[spruciefic399]

This is a paper that I'm glad was published (maybe not Cell, but somewhere), because it presents an interesting and pretty clear theory.

At the same time, it seems like it's fairly clearly falsifiable almost on its face, because there are many genetic disorders involving clear, substantial mutations (in a chromosomal topography sense) that are circumscribed in their effects, at least to one extent or another.

I think some variant of this might be true, where traits are influenced by a very very large number of genes (like thousands or hundreds of thousands or more), possibly interacting or in more complex chaotic effects. But this is basically a variant of the polygenic hypothesis, which has been a major paradigm for years. This model seems like the dominant paradigm pushed to its limit, rather than something fundamentally new.

Maybe I'm misrepresenting my sense of the field, but I doubt that many people doing GWASes believe in a relatively limited number of genes affecting traits. I think this has been true for several years now at least. I've been wrong in my assumptions about the field before though.

[jjeaff]

The top comment on this post addresses the one gene, one trait evidence. In essence, just because changing one gene mutation fixes the problem, that doesn't mean that only one gene was responsible for the problem in the first place.

"The "one gene = one protein" dogma of molecular biology (expanded: "one trait selectable in breeding experiments = one compact locus of the chromosome") was a priori wrong, but it's taken us decades to undo the damage. We were led astray because there are traits that do map to a single locus, or single mutations that were found to be able to control a trait, which is not the same thing as the trait."

[asimpletune]

Did you mean false instead of falsifiable?