"THERE IS A HUGE SWELLING WAVE OF KNOWLEDGE
building up — knowledge about human variation, human inheritance, human nature. Things have gone much further than I realized. Genes controlling intelligence? "We've got a few nailed down, and more are showing up..." I spent much of my working life wading through masses of data. I never did disciplined "data mining" of the kind my guest engages in, but I know how patterns and significance gradually emerge out of a vast mass of undifferentiated bits and bytes. That's what is happening with genomics .. As my friend is toiling away with his nucleic acid molecules, at the other end of the scale population geneticists such as
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza are mapping disease frequencies and patterns of inheritance across entire nations and continents. The work of each reinforces the other. And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular .. ".
-- More.
Posted by Greg Ransom
