype. I know some folks (even very well-educated and highly placed) deny that.

Still it's better to use the term "genetic history" because it's a much better variable to describe distances between people.

People in nearby villages in sub-saharan Africa are likely more diverse than people on different continents outside. People outside Africa are remarkably inbred (the bottleneck is measured in a few thousands at most).

Where does it say the study was done in Japan? Author aren't, first four quoted papers aren't? Only 1 paper is referencing Japan, cohort related table seems to be European heavy based, did I miss something?

I definitely got ahead of myself, you are correct there is nothing to suggest that this study was done using subject data drawn in its majority or even a substantial fraction feom Japanese populations. I noted the affiliation with the Biobank Japan project and hastily assumed that this was the primary source of data for the study.

Given that this would only be interesting in the context of the unusually homogeneous in a Japanese sample, and the consequent difficulty in compensating for this with data thus sourced, my original comment is no longer meaningful. Unfortunately its no longer possible to delete it.

It feels like an homogeneous population would reduce rather than increase confounds.

A short note, that intelligence is a social construct based on statistics. So every finding around tweaking "general cognitive ability" needs to fit into a normal distribution.

Essentially that's why you can call the Flynn Effect Psychology's Schrödinger's cat. There is one and there is none. ;)

> more distant parental relatedness

Erm, further apart genetically, not "further apart" in distance. Perhaps a title fix?

I read that as age-difference which is also false. It is genetic "difference", e.g. one paragraph from the abstract

"In each case, increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months’ less education"

I read this as “the greater the age gap” at first.

> not "further apart" in distance

And also not further apart in time :p

(2015)

Added above. Thanks!

Useful info.

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