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Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

Where does the "all" come from in this headline. I only read the abstract but I read:

>For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation

69% is not close to all. Especially when (I believe) trait is defined fairly strictly in the study to be something easily measured.

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The complete sentence from the study is: "Our results provide compelling evidence that all human traits are heritable: not one trait had a weighted heritability estimate of zero."

So, all traits are at least partially heritable.

Not one? That seems highly suspect.

If I'm understanding the text correct, there are some correlation coefficients of 0.09, 0.1, 0.12 etc. I didn't see in my brief look at it if the sample was large that these would still be statistically significant. It seems misleading title still.

Like it has "social values" and "activities" in there but as far as I can tell it includes samples from various different countries. As long as twins are slightly more likely to end up living in the same country even when adopted - then its hard to say a score of like 0.1 has anything to do with genetics. I'm sure they tried to adjust for it somehow, but I'm pretty skeptical the headline result is capturing anything meaningful.

The next sentence: “The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation.”

Full text here for anyone that wants it: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276922271_Meta-anal...

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