Uncovering the causes of disease is one of the greatest challenges in genetics. 🧬

To help advance this, we created AlphaMissense: an AI model classifying missense variants – or genetic changes affecting proteins.

Here’s how it can help scientists. 🧵 https://t.co/ka19HXINjI pic.twitter.com/m1flaTl2TN

— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) September 19, 2023

Hahahaha.

I’m sure nothing can go wrong here.

The Guardian:

Scientists at Google DeepMind have built an artificial intelligence program that can predict whether millions of genetic mutations are either harmless or likely to cause disease, in an effort to speed up research and the diagnosis of rare disorders.

The program makes predictions about so-called missense mutations, where a single letter is misspelt in the DNA code. Such mutations are often harmless but they can disrupt how proteins work and cause diseases from cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anaemia to cancer and problems with brain development.

The researchers used AlphaMissense to assess all 71m single-letter mutations that could affect human proteins. When they set the program’s precision to 90%, it predicted that 57% of missense mutations were probably harmless and 32% were probably harmful. It was uncertain about the impact of the rest.

Based on the findings, the scientists have released a free online catalogue of the predictions to help geneticists and clinicians who are either studying how mutations drive diseases or diagnosing patients who have rare disorders.

A typical person has about 9,000 missense mutations throughout their genome. Of more than 4m seen in humans, only 2% have been classified as either benign or pathogenic. Doctors already have computer programs to predict which mutations may drive disease but because the predictions are inaccurate, they can only provide supporting evidence for making a diagnosis.

What is a missense variant? ⭕

They’re a type of genetic mutation that can alter how proteins function. Benign ones tend to retain protein function, but pathogenic variants could lead to serious conditions.

Only about 0.1% of such variants have been classified by human experts. pic.twitter.com/pWyfBlQW9M

— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) September 19, 2023

Writing in Science, Dr Jun Cheng and others describe how AlphaMissense performs better than current “variant effect predictor” programs and should help experts pinpoint more swiftly which mutations are driving diseases. The program may also flag mutations that have not previously been linked to specific disorders and guide doctors to better treatments.

The AI is an adaptation of DeepMind’s AlphaFold program, which predicts the 3D structure of human proteins from their chemical makeup.

AlphaMissense was fed data on DNA from humans and closely related primates to learn which missense mutations are common, and therefore probably benign, and which are rare and potentially harmful. At the same time, the program familiarised itself with the “language” of proteins by studying millions of protein sequences and learning what a “healthy” protein looks like.

When the trained AI is fed a mutation, it generates a score to reflect how risky the genetic change appears to be, though it cannot say how the mutation causes any problems.

I’ve said from the beginning: if there is anyone I trust to genetically engineer humans, it’s Google.

Oh.

I didn’t think this was possible?

It is possible?

Would it be possible for someone to do this without telling you?

Huffington Post:

Scientists think they’ve found a new way to offer contraception to men – and this time, they’re going straight for the sperm.

More than 60 years after the female contraceptive pill was first sold in the UK (yes, you read that correctly), scientists think they’ve made a breakthrough in creating a suitable alternative for men.

A study, published in Nature Communications, honed in on mouse sperm. Scientists were able to identify a gene (called Arrdc5) which, when temporarily switched off, made the males infertile.

Scientists are now looking for a drug molecule that might be able to block the protein Arrdc5 produces for a short period of time in humans.

Dr Jon Oatley from Washington State University is the senior author of the study, and he described it as a “once-in-a-decade discovery”.

Don’t get too excited just yet, though.

Plenty more needs to be done before scientists can fully understand the Arrdc5 protein and its relationship with sperm, but it’s an optimistic start and human trials have already begun.

If it were to be successful, it would mean scientists wouldn’t have to look at interfering with testosterone levels. Previous efforts to use hormonal birth control pills for men have been criticised for triggering mood disorders and shrinking testicles.

However, Professor Richard Anderson of the University of Edinburgh – who was not part of the study – said there was still “a long way to go to make it a male contraceptive” and that it could also be a “potential cause of infertility”.

Haha.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Huh?

Eat Your Vaccines: mRNA Gene Therapy Foods?https://t.co/YQ6ZNFa4jY

— David Icke (@davidicke) April 19, 2023

Important to be informed on this issue. Be sure to subscribe to #courageousdiscourse ⁦@joerogan⁩ ⁦@megynkelly⁩ ⁦@IngrahamAngle⁩ ⁩ ⁦⁦@RMConservative⁩ ⁦@drdrew⁩ ⁦@OANN⁩ ⁦@OzraeliAvi⁩ ⁦@FiveTimesAugust⁩ https://t.co/xkBJNJdoPu

— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) April 14, 2023

Love the fact that bringing back the Dodo is a CIA op https://t.co/hK608KFvR3 pic.twitter.com/Fgtt7lmrBP

— Max Chafkin (@chafkin) January 31, 2023

The CIA thinks the gene mod tech being used to resurrect the dodo bird “could be useful for intelligence gathering.” (1440)

How’s that, exactly? pic.twitter.com/WoN4uB0UXj

— The Sage Grouse (@MaybeImALeo) February 1, 2023

What are we doing here, guys?

Are we doing Jurassic Park or what?

I’m bored and that would be at least interesting.

Popular Mechanics:

The biotech company Colossal is actively working to reincarnate both the ancient woolly mammoth and the thylacine. Now, for its next trick, the Dallas-based firm is bringing back the dodo, the flightless bird that went extinct roughly 350 years ago from the island of Mauritius.

Colossal is using the backing of a surprising government partner to sequence the dodo bird’s genome using stem cell technology, the company says.

The process for bringing the dodo back includes genome understanding, tissue cultures, and interspecies surrogacy. Here’s how it will work: The dodo recreation includes “interspecies germline transfer of pigeon PGCs into a surrogate chicken host.” The Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, provides the host cells for genome engineering while the Rodrigues solitaire, the dodo’s closest genetic relative, adds additional insights. The chicken offers a foundation of avian genomics and editing.

…

Colossal had hoped to make the dodo bird part of its early efforts, but additional rounds of funding, including from a venture capital firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, has now put the dodo into the official pipeline.

Michael Crichton really was a clever guy. The process described here is similar to what was described in the books.

However, in his story, the scientists use DNA from mosquitoes that bit dinosaurs and then got stuck in sap that turned into amber.

It’s claimed that mosquitoes really did bite dinosaurs, but that you can’t pull the DNA because mosquito DNA pollutes it.

Anyway, there is some question as to whether dinosaurs even existed, at least on the scale that is claimed by the Science.

They still can’t explain how they had sex. Popular Science just had an article admitting this a few days ago.

We’re getting into a lot of science fiction type science, but none of it is especially interesting. I don’t really care about a woolly mammoth, which is just an elephant.

It’s like all these promises of sci-fi deliver these really shitty versions. “Dinosaurs? Oh, not quite, we’ll give you a hairy elephant. Bionic arm? No, sorry, but I can cut your dick off and shape the wound so it looks sort of like a vagina. City on Mars? No sorry, but Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend is riding around in a dick-shaped space plane.”

Related: Necromancy: The Science Mixing Human Organs with Pig Organs to Raise the Dead

It’s time to really, really change your genetics – with the genes of long-extinct creatures!

El Pais:

For years, scientists from all over the world have been searching for microbes in the ice of Antarctica, in the deepest trenches of the oceans and in the most hostile volcanic environments on the planet. The goal is to track down new proteins that can be used to improve gene-editing techniques. This could open the door to a new era of science and medicine, in which a multitude of diseases could be cured by correcting patients’ faulty genomes with astonishing ease.

Today, a study has been published by a group of Spanish scientists who haven’t just searched for new molecules in space – they have searched for them in time. The team has managed to resurrect proteins from organisms that have been extinct for billions of years.

BILLIONS???

The researchers have focused on recreating Cas9 enzymes – molecules that work like scissors, capable of cutting the DNA of any living being. This is the basis of the CRISPR gene-editing system.

