I have never given a DNA sample and never plan to.
It’s for a few reasons the main one is that once it’s out there it’s out there forever and I don’t trust the future of humanity not to do something against my own interests with it.
I am also pretty confident about my parentage and would expect something extremely mono-racial .
> "I don’t trust the future of humanity not to do something against my own interests with it."
Very reasonable, but unfortunately it is already too late. Most anything against your own interest can already be done using just existing DNA information. You can be identified and accused of a crime just based on existing DNA databases. Shady biolabs can concoct new diseases that target people like you just based on existing DNA databases. New regimes of discrimination against people like you can already be conceived based on existing DNA databases. Etc.
A lot (most?) of the New World DNA testing is private people wanting to learn about their pre-1492 ancestry.
A lot (most?) of the Old World DNA testing is conducted by academics, and it provides the data that New Worlders use to learn about their Old World ancestry. Often it is the testing of specific people or groups who are deemed to represent genotypes, e.g., people whose four grandparents all come from the same region.
If one is diagnosed with cancer, then if one wants modern therapies, one is going to be donating DNA and there will be a much greater sequencing than one gets from 23 and me. Genomic medicine is the future.
> in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized
This is such a common rhetorical attack. And it is so good. And also so nefarious and so false. Why? Because it assumes that we are not currently using unfair selection methods (Anti-White anti-male anti-conservative). It assumes that our current selection methods are fair and any change might be unfair
Exactly. Except for the Nazis no one was out on a limb to institutionalize people based on heredity. There was always enough evidence of social incompetence to go on for institutionalization as is. And Nazis didn't want to institutionalize long term - if someone was "Nutzloser Esser" something worse would happen to him.
White females are the most likely to attend and then complete college after Asian-Americans. How does that demonstrate anti-white discrimination. And the biggest gender achievement gap is between white and black males.
If one looks at SFFA V UNC-Chapel Hill, white males benefit from the athletes advantage in admission. And virtually all highly selective private school use affirmative action to balance the male/female ratios unlike public universities that cannot use affirmative action for males and are thus 55% plus female.
If you are for ending all DEI anti white male policies then I am fine with ending athletic scholarships. If you're telling me there are not anti-white male discrimination practices, then you are a liar
No, the SFFA lawsuits showed that whites and Asians are held to different in unequal standards for admission. However, conservatives need to be a much better job at discussing the issue rather than just repeating memes.
If admission is based strictly on merit, the percentage of male students at high end universities goes down. And if one paid attention to the Varsity Blues Scandal, the students and their families using the side door where taking advantage of the admission advantage that athletes get but were not scholarship athletes. One needs to learn how athletics works at most universities.
And if one was really concerned about male employment prospects, then universities should have much bigger programs to get men to go into careers in healthcare, teaching, and mental health.
You are obviously a smart dude. Are you a education believer or are you woke on genetic IQ? I only want college for the top 5% rather than the top 50%? who then assume that they are the top 5% and become horribly resentful
I will own that conservative's share dumb memes because they're mostly dumb. But you downplaying the actual anti-white male discrimination is extremely intellectually dishonest and unvirtuous
White males go to college at a higher rate than black or Hispanic males. White males have an advantage at virtually all selective private universities. Remember, 70% of the students who finish in the top ten percentage of their high school class are female. The only place where males have any advantage is the math portion of the SAT and that gap is closing.
What conservatives need to reconcile is how to they blame the white/black achievement gap on genetic/culture while blaming the male/female achievement gap on female teachers discriminating against males. It makes no sense.
You know it doesn't make sense to me chess and video games. Why so few high performing females? Sexism? Changing the rules to increase male performance?
I am 90% sure that men are smarter than women and women are more conformist than men and there is the greater male variability theory as well. I am also more than 50% sure that we will find lots of pro female bias in education
On the moral/civic front I am fine with charity for the less advantaged. But I am against the lie of equality and that systemic racism/ sexism explains most of the high achievement gaps
Have you recently enrolled/attended university? I think for older people it is very difficult to grasp just how discriminatory and racist these institutions have become because they aren’t in contact with them.
I have worked (twice) for selective universities. I have also done a large amount of reading and listening concerning the two SFFA lawsuits. I also did a lot of reading and got to talk to a college president about the Varsity Blues Scandal. I have following college admission controversies surrounding the Fisher, Gratz, Grutter, Hopwood, and Bakke decisions. I quote Richard Reeves on the data concerning male academic performance. And yet, no one seems to be able to link to a specific instance of a university having a different, higher admission standard for males (in general) than females.
