Since posting this two years ago, I believe Kman looked into this more and concluded that the intelligence enhancement effect of CORD7 is likely not real.
More information: that “CORD7” variant is actually in an IQ GWAS, but showed ~0 effect. Note that I couldn’t rule out the PROM1 variant in the same way since it’s much rarer and not in the GWAS.
I’m not sure what to make of it. Regardless of whether the variant does much in humans, I’m surprised that they found it had a big effect on one of the things they decided to measure (in fruitflies, and it isn’t exactly the same variant, but still). I think it’s only very weak evidence of the IQ thing being real, but it’s still surprising to me, so there might be something to be learned here.
I think it suggests that the blindness comes from a different, rarer variant (in the PROM1 gene). If anything that would update me towards thinking the IQ effect, if real, also comes from that rarer variant.
(Edit: the 6 carriers of the PROM1 mutation studied in this paper had an average verbal IQ of 104, which is pretty strong evidence against it giving a huge boost to verbal IQ as reported by the CORD7 paper).
This suggests that the intelligence enhancement and the blindness come from different independent alleles.
Since posting this two years ago, I believe Kman looked into this more and concluded that the intelligence enhancement effect of CORD7 is likely not real.
More information: that “CORD7” variant is actually in an IQ GWAS, but showed ~0 effect. Note that I couldn’t rule out the PROM1 variant in the same way since it’s much rarer and not in the GWAS.
What’s your take on this?
I’m not sure what to make of it. Regardless of whether the variant does much in humans, I’m surprised that they found it had a big effect on one of the things they decided to measure (in fruitflies, and it isn’t exactly the same variant, but still). I think it’s only very weak evidence of the IQ thing being real, but it’s still surprising to me, so there might be something to be learned here.
I think it suggests that the blindness comes from a different, rarer variant (in the PROM1 gene). If anything that would update me towards thinking the IQ effect, if real, also comes from that rarer variant.
(Edit: the 6 carriers of the PROM1 mutation studied in this paper had an average verbal IQ of 104, which is pretty strong evidence against it giving a huge boost to verbal IQ as reported by the CORD7 paper).