Charles Murray and I were going back and forth yesterday about the future of polygenic scores, especially as they might be applied in the schools. Murray, as always, looks to a future (now moved back to 2030) in which all behavior is highly predictable from...
(Longer version of article published at: https://leapsmag.com/the-shiny-and-potentially-dangerous-new-tool-for-predicting-human-behavior/) Posted here with permission) Imagine a world in which pregnant parents could go to the doctor and obtain a simple inexpensive genetic test of their unborn child that would allow them to predict how tall he or she would eventually...
In his new book, Blueprint, and elsewhere in his recent writings, Robert Plomin has repeated a striking claim about the causal properties of DNA, in the form of polygenic risk scores: GPSs are unique predictors in the behavioural sciences. They are an exception to the...
Over the last couple of days, Paige Harden ran a poll about causation in the genome. https://twitter.com/kph3k/status/1137379236157775873 There was a lot of very interesting discussion that you should have a look at. My take was to wonder whether "cause" is the most important thing we are trying...
One of the interesting characteristics of GWAS reporting is how regimented it is. The format of old-fashioned social science research was made up fresh by the investigators every time, and part of the fun of reading it was in the creativity of designs, models and...
In the first paper I wrote about GWAS, in 2012, I reviewed a paper about GWAS of height by Weedon et al. After correcting for population stratification, Weedon et al identified a handful of SNPs with genome-wide significant correlations with height (news at the time),...
Charles Murray links to an article about the three laws of behavior genetics, recently updated by others to five. https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1133685813852745729 As is often the case when people of a hereditarian persuasion write about the three laws, Jayman gets it almost entirely wrong, reacting only to the...
A new paper by Selzam, Ritchie, Pingault, Reynolds, O'Reilly and Plomin has just been published on bioRxiv. They show results of an analysis that I have been looking forward to for a long time-- looking at the performance of GPS for a variety of physical...
Last year I wrote a response to a an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Robert Plomin, John DeFries, Valerie Knopik and Jenae Niederhiser titled, "Top Ten Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics." Mine was titled "Weak Genetic Explanation Twenty Years Later." There is...
Plomin’s treatment of “The Gloomy Prospect” is not quite as egregious as his taking credit for the First Law of Behavior Genetics. On the other hand, it provides a clear insight into his overall rewriting of the history of developmental behavioral genetics and the consequences...
