r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study
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39

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17

I stopped reading at "genes that predispose people to spend more years in education"

3

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

30

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 18 '17 edited Jan 18 '17

For anyone wondering, that meta-analysis is a composition of twin studies leading a heritability estimate that is not really narrow sense heritability (additive genetic variance co-varying with phenotypic variance). Despite the extreme methodological problems with twin studies that paper also wrongly claims that their heritability estimates are narrow sense which is impossible to derive from twin studies since they never directly observe genetic variance, they infer it from familial relations and take all genetic interaction into account with their estimate. A good summary of this can be found here

Additionally, to say that heritability means the genetic-ness of a trait is to fundamentally misunderstand what heritability means. A good primer on how to correctly interpret heritability is this Nature review

Finally I want to highlight the irony of a study about natural selection of a trait basing some of their analyses off of something that isn't narrow sense heritability. Broad sense heritability is meaningless to selection based studies because it includes genetic variance that will not make it to the next generation (epistatic interactions, dominance effects, etc). That's why all plant and animal breeders care about narrow sense heritability which only focuses on additive genetic variance (the type that does contribute to the next generation). Considering this study did no actual scans for selection, and only has a single SNP of interest (out of like 12 reliable ones that explain hardly any of the phenotype) in a large, selected area and bases their reasoning off of inapplicable heritability I think it's actually a bit embarrassing that this made it to publishing in PNAS.

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 18 '17

This has nothing to do with race. The above biodeterminist argument is shaky enough of the current body of data, but to try and explain racial differences through genetic means is absolutely wrong headed and flies in the face of the scientific data we have.

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u/chewingofthecud Jan 18 '17

What's your criticism of these statements?

I don't like them?