When I find myself besieged by the kind of people in my mentions this morning, it is tempting to be goaded into sounding as though I think genetic endowment places 0 limits on people, or that GWAS has made no meaningful contributions to science, or that the modest predictions /1
of behavioral PGS are completely useless. I don't think any of those things and I never have. I am, after all, a working empirical behavior geneticist. What I do think is that the hardcore genetic world the right is forever envisioning shows no signs of becoming reality. /2
The RDR h2 of EA, which controls for indirect effects, is .17. (nature.com/articles/s4158…) That is an UPPER LIMIT on the performance of PGS. And even that includes a completely unknown amount of red hair effects. /3
Genetic differences are modestly correlated with behavioral differences in ways that are sometimes scientifically interesting or useful. There is 0 evidence that genetic differences determine behavior within close deterministic constraints across a wide range of environments. /4
Meanwhile it is the Murrays and Sailers who live in a politically motivated fantasy land where the scientific facts have turned out differently. That's easy for them, because of course neither one has ever done a peer-reviewed iota of actual behavior genetics. /end
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