And last, I still am waiting for someone to explain why the white/black achievement gap is due to genetics and thus, nothing can be done, versus the male/female gap being due to males being discriminated against.
The injustice is in the forced diversification of the actual college programs themselves. My school made every stem degree easily accessible to female and non white students to boost diversity in those sought after degrees, there was zero option for white male students to change majors and enroll in computer science for instance, they simply were told to leave the school and enroll somewhere else, this was the case in a big flagship public school. In regards to the male-female gap there is greater aptitude variance among males so there are a lot of dumb men not suitable for college which would probably explain why there is an imbalance in college admissions, I personally don’t see that as an injustice against men, I do think there should be non-college paths for middle class attainment for these men through apprenticeships and whatnot and it’d probably prevent many from turning to crime and drugs. Where a white woman would face discrimination at my school would have been in the enrollment process, the admissions look at the demographics of schools and determine only x% are allowed from said school to limit white admittance.
A cite would be helpful. If one really claiming that some school like Calpoly-SLO had different academic standards for white males versus everyone else. What definitive needs some cites. And the other question is whether this occurred in this century.
Im citing first hand experience that is from the past few years, when did you go to college? If you didn’t go in the past 10 years then how can you even speak on these things accurately? The racial beancounting done by school admissions department during the 2010s is old news at this point and you’d have to be arguing utterly in bad faith to deny it. https://x.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1640129607256137730
> White females are the most likely to attend and then complete college after Asian-Americans.
I want to note that this is a terrible comparison to draw; if you're going to break whites down by sex, you should break other racial groups down by sex too.
The sign of a second-rate mind is to use the Fitzgerald quote as an excuse for cherishing an ontology which is known to be internally contradictory. An anonymous (if not nonexistent) thinker may have said, “one doesn’t have to think one is right about everything, but, regarding one’s beliefs, sometimes life does require that we make a damn decision.”
COWEN: But it’s not totally different. Your whole family’s super tall. If I worked for Yale Athletics, knew nothing about you, and I knew about the rest of your family, I’d be more inclined to travel to your town to scout you for the basketball team, and that would’ve been a good decision. Again, only on average, but just basic statistics implies that.
ZIMMER: You’re very kind, but what do you mean by tall? I’d like to think I’m pretty good at looking over other people's heads in a standing-room-only crowd. And the inseam of my pants is 38"; my shirt size is 18-38. But I remember in college trying out for the volleyball team and being like, “I’m done,” and then watching other freshmen spike the ball better than me.
COWEN: [Followup question]
ZIMMER: I remember what happened to Nicolas Wade in 2014, after he published "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." Don't cancel me!
The issue is that height is not where the recruiting starts but with success playing basketball. A college basketball players has been playing organized basketball since elementary school. And those playing at the college level are tracked from middle school forward by following travel team play, summer tournaments, etc. Yet, Dr Cowen somehow believes that Yale starts with a tall player and then tries to figure out if they are a good players.
> The issue is that height is not where the recruiting starts but with
Okay. Opinions, everybody has one.
To be clear my comment of Mar 6, 2025 at 6:43AM ("COWEN: But it’s not totally different...") was my sarcastic re-statement of Carl Zimmer's far-too-precious argument, "intelligence, wuzzat? Why, shucks, Tyler, I ain't even the best at ol' calculus!"
Cowen hasn't opined on the connection, if any, between basketball talent and tallness.
After all, there are plenty of 5'6" stars in the NBA.
"Should colleges demand DNA results from applicants?"
I first thought that Cowen and Zimmer were going to speculate about tying Affirmative Action admissions to the ancestry information that 23andMe etc. offer. Selective colleges could easily afford the tests ($100 or less), and the results are accurate and precise.
Of course, this turned out to be kind of awkward for (Harvard faculty) quota-filler Elizabeth Warren.
I don't know which "Your Race?" box Lester's sons Stefan Holt (Pepperdine U.) and Cameron Holt (Stanford) checked as 17-year-olds. By U.S. (if not Brazilian) rules, one or two of their grandparents meant that each was fully entitled to Black preferences.
Fairly obviously ("Lester Holt with" photo in https://people.com/all-about-lester-holt-sons-8623455), "% Sub-Saharan Ancestry" would be in the high-single-digits or low teens. Perfect Diversity admits from Pepperdine's and Stanford's points of view. But perhaps not exactly what the American people thought they would be getting from LBJ's Executive Order 11246.
> "Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point"
What?!?! Am I the only one hearing this for the first time? The term "developmentally disabled" didn't even exist in the 1920s or whenever Mr. Zimmer imagines this occurred. Or is "developmentally disabled" supposed to mean "Jews who haven't gone though Cuddihy's 'Ordeal Of Civility' stage of development"? That wouldn't be a crazy interpretation, but somehow I very much doubt this is what Carl Zimmer means since he probably regards Cuddihy as an antisemite.
No Carl, certain circles used to exclude (or more usually, limit) Jewish participation not because they thought Jews were retarded but because they thought Jews were slippery and annoying. And judging by Carl Zimmer (no statistics or calculus needed for that judgement Carl!), some still are.
This is the basis for Zimmer's dubious claim? Even this sketchy little study uses an evidently Jewish psychologist to work with the Jewish subjects of the study. Psychology being a field largely invented by a Jew, Sigmund Freud. I'll go out on a limb here, Jews were not considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point, but Zimmer is happy to say anything to try to shrug off Tyler's question.
Yes, although I don't think they were big in intelligence testing. This was before Stanford Binet. I didn't check the tests but chatGPT claims that many of the questions required cultural knowledge.
The first person I heard bring this up was Thomas Sowell. He thought it meant that black underperformance would be temporary.
The claim that Jews were regarded as unintelligent is traced, I believe, to Stephen Jay Gould. And Charles Murray is the most notable debunker of Gould's claims.
...Consider our daughter’s three suitors, Kabir, Haresh, and Amit. All three appear to be suitable boys, all having graduated from colleges that require test scores at least at the 95th percentile, and all are now in remunerative professions...
It's a complicated calculus. Basically, we already agree that all suitors show similar level of academic competence. But suitor's A parents are brilliant, B's are mediocre and C are substandard? In that case, people will probably opt for family A - which is statistically probably richer too. And with DNA info available, one would probably also know that A is the legit scion of family A?
One needs to look up the idea of firewalls. Many universities have one admission standards for admissions to the university but different standards for certain colleges, majors, and programs.
And universities vary from letting all admitted freshmen major in whatever they want to limiting majors who whatever one stated in the admissions process.
The problem with DNA tests is that reading out race and illegitimacy is super-easy, while reading educational performance very unsatisfying? I think current GWAS models only give out something like r-square of 0.15 or so on educational attainment? It is probably the consequence of GWAS working using linear additive models. Once you include gene combinations there are simply to many degrees of freedom eaten up by all possible combinations.
I have a joke that whenever someone bring up the nepo-baby of an actor, athlete, or musician, I just point out that what did one expect the child of Cindy Crawford, Tom Hanks, or LeBron James to do, go to dental school?
Zimmerman: "I don't think being related to smart people necessarily means you are smart."
Also Zimmerman: "Isn't it insane that in the past people thought Jews were possibly dullards?"
Getting left of center people to openly admit what they obviously know is true is one of the most frustrating tasks out there. If they actually were able to accept this then the country could have an honest debate about how to best accommodate different levels of cognitive ability so as many people as possible could contribute to society and be supported as necessary. But half of them are fully conditioned to reject this because it might imply some not so nice stereotypes about blacks (who this is really about, and always will be) have a basis in reality, and the other half just really enjoy punishing people they don't like through politics and social policy.
When she applies to Houston and Rutgers, she did not check the Native American box. In 2025, one does not get to claim to be an American Indian when applying for college without being a card carrying member. The actual issue for the last two decades has been immigrants from Africa getting the benefits meant for the descendants of American slaves and people using the vague definition of Hispanic to claim to be Hispanic.
Illegal and unconstitutional and noxious racial discrimination against disfavored people (such as males and whites) is the actual "actual issue".
Perplexity: "Some colleges rely on self-reporting for Native American status, which means verification of tribal membership may not always occur during the admissions process.
The University of Oregon's Home Flight program allows students from unrecognized tribes to apply for tuition benefits via letters from council members, extending support to some students without formal tribal recognition.
