Heritability and Its Estimation, Especially in Humans
Last update: 08 Dec 2024 00:11First version: 14 March 2012
I shan't repeat myself.
One issue which I have never really seen adequately dealt with is that human behavior could be substantially predicted from genetics even if no genetic variants have any causal impact on behavior. All that one would need to create this would be for (1) behavior patterns to be shaped by culturally transmitted habits and traditions, which are (2) largely transmitted through families and social classes, which turn are (3) largely endogamous. Endogamy will create population structure (in the genetic sense), which in turn will correlate with traditions, and so behavior. Twin designs won't handle this, unless separated twins were really assigned to completely random cultural backgrounds. (Even then, you'd also need to assume that other people pass on traditions to the randomly-placed twins in ways independent of their genetics and the phenotypic expression thereof.)
See also: Historical Genetics
- Recommended (very misc.):
- John Bound and Gary Solon, "Double trouble: on the value of twins-based estimation of the return to schooling", Economics of Education Review 18 (1999): 169--182 [Preprint: ssrn/226374]
- Sharon R. Browning and Brian L. Browning, "Population Structure Can Inflate SNP-Based Heritability Estimates", American Journal of Human Genetics 89 (2011): 191--193
- C. D. Campbell, E. L. Ogburn, K. L.Lunetta, H. N. Lyon, M. L. Freedman, L. C. Groop, D. Altshuler, K. G. Ardlie and J. N. Hirschhorn, "Demonstrating stratification in a European American population", Nature Genetics 37 (2005): 868--872
- Andrew Crossett, Ann B. Lee, Lambertus Klei, Bernie Devlin, Kathryn Roeder, "Refining Genetically Inferred Relationships Using Treelet Covariance Smoothing", arxiv:1208.2253
- Ann B. Lee, Diana Luca and Kathryn Roeder, "A spectral graph approach to discovering genetic ancestry", Annals of Applied Statistics 4 (2010): 179--202
- Alessandro Lizzeri and Marciano Siniscalchi, "Parental Guidance and Supervised Learning", Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (2008): 1161--1195 [They do not mean "supervised learning" in the sense of statistical learning theory]
- Bonnie Smith, Elizabeth L. Ogburn, Matt McGue, Saonli Basu, Daniel O. Scharfstein, "Causal Effects in Twin Studies: the Role of Interference", arxiv:2007.04511 [While this is not directly about heritability, the issue it raises of interference between twins is clearly relevant to twin-based methods of estimating heritability]
- Or Zuk, Eliana Hechter, Shamil R. Sunyaev, and Eric S. Lander, "The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritability", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 1193--1198
- To read:
- Eva Krapohl, Kaili Rimfeld, Nicholas G. Shakeshaft, Maciej Trzaskowski, Andrew McMillan, Jean-Baptiste Pingault, Kathryn Asbury, Nicole Harlaar, Yulia Kovas, Philip S. Dale, and Robert Plomin,, "The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 15273--15278
- Joris A. Veltman and Han G. Brunner, "De novo mutations in human genetic disease", Nature Reviews Genetics 13 (2012): 565--575
