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…
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…
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…
Last week, after the publication of EA3, Cecile Janssens tweeted about another GWAS she had come across. https://twitter.com/cecilejanssens/status/1020392884959408128 Unsurprisingly this got a lot of pushback, for example this from Stuart Ritchie: https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1020685926924681216 I don’t think Janssens’ criticism was nonsensical at all, in fact I think I know exactly what…
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…
