i/o research

@10pondt From the abstract: "This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance."

@iointelresearch Did you add the part “including those influencing human intelligence” yourself? Because there is no mention of it in this Nature article. nature.com/articles/d4158…

New from David's Reich's lab: "In the past ten millennia [in Europe], we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection," including those influencing human intelligence. nature.com/articles/s4158…

@Avis_Astartes @avidseries David Piffer has made a similar finding for East Eurasian populations in a study published last year.

@avidseries When will they do similar studies in regards to other regions of the world and not that of just Europe?

Population genetics just dropped an atom bomb on blank slate science denial in the pages of Nature. We were told for decades that evolution could not have meaningfully operated on the human brain in the "short period" of time since humans left Africa for Europe and Asia around 50,000 years ago. In fact, it's been accelerating over the past 10,000 years, and the proof is in our DNA, and the DNA of our ancient ancestors. Bigger data sets and improved scientific techniques are exposing the ideologically-motivated lie that's been ruthlessly enforced in academia since the 60s: Population groups are biologically all the same under the skin. Reich himself warned liberals back in 2017 that they needed to prepare for some bad news, and that if they didn't they were going to end up on the wrong side of the scientific revolution occurring in genetics. But rather than accepting his argument, Reich was attacked. Now the bad news is arriving.

@Tocqueville03 Unfortunately, I don't have a subscription.

@iointelresearch Do you have a subscription to Nature? Some screen shots of the actual study would be much appreciated 🙏

@trikomes This isn't a preprint. This is the final updated version.

The "[in Europe]" above refers to West Eurasia, which includes areas now included in Europe and West Asia (from which most of the migration to Europe occurred).

"We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance."

"Within families, higher PGS predicts greater educational attainment [and] occupational status... with no evidence for gene-environment interactions... These findings... reflect properties of cognitive genetic architecture rather than idiosyncrasies of a particular score."

"Relying on a newly constructed PGS using within-family designs... we demonstrate that direct genetic effects account for the large majority of PGS prediction... the within-family association with latent general ability is approximately 0.45." icajournal.scholasticahq.com/article/158459…

"Combining text, genetic markers, and teacher assessments into an ensemble model, we can predict cognitive ability at close to test-retest reliability of gold-standard tests."

"[Using LLM] trained on short aspirational essays written at age 11, we accurately predict [cognitive test scores]... to a similar degree as teacher assessments, and better than genomic data." nature.com/articles/s4427…

"The connectedness of frontal and parietal regions was associated with individual test performance. Further... higher test scores were linked to more complex long-range processes and, at a trend level, to less complex short-range processes."

Brain scans of people taking intelligence tests showed that high scores were linked to highly flexible, diverse neural networks. nature.com/articles/s4200…

"Our PGS predicts higher educational attainment, occupational status, and family income within families, and retains good performance in non-European ancestry samples."

"We present a polygenic score (PGS) for general cognitive ability (GCA) that demonstrates a substantial increase in predictive accuracy... the inverse-variance-weighted within-family association of the PGS with [latent GCA] is estimated at 0.448." osf.io/preprints/psya…

@its_rendered @avidseries The scientific literature on this subject offers a more empirically robust explanation for group disparities than systemic racism.

@avidseries @iointelresearch Why is this subject so fascinating and important to you? I’m just genuinely curious what drew you to it

The paper examined the polygenic architecture of brain structure, function, and behaviors, and included 8,600 children, using 7 brain imaging-derived phenotype (IDP) modalities, polygenic scores (PGS) of 33 complex traits, and 266 cognitive and psychological phenotypes.

Effect sizes are not reported. Without Cohen's d, standardized mean differences, or similar, we cannot assess the practical and substantive magnitude of the differences. They could be small despite statistical significance.

"We compared the estimated Ps between European-ancestry and non-European-ancestry individuals [across 33 traits], and PGS showed no significant differences across ancestries except for the educational attainment (P = 0.006) and IQ PGS (P = 0.0018)." nature.com/articles/s4146…