CRISPR is the immune system of many bacteria and archaea. It allows them to embed virus genetic sequences into their own genome, so that if a virus reappears, CRISPR can identify it, while Cas9 enzymes can slash its genome.

Since its development in 2012, the CRISPR gene-editing system has revolutionized biomedical research, making it possible to rewrite the instruction book of any organism. Now, it’s beginning to be utilized to treat certain diseases in humans. However, this gene-editing system isn’t perfect: it can introduce potentially dangerous errors into the genome. The search for safer alternatives is still ongoing.

A pending question in the field of genetics is how the bacterial immune system – which is much older than humanity – came into existence. Searching for an answer, a team made up of some of Spain’s leading gene-editing experts used a technique to reconstruct the genome of extinct organisms. The technique is known as ancestral sequence reconstruction. It uses powerful computers to compare the complete genomes of living organisms – each made up of billions of letters of DNA – and evaluate what the genomes of their common ancestors would look like.

So far, the researchers have made amazing progress to recover Cas proteins from extinct microbes. The oldest one they have discovered is from 2.6 billion years ago. They have also rescued extinct proteins from microorganisms that lived between 37 million to 1 billion years ago.

Researchers have created new CRISPR systems using these ancient proteins, injecting them into human cells. The results – published in the journal Nature Microbiology – show that, despite being so primitive, all these ancient proteins are capable of editing the DNA of modern human cells.

In the early 1990s, biologist Francis Mojica was studying microbes that lived in the hostile environment of the salt flats of Santa Pola, in the Valencian community of Spain. He also analyzed the DNA sequence known as PAM, which allows microbes to distinguish between their own genomes and the genomes of viruses. Without PAMs, a bacterium could easily kill itself. But the new study – of which Mojica is a co-author – indicates that some of the oldest CAS enzymes are capable of cutting DNA accurately without the need for PAM.

Francis Mojica

Mojica highlights the importance of this discovery to understand the origin and evolution of CRISPR: “Thanks to this recovery, we can see how the immune system of microbes became less harmful to its carriers and increasingly specific for each virus.” In addition, ”this work is important, because it opens up a huge toolbox for creating better CRISPR systems.”

…

Co-author Lluís Montoliu – a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid – emphasizes another advantage of the primitive Cas proteins. Unlike more modern proteins, they aren’t detected by the human immune system, which means that they’re less likely to be rejected by the immune systems of patients when utilized in future medical applications.

Well, that certainly makes a lot of sense.

We can’t have the immune system rejecting our modifications, now can we???

You may want to wear a mask like the one above if you have to get anywhere near printers.

Study Finds:

Working in an office is supposed to be safe working environment, but appearances are often deceiving. In a new discovery that emphasizes just how hazardous seemingly benign modern equipment can turn out to be, researchers from West Virginia University have discovered that microscopic nanoparticles from laser printers may change an individual’s genetic and metabolic profile if inhaled. These changes can seriously increase one’s risk of cardiovascular and neurological disease.

Who knew your office’s printer could be so dangerous? The research team came to their conclusions after placing rat models into the same confined space as a typical laser printer. For a total of 21 days, the models stayed in the space for five hours daily, during which time the printer was running continually.

“It’s equivalent to an occupational setting,” explains study leader Nancy Lan Guo in a university release. “A rat’s life expectancy is about one or two years. In our life, that would be more like four or eight years of five-hour-a-day exposure.”

“The changes are very significant from day one,” she adds.

During the experiment, the rats’ lung cells and blood were habitually (every four days) examined in order to determine if their genetic makeup had been influenced by the toner. The examination was comprehensive; every single gene in the rats’ genomes were analyzed.

…

After just a single day of close exposure to the toner, the rats’ genes linked to metabolism, immune response, and additional important biological processes exhibited clear signs of disruption. After the full 21 days, clear genomic changes associated with cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological disorders were observed in the rats.

“I don’t want to alarm people,” Guo clarifies, “but special ventilation and exposure controls should be installed in rooms where laser printers are in heavy-duty use, because the concentration of nanoparticles released in the air during the printing and copying process is strongly correlated with the printing activities.

What a sick thing to say: “Oh, your office job is causing serious damage to your genes and metabolism, which increases your risk of dying a horrible death. But I don’t want to alarm people.”

I do want to alarm people.

It is insane that most of Modernity is literally out to get everyone in multiple ways, damaging their hormones, their genes, their reproductive organs, their neurons, their skin — pretty much attacking from all fronts — and the experts sit there and say “well, what are you gonna do?” while shrugging their shoulders.

We should be tearing all of this down.

But perhaps the genes that would have allowed for us to get fired up about this and defend ourselves were already compromised by Modernity.

Pregnant women, especially, should be aware of these findings.

“In particular, there is one group I really think should know about this: pregnant women. Because once a lot of these genes are changed, they get passed on through the generations. It’s not just you,” Guo says.

…

Since the experiment involving rats, Guo and her team have also examined genomic changes seen among a group of Singaporean printing company workers. The workers’ genomes largely changed in the same ways that the rats’ did.

“And they’re very young. A lot of the workers ranged from 20 to their early 30s, and you’re already starting to see all of these changes.” Guo concludes. “We have to work, right? Who doesn’t have a printer nowadays, either at home or at the office? But now, if I have a lot to print, I don’t use the printer in my office. I print it in the hallway.”

What are women — let alone pregnant women — even doing in the workplace in the first place?

They should be kept in the safety of a cage.

What about non-pregnant women though? What about the men?

Is everyone working office jobs really going to turn into a mutant?

View this post on Instagram

Beautiful Mother & daughter 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍Just like sisters ! ️️️️️️️️️️️️

A post shared by annaboop (@annaboop) on May 16, 2017 at 7:16pm PDT

I demand a THOROUGH INVESTIGATION into the genes of this woman.

Daily Mail:

An ex-actress once dubbed as ‘Hong Kong’s sex goddess’ has stunned millions with her incredibly youthful looks more than 20 years after she retired from the screen.

Chingmy Yau Suk-ching who rose to fame in 1987 looks almost as young as her daughter in a picture circulating on Chinese social media.

Ms Yau is the wife of Hong Kong fashion tycoon Sham Kar Wai. Their eldest daughter, 18-year-old Sham Yuet, is set to attend this year’s Le Bal des Débutantes, the ultra-glamorous debutante ball in Paris in November.

‘When the two stood together, they look more like sisters than mother and daughter,’ one article on Chinese news outlet Sina praised.

‘How come she hasn’t aged a bit in decades?’ Another web user gushed.

A trending topic page titled ‘Chingmy Yau is still so beautiful’ has gathered more than 150 million clicks on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, with tens of thousands of people expressing their astonishment at Ms Yau’s ageless appearance.

Ms Yau first captured the public’s attention in 1987 when she competed in Miss Hong Kong pageant at the age of 19.

She withdrew from the final of the highly popular beauty contest after being accused of using plastic surgery to improve her chin – allegations she has never admitted to.

Now 51 years old, she continues to frequent the front pages of Chinese tabloids due to her youthful looks.

We should figure out a way to genetically enhance white women so they don’t look like raisins the moment they turn 20. But before actually enhancing their looks, we should bring cages back.

Women over 50 looking like they’re 20-something would be a dream come true for husbands if marriage worked as originally intended but an absolute nightmare under our current social context.

Imagine meeting a cute woman in her late teens who’s Not Like Those Other Girls and thinking you may have found The One and fantasizing about your life with her and the little yous coming out of her baby factory, only to later realize that she’s actually a 51-year-old divorced mother-of-three with herpes and ovarian cancer who leads a feminist support group for “born-again Christian” ex-prostitutes.

Right now, the good thing about white women aging as fast as they do is that their physical appearance has a strong correlation with their states of mind.

As they grow older uglier in appearance, the rottenness of their minds is better represented.

Older women have been exposed to the current Jewish-influenced cultural depravity for longer than their younger counterparts. It’s useful to have their appearances act as an immediate cue of that.

You can add “genetically enhancing women to preserve their youthful looks” to the list of things that would be great to do if the Jews weren’t around.

