animal and plant breeding it is typical to use all available SNPs. Better SNP estimation methods exist and are used in plant and animal breeding1, 2, 37, 44, 50 and such methods have been proposed for applications to human data1, 43. They rely on prior assumptions about the distribution of SNP effects in the genome, and use all data simultaneously. Such Bayesian methods have also been applied to other species51, and related methodologies derived in computer science have been applied to disease data in humans4, 52. Ignorance can’t be bliss in this context and it must be best to use all available genetic and phenotypic information simultaneously. It is outside the scope of this Perspective to discuss these methods in more detail.