Some institutions accept Certificate Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) cards instead of enrollment records as proof of Native American heritage, which can benefit students who may not meet specific tribal enrollment requirements.
Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTI) are designated based on self-identified Native American students, without requiring formal tribal membership verification."
And of course admission pokemon points are not the only benefits of being a Pretendian (see Fauxcahontas, whose salary and job prospects were boosted by her false claims), only the ones officially outlawed by Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. And we know from the numbers that admissions offices hide their illegalities.
I'll admit up front that I haven't checked the GWAS literature in a long time. I don't think GWAS will ever be good at predicting intelligence. At best it will turn out like those Sailer maps of various sociology measures that are actually maps of where lots of black people live plus Indian reservations.
Genetics is predictive in simple cases. A gene produces a defective protein-->disease. Intelligence is the product of a complex process that somehow leads from genes and regulators and epigenetic modification through neurons snaking through the brain and individual connections being somehow made more important and others less and god knows what else.
Complex systems are unpredictable. It's patterns in the chaos. You can't get there by simulation and even if you could, we hardly know any of the rules of the system. It's been decades but I remember finding the half semester of neuroembryology frustrating. There were no rules! Everything we knew was "well in this case this happens and then in this case this happens..."
On top of that, if you want to get there with GWAS you have the problem of sample size vs number of dimensions. There simply are not enough people to come close to making anything other than an over fit model.
It's entirely possible that you could take the bad alleles from the Indian hypothetical and find they had the opposite effect in a village in Northern Italy. Any handful of genes you find having an effect in one population might be operating in a very different average genetic environment in another population.
> I don't think GWAS will ever be good at predicting intelligence.
I tend to agree. Though it depends on, "how good is good?"
1. By GWAS, most people mean SNP-based studies, not whole-genome sequencing. SNP arrays (etc.) can only sample a fraction of genomic variability. Hundreds of genes each have very small effect. Rare alleles can have large effects, usually deleterious -- all of these will be missed.
2. Genetics (and epigenetics) only account for say half of intelligence differences. That represents the upper limit of what a genetics/epigenetics test can predict.
3. If a test's correlation topped out at say 0.4, that could (a) be pretty useful for comparing the means of Group A and Group B, while (b) being not-very-accurate at making predictions about any given individual. Cowen clearly understands both (a) and (b).
Yep. I was thinking about the possibility that the combinations are so complex that some intelligence genes found in Europeans might not, e.g., "work" in the background of Asian genetics and vice versa.
It occurred to me this might show up if we could do a studied of mixed race children of high intelligence couples. Do the children of two Northern European Physics professors have the same average intelligence as the children of one northern European physics professor and one Chinese physics professor?
East Asians and West Eurasians do vary in their cognitive profiles, with Asians being more math and spacially dexterous and W Eurasians more verbal-tilted.
Here's a nature-neutral, nurture-neutral criterion for DENYING admission to college: an applicant's saying not "saying" or "thinking" but "being like."
I have never given a DNA sample and never plan to.
It’s for a few reasons the main one is that once it’s out there it’s out there forever and I don’t trust the future of humanity not to do something against my own interests with it.
I am also pretty confident about my parentage and would expect something extremely mono-racial .
> "I don’t trust the future of humanity not to do something against my own interests with it."
Very reasonable, but unfortunately it is already too late. Most anything against your own interest can already be done using just existing DNA information. You can be identified and accused of a crime just based on existing DNA databases. Shady biolabs can concoct new diseases that target people like you just based on existing DNA databases. New regimes of discrimination against people like you can already be conceived based on existing DNA databases. Etc.
23andme and the like are very popular in the New World where people like to discover their pre-1492 ancestry.
I live in the Old World and I’ve never known anyone to do an ancestry test.
A lot (most?) of the New World DNA testing is private people wanting to learn about their pre-1492 ancestry.
A lot (most?) of the Old World DNA testing is conducted by academics, and it provides the data that New Worlders use to learn about their Old World ancestry. Often it is the testing of specific people or groups who are deemed to represent genotypes, e.g., people whose four grandparents all come from the same region.
If one is diagnosed with cancer, then if one wants modern therapies, one is going to be donating DNA and there will be a much greater sequencing than one gets from 23 and me. Genomic medicine is the future.
But give DNA to a university?
Exactly. No one is going to give DNA for going to university. Well maybe a few would but not many.
