The Economist has a rather distressingly bad article by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, about the supposed general failure in human disease genetics over the last 5 years. The thesis is that Genomes Wide Association Studies (GWAS) for common diseases have been a failure that geneticists are trying to keep hidden, and that the new techniques required to solve the problem of disease genetics will raise ‘politically awkward and morally perplexing facts’ about the different traits and evolutionary histories of races. The former claim is pretty much the same as Steve Jones Telegraph article earlier this year, and is just as specious. I will look at both claims separately.
A quick point of terminology: Miller uses ‘GWAS’ to refer to studies that look for disease association in common variants using a genotyping chip, and acts as if sequencing studies are not, in fact, GWAS. In fact, a sequencing association study is just another type of GWAS, just looking at a larger set of variants.
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