A couple of weeks ago I learned about the Clubhouse app on Twitter. I saw a few messages posted by a fellow population geneticist participating in a ‘room’ focused on Popgen and whatnot and I was very intrigued. I think maybe I was just missing seeing talks and interacting with people and so I really wanted to get in. For a time I had some difficulties getting an invitation but after overcoming a bit of timidity I DMed another population geneticist on Twitter that suggested they had some invitations. They let me in! (I will say that I feel a little uncomfortable about invitation-only status and the iOS limitation, I’m going to remain optimistic that this is just a developer issue that will be fixed in the near term) In the past few weeks I’ve generally not learned a whole lot of new stuff pop gen wise, with the exception of a lot of human pop gen talk, but I’m still finding some interesting conversations to drop in on. There’s definitely a big interest in AI/machine learning and also ongoing debates about current social changes happening around the world. There’s plenty of silly stuff, too. But coming back to Popgen and whatnot, tonight the room focused on dog genetics! I’m not sure I learned a whole lot more than I knew before but it was still fun to learn in particular about the types of insights coming from the 23andme of dogs, embark. There were also a few questions that seemed to dance around the idea of dogs as a system to understand the genetic basis of intelligence. An answer that came up multiple times was that intelligence can be very species/breed specific in animals/dogs, respectively. That seems like a useful approach to me!
Written on March 19th, 2021 by P. Fields