I agree that woo is bad. And microbiome is of course irrelevant wrt boosting IQ. But a good part of the post was about improving health, and microbes do have serious downsides on that front. If you don’t have the good ones you are at a much greater risk of being colonized by the bad ones. And disease still has a non-zero negative effect on people’s brain development and cognition.
Removing bad behaviour from microbiome would be quite a bit more effective and easier than fixing genes, for fighting disease. And many of the diseases with a significant genomic risk scores mentioned in the post probably have an unknown necessary pathogenic cause.
Here’s a paper (Cochran&Ewald) with simple powerful arguments, I always try to push it to any doctors I meet.
I agree that woo is bad. And microbiome is of course irrelevant wrt boosting IQ. But a good part of the post was about improving health, and microbes do have serious downsides on that front. If you don’t have the good ones you are at a much greater risk of being colonized by the bad ones. And disease still has a non-zero negative effect on people’s brain development and cognition.
Removing bad behaviour from microbiome would be quite a bit more effective and easier than fixing genes, for fighting disease. And many of the diseases with a significant genomic risk scores mentioned in the post probably have an unknown necessary pathogenic cause.
Here’s a paper (Cochran&Ewald) with simple powerful arguments, I always try to push it to any doctors I meet.