I don’t understand your arguments at all. Why does the homology of genes between apes and rodents bother you? They are part of a single “super-primate” clade—the euarchontoglires:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euarchontoglires
This degree of overlap is entirely expected and accepted and has been for many decades before fully genome sequence gave us hard numbers.
Can you clarify your second paragraph? Heritability is not a controversial topic but if you are saying the estimates are often abused, then I definitely will agree.
There are clearly dominant traits (and recessive traits). Huntington’s disease is the canonical example. If a student does not understand Mendelian genetics first they will not be able to understand complex quantitative genetics.
Your last statement is extreme. Do you also think that all of Newtonian physics is BS and should not be taught to kids.
As far as mice and people: there arent enough genes for there to be "genes for traits" given the difference of traits between mice and people.
I also take heritability to be quite controversial, since what is the point of the covariance of genes with traits across populations? In almost all cases this isn't informative of anything.
I also don't think we teach children that mass can be arbitrarily large, nor velocities arbitrarily high, etc. -- ie., the false parts of newtonian mechanics arent taught; and the remainder serves as a useful toolset for model construction.
The idea that we have genes for traits is simply false.
Ah thanks. This is a set of comments I get. Appreciated.
The headlines that read “Discovery of Gene X for Autism, Intelligence, Prostate Cancer, even Religiosity”
are definitely crude and wrong click-bait.
Regarding heritability: Almost all of us in genetics use heritability as an operation measure of how difficult it will be to uncover the often large set of DNA variants that modulate trait variation. Since I am now trying my best to map DNA variants that modulate lifespan I need to know how hard I am going to need to work and what same size I will need.
Turns out we will need about 25000 mice to do a good job. And our result will depend strongly on the quirky environment in which we raise our mice; almost equally quirky as human environments, but not as noisy and plagued by as much disease and warfare!
Almost all of us in the field of quantitative genetics know that heritability is strongly dependent on environmental context. There is no heritability for nicotine addiction in a world with no nicotine. This message gets lost in translation—why we seem to recursively fight pointless nature-nurture battles.
> I also take heritability to be quite controversial, since what is the point of the covariance of genes with traits across populations? In almost all cases this isn't informative of anything
If there's no simple linear gene-trait relationship, then how inheritable a trait is will not be tracked by heritability which is a statistic of covariance across a population.
This problem becomes compounded in the extreme if there's any environmental modulation of the trait-gene relationship.
Consider that a scottish accent is nearly 100% heritable: it entirely covaries with genes (localized in scotland), but is 0% inheritable. Suppose eye colour is 100% inheritable, but a product of 100 gene interactions, which have substantial geographical localization. You could easily find a case where heritability of eye colour was 0%, but inheritability 100%.
Heritability is a dumb metric for charlatans anyway, even in a simplified trait-gene world -- but in the actual world we live in, >99% of its uses constitute pseudoscience.
It was originally invented for working in agriculture where population were under genetic control by experimenters -- here the covarience is actaully causally indued by experiment, forcing a much simpler and deterministic relationsihp between genes and traits. In basically all other cases it's meaningless.
Right, thanks. But, at least for the last half century, statistical analyses in quantitative genetics have included genetic and environmental effects in their models, i.e. explicitly trying to find evidence for genetic influences after taking into account environmental effects. (I'm not saying it's easy to do so).
This degree of overlap is entirely expected and accepted and has been for many decades before fully genome sequence gave us hard numbers.
Can you clarify your second paragraph? Heritability is not a controversial topic but if you are saying the estimates are often abused, then I definitely will agree.
There are clearly dominant traits (and recessive traits). Huntington’s disease is the canonical example. If a student does not understand Mendelian genetics first they will not be able to understand complex quantitative genetics.
Your last statement is extreme. Do you also think that all of Newtonian physics is BS and should not be taught to kids.