Goodness only knows where it might end up.
"No one is going to give DNA for going to university."
False. Many would in fact give up their DNA privacy for a shot at improving their chances of admission to a more prestigious university.
> in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized
This is such a common rhetorical attack. And it is so good. And also so nefarious and so false. Why? Because it assumes that we are not currently using unfair selection methods (Anti-White anti-male anti-conservative). It assumes that our current selection methods are fair and any change might be unfair
Exactly. Except for the Nazis no one was out on a limb to institutionalize people based on heredity. There was always enough evidence of social incompetence to go on for institutionalization as is. And Nazis didn't want to institutionalize long term - if someone was "Nutzloser Esser" something worse would happen to him.
White females are the most likely to attend and then complete college after Asian-Americans. How does that demonstrate anti-white discrimination. And the biggest gender achievement gap is between white and black males.
If one looks at SFFA V UNC-Chapel Hill, white males benefit from the athletes advantage in admission. And virtually all highly selective private school use affirmative action to balance the male/female ratios unlike public universities that cannot use affirmative action for males and are thus 55% plus female.
Look data up instead of relying on stereotypes.
If you are for ending all DEI anti white male policies then I am fine with ending athletic scholarships. If you're telling me there are not anti-white male discrimination practices, then you are a liar
No, the SFFA lawsuits showed that whites and Asians are held to different in unequal standards for admission. However, conservatives need to be a much better job at discussing the issue rather than just repeating memes.
If admission is based strictly on merit, the percentage of male students at high end universities goes down. And if one paid attention to the Varsity Blues Scandal, the students and their families using the side door where taking advantage of the admission advantage that athletes get but were not scholarship athletes. One needs to learn how athletics works at most universities.
And if one was really concerned about male employment prospects, then universities should have much bigger programs to get men to go into careers in healthcare, teaching, and mental health.
You are obviously a smart dude. Are you a education believer or are you woke on genetic IQ? I only want college for the top 5% rather than the top 50%? who then assume that they are the top 5% and become horribly resentful
I will own that conservative's share dumb memes because they're mostly dumb. But you downplaying the actual anti-white male discrimination is extremely intellectually dishonest and unvirtuous
White males go to college at a higher rate than black or Hispanic males. White males have an advantage at virtually all selective private universities. Remember, 70% of the students who finish in the top ten percentage of their high school class are female. The only place where males have any advantage is the math portion of the SAT and that gap is closing.
What conservatives need to reconcile is how to they blame the white/black achievement gap on genetic/culture while blaming the male/female achievement gap on female teachers discriminating against males. It makes no sense.
You know it doesn't make sense to me chess and video games. Why so few high performing females? Sexism? Changing the rules to increase male performance?
I am 90% sure that men are smarter than women and women are more conformist than men and there is the greater male variability theory as well. I am also more than 50% sure that we will find lots of pro female bias in education
On the moral/civic front I am fine with charity for the less advantaged. But I am against the lie of equality and that systemic racism/ sexism explains most of the high achievement gaps
Have you recently enrolled/attended university? I think for older people it is very difficult to grasp just how discriminatory and racist these institutions have become because they aren’t in contact with them.
I have worked (twice) for selective universities. I have also done a large amount of reading and listening concerning the two SFFA lawsuits. I also did a lot of reading and got to talk to a college president about the Varsity Blues Scandal. I have following college admission controversies surrounding the Fisher, Gratz, Grutter, Hopwood, and Bakke decisions. I quote Richard Reeves on the data concerning male academic performance. And yet, no one seems to be able to link to a specific instance of a university having a different, higher admission standard for males (in general) than females.
And last, I still am waiting for someone to explain why the white/black achievement gap is due to genetics and thus, nothing can be done, versus the male/female gap being due to males being discriminated against.
The injustice is in the forced diversification of the actual college programs themselves. My school made every stem degree easily accessible to female and non white students to boost diversity in those sought after degrees, there was zero option for white male students to change majors and enroll in computer science for instance, they simply were told to leave the school and enroll somewhere else, this was the case in a big flagship public school. In regards to the male-female gap there is greater aptitude variance among males so there are a lot of dumb men not suitable for college which would probably explain why there is an imbalance in college admissions, I personally don’t see that as an injustice against men, I do think there should be non-college paths for middle class attainment for these men through apprenticeships and whatnot and it’d probably prevent many from turning to crime and drugs. Where a white woman would face discrimination at my school would have been in the enrollment process, the admissions look at the demographics of schools and determine only x% are allowed from said school to limit white admittance.
