{"id":43298,"date":"2011-08-24T16:20:25","date_gmt":"2011-08-25T00:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=13634"},"modified":"2011-08-24T16:20:25","modified_gmt":"2011-08-25T00:20:25","slug":"twin-studies-are-not-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/24\/twin-studies-are-not-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"Twin studies are not useless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few friends have pinged me on this piece in <i>Slate<\/i>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2301906\/pagenum\/all\/\">Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless<\/a>. The headline is bold, but the piece is just a sloppy mishmash. It&#8217;s really something amenable for a major &#8220;fisking,&#8221; but I generally don&#8217;t like doing that sort of thing, because it doesn&#8217;t seem a optimal allocation of time (though I have to note that the author seems to be implicitly using a colloquial form of the concept of heritability, which I think is going to confuse an already naive audience). A lot of the article is taken up with criticisms of political scientist <a href=\"http:\/\/politicalscience.rice.edu\/Content.aspx?id=56\">John Alford&#8217;s<\/a> behavior genetic findings on the heritability of ideology. I&#8217;ve had personal communication with other researchers in this area who actually are broadly critical of Alford&#8217;s methodology, <b>but they&#8217;re still strongly invested in using genomics and behavior genetics to explore this issue.<\/b> In other words, rejecting Alford&#8217;s conclusions does not entail that you just reject twin studies, as such.<\/p>\n<p>\nOf course there&#8217;s a lot more to twin studies than behavior genetics. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/08\/twin-studies-are-not-useless\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2010\/12\/estimating-heritability-using-twins.php\">Luke Jostins<\/a> at <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/08\/twin-studies-are-not-useless\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2010\/12\/estimating-heritability-using-twins.php\">Genomes Unzipped<\/a> had a long post up defending the methodology, with caveats, in estimating heritability. But what  &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few friends have pinged me on this piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. The headline is bold, but the piece is just a sloppy mishmash. It&#8217;s really something amenable for a major &#8220;fisking,&#8221; but I gene&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,360,1694],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavior-genetics","category-personal-genomics","category-twin-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43298","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=43298"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43365,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43298\/revisions\/43365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}