Saturday, September 12, 2020

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). 

 The first point is not a "yielded" lesson. It is an assumption. GWAS were expected to find a few genes related to a trait and were unable to do so. They only flag hundreds or thousands of correlations, of which exactly zero for any psychological trait have been demonstrated to be causal. The second ignores the fact that the predictive nature of genetic variants (even from the cited Lee study) were vastly deflated by within family analysis. It's worse than this, really, because these studies look at specific populations and the predictions do not have any value for other populations, which makes it very likely that even the paltry results to date will be further watered down with more diverse populations. This also adds another dimension to the attempt to explain genetics and psychological traits, because you then have to assume that different populations have an entirely different set of genes involved in the genotype to phenotype. Since most psychiatric disorders present in relatively similar manner and frequency in different populations despite being correlated to very different genetic variants, it would be a coincidence of great proportion to assume that such a presentation is possible. 

Realistically, GWAS did little more than negate candidate gene studies and generate thousands of correlations that might all be false positive results. So what does the field of behavioral genetics do with this? Well, much like when candidate genes died, and were replaced by GWAS, they pivoted again, this time to "polygenic scores."  To her credit, Harden acknowledges that these scores were initially overhyped, particularly by Robert Plomin, but Harden's touting of these scores at all is, in my view, already becoming an outdated pivot. Like candidate genes and GWAS, they seem promising at first, but the results don't hold up, even within the same study (when checking within family) and certainly not in other diverse populations as noted with GWAS. Attempts to use pgs for schizophrenia, recently, could not do better than just knowing whether a person was male or female and old or young. Effectively a null.

Harden closes with a few points. I'd like to highlight this for starters:

But twin studies (in conjunction with molecular genetic studies, which are discussed in more detail below) provide some of the strongest evidence that families reproduce their social privilege across generations through environmental mechanisms, not just genetic ones.When it comes to whether one is poor or rich, educated or uneducated, the family-level environment in which the person was raised does certainly make a difference.

I don't know Dr. Harden personally, but the idea that this would even be in question is strikingly naive related to the society we live in, and this fact requires not the least bit of science to perceive.

Most of the rest of the piece was an attempt to justify the use of pgs scores for admittedly tiny effects. As Dr. Harden is aware, most of these studies, even if assumed to have some validity, have little purpose other than justifying the study. Little if anything practical, can be developed from these scores and, in my view, they can be misused, regardless of their validity. The most amusing one cited appeared to be an attempt to prove that post-communist Estonia was more "meritorious" than communist era Estonia based on polygenic scores for educational attainment. Such an unreplicatable study has so many underlying assumptions and such a level of propaganda and political ideology tracking it, that it is useless and I think that, had the opposite result been found, the same argument could have been made. It is reminscent of the absurd, ideologically based conclusions of evolutionary psychology. 

Thus, there is no prospect for candidate gene studies, there is little or no prospect for GWAS producing useful results, and it is likely that pgs will produce nothing useful. If the field of behavioral genetics is not dead, it is most certainly in its death throes. 


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