Don’t be discouraged though.

It’s likely that the Chinese will work on this while we work on making the Jews not be around. We can then buy the technology from them, apply it to our own women and fill hundreds of millions of cages with ever-youthful kitchen appliances.

This is what it feels like to win the intelligence genetic lottery.

It turns out intelligence exists, is super important and is determined by genes, guys. Who would have thought. I guess that means the Alt-Right was wrong, and the Jews were right about everything.

Time to pack our bags and leave the internet.

Oh, wait. I got that backwards. That was actually our position all along. Phew.

I’ll be waiting for the Jews to apologize and give the green light on our eugenics programs. Should happen anytime, now.

I’m sure the Jews will be graceful in their acceptance of defeat.

MIT Technology Review:

Ready for a world in which a $50 DNA test can predict your odds of earning a PhD or forecast which toddler gets into a selective preschool?

I was born ready.

Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist, says that’s exactly what’s coming.

For decades genetic researchers have sought the hereditary factors behind intelligence, with little luck. But now gene studies have finally gotten big enough—and hence powerful enough—to zero in on genetic differences linked to IQ.

That final stupid argument is now abolished. “But which gene is responsible for IQ tho” was the final holdout of the liberal argument, which they would trot out in desperation after the reality of the inheritance of intelligence was laid down by race realists.

You don’t need to know which genes are responsible for intelligence to demonstrate, scientifically, that Black people are stupid.

However, now we’re finding those genes.

A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000 test takers. Results from an experiment correlating one million people’s DNA with their academic success are due at any time.

The discoveries mean we can now read the DNA of a young child and get a notion of how intelligent he or she will be, says Plomin, an American based at King’s College London, where he leads a long-term study of 13,000 pairs of British twins.

This is pretty exciting stuff. And these types of studies are forcing mainstream publications to publish extremely problematic statements, such as the following wonderful prose:

To psychologists, IQ tests measure something called “g”—the general factor of intelligence. People who are better at math, spatial reasoning, verbal ability, and other skills that tests can measure have higher g.

And that’s not all. The g factor is strongly correlated with income, happiness, health, and life span. More g seems to be a good thing all around. To Plomin it’s the “omnipotent variable” in life.

It’s also highly heritable. Comparisons of twins, both identical and fraternal, separated at birth or raised together, had shown that genetics must account for more than half of intelligence—a huge effect for genes. The rest is due to your schools, your diet, and other environmental factors.

In other words: the Nazis were right about everything.

Obviously, we’ve known, scientifically, that intelligence was highly inheritable for decades. But the establishment has managed to sweep this information under the rug.

With this new genetic information coming out, the cat is permanently out of the bag. How are people going to believe that intelligence is a “social construct” or some shit when they can pay 50$ to get their IQ from a DNA test?

So now they’re switching strategies and bringing out the information slowly, in a soft way, in order to avoid having a large-scale paradigm shift in the population.

Naturally, even this article includes hand clutching over the fact that this will very soon prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism is scientifically justified.

Others suggest that genetic models of intelligence will be used to compare races, ethnic groups, or people from different parts of the world. In an editorial about the genetics of race published in the New York Times on March 23, Harvard University biologist David Reich cited the new genetic IQ predictors and cautioned that “all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations.”

The warning was implicit: differences in IQ could be due to genes, not circumstance, and polygenic scores might prove it.

Once again:

These people know.

As soon as we’ve found enough genes to give a pretty accurate prediction about a person’s “g factor,” that will be applied to the millions of dna sample data we have for different populations, and will show that these “intelligence genes” are far from evenly distributed across the different ethnicities.

Considering how fast they’ve been making progress, this could be the new reality within a few years, or even months.

It’s going to be very hard to argue against alt-right talking points when the average normie is aware that intelligence is genetically determined, and differs significantly across the races.

The future is looking very bright indeed.

Heresy against the Cult of Equality is no longer permitted in the public sphere. Its dogma – that people have equal genetic potential which is simply shaped differently by their divergent lifetime experiences – must go unchallenged.

