Flawed Science, Twin Studies, and Schizophrenia with Jay Joseph, PsyD
Flawed Science, Twin Studies, and Schizophrenia with Jay Joseph, PsyD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AVDetPXy6M
Tag: genetics
FOTD Episode 11: The Trouble With Twin Studies – Does Our DNA Make Us Who We Are? (with Jay Joseph)
Twins separated at birth studies are problematic for multiple reasons.
Studies comparing twins reared together to siblings doesn’t isolate genetics because the environment is different for each sibling cohort.
A whole bunch of claims about genetics rest on these bad studies or claims that these studies don’t strongly support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoysrR7Adwk
The Self-Sustaining Outrage Cycle of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans Ad
“were “the Democrats,” collectively, actually upset about the ad?
At first, “criticism of the ad campaign had come almost entirely from a smattering of accounts with relatively few followers,” Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times wrote last week. “Conversation about the ad did not escalate online or in traditional media until days later, after right-leaning influencers, broadcasters and politicians began criticizing what they described as a wave of progressive outrage.”
…
Do woke liberals really think a publicly traded clothing company, and one of the biggest stars in the world, are inserting eugenicist terminology into commercials? Who cares, if it means I get to make my political enemies out to be fools.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/11/the-self-sustaining-outrage-cycle-of-sydney-sweeneys-jeans-ad/
Can We End Racism by Ending the Idea of Race Itself?
“Mason notes that our ancestors migrated at levels that most people grossly underestimate, leading to far more genetic mixing than people typically assume. She points out that our current understanding of DNA undermines a lot of assumptions that arose from observing external traits, such as skin color, nose shape, and eye shape, since such traits can arise from the same genetic allele but be inherited from entirely different people. Furthermore, thanks to the random genetic recombination that happens with every new generation, 75 percent of your genetic makeup is attributable to only 5 percent of your ancestors. A 23andMe test will tell you about only 8 percent of your ancestors, because they’re the only ones left represented in your DNA today. In fact, it’s possible that two dark South Africans can be more genetically divergent from one another than one of them is from a white Swede.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/25/how-to-end-racism/
Geneticist Razib Khan Answers My Most Controversial Questions About Genetics
Geneticist Razib Khan Answers My Most Controversial Questions About Genetics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfQ8Fh4waUE
Jews, Like Palestinians, Are ‘Indigenous’ to the Middle East
“According to a 2016 summary by genetic researchers Ariella Gladstein and Michael F. Hammer, however, “Ashkenazi Jews are not closely related to modern populations that best represent the Khazars.” Rather, they “appear equally close to both Middle Eastern and European populations,” and they “likely arose from a genetically diverse population in the Middle East.”
Notably, Abbas did not address Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who account for about 45 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 32 percent for Ashkenazim. Overall, a 2000 study found, “a substantial portion” of Jewish and Arab Y chromosomes (70 percent and 82 percent, respectively) belonged to the same chromosome pool, results that were consistent with “previous studies that suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living in the Middle East.””
…
“While genetic research belies the notion that Jews are newcomers to the Middle East, it gets you only so far. In particular, it does not address conflicting land claims based on much more recent developments.”
…
“Israel’s founding in 1948, which most Jews celebrate but most Palestinians remember as the Nakba (catastrophe), involved a mixture of prior land purchases, arbitrary line drawing by the United Nations, and a war in which the nascent state was attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Some of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled their homes planned to return after the anticipated Arab victory, while others were forcibly expelled.
Israel’s defenders have long argued that it could rightly claim land won in defensive wars—in 1967 as well as 1948. They have noted that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab states and wondered why Arab states could not likewise absorb Palestinian refugees.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/18/jews-like-palestinians-are-indigenous-to-the-middle-east/
The Politics of DNA
“”Luck,” E.B. White once said, “is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.” They worked hard, no doubt, to get where they are. But they also benefited enormously from good fortune, not just in life but in life’s building blocks. A fortunate combination of thousands of slight genetic differences boosted their intelligence, motivation, openness to experience, task perseverance, executive function, and interpersonal skills.
“Like being born to a rich or poor family, being born with a certain set of genetic variants is the outcome of a lottery of birth,” the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden argues in The Genetic Lottery. “And, like social class, the outcome of the genetic lottery is a systemic force that matters for who gets more, and who gets less, of nearly everything we care about in society.””