The Hidden Link Between “Genetic Nurture” and Educational Achievement
The genes that shape how educated you eventually become don’t necessarily have to be passed on to you.Photo Illustration by Peshkova / Shutterstock The phrase “Look down your nose” comes from a time when aristocrats were taller than commoners due to their superior nutrition. European elites would literally look down on their inferiors. So it […]
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The future belongs to morning people
A new method for estimating heritability and selection, Evaluating and improving heritability models using summary statistics: There is currently much debate regarding the best way to model how heritability varies across the genome. The authors of GCTA recommend the GCTA-LDMS-I Model, the authors of LD Score Regression recommend the Baseline LD Model, while we have […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 22: Solving the Missing Heritability
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 22: Solving the Missing Heritability“Narrow-sense” heritabilityThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) we discuss the “missing heritability,” and whether it has been “s…
In search of the missing heritability
We’ve always known that parents resemble their offspring. An intuitive understanding of how traits are passed down in families is probably as old as our species and its ability to reflect on the world around us. The ancient Romans would often observe a…
The moral measure of bad teeth
Recently I was at the dentist and I was told that because I did not have any caries at this age, I would probably not have to worry about that in the future (in contrast, I do have some issues with gingivitis). I wasn’t surprised that I didnR…
Me & my 0.55 brother against my 0.45 brother
One of the more fascinating things about getting much of your child’s pedigree genotyped is that one can ascertain true relatedness to various relatives, rather than just expected relatedness. For example, 28% of her genome is identical by descen…
Most people don’t understand “heritability”
According to the reader survey 88 percent said they understood what heritability was. But only 34 percent understood the concept of additive genetic variance. For the purposes of this weblog it highlights that most people don’t understand heritability, but rather heritability. The former is the technical definition of heritability which I use on this weblog, […]
Blank slate when you want it that way
Tim Pawlenty debates Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ idea:
Gregory pressed, asking “Is being gay a choice?”
Pawlenty ultimately said, “I defer to the scientists in that regard.”
Again, Gregory pressed: “So yo…
Heritability and genomics of facial characteristics
On several occasions I’ve gotten into discussions with geneticists about the possibility of reconstructing someone’s facial structure by genes alone. Combined with advances in pigmentation prediction by genetics, this could put the sketch a…
Breaking the “Central Dogma”
Epigenetics is making it “big time,” Slate has a review up of the new book Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. In case you don’t know epigenetics in terms of “what it means/why it matters” holds out the promi…
Does heritability of political orientation matter?
At The Intersection Chris Mooney points to new research which reiterates that 1) political ideology exhibits some heritability, 2) and, there are associations between political ideology and specific genes. I’ll set #2 aside for now, because this …
It’s about heritability….
I’m going to promote a comment:
…would knowing the root biological cause for differences which are already apparent to us change anything?
It’s obvious to you that there’s a contradiction here, but to the average educated person this…
Why siblings differ differently
The Pith: In this post I examine how looking at genomic data can clarify exactly how closely related siblings really are, instead of just assuming that they’re about 50% similar. I contrast this randomness among siblings to the hard & fast de…
When genes matter for intelligence
Image credit: Aleksandra Pospiech One of the interesting and robust nuggets from behavior genetics is that heritability of psychological traits increases as one ages. Imagine for example you have a cohort of individuals you follow over their lives. At the age of 1 the heritability of I.Q. may be ~20%. This means that ~20% of […]
Heritability and genes as causes
Since the beginning of this weblog (I’ve been writing for eight years) heritability has been a major confusion. Even long time readers misunderstand what I’m trying to get at when I talk about heritability. That’s why posts such as Mr. Luke Jostins‘ are so helpful. I had seen references to a piece online, The Causes of […]
Every variant with an author!
I recall projections in the early 2000s that 25% of the American population would be employed as systems administrators circa 2020 if rates of employment growth at that time were extrapolated. Obviously the projections weren’t taken too seriously, and the pieces were generally making fun of the idea that IT would reduce labor inputs and […]