Posted at 15:53h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 7 Comments
Reactions to my post yesterday about Human Diversity mostly involved my invocation of the idea of genetic determinism, henceforth GD. https://twitter.com/RealYeyoZa/status/1222430602319880192?s=20 https://twitter.com/hbdchick/status/1222221445557817345?s=20 I know that GD is sometimes used as an all-purpose tool to attack any assertion of a role for genetics in human behavior, but that isn’t…
Posted at 14:51h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 12 Comments
Charles Murray’s new book, Human Diversity, is out today. I will write a few blog posts about it over the next few weeks. First, a general note about how I am going to approach the book. It will come as no surprise to anyone who…
Posted at 14:35h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 0 Comments
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…
Posted at 17:12h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 2 Comments
(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…
Posted at 08:27h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 3 Comments
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…
Posted at 13:14h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 4 Comments
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…
Posted at 12:13h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 0 Comments
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),…
Posted at 16:29h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 1 Comment
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…
Posted at 12:56h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 1 Comment
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…
Posted at 15:36h in Uncategorized by Eric Turkheimer 0 Comments
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…