Here we have a mainstream conservative just summarising the results of basic research findings about the heritability of intelligence. To put it in simple terms, he says stupid people are born stupid and there’s not much you can do about it. But, of course, he phrases it much more politely. Didn’t help him, though.

So what are the things that schools cannot change? Having immersed myself in psychology, particularly psychometrics, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that it is naïve to think schools can do much to ameliorate the effects of inequality. I don’t just mean socio-economic inequality; I also mean differences in intelligence. A child’s general cognitive ability is the strongest single predictor of how well they do in their GCSEs, with differences in IQ accounting for more than half of the variance in exam results. See this 2007 study, for instance, which involved tracking 70,000 English schoolchildren over a five-year period. It’s a finding that has been replicated several times.

Can schools do anything to raise children’s general cognitive ability? The answer is maybe, but we haven’t yet discovered how to do it. Intelligence is a highly heritable characteristic, which is to say that more than half the variance in IQ at a population level is due to genetic differences, with less than half due to environmental differences. It’s true that the heritability of IQ is lower among children than it is among adults, with the environment playing a bigger role during adolescence. But the impact of the environment on children’s attainment, even during these formative years, is still fairly negligible – lower than most educationalists believe. Overall, children’s genes account for between 60 and 70 per cent of the variance in GCSE results, with IQ accounting for about half that genetic influence.

Source

This appeared as one side of a debate, meaning a contrary view was published at the same time. But this wasn’t enough. After a storm of criticism, the article was taken down and an apology given.

One of the pieces submitted, by Toby Young, we disagreed with. We wanted to give the opposing view, so we published Toby’s piece alongside a rebuttal from Sonia Blandford, who has recently written on similar subjects. The aim was to drive debate. But we shouldn’t have published his blog, even with the rebuttal: it was against what we believe is true and against our values and vision. We apologise. Although we don’t want to provide a platform for those views we also don’t want to cover over our mistake, so this note also serves as a record.

Source

At its irrational core, the Equality Movement is a rebellion against the very idea of natural difference, a rejection of nature itself; and, since science is just nature elucidated, a repudiation of science too.

In a survey of 71 experts on international differences in IQ recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, approximately 90% stated that genes were responsible for differing levels of cognitive ability between nations. This differs enormously from the popular narrative on group differences, which holds that genes are meaningless and play no part in human variation. In addition, experts believe that test bias plays only a small role, while discrimination has almost no effect on group differences.

IQ scores differ widely by country. At the top, East Asians have an average IQ of around 105, and Europeans have a slightly lower IQ around 100. Middle Easterners, Eskimos, and Hispanics have an average IQ around 85, while sub-Saharan Africans and Aborigines have IQ scores around 75. Some IQ differences are even larger; the average school student in Yemen, for example, has an IQ of 65, while the average Korean student has an IQ of 113. These group differences are the consequence of several factors, with evolutionary processes or genes playing a large role.

Given a sample of fifteen items, including choices such as culture, geography, genes, and test bias, intelligence experts stated that genes are the most important factor in causing group differences in ability. Although many in the media refuse to even acknowledge that nations vary in IQ, experts overwhelmingly accept this fact, and between 87% and 93% believe that genes are at least partially responsible. Quantity and quality of education were the next most important factors in explaining intelligence, and combined cause more group differences than just genes. Culture and health were also considered important.

In Western countries, education plays little role in IQ differences, because all children are educated to a high standard. However, education disparities are greater between countries. For example, a paper on African IQ (which they found to be 80) noted that:

Several items in [IQ] tests contain geometric shapes, which have no names in many African languages. It is not uncommon in (rural) Africa to come across test-takers who are unfamiliar with color-printed material, or who are inexperienced with using a pencil.

IQ researchers strongly believe that sampling error, test knowledge, and test bias were minimal, explaining just 11% of group differences. Contrary to the media’s perception of IQ tests as racist and bigoted, intelligence experts believe discrimination to be a trivial factor, accounting for just 2% of differences. In addition, discrimination explains almost none of the substantial IQ difference between White people and immigrants to the West from non-White countries. Likewise, climate, geography, and immigration are believed to cause no or almost no IQ differences.

