It's a shame the genetic studies aren't published in more noteworthy journals. It's not that it's necessarily wrong, but it's to easily dismissed as fringe science. It's a nice story but hand-waving and certainly not compelling. Definitely not reductionist in regards to the molecular aspects of heterozygous advantage. I mean we're not seeing those types of diseases in north western Europeans, unlike the Cochran et al study.
Keep in mind that a year may elapse between the initial publication in a preprint archive and the final publication in a journal. Even the recent Reich lab study is still available only as a preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021
We generally don't see diseases like Tay-Sachs in Western Europeans. The big exception is French Canadians, and the reason may be the same, i.e., rapid cognitive evolution within a small population.
Frost, P. (2012). Tay-Sachs and French Canadians: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Advances in Anthropology 2(3): 132-138. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aa.2012.23016
In such a context, selection has to work with a relatively small number of promising alleles, including some that have adverse consequences in the homozygous state. It's possible that the increase in alleles for autism in Western Europeans may be due to a similar evolutionary logic, i.e., selection has to make do with the alleles that are available.
As usual, engaging and informative.
It's a shame the genetic studies aren't published in more noteworthy journals. It's not that it's necessarily wrong, but it's to easily dismissed as fringe science. It's a nice story but hand-waving and certainly not compelling. Definitely not reductionist in regards to the molecular aspects of heterozygous advantage. I mean we're not seeing those types of diseases in north western Europeans, unlike the Cochran et al study.
Some studies of recent cognitive evolution have been published in noteworthy journals, e.g., Kuijpers et al. (2022) https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.833190
Keep in mind that a year may elapse between the initial publication in a preprint archive and the final publication in a journal. Even the recent Reich lab study is still available only as a preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021
We generally don't see diseases like Tay-Sachs in Western Europeans. The big exception is French Canadians, and the reason may be the same, i.e., rapid cognitive evolution within a small population.
Frost, P. (2012). Tay-Sachs and French Canadians: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Advances in Anthropology 2(3): 132-138. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aa.2012.23016
In such a context, selection has to work with a relatively small number of promising alleles, including some that have adverse consequences in the homozygous state. It's possible that the increase in alleles for autism in Western Europeans may be due to a similar evolutionary logic, i.e., selection has to make do with the alleles that are available.