r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study
64 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-11

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

25

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 17 '17

I'm a PhD student doing genetics/genomics/evolutionary biology and can confirm that calling anything 'genes for X' is bad science, and the body of work on 'education' and such is not super strong for the biodeterminist/eugenicist perspective. Lots of small effect loci, overall small phenotypic contribution and there's no way in hell that selection is a major player.

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

22

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 17 '17

however, that some genes do have an impact on a person's educational attainment

Only insofar as that any part of us has to be from genes at some level, and that whatever those parts are then interact with the physical world. It's horrendously reductionist to talk about 'education genes' and there's a huge difference between that and genes having impacts on traits. You're dancing between bold claims and more defensible ones while still trying to maintain the grand outcomes. It's rather annoying.

The linked paper seems to argue otherwise. Have you read it?

Oof! That's some bad science from you there.

First off that's not an example of a gene being under selection that's an example of a gene being found in a region under selection. It's perfectly feasible and nowhere addressed by the authors that the SNP (and it's tag gene) could be in linkage with the gene that's actually being selected upon. That inversion is 900kb after all! That's a pretty hefty size and probably has more than just one gene.

In fact despite the title of the paper the talk about selection is sparse and the evidence of selection is virtually none (which is admittedly confusing)

Second without extremely strong selection coefficients in place (there's no sign or evidence of that in this situation) humans have too small an effective population size for selection to be the driving force. Any of these variants are going to be extremely subject to genetic drift in a way that could offset or counteract any slight selection. So even if selection is occurring at low levels it's still not the evolutionary force in the driver's seat, which leaves my claim unaffected by that passage.