{"id":36620,"date":"2011-01-19T14:56:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T22:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=9258"},"modified":"2011-01-24T07:01:46","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T15:01:46","slug":"friends-genes-heritability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/01\/19\/friends-genes-heritability\/","title":{"rendered":"Friends &amp; genes &amp; heritability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few people have inquired of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2011\/01\/07\/1011687108\">PNAS<\/a> paper <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2011\/01\/07\/1011687108\">On sharing genes with friends<\/a>. I avoided comment  in part because I&#8217;m skeptical of the findings. So much behavior genomics just hasn&#8217;t panned out over the long term, and is probably susceptible to the issues which fuel the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2010\/12\/the-mysterious-decline-effect\/\">&#8220;decline effect&#8221;<\/a>. Statistical significance is a random variable too. The fundamental issue which I want to emphasize is this: <strong>many behavioral traits are highly <em>heritable<\/em>, insofar as the correlation between relatives of trait value is in direct proportion to their genetic correlation.<\/strong> But, just because a trait is heritable does not mean that you can affix the variation to a <em>specific <\/em>set of genes. That is because the character of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/01\/the-rise-of-genetic-architecture\/\">genetic architecture<\/a> varies, and it may be that for many behavioral traits with some biological basis the causal variants which are responsible for the range in trait values are distributed across <em>thousands<\/em> of genes, and so are of very small effect.<\/p>\n<p>Carl Zimmer <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/loom\/2011\/01\/18\/how-many-people-are-not-everyone-some-thoughts-on-scientific-debates-and-smackdowns\/\">relayed the depth of skepticism in the scientific community yesterday<\/a>, and today <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2011\/01\/on-sharing-genes-with-friends\/\">Dr. Daniel MacArthur reviewed the paper<\/a>. Here are the top line reactions:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nAltshuler\u2019s skeptical view of the paper was fairly widely shared by &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few people have inquired of the PNAS paper On sharing genes with friends. I avoided comment  in part because I&#8217;m skeptical of the findings. So much behavior genomics just hasn&#8217;t panned out over the long term, and is probably susceptible t&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,871,4,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavior-genetics","category-genes","category-genetics","category-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36620"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36796,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36620\/revisions\/36796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}