The GWAS hoax....or was it a hoax? Is it a hoax?

A long time ago, in 2000, in Nature Genetics , Joe Terwilliger and I critiqued the idea then being pushed by the powers-that-be, that the g...

complex traitscomplexitygene mappinggeneticsGWASomnigenic

Some genetic non-sense about nonsense genes

T he April 12 issue of Nature has a research report and a main article about what is basically presented as the discovery that people typic...

gene inactivationgene knockoutgeneticsGWASprediction

Genomic causation....or not

By Ken Weiss and Anne Buchanan T he Big Story in the latest Nature  ("A radical revision of human genetics: Why many ‘deadly’ gene mut...

Big Datacausationcomplex causationcomplexitygeneticsGWAS

FAS - Fishy Association Studies

                                              On Saturday, July 19, 1879, the brilliant opera                                    composer, R...

Big DataGWASnormal sciencesciencewishful thinking

How many diseases does it take to map a SNP? Fifteen years on

K en and I are here in Finland, preparing to teach a week of Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics with Joe Terwilliger and colleagues.  Not s...

chronic diseasegeneticsGWASlogical reasoningLogical Reasoning in Human Genetics

Adam's sin and Next Generation Sequencing

Before the Enlightenment, in western scholarship at least, our understanding of the world was based on data we could detect with our senses,...

epistemologyGWASNext Generation Sequencingphilosophy of science

Genes 'for' XLID -- the replication/falsifiability fallacy

How do we know when a particular gene variant actually causes a trait?   A recent paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics (XLID-Cau...

causationgene functionGWASreplication