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Sabugosa's avatar

I thought very weird Ian had a whole political view based sole on IQ, specially the fact he doesn't seem to truly understand the issue.

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Ian Jobling's avatar

I just posted this note in response to this article. I may decide to respond more fully later.

The heart of Seb Jensen’s criticism of my work is a pedigree-based GWAS (Hill et al.) that purports to show that IQ has a heritability of 0.54. Ever since this study came out in 2018, hereditarians have pointed to it in the hope that one day GWAS might confirm the high heritability found by twin studies, and just as often geneticists have pointed out its flaws. Most recently, this study was discussed in an article by Sasha Gusev, who pointed out that it does not fully control for relatedness/kinship. Since closely related individuals tend to share environments, it cannot be known how much of this heritability figure is due to shared environment. Nor could the Hill et al. study control for indirect genetic effects. As Hill et al. say in their paper:

“The use of related individuals can result in the confounding of pedigree genetic effects with shared family environmental effects. We were able to adjust for phenotype similarity driven by couple similarity, family similarity and sibling similarity, but some residual, uncorrected confounding might remain. Moreover, this method is incapable of separating out indirect genetic effects from relatives. Potential sources include geographical confounding, e.g., cousins attending the same school, and other environmental similarities that we could not adjust for.”

People who write on the issue of the heritability of IQ would be well-advised to read Gusev’s Substack articles and his online book carefully so that they don’t repeat points that have already been addressed.

There are links in the note, which is here: https://substack.com/@ianjobling/note/c-70543695

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