Substantiate this please because just the other day I read "We know from many decades of research in behavioral genetics that about half of the variation across people in IQ is due to genes." [0]
A lot of people want to believe that genetics doesn't play a big part in differentiation between human abilities but as science is not supporting that viewpoint it might be a good time to begin re-educating people on the limits of education.
[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
Actually, heritability of eye color is 98%. A somewhat complete listing of heritability according to SNPedia (which doesn't include intelligence):
http://snpedia.com/index.php/Intelligence is not being well captured by GWAS. All current associations are probably false positives.
I've not seen any evidence specific to mathematical ability.
Why do you say that? The recent results like Rietveld et al 2013 have used stringent false-positive rates precisely because of the early rash of false positives in the early '00s, and the hits seem to be replicating pretty well.
The most current information I see is Rietveld published 10 days ago. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/06/095679761454... and that paper claims to have found an explanation for ≈2% of educational attainment and cognitive function.
None of the reported snps (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266) have been mentioned in any other publication. So I don't yet see a basis for "the hits seem to be replicating pretty well".
I do not doubt that genetics plays a significant role in intelligence, but I expect that intelligence, and the proxy of educational attainment, is an overly broad phenotype. I also expect that epistatic effects may be important and would necessitate unrealistically massive sample size or a very different experimental design.
Yes, since people upped their game precisely because of that paper's findings...
> None of the reported snps (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266) have been mentioned in any other publication. So I don't yet see a basis for "the hits seem to be replicating pretty well".
What do you mean? As I recall, Rietveld et al 2013 used internal replication to test its hits, which worked out well. Your link is itself a another replication of Rietveld et al 2013, is it not? (What exactly did you think the abstract meant when it talked about "A recent genome-wide-association study" or "The study"?) And then there's "Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children" , Ward et al 2014; and I believe "Educational attainment-related loci identified by GWAS are associated with select personality traits and mathematics and language abilities", Zhu et al 2015 is also relevant.
Time will tell, I have no doubt.
I think this is unreasonable. This is not a lone author working with a set he hand-collected and has had unlimited freedom to monkey with. This is the lead author on a project involving scores of authors analyzing vast datasets pooled together by like a dozen distinct organizations.
The most interesting part to me is that it might be coming to an end!