I've noticed a lot of pro-natalism, assortative mating, and pro-polygenic scoring for IQ among rats and also pro polygenic scoring for IQ. This is a case against it.
I haven't seen Scott acknowledge this already, but he seems to have all the information to come to this conclusion but still talks positively about polygenic scoring for IQ.
- Genes for IQ are related to genes for autism
- Genes for IQ increase IQ up until the point where you actually have autism, then autism means IQ goes down.
- The autism epidemic may have been caused by assortative mating (people with subclinical autism marrying other people with subclinical autism producing children who are autistic)
- The sort of people that would do polygenic scoring for IQ are exactly the sort of people whose children might already be at risk for autism (high systemisers)
- People who do polygenic scoring of embryos to produce a high IQ child will likely disproportionately struggle to cope with having a child who is disabled. (People who care a lot about producing a "superior" child will probably have a hard time if doing so resulting in an "inferior" child.)
- This can be probably be mitigated by researching how different genes for IQ interact to produce autism, but this requires research we don't have yet (and indeed, autism rights activists have actively discouraged and made more difficult to do.)
- Polygenic scoring for autism at our current knowledge level would result in lower IQ children
I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm a rat that married another rat and we have an autistic child. He is not intellectually disabled (normal IQ) but his autism is nonetheless quite severe. This isn't the fun "really likes trains a lot" kind of autism but the "will scream for an hour if I point out a mistake on his math homework" kind and the "I can't hire a babysitter because they've all quit after one time" and he will likely never be able to move out or hold down a job, and so I'm stuck living with him FOREVER. This is especially bad as he is unpleasant to interact with. Consequently I regret having children at all, it is 100% not been worth it.
I have rat friends who had relatively normal/pleasant children, or at least easy going on
... keep reading on reddit ➡I've seen a few comments here that seemingly throw shade at PRS. Is there a problem with the methodology per se, or is the problem solely with non-geneticists misunderstanding and abusing PRS for their own ends?
My understanding of PRS as a non-geneticist is that it's a linear prediction from your single nucleotide polymorphisms to a particular phenotype, and for traits where GWAS explains a large proportion of the variation, then the PRS will be highly correlated with phenotypical variation and therefore the PRS will be meaningful. For traits where GWAS doesn't currently work as well (e.g. IQ), the PRS will contain some signal, but otherwise will only be loosely correlated with the phenotype of interest. Is there any methodological weakness that I've missed with this understanding?
Song, W., Shi, Y., Wang, W. et al. A selection pressure landscape for 870 human polygenic traits. Nat Hum Behav (2021).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01231-4
Hi all - am super new to Nebula and just got my results. I have no background in genetics and have been struggling to understand the polygenic risk score / percentile rankings Nebula shares. First question: am I right to think of the risk score as effectively a Z score? Or is it something different? Second question (ok, third question, but second topic): does anyone know anything about Nebula’s user base? I’m guessing that it probably is meaningfully different from the population as a whole, which makes it hard for me to really know what to make of the percentile rankings …
Finally got my results. Not sure if I'm missing something, or if I am, like Mr. Burns, just so insanely sick that everything is perfectly in balance, resulting in invincibility.
100th for 5 or 6 diseases, in the 95+ percentile for about 15 or 20 others. Is this normal?
Hey,
I've recently done a WGS with Nebula and trying to better unterstand my risk for certain traits and diseases. One thing I stumbled over is a particular study where I have a negative score of almost -5 but at the same time I'm in the >90th percentile for a high genetic predisposition.
My assumption was that positive polygenic scores indicate a increased risk and negative scores indicate a decreased risk, meaning they are more or less normalized to be "0" in average.
The 90th+ percentile is based on the score of other nebula users. So of course it could be that the genetic makeup of nebula users is very different from the population originally used in the GWAS. But that doesn't seem to plausible to me.
Is there another explanation why you can have a negative score but high predisposition?
