Amerika

As genetics advances, it moves from something like Lewontin’s Fallacy which looks at single genes, and instead matures toward an ancestor of what we call genetic frameworks, namely shared traits that interact with each other to make a comprehensible whole.

Interest has steadily risen in haplotype blocks instead of SNPs or other smaller units of measure that correlate to specific traits not blocks of traits:

With high marker density and linkage disequilibrium (LD) between markers, genotype data in breeding populations tends to exhibit considerable redundancy. Therefore, interest is growing in the use of haplotype blocks to overcome redundancy by summarizing co-inherited features. Moreover, haplotype blocks can help to capture local epistasis caused by interacting loci.

Co-inherited features make up what we think of as defining cultivars, landraces, and subspecies. These are traits that group together into clusters making abilities. When the parents are from the same ethnic group, these get passed on intact, but with hybridization, only some of the traits come through and some abilities are lost.

Science is starting to get more of a handle on DNA as a language comprised of paragraphs or functions written in traits that code for proteins that then compel certain reactions in the body. We are, like Darwin, taking a statistical view of genomics:

“Haplotype” and “haplotype block” are widely used terms in evolutionary genetics, and have increased in importance across many disciplines (Delaneau et al., 2019; International HapMap Consortium, 2005; Leitwein et al., 2020). An important but often overlooked fact is that populations evolve through changing frequencies of blocks of the genome, not individual sites. Therefore, we should be most interested in understanding the trajectories of the underlying haplotypes, yet these are often obscured at the level of SNPs (Castro et al., 2019; Clark, 2004). Thus, disentangling the evolutionary history underlying genomic patterns can be challenging using solely site‐based statistics. For example, while whole‐genome scans for signatures of selection can reveal individual SNPs associated with fitness differences (Poelstra et al., 2014; Tavares et al., 2018), it is extremely difficult to pinpoint the causal variants (Burri, 2017; Grossman et al., 2010; Ravinet et al., 2017; Rockman, 2012; Stankowski et al., 2019; Tavares et al., 2018; Wolf & Ellegren, 2017). As another example, shifts in polygenic scores from genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) can be misinterpreted as signals of selection, as opposed to artefacts of population structure (Berg et al., 2019; Novembre & Barton, 2018; Sella & Barton, 2019), which often leave clearer signatures in shared haplotype structure.

In a broader shift, instead of looking at specific sites, we are looking at types of syntax coding for traits across the genome, because this shows us the traits the organism possesses, not how it matches up to specific past examples.

What comes next is a look at genomic coherence, or how well these traits work with each other. Science is avoiding that one because it will reveal that not just race- but ethnic- and class-mixing create genetic chaos by rolling the dice on every trait.

We are about to understand what has been written about on this site before, the genetic framework. This is an architectonic assembly of related traits that make up the genetic coding for what becomes culture in addition to abilities. This is what distinguishes populations.

Genetic frameworks are fragile because even small amounts of foreign DNA remove parts of the framework and replace them with other, erratic elements. The healthiest frameworks are reinforced with similarity to others in the population, so breeding is not a dice roll.

Egalitarians hate Darwinism — the idea that all behaviors are coded for by traits, and whatever reproduces defines that set of traits — because it points out the ugly truth that we can breed humans like cattle for the traits we want.

That in turn says that not only are we all not equal, but some are not desired. They have traits we do not want. They cannot be fixed with education, welfare, patriotism, religion, or “love.” They simply must go away.

Naturally, this means that the egalitarians will fight the notion of genetic frameworks with kicky-screamy tantrums as usual. When genetics was a lottery, where your genes were spaces on a Bingo board and you got lucky if the right numbers were called, they could handle it.

But now we see genetics as a case of not randomness, but traits working together, which means that you are either moving upward to more coherence of your traits, or you have sabotaged your genetic framework and you are descending into biological and psychological chaos.

This also means that we are figuring out that many of the ways we measure population relatedness are simply wrong. The statistical approach shows us more of what is in different groups than the study of particular locations. That scares the egalitarians, which means it is probably a good thing.

Tags: genetic frameworks, genetics, lewontin's fallacy