

2013: What should we be worried about? - spindritf
http://edge.org/responses/q2013

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a_bonobo
The first response on Chinese eugenics is extremely weird and confuses a
couple of things, first of all:

>It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major
rival to Illumina.

BGI _uses_ Illumina-technology! There is a difference between both companies
(disclaimer: I sometimes work with BGI), Illumina just builds the machines and
does little to no sequencing by themselves, BGI is a massive sequencing
facility that is involved in the sequencing of myriad genomes right now, with
only little focus on human genomics. BGI themselves don't build any sequencing
technology (yet?), so this guy is comparing apples to oranges here, like
someone comparing a weapons manufacturer to an army.

His implications about inheritance of IQ are flawed as well - just because
there are alleles linked to some trait (IQ in this case) doesn't mean that
these alleles are useful, you have especially in IQ studies massive
confounding going on - for example, wealth might be a better predictor of IQ
than certain alleles, just because right people have better access to
knowledge than poor people. He completely ignores environment in this issue!

>partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic
fertility among rural peasants.

And what is that sentence supposed to mean? Peasants are "lowly" idiots with
"bad" genes not worthy of having kids? This man does not understand genetics.

