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Genetics, Society, History, etc
I think that geneticists must teach the nasty eugenic and racist parts of our field's history. Here are some quotes.
From Pearson:
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"...there is no institution more capable of impartial statistical inquiry than the Galton Laboratory. We have no axes to grind…we are paid by nobody to reach results of a given bias ... we have no political, no religious and no social prejudices..."
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"intelligence can be aided and be trained, but no training or education can create it. You must breed it."
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"The climax culminated in Galton’s preaching of Eugenics, and his foundation of the Eugenics Professorship. Did I say ‘culmination’? No, that lies rather in the future, perhaps with Reichskanzler Hitler and his proposals to regenerate the German people. In Germany a vast experiment is in hand, and some of you may live to see its results. If it fails it will not be for want of enthusiasm, but rather because the Germans are only just starting the study of mathematical statistics in the modern sense!" (there's more context here)
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The MAOA and 5-HTTLPR era was wild. Note that this has modern costs still, e.g. alt-right people still cite MAOA studies that failed to replicate. My snarky tweet on it.
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Risch et al (1999) on autism "These results are most compatible with a model specifying a large number of loci (perhaps >/=15) and are less compatible with models specifying </=10 loci."
- Autism advocates argue against genetic studies that could be used for prenatal tests. Interesting quote:
“Speaking as an uncle of a low-functioning autistic niece, I worry that therapies for the families that are desperately seeking to improve the quality of life of their disabled children will be ‘paused’ as a result,” Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote in an email to Spectrum.