Greg Cochran has a review of Carl Zimmer’s new book in Quillette. Zimmer’s book is long, and (as Cochran notes; I haven’t finished it) has a great deal in it, most of which appears to be of little interest to Cochran. He wants to talk...
Heritability and Malleability There has been some interesting discussion on Twitter of a very old topic, the relationship between heritability and malleability. The standard thing to say here is that there is no relationship between the two-- the fact that an individual difference is heritable is...
Emily Smith-Woolley, along with Robert Plomin and his team, just published an article entitled, "Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them." The title of the article is in my opinion seriously misleading. I have to...
Julie O'Toole, of the Kartini Clinic for Children and Families, recently posted a blog with the title I have borrowed here, referring a new study of Anorexia Nervosa from the Psychiatric Genetics Consortium, led by Cynthia Bulik. Unsurprisingly I don't think the study qualifies as...
You might be getting old, if...
I often feel as though I am swimming upstream when I make the case that behavioral genetics is not headed for a golden future in which the genetics of intelligence and schizophrenia are understood all the way down to the genome. Why not? They are...
Less time for blogging the next couple of weeks, so some shorter posts...
First, a note from Twitter. Several people (eg Michel Nivard and Ruben Arslan) thought I was being a little "misleading" in my characterization of what GPS can do as opposed to twin and family studies. That may be; I can get carried away when I...
I said yesterday that GPS are basically an extension of twin and family studies, making it possible to use singletons to conduct the kind of research that used to require twins or other family members. Such research can be useful for some purposes but it...
Yesterday Paige Harden posted an excellent piece on the genetics of intelligence, and I agree with all of it. I have been meaning to write something about Genomewide Polygenic Scores myself, (GPS; I usually call them Polygenic Risk Scores, it's the same thing if I...