A cite would be helpful. If one really claiming that some school like Calpoly-SLO had different academic standards for white males versus everyone else. What definitive needs some cites. And the other question is whether this occurred in this century.
Im citing first hand experience that is from the past few years, when did you go to college? If you didn’t go in the past 10 years then how can you even speak on these things accurately? The racial beancounting done by school admissions department during the 2010s is old news at this point and you’d have to be arguing utterly in bad faith to deny it. https://x.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1640129607256137730
https://x.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1782107192424014272
> White females are the most likely to attend and then complete college after Asian-Americans.
I want to note that this is a terrible comparison to draw; if you're going to break whites down by sex, you should break other racial groups down by sex too.
In every ethnic category, females are more likely to attend than males, even with Asian-Americans. And for many of the same reasons.
The sign of a second-rate mind is to use the Fitzgerald quote as an excuse for cherishing an ontology which is known to be internally contradictory. An anonymous (if not nonexistent) thinker may have said, “one doesn’t have to think one is right about everything, but, regarding one’s beliefs, sometimes life does require that we make a damn decision.”
A second rate mind is still pretty good. I figure there must be at least two rates above mine.
COWEN: But it’s not totally different. Your whole family’s super tall. If I worked for Yale Athletics, knew nothing about you, and I knew about the rest of your family, I’d be more inclined to travel to your town to scout you for the basketball team, and that would’ve been a good decision. Again, only on average, but just basic statistics implies that.
ZIMMER: You’re very kind, but what do you mean by tall? I’d like to think I’m pretty good at looking over other people's heads in a standing-room-only crowd. And the inseam of my pants is 38"; my shirt size is 18-38. But I remember in college trying out for the volleyball team and being like, “I’m done,” and then watching other freshmen spike the ball better than me.
COWEN: [Followup question]
ZIMMER: I remember what happened to Nicolas Wade in 2014, after he published "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." Don't cancel me!
COWEN: [Followup question]
ZIMMER: Don't cancel me!
Embarrassing.
I like that you gave him an 18 inch neck.
Cowen fails to understand that there are plenty of 6 foot 8 inch males who are horrible basketball players (or volleyball players).
> Cowen fails to understand that there are plenty of 6 foot 8 inch males who are horrible basketball players (or volleyball players).
A clever comment that is likely to cause Sailer and many of his readers to chuckle.
I'm assuming you meant it to be funny.
That's not necessarily the case; it's also the type of argument that a midwit laptop-class pundit would offer as a ¡gotcha! rebuttal of HBD heresies.
The issue is that height is not where the recruiting starts but with success playing basketball. A college basketball players has been playing organized basketball since elementary school. And those playing at the college level are tracked from middle school forward by following travel team play, summer tournaments, etc. Yet, Dr Cowen somehow believes that Yale starts with a tall player and then tries to figure out if they are a good players.
> The issue is that height is not where the recruiting starts but with
Okay. Opinions, everybody has one.
To be clear my comment of Mar 6, 2025 at 6:43AM ("COWEN: But it’s not totally different...") was my sarcastic re-statement of Carl Zimmer's far-too-precious argument, "intelligence, wuzzat? Why, shucks, Tyler, I ain't even the best at ol' calculus!"
Cowen hasn't opined on the connection, if any, between basketball talent and tallness.
After all, there are plenty of 5'6" stars in the NBA.
Should colleges demand DNA tests? Who cares? Colleges are rapidly making themselves irrelevant…we all know that.
Maybe we should bring back pre-marital blood testing…and include DNA analysis for everyone. That might have value.
Mr. Google tells me that Maine was the first state to repeal its’ pre-marital tests, and that most states had them.
The tests were primarily designed to detect STDs, and the guys were generally the culprits.
You could give your DNA results to your intended along with a lab-grown diamond. Romantic, eh?
"Should colleges demand DNA results from applicants?"
I first thought that Cowen and Zimmer were going to speculate about tying Affirmative Action admissions to the ancestry information that 23andMe etc. offer. Selective colleges could easily afford the tests ($100 or less), and the results are accurate and precise.
Of course, this turned out to be kind of awkward for (Harvard faculty) quota-filler Elizabeth Warren.
