Ian Sample
speaker
2,123 appearances
29 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 5d ago
Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
Things like obesity, things like religiosity, even autism.
People put that down to environmental factors.
too many decades ago.
How much difference does each actual gene variant make?
And you talk about these polygenic scores, which look at the contributions of lots of genes and how they correlate with risky antisocial behaviors.
But even when you look at sort of groups of genes where these effects may add up, is it possible to attribute causation at like an individual level or, you know,
Are there other factors you have to consider?
And obviously, the things that come to mind are cycles of deprivation, abuse, racism, these other factors that are going to be non-genetic.
There's something I want to ask a bit more about, because in the book you say there's no way to meaningfully distinguish between nature and nurture, that our genes and our environment combine in ways that are just impossible to pick apart.
But I wonder if you could unpack that because clearly you're saying, and sometimes drawing on these twin studies, you're saying that you can isolate genetic components and you can say that genes do affect the chances of someone doing something.
So the influence of these gene variants in the average person is still nowhere near deterministic.
We're getting away from the idea of genes being deterministic, thank goodness.
So if that's the case, what is the value of the kinds of polygenic scores that you're interested in?
If they're not going to say, yes, this person is destined to be a rongan, what is the value of those scores?
Coming up, from the lab to the fertility clinic, the troubling real-world applications of polygenic scores.
some of this work can feel unsettling.
And we know that fertility clinics are already offering embryo selection using polygenic scores, and they are selling selection for lowering risk of certain cancers, but even IQ, whatever they mean by IQ, and psychiatric conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia, which leads you to the question of whether the kind of work that
you're doing will make people wonder, oh, well, does this open the door to selecting for well-behaved people?
Which obviously starts getting into, you know, we get into the realm of eugenics.
It has to come up.
Showing 1541–1560 of 2,123 · page 78 of 107
← Previous
Next →