kristjanmoore.bsky.social
Research at deCODE genetics: genomic ancestry, ancient DNA, and whatever else needs doing. Trying to have true beliefs. 🇬🇧🇮🇸
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Medieval samples from around there!), but some present-day French also have it, as well as a Medieval Brittany sample. While those observations might be explained by migrating Britons/Bretons, it's notable that an especially clear example is labelled Normandy pre-Roman IA and also carries R-L21.
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Interesting to see the Irish/Scottish-like outliers! Though I think there are other places they could be from. Many Bronze and Iron Age samples around Belgium also show this Irish-like drift. I'm not sure how long this kind of ancestry persisted in the region (would be great to get more Iron to
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Link 1: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Link 2: academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...
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And carefully evaluating so many protocols should help us get even better palaeoproteomic results in the future. Very excited to see how the method develops and what it will tell us about all those fascinating hominin bones of uncertain affinity that we can't realistically get DNA from.
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Especially appropriate concern in the case of prostate cancer, given that treatment provides less net benefit than you might think. Though the above paper does focus on individuals with cancers assessed as higher risk.
Link 1: www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-03...
Link 2: medicine.washu.edu/news/surgery...
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The exodus of academics and promotion of paid bluechecks is really making itself known on Twitter now. If this claim had come out a few years ago you'd probably have seen a few well-informed debunkings with 10k's of likes from biologists correcting the record. Not really seeing that over there now.
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Although this finding and others replicate when using just the samples identified in DBDS/CHB, as I understand the clustering was performed on UKB + DBDS/CHB simultaneously, so potential caveats relating to exactly how clusters were defined and used might affect both?
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One thing that occurs to me: of the ~850 UKB participants born in France, only 454 make it into the "France" cluster(s) used for IBD. While there's some non-French ancestry in the ~850, this winnowing might be too strict - maybe enriched for especially un-British-like French-born samples?
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In terms of data here at deCODE, we have some summary stats and association results of our own for cohorts that might be relevant here, but I'm not sure which I'd be able to divulge...
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Not for Papuans! I also don't find any associations for the SNP on the GWAS Catalog, which should include results from GWAS on the Japanese and Taiwanese biobanks, and probably other cohorts featuring a lot of East Asian ancestry.
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Their tagging SNP rs3087348 also has ~20% frequency in the Human Origins Papuans. They're very deeply diverged from Northeast Asians (50kya?). I don't believe there's any dairy in traditional Papuan diets.
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The authors here are also another example of the kind of PRS enthusiasts who focus on traits like IQ which are clearly strongly mediated by environment and are especially hard to get direct effect estimates for, but don't really grapple with this properly.
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Well, they do claim some kind of "custom fine-mapping" method, so they are on some level aware of the causal variant issue. And who knows, maybe it blows all other approaches out of the water - but somehow I doubt it.
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World collide: a Silicon Valley-sphere roadmap for genetically editing high-IQ "superbabies" uses as a supporting citation the same deeply flawed aDNA paper I compained about earlier today.
www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZa...
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Despite the presence of such elementary errors as incorrect calculation of allele frequencies, the original paper is *not* being retracted.
And it will probably continue to get naively cited by authors outside ancient DNA, many of whom will never learn about the rebuttal: 2/2
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Still adding to the gallery after all these years.
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Worked fairly well for me:
bsky.app/profile/kris...
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Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna are essentially the biggest funders of EA causes. Take a look at his Bluesky timeline:
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Effective altruists as a group spend huge amounts of time criticising their philosophy and their own attempts at implementing it.
The EA Forum has a whole section on "criticism of effective altruism" with many well-read and up-voted posts.
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How do you square the fact that many effective altruists give away 10% of their income with your idea that they "believe more money should go to themselves"?
Every EA I know thinks that PEPFAR was an incredible initiative and grieve its potential loss.
Please read into things before posting.
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Pretty similar to the numbers from the UK, Germany, and Italy.
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Very good points - I'm sure you've seen some of the polls showing that trust in science now shows a clear partisan split in the US.
I do think that the sloppiness and bullheadedness around the article was in part because it (apparently) comported so well with concerns around equity and diversity.
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Eventually, we'll likely reach a place where germline editing (including polygenic) is a feasible, net-positive health intervention, but that'll be a while yet – and the ethical concerns will be enormous.
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A factor I've not seen mentioned here is that UK schools have "half-term" holidays lasting a week, with precise dates varying by school and area. Good opportunity for families to take a short vacation.
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Last image above shows that some are doing embryo selection. Heliospect does seem to be specifically offering analysis of cognitive traits. I would guess that some are going for cognitive traits formally or informally. Editing hopefully farther off, but there is clearly enthusiasm for it:
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Seems plausible that this is partly due to the exodus of academic geneticists from Twitter, leaving an echo chamber of SF contrarian uber-reductionists memeing themselves into hype over snake oils.
(Will be another issue entirely if and when these technologies actually begin to work as marketed.)
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Many (but not all) of the traits people might care about are very polygenic, though some people will carry a rare variant of large (usually "negative") effect. Pleiotropy, at least for GWAS hits, is less extensive than some theoreticians thought. But yes, I think of gene editing fans as quite naive.
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Funnily enough, I live in Reykjavik and am (basically) originally from the UK too!
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My sense is that Iceland was indeed poor compared to other (Western) European countries until the early-mid 1900s. No urbanisation until the 1800s, economy based on subsistence and some fishing till late. Post-WWII US influence via e.g. military base and Marshall Plan investment was fairly important
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Posted the wrong paper like an absolute ninny. Thanks!
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Interesting - contradicts the January paper (link) which employed some slightly weird argumentation to suggest that syphilis and its relatives diversified before the Beringian crossing.
(Anyone know the backstory behind the October "concerns have been raised about the data and conclusions" note?)