Mark McCarthy

@SashaGusevPosts Great post. Not least for using “dichotomania” to describe the medical obsession with thresholds

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

It’s time to move on…. Time to accept that Twitter ain’t ever coming back. So off to the sunny uplands of bluesky. Lots of lovely ppl over there. Come join us. Markmccarthy985.bsky.social

@ShivaniM_KC That would be the thing! No, Denver

@markmccarthyoxf Surely not Cali

It’s Winter in America

Super happy to see @Derekgripper tonight. Long a fan of his extraordinary reimagining of W African kora, & of J.S. Bach, the musical distance bw them far shorter than y might imagine. 2024 gigs: Oumou, Fatou, Tinariwen, Femi Kuti (in Lagos!), Derek, been a good year

Want to help refugees, but not sure how? I found a surprisingly simple answer theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

This is a huge loss to absolutely nothing and no one, anywhere.

You’re on, @pollytoynbee ! Here’s hoping. It’s a very good sign that a dedicated Child Poverty Unit has been set up in Downing St. However, the first thing any of the child poverty campaigning bodies invited to the unit will recommend is the lifting of the two-child benefit cap. Hats at the ready….

In 2023 I led negotiations involving 9 corporations & 24 African institutions that trained 408 African scientists in genomics & bioinformatics. That effort, with >100 African authors, is now published in @NatureGenet. Thanks to all contributors:  nature.com/articles/s4158…

It’s apricot harvest time in Menlo Park. And this year i beat the squirrels!!

@BrentRichards19 No

@markmccarthyoxf Ghana?

Where did i just land?

Femi Kuti live at the new Afrika Shrine, Lagos. That’s a big one off the bucket list

This week marks 30 years since South Africa held it's first democratic elections in 1994. This is a good week to read Mandela's famous opening statement at the Rivonia trial delivered this week 60 years ago. One of the greatest speeches in history. 1/ law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projec…

There’s a book to be written on how Sunak got to a place where his Rwanda policy with its unworkable, cruel, expensive, law breaking nationally embarrassing contradictions- Rwanda is safe but it’s a deterrent etc, etc- became his make or break policy in a country where public services are in crisis and the post Brexit economy is stagnant. Shines much light on a prime minister hopelessly out of his depth, a Tory party gripped by fantasy with their newspapers screaming them on..it’s like a dark modern Monty Python sketch.

"how geneticists construe human genetic populations... [is] also sociopolitical. Genetic distinctions between human populations are not natural; they are the consequences of categorizations developed by geneticists" 🔥

@mathiesoniain Weird outcome where the only ancestry visualizations of AoU (as far as I'm aware) are the above UMAP or the below PCA plot where hard genetic clusters are, for some reason, labeled as ethnicities

UMAP aside, I think there is tremendous ambiguity in the use and definition of race, ancestry, and ethnicity throughout the AllOfUs paper (not to mention conflation of genetic ancestry and genetic similarity)