Steve Hsu: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is unbelievably interesting. By the way, this just occurred to me—it's supposed to be highly heritable, especially people in Asian countries, who have the experience of having grandparents that are much shorter than us, and then parents that are shorter than us, which suggests that the environment has a big part to play in it malnutrition or something. So how do you square that our parents are often shorter than us with the idea that height is supposed to be super heritable. Another great observation. So the correct scientific statement is that we can predict height for people who will be born and raised in a favorable environment. In other words, if you live close to a McDonald's and you're able to afford all the food you want, then the height phenotype becomes super heritable because the environmental variation doesn't matter very much. But, you and I both know that people are much smaller if we return to where our ancestors came from, and also, if you look at how much food, calories, protein, and calcium they eat, it's different from what I ate and what you ate growing up. So we're never saying the environmental effects are zero. We're saying that for people raised in a particularly favorable environment, maybe the genes are capped on what can be achieved, and we can predict that. In fact, we have data from Asia, where you can see much bigger environmental effects. Age affects older people, for fixed polygenic scores on the trait are much shorter than younger people. Oh, okay. Interesting. That raises the next question I was about to ask: how applicable are these scores across different ancestral populations?…

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