“We have the tools to do this—we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples’ DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.”
I remember a few years ago the Chinese offering free genomic scans for the sufficiently intelligent. Did anyone sign up for that? Anyone know of how that story turned out? I assume they weren’t going to share that info.
A number of LWers signed up (it was posted here) for the BGI high-IQ project; I believe they got copies of their data. As for the project as a whole: Hsu has mentioned some of how it went, including in a podcast last year which I believe got transcribed; basically, BGI made some disastrous strategic decisions in trying to develop & use a genome-sequencing competitor to Illumina and the high-IQ project got orphaned in the chaos, and is largely irrelevant now as similar high-IQ samples turned up nothing special (so the original premise, that either enrichment would increase power dramatically or that rare variants would be found, I forget which, turned out to be wrong) and the regular GWASes like SSGAC+UK Biobank have made much progress & rendered their relatively small sample mostly irrelevant. Hsu sounded moderately hopeful that something might still be finished & published, but hu knows.
I think they got in the single-digit thousands, perhaps 5-10,000, but I don’t really recall.
There must have been power estimates done internally, but if there was one ever made public explaining how much power they expected from enrichment, I didn’t hear about it. I won’t pretend I know the details of what they were thinking sufficient to do my own power analysis, but I didn’t think it was a terrible idea at the time; it was worth trying, and the results could always (I assumed) be meta-analyzed with later bigger results.
“We have the tools to do this—we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples’ DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.”
I remember a few years ago the Chinese offering free genomic scans for the sufficiently intelligent. Did anyone sign up for that? Anyone know of how that story turned out? I assume they weren’t going to share that info.
A number of LWers signed up (it was posted here) for the BGI high-IQ project; I believe they got copies of their data. As for the project as a whole: Hsu has mentioned some of how it went, including in a podcast last year which I believe got transcribed; basically, BGI made some disastrous strategic decisions in trying to develop & use a genome-sequencing competitor to Illumina and the high-IQ project got orphaned in the chaos, and is largely irrelevant now as similar high-IQ samples turned up nothing special (so the original premise, that either enrichment would increase power dramatically or that rare variants would be found, I forget which, turned out to be wrong) and the regular GWASes like SSGAC+UK Biobank have made much progress & rendered their relatively small sample mostly irrelevant. Hsu sounded moderately hopeful that something might still be finished & published, but hu knows.
So how many 150+ IQ samples did the latest studies have access to?
More generally, what’s the equivalent general population sample size for the tail sampled high IQ populations?
Article about the Chinese Study and it’s linking up with the SMPY study
http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985
I think they got in the single-digit thousands, perhaps 5-10,000, but I don’t really recall.
There must have been power estimates done internally, but if there was one ever made public explaining how much power they expected from enrichment, I didn’t hear about it. I won’t pretend I know the details of what they were thinking sufficient to do my own power analysis, but I didn’t think it was a terrible idea at the time; it was worth trying, and the results could always (I assumed) be meta-analyzed with later bigger results.