But a new study has suggested it may be possible to predict a person's academic achievement by looking at their DNA alone.
Researchers have developed a new genetic scoring technique that explains almost 10 per cent of the differences between children's educational attainment by the age of 16-years-old.
A polygenic score based on 74 genetic variants thought to play a role in educational performance
'Through polygenic scoring, we found that almost 10 per cent of the differences between children's achievement is due to DNA alone.
'Ten per cent is a long way from 100 per cent but it is a lot better than we usually do in predicting behaviour.
'For instance, when we think about differences between boys and girls in maths, gender explains around one per cent of the variance.
A genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), derived from a 2013 genome-wide association study (N=127,000), explained 2% of the variance in total years of education (EduYears). In a follow-up study (N=329,000), a new EduYears GPS explains up to 4%. Here, we tested the association between this latest EduYears GPS and educational achievement scores at ages 7, 12 and 16 in an independent sample of 5825 UK individuals. We found that EduYears GPS explained greater amounts of variance in educational achievement over time, up to 9% at age 16, accounting for 15% of the heritable variance. This is the strongest GPS prediction to date for quantitative behavioral traits. Individuals in the highest and lowest GPS septiles differed by a whole school grade at age 16. Furthermore, EduYears GPS was associated with general cognitive ability (~3.5%) and family socioeconomic status (~7%). There was no evidence of an interaction between EduYears GPS and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement or on general cognitive ability. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences.
2% 4% 9%
LIBERALS ON SUICIDE WATCH
Sebastian Reyes
Those are weasel words that have no meaning and shouldn't be in anything about science.
Alexander Rodriguez
Never study quantum mechanics then.
>Probability >statistics
These are parts of science.
Ryan James
False equivalence.
Ryan Walker
Low IQ subhuman.
Carson Sanchez
>10% I guarantee you that popularity accounts for much more than that.
Christopher Sanchez
Test your 1 year old's popularity score. vs Test your embryo's genetics
Austin Howard
No fucking derp, but nobody's retarded enough to think this is evidence for genetic cause.
Hunter Peterson
Liberals should totally support these discoveries.
The sooner we can start discriminating on the basis of presence of particular genotypes themselves, the sooner we can eradicate any utilitarian grounds for institutional racism.
Any institution for which acceptance would be purely merit-based would necessarily become mixed-race.
In the past, they might discriminate on secondary characteristics like race "just in case". But now it will be easy and more reliable to know someone's true potential regardless of whatever other correlates exist.
Angel Sanchez
wew, took everybody long enough to figure this out.
dumb family --> dumb kids smart family --> smart kids
Pretty obvious if you ask me.
Julian Gomez
You don't properly think things through.
This is far more consequential.
The results of these studies is the fact a smart OR dumb family can know which genetics are better. Meaning things like embryo selection or embryo editing become effective ways to improve outcome.
Proving liberals wrong is just a side-effect of a much bigger genetic revolution.
Connor Clark
They worked pretty damn hard to suppress scientific evidence that African Americans have genes which promote violent behavior, aka MAOA-2R.
They don't like genetic determinism because it supports the fact certain people are inferior or superior. They would rather pretend everything is a result of social constructs.
Xavier Parker
>Proving liberals wrong is just a side-effect of a much bigger genetic revolution. The future is bright lads. Genetics will finally start to enter the spotlight and show the world that many more things than we previously thought are beyond the control of socialization. Tired of all these wankers assuming that social constructs are the only factors that effect the way humans develop.
Brayden Johnson
It's pretty shocking that entire fields of study in Academics believe that there is no male-female difference except differences due to social factors.
I guess playing with male toys make you think twice as many sexual thoughts on average per day.
It's pretty loony. Disproving the social construct post-modernist view on life is really just a bonus. Only very unintelligent people actually believe that stuff.
The economic benefit of a 10% improvement in average cognitive ability is about 6x higher GDP from the previous level. Intelligence is extremely transformative and powerful.
We are going through two huge revolutions in computing and genetics which will open up tremendous "intelligence" improvements for society.
Although the more transformative thing would be something similar to steroids but for neurons.
Jace Watson
This isn't an 'i fucking love science' clickbait article like you're useful.
Michael Brown
>not clickbait >dailymail.co.uk
How many bowls have you smoked today?
Hudson Perez
>useful Autocorrect or dyslexia?
Joseph Bell
Are you stupid? Genetics work won't help against unnecessary discrimination from utilitarian point of view. Many countries have school systems that just gauge your performance by tests and then judge anonymously based on that alone.
What is the point of discriminating based on genetics? How is that different from normal racism? Why not just gauge performance rather than judge based on probability of being able to achieve given performance?
Averages are cool and all but individual case basis is the only moral way of judging.
Brody Rivera
10%? more like 50%, it either happens or it doesnt
Cooper Taylor
It's okay.
In a properly ran society the low scoring genetics would never be born.
They would never exist to be discriminated against. They would just be in some garbage bin like the ones with sexuality issues or ugly faces.
Kayden Rogers
In a properly ran society we would be already post scarcity and we wouldn't need to randomly shit on people for various reasons.
Your properly ran society also offers no individual freedom if you can't even have your child be born.
I think the whole reason why so many scientists don't like publishing on delicate issues is because of genocidal retards like you, not some conspiracy.
Camden Perez
>genocidal retard
There is no genocide
Parents will choose.
The "enhanced" children will have a bigger gap with normal children than any current racial differences.
Jaxson Ross
>evolution of life ended with the perfect form of life, human beings.
Nope, it just began. Natural evolution goes at an extremely slow pace. The newest capability on Earth is now millions of times more powerful than natural processes and accelerating.
If you had any hopes of "humans" existing in 100 years, you best get ready for disappointment.
Mason Young
>Averages are cool and all but individual case basis is the only moral way of judging.
Because everyone deserves a fair chance to be successful, right? If not for material benefit then because success is a point-of-pride.
In an ideal world, I don't think it's even right to be framing the debate in terms of what people deserve. Generally speaking, people can be said to "deserve" an extremely small subset of their life outcomes (generally a larger share in developed societies than undeveloped ones, but tending to be quite a bit of determinism in any case). We're born into almost every circumstance we endure.
Why did some of our distant ancestors decide to migrate to one place while others chose a different strategy? There's no reason to think there was any particular merit to either, the outcome and manifestation of their choices upon our ancestry was almost certainly completely random for all practical purposes.
It's more nonsensical to think in terms of fortunate / unfortunate than deserved undeserved. But there's more to discrimination than being fair, of course. Having a meritocratic society tends to benefit everyone that lives within it for its own sake. That, and we're afraid many folks will be complacent and unmotivated if they're convinced they've done their best.
>Are you stupid? Genetics work won't help against unnecessary discrimination from utilitarian point of view.
If you discriminate against race A because they have higher frequency incidence of some phenotype, "them blacks are violent, can't have 'em in our neighborhood" or what-have-you, and then some means to tease apart which individuals posses the corresponding genotype gains prevalence, any merit that could be argued for racial discrimination would be debased.
Daniel Lee
>There's no reason to think there was any particular merit to either *with reference to the quality of life current generations of their offspring enjoy
>It's more nonsensical to think in terms of fortunate / unfortunate *it's more sensical
Jayden Myers
This would actually be an interesting study.
There's a meme out there that the bullied kids are all geniuses but in reality the bullied kids are all just weird morons who will never quite fit in or be successful in society.
pic possibly related (only looked at the filename).
Logan Jackson
>There's a meme out there that the bullied kids are all geniuses but in reality the bullied kids are all just weird morons who will never quite fit in or be successful in society. In my experience the smart kids tend to be bullied, but the (potential) genius kids aren't.
