All of Kris Moore's Comments + Replies

I think you should take seriously that in the first paper linked in my comment, the population-wide SNP heritability for cognitive ability is estimated at 0.24 and the within-sibship heritability at 0.14. This is very far from the 0.7 estimate from twin studies. While a perfect estimate of direct additive heritability would be higher than 0.14, I don't think that rare variants (and gene-gene interactions, but this would no longer be additive heritability) would get you anywhere close to 0.7. Note also that UK Biobank with its purportedly poor IQ test repre... (read more)

I don't think that recent ancient DNA papers are affected by this issue, at least not to the same extent. Every aDNA researcher I know is extremely aware of the many pitfalls associated with sequencing ancient material and the various chemical and computational methods to mitigate them. Checking for signs of systematic artifacts in your aDNA data is very routine and not especially difficult.

To provide some brief speculation, I think a major explanation for this paper's errors is that aDNA lab that did the sequencing was quite old, under-staffed, and did no... (read more)

Basically any paper trying to detect signals of natural selection in humans will turn up something plausibly immune-related [1] [2] [3] [4]. Alongside pigmentation and diet-related genes, it's one of the most robustly detected categories of monogenic selection signal.

While it seems extremely likely that some selection due to pathogenic disease has occurred in humans, I don't think I've seen a paper that convincingly ties a particular selected gene to a particular historical pathogen or pandemic. It would be pretty hard to do so. There's a many-to-many mapp... (read more)

It is becoming increasingly clear that for many traits, the genetic effect sizes estimated by genetic association studies are substantially inflated for a few reasons. These include confounding due to uncontrolled population stratification, such as dynastic effects, and perhaps also genetic nurture^[1]. It is also clear that traits strongly mediated through society and behaviour, such as cognitive ability, are especially strongly affected by these mechanisms. 

You can avoid much of this confounding by performing GWAS on only the differences between sibl... (read more)

The "Black Death selection" finding you mention was subject to a very strong rebuttal preprinted in March 2023 and published yesterday in Nature. The original paper committed some pretty basic methodological errors^[1] and, in my opinion, it's disappointing that Nature did not decide to retract it. None of their claims of selection – neither the headline ERAP2 variant or the "half a dozen others" you refer to – survive the rebuttal's more rigorous reanalysis. I do some work in ancient DNA and am aware of analyses on other datasets (published and unpubl... (read more)