The report also notes that among long-term ethnic groups in Europe, the least intelligent are Gypsies. Gypsies are descended from the Indian ‘untouchable’ caste and migrated to Europe centuries ago.

Intelligence, also known by the politically correct codeword cognitive ability, plays a major role in both group and individual success in life. Higher intelligence causes people—or at least correlates with what causes people—to earn more money, live longer and healthier lives, and have more social status. Higher intelligence also generally causes people to commit less crime and to be more honest. In fact, intelligence has effects in almost every area of life – smarter people, for example, are less likely to be murdered.

IQ research is itself subject to genetic variation, and like many other areas of life, top intelligence researchers are overwhelmingly White. Over 90% of researchers are from white countries. Interestingly, around 20% of IQ researchers have some Jewish ancestry. The full paper is available here (provisional copy, free for now).

Good news, brothers:

We’re all brothers!

RT:

Two-thirds of modern-day European males trace their genetic roots to just three Bronze Age forbears, who almost literally launched the “population explosion” many centuries ago, a new DNA study suggests.

Before coming to this conclusion, a research team from the University of Leicester analyzed the DNA sequences of 334 modern European men from 17 different European and Middle Eastern populations, focusing on the large portions of the Y-chromosome passed exclusively from fathers to sons.

Their findings were published in the Nature Communications.

After that they compared the DNA from each population in order to trace the key mutations in the genomes and find out when they might have occurred. Such an approach allowed the scientists to trace paternal lines down through a long period of history.

One mutation they found originated around 4,750 to 7,340 years ago and is prevalent in Norwegian and Orcadian populations. The second occurred between 3,700 and 6,500 years ago and has spread throughout Spain, Italy, France, England and Ireland. The third dated from about 3,470 to 5,070 years ago is prominent in the Sami in Lapland, Norwegians, Danes and Friesian populations in the Netherlands, as well as being found in France, Hungary, Serbia and Bavaria, the study reports.

According to the researchers, these three paternal lines account for about 63 percent of modern European men. That means that from 371.25 million males currently living in Europe around 233 million are descendants of just three men, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Those branches of the European genetic tree are fairly young, which suggests most modern populations settled in Europe only after the spread of farming during the Neolithic era, rather than during the period of hunter-gatherers moving across the continent in the Paleolithic era, as previously thought.

According to the scientists, the time of “population explosion” was also a period of social, economic and technological advances.

“The population expansion falls within the Bronze Age, which involved changes in burial practices, the spread of horse-riding and developments in weaponry,” Professor Mark Jobling, a lead researcher and geneticist at the University of Leicester, said.

“Dominant males linked with these cultures could be responsible for the Y chromosome patterns we see today,” he added.

Although it is still unclear who exactly the ‘fathers’ in these paternal lineages were, or even if they were born in Europe, the scientists believe they were influential and powerful individuals, likely tribal chieftains.

According to the researchers, people in positions of power would tend to travel more widely and father far more children than their subjects, so their lineages became dominant.

“We think that a social structure in which resources and power are more easily accessible to only some men may allow for a few paternal lineages to become very frequent in a short amount of time,” Dr. Chiara Batini, a co-author of the research and a geneticist at the University of Leicester, said.

The scientists are now planning to continue their study, as it can help them to gain deeper understanding of how the three identified paternal lineages spread across Europe.

“Given the cultural complexity of the Bronze Age, it’s difficult to link a particular event to the population growth that we infer,” Batini said.

“But Y-chromosome DNA sequences from skeletal remains are becoming available, and this will help us to understand what happened, and when,” she added.

I don’t know how much you can really put into these studies.  You would have to know a lot more than I know to be able to know if it was legit or just people putting out whatever gibberish they thought up to keep their research grants coming.

But I like this study.  The idea that all European men have the same three uber-alpha granddads who were just rolling across Europe getting laid left and right should be promoted as true, even if it isn’t.  There is nothing bad which can come from believing in this story.