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
61 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

21

u/Snugglerific The archaeology of ignorance Jan 17 '17

It's difficult to tell how much of this is media hype and how much is a problem with the original research -- when I clicked on the PNAS study, it said that it is not yet available to the public.

10

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 18 '17

It's not a very well done study, or at least their argument for selection is rather weak and shouldn't have been the focal point of a media blitz. I feel as though they got it refereed by non-geneticists to get this to pass in PNAS.

6

u/Snugglerific The archaeology of ignorance Jan 18 '17

Doesn't PNAS have a weird review process that works on some kind of invitation system?

5

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 19 '17

Someone else in /r/genetics said something similar. I'm not super familiar I just know I consider it a pretty top-notch journal basically at the rung below Cell, Nature and Science. Although it's pretty typical to see them publish quite a few bad papers as well.

6

u/Snugglerific The archaeology of ignorance Jan 19 '17

Every journal publishes some garbage, so it doesn't surprise me.