It ’s now possible, in theory, to predict life success from a genetic test at birth

By guest blogger Stuart Ritchie For decades, we’ve known from twin studies that psychological traits like intelligence and personality are influenced by genes. That’s why identical twins (who share all their genes) are not just more physically similar to each other than non-identical twins (who share half their genes), but also more similar in terms of their psychological traits. But what twin studies can’t tell us is which particular genes are involved. Frustratingly, this has always left an ‘in’ for the incorrigible critics of twin studies: they’ve been able to say “you’re telling me these traits are genetic, but you can’t tell me any of the specific genes!” But not any more. With a new method, “polygenic scoring”, behaviour geneticists can now look to see whether people have specific genetic variants or not, and based on this, make some impressively accurate predictions about how they will behave in the future. Particularly in the case of two new studies, this development also means researchers are getting themselves into a whole new set of controversies. The method is relatively simple. Imagine you’d found in a study that smarter people are much more likely to have one particular version of a gene than people who are less intelligent. You could then, in an entirely new sample, see if people with this “intelligence gene” were doing any better than those without it. The polygenic scoring method is just this, writ large – inste...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: biological Educational guest blogger Intelligence Source Type: blogs