Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Polygenic scores are all the rage. Naturally, you want to know your own scores, and you have a reading of your genome from some company. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t provide you with interesting results? Fear not, you can download your ‘raw data’ (actually the genotypes from the SNP chip) and upload it to some other…
Continue ReadingCounting significant hits was always a dumb way to measure progress in genomic prediction of a trait. Breeders using animals and plants never bothered with this approach and they used ridge regression for best predictive power (a “two cultures” problem no doubt). Researchers in human genetics are starting to catch up, implementing clever Enet approach…
Continue ReadingA while ago, I had an idea for a direct estimate of the between group heritability from polygenic scores. The idea is based on the old DeFries (1972) paper, which had the following equation: where h2B is the between group heritability, h2W is the within group heritability, t is the intraclass phenotypic correlation, and r…
Continue ReadingDunkel, C. S., Woodley of Menie, M. A., Pallesen, J., & Kirkegaard, E. O. (2019). Polygenic scores mediate the Jewish phenotypic advantage in educational attainment and cognitive ability compared with Catholics and Lutherans. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. So predictably, our study on Jewish IQ has elicited some rather harsh (and in some cases moralistic) criticisms from…
Continue ReadingAntonio Regalado is providing us with a recent series of the arguably best informed (compared to Guardian, Nature news etc.) popular science articles on genomics and its relevance to modern eugenics (embryo selection or genetic engineering) as well as the group differences causation question. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609204/eugenics-20-were-at-the-dawn-of-choosing-embryos-by-health-height-and-more/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610251/forecasts-of-genetic-fate-just-got-a-lot-more-accurate/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610339/dna-tests-for-iq-are-coming-but-it-might-not-be-smart-to-take-one/ As background for some of these, I had…
Continue Reading(See 2015 post) There’s a very interesting new preprint out: Heterogeneity in polygenic scores for common human traits Erin B Ware, Lauren L Schmitz, Jessica D Faul, Arianna Gard, Colter Mitchell, Jennifer A Smith, Wei Zhao, David Weir, Sharon LR Kardia bioRxiv 106062; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/106062 This study investigates the creation of polygenic scores (PGS)s for…
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