tomochingus:

u motivated me to finish this thing that was in my unfinished folder for days thanks

krampusaurus:

astoundingbeyondbelief:

• ghidorah has spent the past 17 years at the gym
• rodan looks great as expected but does the poor man have any eyes
• also thought mothra’s eyes would be bigger but i’m fine with all the other wild stuff going on there
• godzilla is pretty much perfection

Yep, he has eyes.

unnana:

thecommonchick:

for those worried the iguana isnt hurt. its tummy is very good at dispersing force because it is adapted to evade predators by jumping from a tree and bellyslamming into a pool of water below!!

titleknown:

biologyweeps:

underthehedge:

vassraptor:

sixth-light:

star-anise:

doomhamster:

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST NO. NO. 

If you want to be a biologist, then I have the first lesson for you right here – there is NO way a gene screening can predict your educational success. Even if you have a chromosomal disorder like Down’s syndrome that tends to be linked to intellectual disability, that’s not a sure-fire prediction.

What are your life circumstances? Do you have any neuropsychological disorders or mental illnesses (and no, last I heard none of those had been directly linked to any particular genes to an extent that’d let one screen for them – there’s no “ADHD gene”) that might make things harder for you? Can your family afford to support you financially so you won’t have to worry as much about debt or work? Do you have any personality traits or knacks that could help you in academia – are you curious, stubborn, disciplined, creative, competitive? Do you have a good memory? Can you read quickly, or write well? Are you good at networking and organizing?

All those things say a LOT more about your likelihood of succeeding in higher education than a gene scan ever could. 

( @grison-in-labs? @star-anise? Anything to add?)

I would be JUST as dubious over somebody deciding they can’t be a biologist from a look at their IQ test, honestly. This is both because low IQ isn’t a death sentence for your dreams, and because the ability for “educational achievement” isn’t a stable trait. 

We have long assumed that raw intelligence is what makes someone able to go to college. A baby would be born with Down’s syndrome and the doctor would blithely say, “This child will never succeed in school or live very long.” And guess what? That was because the baby wasn’t likely to be GIVEN adequate schooling and medical care! The same way the life expectancy of people with Down’s syndrome increased dramatically over the last century with better medical care, in the last few decades people with developmental disabilities HAVE started to get adequate educations, and HAVE started to get college degrees and professional careers!

So this is me giving that genetic test the greatest degree of latitude possible, giving it the very big benefit of the doubt as to whether it’s actually detecting a real intellectual disability. I’m not a geneticist; maybe it’s actually possible. In which case, the “educational attainment” scores of people with certain genes has been so low for so long because schools made a POINT of detecting them as early as possible and kicking them OUT of the educational system or warehousing them in “schools” that taught them nothing! For hundreds of years!

(deep breath)

But I actually deeply doubt that the test is picking up something real, because the best way to find out if someone’s going to struggle in higher education is to see how they’re doing in education now. In a good system, someone with intellectual or developmental disabilities should already have been noticed, identified, and given supports. In a crappy system, they or their teachers might notice things that make them a “bad student” in some particular way–bad grades, trouble paying attention in class, greater difficulty in some areas than others, frustration or anger problems, trouble socializing. Those would be the first sign of trouble, not a genetic test in someone old enough to write in a mature fashion about “plugging genetic data” into a DNA database and their passion to become a biologist.

Anon, if you’re worried about achieving your dreams, my best advice is to reach out to people–your teachers, your school’s counsellors, science mentoring groups, science bloggers, scientists you admire, or local professional scientific associations–and say, “I want to become a biologist; what help or advice can you give me for difficulties I might run into?” Even/especially if you’re having trouble already. If you’re at all worried you might struggle, then you need help figuring out how to succeed in school and how to find a job in your field. That comes from things like disability assessments, academic coaching or tutoring, camps, internships, mentors, peers, and colleagues.

So don’t just keep pursuing your dream, anon. Go even harder. If you want to be a scientist–especially a researcher–you’re going to need to learn how to bounce back from setbacks and disappointments. Almost every scientist I know has had to deal with rejected grant applications and research papers. Government priorities change and suddenly you have to pivot your entire career to stay in the business. And for a lot of young scientists, it’s a difficult dance to find good paying work in the area you want. You’re going to have to learn how to fight even when the going is tough; why not start now?

I’m not precisely a scientist (I’m a mental health therapist), but I flunked a lot of classes in university before my ADHD was diagnosed, and every time I got back marks with a D among them, I had to ask myself, “How bad do I want this? Do I want to keep going even if it’s this hard?” As it turned out, the answer kept being “yes”, so I kept going, and after I got my diagnosis my school did everything they could to keep me from flunking out, so I survived and graduated.

And it has been, let me tell you, EXTREMELY useful experience to have under my belt as I grow into An Old and start mentoring and counselling struggling students. Which might be something that you, as a scientist, will someday do.

Yo, I’m a biologist, they gave me the PhD and everything, and that “Promethease” thing sounds like 100% unadulterated bullshit. There is NO genetic test that can predict how you, an individual, will succeed academically. There just isn’t. 

