I'm very confused by the article. Not sure if it's because the language or because it's not very clear. On the one hand it says that there are too little evidence of "hereditability" to be useful to cure diseases. On the other hand it says that there is a lot of evidence, to the point of being "disturbing", of racial traits. What am I reading wrong?
Regarding the missing heritability, they are claiming that this is a deficiency of GWAS. It then goes on to talk about sequencing, which it says will find lots of evidence for miscegenation, etc. (To which I say, sure, but what of it?)
In case you are not familiar with the methods, the difference between GWAS/SNP analysis and sequencing is this: GWAS relies on surveying ~500,000 (up to 6 million now, but it doesn't really matter) known single nucleotide polymorphisms. So you might ask, "which nucleotides of this subset of the human genome differ in a systematic way between cases and controls."
With sequencing, you are surveying all nucleotides, not just a subset of 500,000. So you instead ask "which nucleotides out of the 3 billion (haploid) differ between cases and controls?"
...will find lots of evidence for miscegenation, etc. (To which I say, sure, but what of it?)
Thank you for the explanation. I'd love to know more about my DNA, specially if it says that I have a lot of far relatives around the world, I can't understand that's a problem.
