After a long and difficult pregnancy, Nature Genetics finally gave birth to a big paper about genetic influences on educational achievement. Now we know more of the genes that result in high heritability of phenotypes like educational attainment – including something about the metabolic paths involved. These results don’t explain all the heritability we see – in particular the part due to rare deleterious variants – but they explain some. Now, from a gene sample, knowing nothing else, we can say something about some kid’s likelihood of completing college. People in the bottom quintile of the polygenic score had a 10% chance of graduating, those in the top quintile had a 55% chance. Obviously if we knew his grades, test scores, permanent record and genotype, we could make an even better prediction: still, this is interesting.
As usual we have public intellectuals fulfilling their duties: trying to stuff falsehoods into the…
View original post 453 more words
Nicht-Linke Blogs 