Feel free to ignore the fuck out of it and take all the excellent advice above instead. 

Also, OP, consider how Promethease got those results. Dig into the methodology. I strongly suspect that you’ll find that this is a sampling size thing or a race or class thing or all of the above, and really means people with your genes are underrepresented either in education or in the pool of people sharing their DNA with 23andme or ancestry.com. Or both. “Discriminated against” is not the same thing as “lacks potential or ability,” and that’s an important thing to learn if you want a STEM career. And so is identifying bad science or bad science reporting/education when you see it.

(And please use Promethease with caution. It’s not all bullshit, but it’s not a qualified genetic counselor either.)

Yeah, another biologist here: Dear Anon, don’t give up based on this, go forth study biology, and you’ll find out exactly how much nonsense that is.

I’m with @vassraptor here, any gene variant or collection of them that apparently means  “poor academic achievement” I see two possibilities there.

1: The gene/s is linked to a specific mental impairment, in which case it would be labelled as such rather than just “poor academic prospects”.

2: The gene/s are linked with ethnic groups that are typically denied access to educational resources, and any correlation with poor academic achievement is just a product of social factors. 

Like, legit, if you ignore other factors you can probably correlate genes for higher skin melanin with lower academic achievement, not because black people are inherently stupid but just because there’s a load of places where they are denied access to quality education. If you predominantly sample from those places as well it will skew results further.

Lack of attainment does not equal lack of ability, and correlation does not equal causation. 

Other things to consider are that genes do not exist in a vacuum, they interact in a million ways with each other. I mean if you’ve got two damaged copies of the CFTR gene you’re definitely going to have Cystic-Fibrosis, but anything as nebulous as “academic achievement” or “intelligence”? Nah.

I have ADHD, and as pointed out there is no “ADHD gene”, what there is is a whole collection of genes associated with ADHD. Each of which having multiple variants (alleles), some of which contribute to ADHD and some of which don’t. You don’t have ADHD by having one gene that makes you ADHD, you have ADHD by having enough of these pro-ADHD alleles in the right combinations to cause ADHD. Neither of my parents have ADHD but I can see some of the traits in both of them, they clearly both have quite the collection of alleles that can lead to ADHD but below the disabling threshold. 

Why do I mention this? Because these genes can, in moderation, really be beneficial to say academia, however above a certain threshold they become a disadvantage. Depending on how you sampled though you could correlate many of these alleles either with enhanced achievement or academic failure and even if you sampled perfectly, the average of them does not paint the full picture.

Tl;dr: Don’t let some Highly Questionable voodoo-science tell you you’re doomed before you start. 

Oh also I just had a look at what they’re using to calculate this

theunitofcaring:

I think you’re giving that data vastly, vastly more weight than it ought to have. Scores can only predict “in a group of a thousand people with this trait, how many of them will accomplish this thing?” I think often we’re not even competent enough yet to predict that with any confidence. I’m not sure this should have much more weight than a horoscope. 

If you already know how you do in school, that’s vastly more information than you can get from your genetic data. You should basically not even consider your genetic data on any subject where the effects are also things you can directly observe. You know your grades and your ability-to-learn-stuff and your ambition-to-learn-stuff; Promethease adds, as far as I can tell, literally no information to that.

Please don’t sabotage yourself or abandon things you care about because of the output of a fairly inaccurate online test that even at its best would be screened off by ‘how do you do in class?’.

Since then, the SSGAC has uncovered more than 1,000 genetic variations associated with years of schooling. Benjamin’s team has gone out of its way to make it clear that each one exerts only a teeny tiny bit of influence—three additional weeks of education, max—and that even collectively, the variants are not powerful enough to predict an individual’s academic achievement.

So, yeah, don’t sweat it.

@biologyweeps you should make some interesting screeching noises upon reading this.

I have indeed made very high pitched screeching noises. 

There have been repeated studies that show the the most reliable predictor of academic achievement in WEALTH. Because the more money your parents can throw at your education, the better they can support you and your goal, the more likely you are to actually achieve them. Genetics pale in comparison to the economic factors and you know what?

You can still succeed. Neither of my parents have a higher education but both me and my sister do. She’s recently finished her psychology degree, I’ve got one in biology. I have dysgraphia. I had a pretty crushing depression while at university so it took me longer than expected to get my degree, but i did get it.  You can absolutely and totally get that biology degree if you want to, Anon. As mentioned above, reach out. Find support programs, talk to your teachers, and don’t give up. You can do it. If you change your mind due to something else (god knows academia isn’t for everyone. I left after I got my degree and I’m happy as a clam as a labtech now) that’s one thing, but don’t let some supposedly predictive test discourage you. 

Reblogging because, holy fucking fuck, the fact that a person was potentially derailed from their career path due to genetic information metrics, and heavily biasted genetic information metrics at that, is some GATTACA shit.

We really do need to realize that STEM fucking needs to listen to the social sciences to avoid dystopian bullshit like this, and we need to be a lot more vocal about it…

lesbiantaeyamada:

She’s a bad girl

Also their new outfits are cute