f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History [Author] Nicholas Wade [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/09/24 [Review] 
Wade’s book is a short fairly breezy overview of population genetics, combined with some long overviews of a few previous works speculating on possible grand historical evolutionary changes in human groups like the Jews. Because he takes seriously all the genetics research, unsurprisingly it’s controversial. I was waiting eagerly for it to come out to see whether Wade had put together a synthesis for the layman of all the extraordinary research which has been done over the past 20 years and summarized the flood of genetics research which has been unleashed by the crashing price of genome sequencing. I was disappointed. Wade’s book will convince no one: he hits a few highlights, but omits anything like comprehensive coverage of the theoretical and empirical grounds for accepting the laws of behavioral genetics (everything is partially heritable & usually highly polygenic, the effects of shared environment like family socioeconomic status is weak, and the rest of variance is unpredictable noise). All such a short overview can do is inflame the debate, when what is needed is to end it. Wade doesn’t describe a century of consistent results from twin studies (it’s remarkable that he could write such a book without, as far as I could tell, mentioning Plomin even once!), the missing heritability’s problem resolution by GCTA as due to traits being highly polygenic & affected by rare variants, doesn’t describe the successes of GWAS (for example, to borrow one out-of-date tabulation we now have 23% of Alzheimer’s, 3% bipolar, 13% breast cancer, 25% CAD, 13% Crohn’s disease, 31% prostate cancer, 13% lupus, 14/28% type I/II diabetes; and schizophrenia seem to have recently yielded a bit), and in some cases dramatically understates the state of the art - he confidently predicts that as far as linking genes with intelligence, “that is unlikely to happen anytime soon”, because “each of which [genes] has too small an effect to be detectable with present methods”, citing a well-known paper on the failure of early hits due to small sample sizes, except that at the estimated effect sizes, with reachable sample sizes like 100k SNP samples, the hits were predicted to be detected, and indeed, before A Troublesome Inheritance was even published, the first hits came out and have been replicating well (see Rietveld et al 2013, Rietveld et al 2014, Ward et al 2014, Zhu et al 2015). Another passage I noted with a raised eyebrow argues that a change in a population’s mean of a trait is unimportant since it would be relatively small, which is wrong since that could have a profound impact on the tails of how many members of that population are extremely high or extremely low on that trait, which is something he acknowledges in a later chapter on Jewish intelligence - that their somewhat higher mean intelligence than the surrounding goyim would explain their enormous overrepresentation among geniuses and other elites. When I look through just some of my reading on related subjects over the past year, I find hardly any of it covered: “Hints of genomic dark matter: rare variants contribute to schizophrenia risk” “Genetic enhancement of cognition in a kindred with cone–rod dystrophy due to RIMS1 mutation”, Sisodiya et al 2007 “Common DNA Markers Can Account for More Than Half of the Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities”, Plomin et al 2013 “Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside” “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts) “Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable”, Hopkins et al 2014 (excerpts) “Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children”, Ward et al 2014 (Rietveld et al 2013’s 3 SNP hits for intelligence are starting to replicate; excerpts) “The genetics of investment biases”, Cronqvist & Siegal 2014 (excerpts) “Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability: Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination”, Gustavson et al 2014 “A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?” (see “Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins”, “The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals”, & “A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”) How harmful is smoking during pregnancy - after controlling for the sort of people who would do that? “On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits”, Hsu 2014 “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts) Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment “The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes”, Tesser 1993 (excerpts) “Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)”, Helbig 1991 (“For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.”) “Uncovering the Hidden Risk Architecture of the Schizophrenias: Confirmation in Three Independent Genome-Wide Association Studies”, Arnedo et al 2014 (press release; excerpts) “Common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance identified using the proxy-phenotype method”, Rietveld et al 2014; supplementary information (Rietveld et al 2013 hits replicate some more; discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) “Substantial SNP-based heritability estimates for working memory performance”, Vogler et al 2014 (excerpts) a href=“https://pdf.yt/d/bEVFEdtFm8DFf9r6”>“Growth, efficiency, and yield of commercial broilers from 1957, 1978, and 2005”, Zuidhof et al 2014 “The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence”, Krapohl et al 2014 “Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption”, The Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al 2014 “Friendship and natural selection” “Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height” “Predicting human height by Victorian and genomic methods” Ancestry Informative Marker Sets for Determining Continental Origin and Admixture Proportions in Common Populations in America …Well, I could continue listing fascinating recent research for a while, let’s say. I don’t think Wade does a good job conveying the ferment and output of the field as increasing sample sizes and sophistication are making headway. And it’s not like he’s omitting the cutting-edge research in favor of a detailed discussion for the layman of what genes are, what terms like “SNPs” or “haplotypes” are, what’s the distinction between your $99 23andMe purchase and the $1000 thing you might otherwise buy, the principles of population genetics like drift, fixation, IQ etc - actually, quite the opposite, he freely talks about variants and genes and only chapters later explains his terms, if at all. So what is the book about if he isn’t covering those topics? Well, for the most part it seems to be a summary of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, Clark’s Farewell to Alms & The Son Also Rises, Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order, Botticini & Eckstein’s The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, and Cochran’s Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. Wade is interested in the possible different selective pressures on each population as they co-evolve with their institutions and environment, sometimes tending towards domestication, sometimes not. His presentation is not terrible, but I think most readers would be better off simply reading the source books (I have read most of them and they are worth reading in their entirety). Excerpts: ch1 ch2 ch3 ch4 ch5 ch7 ch8-9
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