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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

> And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

This might not be logical. If your DNA's in UK Biobank you might be more likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.

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The UK Biobank definitely has a bias, but it's in the opposite direction to that you are suggesting here. It's primarily healthy people who are enrolled only when they reach the age of 40 and still have no significant health problems. So, if you are in the UK Biobank, you are less likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.

Biobank is a voluntary data collection system, I thought. It's not based on whether someone is sick.

(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)

Yes. UK Biobank is a voluntary programme.

(I work in Genomic)

I think the assertion is that most people basically don't feel they have anything special genetically. As such, most people just aren't entering these databases that are opt-in.

Contrast this to people that do have a genetic oddity about them. Just having the traits is often enough to get people to find out more about them.

Perhaps, but it is primarily about allowing researchers to find healthy people with particular genes for their research (most commonly: they suspect a gene is involved in a disease, and while they have plenty of people with that disease and gene, they also need to look for people who have that gene and don't have the disease).

Right, that assertion did not intend on bad intentions of this research. Just pointing out that you can get a selection bias on open calls, as well.

A bit like the high number of negative paternity tests. Selection bias is huge.

I think you misunderstood what they were trying to say.

They were trying to get an estimate on the prevalence of incest.

So the number of people who have been documented to have DNA showing that this happened is literally the floor on the amount of times incest occurs.

Yes, for UK Biobank's samples. I'm saying that the UK Biobank's samples could in theory have a higher than average rate of incest, making that number not a floor for the overall population.

I'm only making a technical point of logic. It's not a comment on UK Biobank in general.

As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the opposite is likely true due to the bias in the selection process for Biobank.

I'm still not making a particular comment about UK Biobank. I'm saying the logic in the article is bad, as it says this number must be a floor. This isn't the case.

Logically true.

If the statistics are done on "Incest survivors DNA bank" and show 100% occurence of incest, it doesn't mean they're applicable to the general population.

That's the argument. That this DNA bank has a (lesser than the contrived example, but still true) bias.

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