I've just watched this talk about Genetics and Intelligence by Steve Hsu1, a theoretical physicist and Scientific Advisor to the Cognitive Genomics Lab of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute), probably the leading genomics research center in the world.
Apparently, the main reason he gave this talk was to recruit volunteers for a study from the Cognitive Genomics Lab with the goal of investigating the genetics of human cognition.
We currently seek participants with high cognitive ability. You can qualify for the study if you have obtained a high SAT/ACT/GRE score, or have performed well in academic competitions such as the Math, Physics, or Informatics Olympiads, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, TopCoder, etc.
Automatic qualifying criteria include:
An SAT score of at least 760V/800M post-recentering or 700V/780M pre-recentering; ACT score of 35-36; or GRE score of at least 700V/800Q.
A PhD from a top US program in physics, math, EE, or theoretical computer science.
Honorable mention or better in the Putnam competition.
If you qualify as a participant, we may send you a DNA saliva kit. After you return this kit, we will genotype your DNA, and the data will eventually be available to you on this website, in a format compatible with many 3rd party interpretational tools.
I guess there are quite a few Lesswrongers smart enough to qualify for this study. If you want to advance Science and get genotyped for free check out their website for further information.
1: Steve Hsu has an awesome blog called "Information Processing". He writes about the genetics of intelligence, economics, psychometry, career advice for geeks, physics, etc.
Apparently selection is still ongoing: I got an email today saying they're sending me the kit. What kind of information should I expect when the results come back? I've never been genotyped before, so I don't know if this will be telling me stuff I already know, listing risk factors for diseases, declaring me genetically nonhuman, or what. I'm a step behind the rest of you on what genotyping actually does.
Although I got the email 2/23/13 saying my results were expected in May, I haven't gotten anything yet, and the site says it is still being sequenced. The results will be encoded. You will need a program to decode it. When you log into the site, at the top one of the options is Software. Under that, they list several programs that can be used. If anyone can make sense of it, I'd love to learn how. Just because I was a mathematical idiot savant at one point doesn't mean that part of my brain didn't shrivel up and die once real life happened.
I've just watched this talk about Genetics and Intelligence by Steve Hsu1, a theoretical physicist and Scientific Advisor to the Cognitive Genomics Lab of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute), probably the leading genomics research center in the world.
Apparently, the main reason he gave this talk was to recruit volunteers for a study from the Cognitive Genomics Lab with the goal of investigating the genetics of human cognition.
From their homepage:
I guess there are quite a few Lesswrongers smart enough to qualify for this study. If you want to advance Science and get genotyped for free check out their website for further information.
1: Steve Hsu has an awesome blog called "Information Processing". He writes about the genetics of intelligence, economics, psychometry, career advice for geeks, physics, etc.