Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.
Capital punishment is not a breeding program
No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe
sequencesandconsequences.substack.com
A new natural history GCSE is to be introduced as part of the government’s curriculum reforms
Natural history GCSE finally gets go-ahead
Landmark qualification to be made available in schools years after its initial target start date, with content to be decided after a 12-week consultation
tes.com
"Racist crimes in Northern Ireland reached a record high last year, and a political response is urgently required." www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
Luqman Saeed | In Belfast
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to go out, with an oppressive...
lrb.co.uk
A Substack post on the Nature Human Genetics article. The piece itself is very short, so it is sort of a summary of a summary.
Polygenic Scores Are Not Genetic Predispositions
Language matters
ericturkheimer.substack.com
"psychiatric disorders are outcomes, not essences. Psychiatric geneticists think I am nuts for saying so, but I genuinely believe there is no biological explanation of depression, any more than there is a biological explanation for divorce or bankruptcy" bsky.app/profile/ent3...
Eric Turkheimer@ent3c.bsky.social · 3mo agoBlog Post: Essence Medicine and Outcome Medicine. It's about a paradox: The most dramatic scientific discoveries, the ones behavior geneticists can't stop reaching for, turn out to be the most ethically problematic.
A Reform government is not inevitable. But more of the same will only make it more likely. Great to speak to the brilliant @trillingual.bsky.social about the rise of the British radical right - and what comes next, for Reform, Farage and all of us democracyforsale.substack.com/p/a-reform-g...
A Reform government is not inevitable
Daniel Trilling on Nigel Farage’s election surge, the establishment that enabled it, and what comes next.
democracyforsale.substack.com
A man with HIV has gone into remission after receiving bone marrow from his brother, who has a rare mutation that prevents the function of receptors that HIV binds to
Person functionally cured of HIV after bone marrow transplant from sibling
A man with HIV has gone into remission after receiving bone marrow from his brother, who has a rare mutation that prevents the function of receptors that HIV binds to
scientificamerican.com
🚀 Our preliminary ballot on pay, funding and workload is live! If you are a teacher or support staff member in a state-funded school in England, you should have received an email and a text message with your unique voting link. Every vote counts! Vote now 👉 NEUActivate.com #SaveEducation
Review: Turkheimer "Understanding the nature nurture debate" biologist.rsb.org.uk/understandin...
An age-old question
A book review from the Royal Society of Biology
biologist.rsb.org.uk
"The conclusion is simple: the pathways from genes to traits are a maze in a tangled bank of organic complexity that fundamentally limit the power of genetic predictions about complex traits" open.substack.com/pub/randynes...
The gene ➔ trait path traverses a tangled bank
Severely limiting the power of genetic predictions
open.substack.com
I posted a long reply to Freddie deBoer's comment on my piece about intelligence with Dan Willingham @dtwuva.bsky.social. substack.com/profile/1707...
Eric Turkheimer (@ericturkheimer2)
Not sure if this is intended as a comment on my piece with @Daniel Willingham: https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2025-2026/turkheimer_willingham But I will go ahead and respond to it as if it is. Speaking ...
substack.com
Book review: The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science by Peter Hotez thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-bo...
The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science
5th December 2025 Peter J HotezJohns Hopkins University Press, £14.99 Why is vaccine uptake falling and what can be done to improve vaccine coverage? The book’s author, Peter Hotez, is a high-pr...
thebiologist.rsb.org.uk
"our inability to define anything even resembling deterministic causal mechanisms underlying heritability coefficients places strict limitations on their application in the real world, or on our theoretical accounts of how human inequality (in the nonpejorative evolutionary sense) comes to be"
Eric Turkheimer@ent3c.bsky.social · 8mo agoBlog post: A Missing Heritability Update. Three legs and other problems. I follow up on the recent excellent post on the subject by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/missing-he...
"The failure to reckon with confounding fuels misinterpretation of genetics research and impedes scientific progress. We are therefore concerned that a publishing culture which rewards sensationalism may instead promote a decline in standards"
Hannah Thomasy@hannahthomasy.bsky.social · 9mo agoIf you've ever rolled your eyes about research claiming that complex traits (from chocolate preference to socioeconomic status) have simple genetic explanations, check out this great paper from @jbenning.bsky.social @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social 🧪🧬
"The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded" www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...
Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.
theatlantic.com
"By analyzing data from more than one million Danish children, we found absolutely no indication that the very small amount of aluminum used in the childhood vaccination program increases the risk of 50 different health outcomes during childhood" en.ssi.dk/news/news/20...
Large Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or 49 other health conditions
A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety o...
en.ssi.dk
New blog post: The New Eugenics Companies (Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection)
The New Eugenics Companies
Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection
ericturkheimer.substack.com
My new piece for @science.org is about safety, technology and how we can't automate governance. A quick thread... 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Governance can’t be automated
On the corners of the Holborn viaduct in central London, there are four statues: Commerce, Agriculture, Fine Art, and Science. The figure representing Science looks like she should be in Ancient Greec...
science.org
Finally read this by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social - very interesting piece. There's some fascinating bit of sociology of science to be done on when things get counted as replication crises versus when they're seen as healthy methodological progress. theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/how-popula...
How population stratification led to a decade of sensationally false genetic findings
Stratification makes environments look like genes
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
My interview with the indispensable @awaisaftab.bsky.social has been published. Challenging questions, gave me a lot of ideas to chew on. Got me thinking about how different the scientific politics of individual differences (like IQ) are from psychiatric genetics.
The Unbearable Incoherence of Heritability: Interview with Eric Turkheimer
Eric Turkheimer is Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of Psychology at University of Virginia.
psychiatrymargins.com
A breath of fresh air to read a good opinion piece in a major newspaper www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Trump and Musk are obsessed with genetics – but there’s no science behind their simplistic views | Jonathan Roberts
The US right is misrepresenting science to support its racist agenda. There’s far more to it than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genes, says genetic counsellor Jonathan Roberts
theguardian.com
In a new paper Matthews, Tabery, & @ent3c.bsky.social articulate a value-harm trade off framework to distinguish controversial from abhorrent science. Concluding: "genomic race science is not just controversial science but, rather, abhorrent science... because it is both valueless and harmful."
How to Diagnose Abhorrent Science
What makes certain scientific research controversial? And when does scientific research go beyond being merely controversial to be something far worse? We propose a diagnostic framework for distingui...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
A lovely essay and review of my book by Erik Parens, of the @hastingscenter.bsky.social. Erik disagrees, gently, with the basis for my pessimism about the prospects for genetic explanation of human differences. /1
Is Human Agency in Danger of Being Drowned by Genetic Determinism?
Erik Parens, PhD is a Senior Research Scholar at The Hastings Center and director of its Initiative in Bioethics and the Humanities.
elsihub.org
