When the U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages
Wow! This has implications for human genetics (a study that originated partly in considering human body size measurements like those described in the article) that I think most popular writers on human genetics have not taken into account. There was an article posted to Hacker News earlier this week that suggested, surely falsely in my opinion, that human genomes can be optimized for intelligence to such a degree that we won&#x27;t even be able to estimate IQ scores for future individuals with the same kind of tests that we use now. I rather doubt it. Because of pleiotropic effects of genes, almost surely there isn&#x27;t a gene shuffle that will massively increase human intelligence, but rather just strategies (as likely to be environmental as genetic) to improve average intelligence within the range already found in the worldwide human population.<p>Similarly, imputation of &quot;race&quot; by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, but for any trait of interest, a person who by both genome testing and known historical ancestry is categorized in some &quot;race&quot; category might have any degree of variance from &quot;average&quot; in the trait found in the whole human genome. It will be exciting to follow up on larger and larger data sets on these issues as human genomics projects continue.