Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Sasha Gusev's avatar

I think you cannot really talk about the magnitude/value of an effect size without first explaining what you intend to use it for. There are rare variants explaining a tiny amount of population variance but providing very important information for drug targets (which can then explain a large amount of population variance when intervened on). On the other hand, a smoking polygenic score might explain a decent amount of variance in lung cancer risk but will be useless in a model that already includes smoking itself. What is the intended use of the PGS? A lot of the existing applications in behavior genetics want to have a "clean" causal instrument, and the population PGS is clearly not that (and, I would argue, confounded in ways can be extremely misleading).

The more general point I'd make is that if a field describes a trait with 80% heritability (like height) as "largely genetic" then it should describe a trait with 10-20% heritability (like IQ is shaping up to be and Edu already is) as "largely non-genetic". That's just being consistent.

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts