Genetic effects on educational attainment in Hungary

Ujma, Péter P.; Eszlári, Nóra; Millinghoffer, András; Bruncsics, Bence; Petschner, Péter; Antal, Péter; Deakin, Bill; Breen, Gerome; Bagdy, György; Juhász, Gabriella

doi:10.1101/2020.01.13.905034

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 35 publications

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“…Looking toward a broader social context, several insightful studies have shown that the heritability of educational attainment increases with equality of opportunity. We see evidence for this within countries over time (Heath et al, 1985), within and between countries over time (Engzell & Tropf, 2019; de Zeeuw, de Geus, & Boomsma, 2015), and within countries following a major policy change (Colodro-Conde, Rijsdijk, Tornero-Gómez, Sánchez-Romera, & Ordoñana, 2015; Rimfeld et al, 2018; Ujma et al, 2022). Although there is also some evidence going in the other direction (Silventoinen et al, 2020), the overall pattern appears to be that diffusion of educational opportunity results in genes explaining a relatively greater proportion of variance in educational attainment.…”

Section: Interpreting Heritabilitymentioning

confidence: 84%

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

Uchiyama¹,

Spicer²,

Muthukrishna³

2021

Behav Brain Sci

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Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior—largely independent of each other. Here we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and diffusion, density of cultural sub-groups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ.

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Section: Interpreting Heritabilitymentioning

confidence: 84%

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

Uchiyama¹,

Spicer²,

Muthukrishna³

2021

Behav Brain Sci

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Beyond a Shared History: A Biosocial Perspective on Sociogenomics and Racism in Germany

Aikins,

Willems,

Fraemke

et al. 2024

Köln Z Soziol

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Recent advances in sociogenomics offer new opportunities to integrate genetic and epigenetic measures into social science research on human lifespan development. Now, German social science cohorts have followed suit with this global trend. We anticipate that the integration of genetic measures into German social science cohorts is likely to be met with hesitation and dismay. Historically, racialized pseudo-science disguised as genetic research was used to justify the political exploitation, oppression, and genocide conducted by colonial and Nazi Germany regimes. In response, German institutions and social sciences actively avoided race-related research. However, avoiding the intersection of socially constructed race and genetics may stall the deconstruction of enduring racial discrimination and the identification of racialized social inequalities. Recent survey studies show that half of the German population still believe in the existence of biologically distinct human “races” and that racism is rampant. This article is aimed at providing a biosocial perspective on sociogenomics and racism in Germany. First, we discuss the biologistic construction of race that became prevalent in colonial and Nazi Germany. We argue that racist legacies are sources of social inequality in contemporary German society. We further review recent human genomic science that clearly demonstrates that there is no biological basis to socially constructed race. Second, we propose a biosocial perspective that integrates how genes “get out of the skin” and racism “gets under the skin”. Transactional genetic effects, which involve human behavior and interactions between people in society, are expected to depend on environmental inequalities tied to systemic racism. We summarize recent sociogenomics studies using polygenic indices and epigenetic profile scores showing that a) genes contribute to complex human traits and b) the expression of genetic variation is affected by socioeconomic and racialized inequality. Finally, we offer a roadmap toward race-critical biosocial research that breaks with the historically informed avoidance of race to reconstruct race-critical concepts, datasets, and scientific systems.

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Polygenic Scores in Developmental Psychology: Invite Genetics In, Leave Biodeterminism Behind

Raffington

Mallard

Harden

2020

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol.

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Polygenic scores offer developmental psychologists new methods for integrating genetic information into research on how people change and develop across the life span. Indeed, polygenic scores have correlations with developmental outcomes that rival correlations with traditional developmental psychology variables, such as family income. Yet linking people's genetics with differences between them in socially valued developmental outcomes, such as educational attainment, has historically been used to justify acts of state-sponsored violence. In this review, we emphasize that an interdisciplinary understanding of the environmental and structural determinants of social inequality, in conjunction with a transactional developmental perspective on how people interact with their environments, is critical to interpreting associations between polygenic measures and phenotypes. While there is a risk of misuse, early applications of polygenic scores to developmental psychology have already provided novel findings that identify environmental mechanisms of life course processes that can be used to diagnose inequalities in social opportunity. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 2 is December 15, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Genetic effects on educational attainment in Hungary

Cited by 3 publications

References 35 publications

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

Beyond a Shared History: A Biosocial Perspective on Sociogenomics and Racism in Germany

Polygenic Scores in Developmental Psychology: Invite Genetics In, Leave Biodeterminism Behind

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