I'm in France for a week, and thought it would be fun to restart an old blog I used to keep about our time here, dating from our search for an apartment. Bon appetit.

An offer I may not follow up on...

Got an email about my reply to Jay Joseph's review of my book. I didn't know it was out. Reply is titled, "Taking Correlations Seriously." I will link to my personal copy of my reply, and put a link to Jay's review in a reply to this post. Not sure how firewalled it is.

Just watched the Trump s**t video. I know, don't feed the trolls. But remind me-- why am I not allowed to have any negative feelings about people who voted for this guy? Oh right, that makes me an overeducated elite prig.

Here in Central Virginia we have had the rarest of comforts lately-- temperate weather. Have not used either heat or air conditioning since early August.

UVA says no to the compact. A little more polite than I might have preferred, but I'll take it. Whew.

Here is another way to put the paradox. If you ask, "If I had different genes, would my personality be different?" Then the answer is, "Probably, yes." If you ask, "If I had THESE genes, what would my personality be like?", the answer is, "We don't have any idea."

Blog post: Why I won the bet: The not so inexorable progress of human science. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/why-i-won-...

Great time last night at the Jefferson Theater: Don Was and the Pan-Detroit ensemble. Played from their album "Groove in the Face of Adversity" and ALSO covered Blues for Allah, in its entirety, on the 50th anniversary of its release. Highly recommended.

On the other site: A rare compliment, or at least I think so.

Blogpost: How my bet with Charles Murray came about. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/my-bet-wit...

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Blog post: Ancestry and Education Indirect, direct, confounded and quasi-causal. I write about a preprint by Wang et al, in which they look for associations with genetic ancestry in an admixed Mexican population. They found genetic effects for height and Type-II diabetes, but not for education.

Something happened to the link in my post. Here is the link to, "The Hard Question in Psychiatric Nosology." ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/the-hard-q...

Haven't posted much lately-- busy. One of my Substack projects is republishing my chapters from the Kendler and Parnas series on the philosophy of psychiatry. The books are expensive and hard to find. This is, "The Hard Question in Psychiatric Nosology." /1 @awaisaftab.bsky.social

After several recent visits to extraordinarily busy hospitals and clinics (I am fine), my conclusion is that on the list of what is keeping the economy going, #1 may be AI, but #2 is keeping baby boomers alive.

The first song on Taylor Swift's album is obviously evoking Shakespeare, with some mentions of Dylan. But the real (unlikely, I know) reference is to Robert Hunter: You may meet the fate of Ophelia, sleeping and perchance to dream. / Honest to the point of recklessness, self-centered in the extreme.

Ah, I am assigned a 1 hour training video this morning. I spend several hours a week doing training and compliance activities. At a university, of course, they don't come with a recommendation for what other activity I should NOT do. Implicit understanding is that I will do it over the weekend.

Prepping for @dgps.bsky.social Methods, few recent papers pushing ctsem and dynamic models in interesting directions #1 Developmental changes in twin cognitive correlation (ACE) across age, test instrument, zygosity, with @evangiangrande.bsky.social @ent3c.bsky.social et al osf.io/preprints/ps...

This study of intelligence in the UK Biobank is typical of a lot of current social science genomics. Impressive technically, and not over-interpreted. But still, a main result gets lost in the sauce. Within-families, the direct-effect polygenic score explains no more that 1-3% of the variance. /1

Nice writeup on our paper that was recently published in Aging where we found second generation epigenetic clocks predicted cognitive decline in midlife in the Louisville Twins @ent3c.bsky.social @aging-us.bsky.social www.psypost.org/biological-a...

At the risk of defending someone I have no interest in defending, this story is not as simple as it seems. It is an indisputable fact that there are more males at the very low end of the IQ distribution, because there are many rare X-linked syndromes that confer developmental disability. /1

Protip to undergrads: if emailing my grad student Sophie about working in the lab, opening your email with "Hey, Sophia" is probably not the best approach.

