GWAS Meta-analyis for Bipolar Disorder Gives Glowing Analysis, but is impossible to Interpret (Again)

 A brief review of this GWAS for Bipolar Disorder:

Genome-wide association study of over 40,000 bipolar disorder cases provides novel biological insights (Mullins et al. )

Like almost all the behavioral genetic GWAS studies, this one uses a meta-analysis, despite having new data added to previous data and the new data was never assessed (at least in print) independently. Thus, it is difficult to assess statistically what is success and what is failure, although it is filled with the usual accolades:

This GWAS provides the best-powered BD polygenic scores to date, when applied in both European and diverse ancestry samples. Together, these results advance our understanding of the biological etiology of BD, identify novel therapeutic leads and prioritize genes for functional follow-up studies.

 Well, the best and the only, really. But, of course, I have a lot of questions. The first is related to their significant loci count, and for which I needed partial clarification from one of the authors, as I will discuss after the fold (click "read more" to continue).

Weekend at Bernie's for Behavioral Genetics

Here is what I think is an attempt by Paige Harden at a behavioral genetics pivot:

“Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated”: Behavior Genetics in Postgenomic Era

On the contrary, I'd say that this is an attempt to prop up a corpse. The piece starts by basically burying "candidate gene" studies, which were the previous propped up corpse they spent a couple of decades convincing us was proof of genetic correlations for behavior (and personality and intelligence). Well, no self-reflection about the fact that something you were sure about for so long turned out to be nothing. It's easier to throw the past in the dustbin than consider the possibility that we are still working with dust. The candidate genes were largely killed by GWAS, which appears to have been their only useful function. We are now in the second wave of this, with GWAS and pgs largely in a death spiral, which was really not acknowledged by those in the field prior to this piece, to my knowledge. Thus, I am reporting their death, and I don't exaggerate. However, Harden does exaggerate here:

Overall, GWAS results have yielded two general lessons for psychology. First, traits of interest to psychologists are massively polygenic, meaning that they are associated with thousands upon thousands of genetic variants scattered throughout the genome, each of which has a tiny effect. This has been called the fourth law of behavior genetics (Chabris et al. 2015). Second, the aggregate predictive power of measured genetic variants, in some cases, rivals the predictive power of traditional social science variables, such as family socioeconomic status (SES) (Lee et al. 2018).