|
Search Results for 'heritability'
Why are taller people more intelligent?
Update: First, people coming to this weblog for the first time should know that I moderate comments. So if you leave an obnoxious one it’s basically like an email to me (no one will see it). Second, the correlation between height and intelligence is not that high. This association is probably not going to be [...]
Schizophrenia about genetics
The genetics of schizophrenia is a fertile if fraught topic. But I won’t be discussing that in this post. Rather, I want to put the spotlight on a peculiar contradictory and illogical tendency in the contemporary American Zeitgeist: the gene is all-powerful, and the gene is irrelevant. The same people who raise eyebrows with skepticism [...]
Pigmentation: the simplest of complex traits not so simple?
One of the pitfalls about talking about genetics, especially human genetics, is that the public wants a specific gene for a specific trait. Ergo, the “God gene” or the “language gene.” In some cases science has been able to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and offer up a gene for a trait. But [...]
Revisiting the architecture of evolution
An old argument going back to the origins of theoretical population genetics has to do with the nature of the genetic effects which control traits and are subject to change in allele frequency due to adaptation. Often these are bracketed as part of the controversies between R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright (see Sewall Wright [...]
Words rule life (?)
As an aside in a fascinating City Journal piece on educational policy, A Wealth of Words: Vocabulary doesn’t just help children do well on verbal exams. Studies have solidly established the correlation between vocabulary and real-world ability. Many of these studies examine the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which the military devised in 1950 as [...]
Let’s get a little behavior genetic
In Slate there is an important piece up, The Early Education Racket, which attempts to reassure upper middle striving types that it isn’t the end of the world if their children don’t get into the right preschool. It is important because there are many people out there with lots of money (or perhaps more accurately, [...]
Laura Hercher convinces me there is no non-self interested case for genetic paternalism
Over at David Dobbs’ weblog Laura Hercher has a guest post up with the heading The Case for Selective Paternalism in Genetic Testing. Here are some relevant sections: Which brings me back to this issue of paternalism. I agree that it makes no sense to put up obstacles for inquisitive and motivated individuals who wish [...]
Gene surfing with David Dobbs
Over at National Geographic David Dobbs of Neuron Culture has an eminently readable and engrossing piece up, Restless Genes. I have never really read about ‘allele surfing’ on the wave of demographic expansion in the way that Dobbs’ rendered it. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to produce that sort of spare but informative prose. [...]
Inflammatory bowel syndrome is nature’s side effect
Last week Luke Jostins (soon to be Dr. Luke Jostins) published an interesting paper in Nature. To be fair, this paper has an extensive author list, but from what I am to understand this is the fruit of the first author’s Ph.D. project. In any case, you may know Luke because I have used his [...]
A golden age of sibling comparisons
Image credit: Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings I really love the paper Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings. I first read it about six years ago. The result is rather straightforward, but the problem is empirically a moderately deep one. Modern analytic genetics as [...]
You don’t need “genes” for genetics
After yesterday’s post I feel it is important again to reiterate that there is an unfortunate tyranny of the gene-as-physical-entity when it comes to our understanding of human heredity. To clarify what I mean, I think it is useful to borrow a framework from Andrew Brown. On the one hand you have a conventional modern [...]
A plea for population genetics
The title here is somewhat misleading. This is not just a plea for population genetics, but for quantitative genetics as well. Genetics is a big field. But today it is defined by and large by DNA, the concrete entity in which the abstraction of the gene is embedded. Look at the header of this website, [...]
Distributing the origins of human will
In The New York Times David P. Barash writes about how parasites might influence our behavior. This should not be too shocking an idea to readers of this weblog, I’ve blogged about Toxoplasma gondii before, on which there has been a raft of publications over the past 10 years or so. My main issue is [...]
Thinking about heritability
Heritability: The heritability of a trait within a population is the proportion of observable differences in a trait between individuals within a population that is due to genetic differences. Factors including genetics, environment and random chance can all contribute to the variation between individuals in their observable characteristics (in their “phenotypes”)…Heritability thus analyzes the relative [...]
Predicting someone's face: look at their parents
A few years ago there was a paper out which illustrated that standard Galtonian method of regression of offspring upon parents still predicted height far better than the most modern genomic techniques. The issue is that height is a quantitative trait whose variation is controlled by variants at hundreds, and likely thousands, of loci. Generating [...]
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 descent from my father, while 22% is from my mother. She is 26% identical by descent with [...]
The educated and conservative think fatness is a choice
After the post on fatness and homophobia I decided to query the GSS on the extent to which people think that fatness has a strong biological element, similar to homosexuality. There’s a variable, GENENVO1. It asks: Character, personality, and many types of behavior are influenced both by the genes people inherit from their parents and [...]
A political animal in the genes
Trends in Genetics has a review article, The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn’t that I think they’re revolutionary. Usually they aren’t. Rather, the public domain has totally forgotten about this domain of study. Most of the informed and high-toned discussion presumes that [...]
The heritability of impulse control
The above figure is from a paper I stumbled upon, Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: a meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies:
Why aren't we all tall?
There’s a fair amount of social science and anecdata that tall males are more reproductively fit. More precisely, males one to two standard deviations above the norm in height seem to be at the “sweet spot” as an idealized partner (e.g., leading males). And, short men often have fewer children. Short women will pair up [...]
DISCOVER's Newsletter
Sign up to get the latest science news delivered weekly right to your inbox!