Just got around to reading the nytimes story about that racist community in Arkansas. As always, their ideology turns out be be based on perversions of genetics.

Thinking about that long talk I posted yesterday, and how most people won't have the time to watch (neither would I). But I am on planes a lot looking for something to do. It would be cool to have a site where we could upload talks for people to download for watching offline during travel.

My Dobzhansky lecture at BGA: "Theodosius Dobzhansky and the Origins of Radical Behavior Genetics" is publicly available. I talk about the tensions introduced into the field at the difficult border between science using model organisms and human beings. Thanks to BGA for the opportunity.

SSGAC just posted this on the other site. I understand why they need to respond as an organization, but my point was not that individual people should be reprimanded or shunned. It's more that I want to hear how individual SSGAC researchers think about the problems presented by the new companies.

New blog post: The New Eugenics Companies (Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection)

Note from a week with grandkid: The "natural" label attached to various foods has mostly been bullshit over many years, but one product it has worked for is fruit popsicles. They are much better than the frozen Koolaid of my youth.

Back when the family was doing something useful:

Excellent takedown of Nucleus Embryo by Arthur Caplan and James Tabery. The problem with Nucleus isn't eugenics. It is rescued from its own eugenic intentions by the fact that it won't work. It is bogus science.

Nice shout out of our new paper at Aging, led by @sophiebell.bsky.social (unfortunately with the PI, Chris Beam, going unmentioned!). What I like about this paper is that we can predict DECLINE, ie, adult IQ after controlling for childhood IQ, which already accounts for half the variance.

I just received the sad news that my student Mary Waldron has died. Mary was the first in a line of gifted graduate students in behavior genetics in my lab. She co-wrote the Nonshared Environment paper with me, and generally transformed my career.

Is the @hastingscenter.bsky.social out of their mind?

Nice piece from my astoundingly well-read friend Mark Edmundson....

New paper with first author @sophiebell.bsky.social. We show that epigenetic clocks predict decline in IQ between adolescence and midlife, between and within twin pairs, and that the effect is stronger among people from low SES backgrounds. A Scarr-Rowe-adjacent effect. www.aging-us.com/advance

The rare NYTimes op-ed that made me happy.

Regret about suggesting my own book prompts me to do a little better. (I don't know the OPs background...). I disagree with the outlook of Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All That Matters, but it is a good brief introduction to the classical Spearman psychometric theory.

I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:

I lived through the 1981 flash floods in Austin. Spent the night in a basement apartment right across Lamar from Shoal Creek. Took two inches of water. Walked down Lamar the next morning and there were cars in the trees.

A few additional interesting points about Jordan Lasker. One, he appled to work as a graduate student in my lab years ago: bsky.app/profile/ent3...

I had a great time talking to Jen Howk on her Face of the Deep podcast. Jen describes herself as a "reformed hereditarian" so there was plenty to talk about.

I cite this thread in yesterday's post about PGS effect sizes. It is ported from Twitter so the graphics aren't great. The (unsurprising) point is that a PGS with low R^2 does a poor job of predicting the phenotype, and big samples don't help. Thread follows:

In other news from the BGA meeting @sophiebell.bsky.social won the award for best student oral presentation. I think my lab is firmly in the lead for student awards, BGA-wide. Gifted students have always been my secret sauce.

There should be a recording of the talk available. I'm trying to track down a link.

News Flash! Effect sizes don't matter! The polygenic score world is moving from anger/denial to the bargaining phase. (Thanks Sasha) ‪@hughjonesd.bsky.social‬.

As the annual meeting gets ready to open with a Festschrift for Matt McGue, BGA released an excellent position on misuse of genetics. Shoutout to @evangiangrande.bsky.social, who led the effort.

Same problems everywhere, I guess.

Hey @michelnivard.bsky.social, you asked for my comments on the public platform... have a response/rebuttal? Looking forward to it.