In the post below, Moderate marginal value to genomics, I left some things implicit. It turns out that this was an ill-considered decision. In reality my comments were simply more cryptic and opaque than implicit. This is pretty obvious because even those readers who are biologists didn’t seem to catch what I had assumed would be obvious in the thrust of my argument.

The point in the broadest sense is that DNA and genomics are not magical. Genetics existed before either of them. Understanding the physical basis of genetics has certainly been incredibly fruitful, and genomics has altered the playing field in many ways. But there was a broad understanding of genetics before DNA and genomics, both in a Mendelian sense and in the area of biometrics and quantitative genetics. In the earlier post I indicated that the tools for predictions of adult traits due to the effect of genes have been around for a long time: our family history. By this, I mean that a lot of traits of interest are substantially heritable. A great deal of the variation within the population can be explained by variation of genes in the population, as inferred by patterns of correlation ...