I don't know which "Your Race?" box Lester's sons Stefan Holt (Pepperdine U.) and Cameron Holt (Stanford) checked as 17-year-olds. By U.S. (if not Brazilian) rules, one or two of their grandparents meant that each was fully entitled to Black preferences.
Fairly obviously ("Lester Holt with" photo in https://people.com/all-about-lester-holt-sons-8623455), "% Sub-Saharan Ancestry" would be in the high-single-digits or low teens. Perfect Diversity admits from Pepperdine's and Stanford's points of view. But perhaps not exactly what the American people thought they would be getting from LBJ's Executive Order 11246.
> "Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point"
What?!?! Am I the only one hearing this for the first time? The term "developmentally disabled" didn't even exist in the 1920s or whenever Mr. Zimmer imagines this occurred. Or is "developmentally disabled" supposed to mean "Jews who haven't gone though Cuddihy's 'Ordeal Of Civility' stage of development"? That wouldn't be a crazy interpretation, but somehow I very much doubt this is what Carl Zimmer means since he probably regards Cuddihy as an antisemite.
No Carl, certain circles used to exclude (or more usually, limit) Jewish participation not because they thought Jews were retarded but because they thought Jews were slippery and annoying. And judging by Carl Zimmer (no statistics or calculus needed for that judgement Carl!), some still are.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22developmentally+disabled%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
I think this is the study:
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/low/1917-goddard.pdf
This is the basis for Zimmer's dubious claim? Even this sketchy little study uses an evidently Jewish psychologist to work with the Jewish subjects of the study. Psychology being a field largely invented by a Jew, Sigmund Freud. I'll go out on a limb here, Jews were not considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point, but Zimmer is happy to say anything to try to shrug off Tyler's question.
Yes, although I don't think they were big in intelligence testing. This was before Stanford Binet. I didn't check the tests but chatGPT claims that many of the questions required cultural knowledge.
The first person I heard bring this up was Thomas Sowell. He thought it meant that black underperformance would be temporary.
The claim that Jews were regarded as unintelligent is traced, I believe, to Stephen Jay Gould. And Charles Murray is the most notable debunker of Gould's claims.
...Consider our daughter’s three suitors, Kabir, Haresh, and Amit. All three appear to be suitable boys, all having graduated from colleges that require test scores at least at the 95th percentile, and all are now in remunerative professions...
It's a complicated calculus. Basically, we already agree that all suitors show similar level of academic competence. But suitor's A parents are brilliant, B's are mediocre and C are substandard? In that case, people will probably opt for family A - which is statistically probably richer too. And with DNA info available, one would probably also know that A is the legit scion of family A?
But if C was very handsome, drove a Corvette and was edgy in personality....
If parents select, it would be a no no, lol. After all, you don't want to have to care for your abandoned daughter with one or two kids in tow.
Of course.
No to the DNA. No to tests for alcohol consumption. Very good high school grades and at the bare minimum, 1000 on the SAT.
One needs to look up the idea of firewalls. Many universities have one admission standards for admissions to the university but different standards for certain colleges, majors, and programs.
And universities vary from letting all admitted freshmen major in whatever they want to limiting majors who whatever one stated in the admissions process.
The problem with DNA tests is that reading out race and illegitimacy is super-easy, while reading educational performance very unsatisfying? I think current GWAS models only give out something like r-square of 0.15 or so on educational attainment? It is probably the consequence of GWAS working using linear additive models. Once you include gene combinations there are simply to many degrees of freedom eaten up by all possible combinations.
Tangent: does anyone here read Sasha Gusev?
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/
He seems quite confident that heritability is overrated. But, as a poetry major (so to speak), I am not competent to evaluate his claims.
I have a joke that whenever someone bring up the nepo-baby of an actor, athlete, or musician, I just point out that what did one expect the child of Cindy Crawford, Tom Hanks, or LeBron James to do, go to dental school?
> Sasha Gusev
Gusev/Sailer Twitter spat from Jan. 2024: https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1750514382705238181
Zimmerman: "I don't think being related to smart people necessarily means you are smart."
Also Zimmerman: "Isn't it insane that in the past people thought Jews were possibly dullards?"
Getting left of center people to openly admit what they obviously know is true is one of the most frustrating tasks out there. If they actually were able to accept this then the country could have an honest debate about how to best accommodate different levels of cognitive ability so as many people as possible could contribute to society and be supported as necessary. But half of them are fully conditioned to reject this because it might imply some not so nice stereotypes about blacks (who this is really about, and always will be) have a basis in reality, and the other half just really enjoy punishing people they don't like through politics and social policy.
DNA could be a check to see if the students used LLM AI's to do all their high school work or had someone else take their S.A T.'s.
A huge disparity would be a red flag.
And what about eliminating those Pretendians getting in?
They have to be card carrying to get the native American benefits.
Nonsense. Fauxcahontas got the benefit of being The First Indian Prof without being a card carrying member of any Indian tribe.
When she applies to Houston and Rutgers, she did not check the Native American box. In 2025, one does not get to claim to be an American Indian when applying for college without being a card carrying member. The actual issue for the last two decades has been immigrants from Africa getting the benefits meant for the descendants of American slaves and people using the vague definition of Hispanic to claim to be Hispanic.
Illegal and unconstitutional and noxious racial discrimination against disfavored people (such as males and whites) is the actual "actual issue".
Perplexity: "Some colleges rely on self-reporting for Native American status, which means verification of tribal membership may not always occur during the admissions process.
The University of Oregon's Home Flight program allows students from unrecognized tribes to apply for tuition benefits via letters from council members, extending support to some students without formal tribal recognition.
Some institutions accept Certificate Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) cards instead of enrollment records as proof of Native American heritage, which can benefit students who may not meet specific tribal enrollment requirements.
Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTI) are designated based on self-identified Native American students, without requiring formal tribal membership verification."
And of course admission pokemon points are not the only benefits of being a Pretendian (see Fauxcahontas, whose salary and job prospects were boosted by her false claims), only the ones officially outlawed by Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. And we know from the numbers that admissions offices hide their illegalities.
So, you're lying as usual.
I'll admit up front that I haven't checked the GWAS literature in a long time. I don't think GWAS will ever be good at predicting intelligence. At best it will turn out like those Sailer maps of various sociology measures that are actually maps of where lots of black people live plus Indian reservations.
Genetics is predictive in simple cases. A gene produces a defective protein-->disease. Intelligence is the product of a complex process that somehow leads from genes and regulators and epigenetic modification through neurons snaking through the brain and individual connections being somehow made more important and others less and god knows what else.
Complex systems are unpredictable. It's patterns in the chaos. You can't get there by simulation and even if you could, we hardly know any of the rules of the system. It's been decades but I remember finding the half semester of neuroembryology frustrating. There were no rules! Everything we knew was "well in this case this happens and then in this case this happens..."
On top of that, if you want to get there with GWAS you have the problem of sample size vs number of dimensions. There simply are not enough people to come close to making anything other than an over fit model.
It's entirely possible that you could take the bad alleles from the Indian hypothetical and find they had the opposite effect in a village in Northern Italy. Any handful of genes you find having an effect in one population might be operating in a very different average genetic environment in another population.
> I don't think GWAS will ever be good at predicting intelligence.
I tend to agree. Though it depends on, "how good is good?"
1. By GWAS, most people mean SNP-based studies, not whole-genome sequencing. SNP arrays (etc.) can only sample a fraction of genomic variability. Hundreds of genes each have very small effect. Rare alleles can have large effects, usually deleterious -- all of these will be missed.
2. Genetics (and epigenetics) only account for say half of intelligence differences. That represents the upper limit of what a genetics/epigenetics test can predict.
3. If a test's correlation topped out at say 0.4, that could (a) be pretty useful for comparing the means of Group A and Group B, while (b) being not-very-accurate at making predictions about any given individual. Cowen clearly understands both (a) and (b).
Yep. I was thinking about the possibility that the combinations are so complex that some intelligence genes found in Europeans might not, e.g., "work" in the background of Asian genetics and vice versa.
It occurred to me this might show up if we could do a studied of mixed race children of high intelligence couples. Do the children of two Northern European Physics professors have the same average intelligence as the children of one northern European physics professor and one Chinese physics professor?
East Asians and West Eurasians do vary in their cognitive profiles, with Asians being more math and spacially dexterous and W Eurasians more verbal-tilted.
Here's a nature-neutral, nurture-neutral criterion for DENYING admission to college: an applicant's saying not "saying" or "thinking" but "being like."