E. Fuller Torrey
Article
E. Fuller Torrey is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 24, 2024 and February 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “E. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article”; “Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently wrote a paper”; “and E. Fuller Torrey is, so take this with a grain of salt”. It most often appears alongside Awais Aftab, birth canal asphyxia, cannabis.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: January 24, 2024
- Last seen: February 08, 2024
Appears In
- Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders
- It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
- Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure
Related Pages
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- Awais Aftab (2 shared issues)
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- birth canal asphyxia (1 shared issues)
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- cannabis (1 shared issues)
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- cannabis use (1 shared issues)
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- Dr. Aftab (1 shared issues)
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- Dr. Steven Hyman (1 shared issues)
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- epilepsy (1 shared issues)
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- Germany (1 shared issues)
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- It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic (1 shared issues)
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- Matthews & Turkheimer, 2022 (1 shared issues)
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- Metacelsus (1 shared issues)
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- Michael Roe (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
E. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual “if we can’t name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all” - but two arguments stood out:
Inline links: published a journal article
Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently wrote a paper trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between “the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong” and “the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn’t describe it as ‘mostly genetic’”.
Inline links: wrote a paper
The only thing that makes sense to me (and I’m definitely not an expert, and E. Fuller Torrey is, so take this with a grain of salt) is thinking of schizophrenia as cumulative damage to some abstract computational organ. Consider an analogy to kidney disease. The cause of kidney disease is “anything that hurts your kidney”. It can be caused by kidney infections, kidney cancer, trauma to the kidney, autoimmune diseases affecting the kidney, etc. Kidney disease is just a catch-all term for “anything causing your kidney to work less well than it should”. If you examined its heritability, it would probably be substantially genetic. Some of these genes would be for bad kidneys. Others would be weirder: probably a gene for risk-seeking impulsive behavior would show up, since that increases your chance of trauma to the kidney.
I think if E. Fuller Torrey had discovered that something fun and interesting like toxoplasma or social defeat explained 80% of the variance in schizophrenia, everyone would say “Oh! That causes schizophrenia!” and forget all the nitpicking. This would happen even though toxoplasma can cause other things, even though it might not explain the exact causal pathway by which toxoplasma causes schizophrenia, etc. I think people really want things not to be genetic, so when they do turn out to be genetic, they apply higher standards for whether you can call that “the cause”. Then people underestimate how much genes matter.
We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic, the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders. Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to: