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...
One of the peculiar things about Robert Plomin's recent, Blueprint, is that it seems to point in both directions. It is impossible to read the book without coming away with the impression that genes are the most important, in some ways the only, determinant of...
I have more to say about Plomin's use of my ideas in Blueprint, but for now I want to start at the beginning and write about the book and the ideas in contains. The obvious place to begin is the title. It is safe to...
I have been planning to spend a week or so blogging about Robert Plomin’s new book, “Blueprint.” The first post was going to be about the title, but that is going to have to wait for a day or two because I need to discuss...
The new EA3 study is out today. Or I should say it is unembargoed today, the basic findings have been floating around the genomics community in one form or another for quite a while. I should add that it is first authored by GHA participant...
I'm having a bad Wordpress day. A slightly nicer version of this post is here: http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/ea3-better-formatting/ The new EA3 study is out today. Or I should say it is unembargoed today, the basic findings have been floating around the genomics community in one form or another for...
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...
