As an indicator of educational opportunity, social scientists have studied intergenerational mobility—the degree to which children’s attainment depends on that of their parents—and how it varies ...across place or time. We combine this research with behavior genetics to show that societal variation in mobility is rooted in family advantages that siblings share over and above genetic transmission. In societies with high intergenerational mobility, less variance in educational attainment is attributable to the shared sibling environment. Variance due to genetic factors is largely constant, but its share as a part of total variance, heritability, rises with mobility. Our results suggest that environmental differences underlie variation in intergenerational mobility, and that there is no tension between egalitarian policies and the realization of individual genetic potential.
Recent years have seen the birth of sociogenomics via the infusion of molecular genetic data. We chronicle the history of genetics, focusing particularly on post-2005 genome-wide association studies, ...the post-2015 big data era, and the emergence of polygenic scores. We argue that understanding polygenic scores, including their genetic correlations with each other, causation, and underlying biological architecture, is vital. We show how genetics can be introduced to understand a myriad of topics such as fertility, educational attainment, intergenerational social mobility, well-being, addiction, risky behavior, and longevity. Although models of gene-environment interaction and correlation mirror agency and structure models in sociology, genetics is yet to be fully discovered by this discipline. We conclude with a critical reflection on the lack of diversity, nonrepresentative samples, precision policy applications, ethics, and genetic determinism. We argue that sociogenomics can speak to long-standing sociological questions and that sociologists can offer innovative theoretical, measurement, and methodological innovations to genetic research.
Research on genetic influences on human fertility outcomes such as number of children ever born (NEB) or the age at first childbirth (AFB) has been solely based on twin and family-designs that suffer ...from problematic assumptions and practical limitations. The current study exploits recent advances in the field of molecular genetics by applying the genomic-relationship-matrix based restricted maximum likelihood (GREML) methods to quantify for the first time the extent to which common genetic variants influence the NEB and the AFB of women. Using data from the UK and the Netherlands (N = 6,758), results show significant additive genetic effects on both traits explaining 10% (SE = 5) of the variance in the NEB and 15% (SE = 4) in the AFB. We further find a significant negative genetic correlation between AFB and NEB in the pooled sample of -0.62 (SE = 0.27, p-value = 0.02). This finding implies that individuals with genetic predispositions for an earlier AFB had a reproductive advantage and that natural selection operated not only in historical, but also in contemporary populations. The observed postponement in the AFB across the past century in Europe contrasts with these findings, suggesting an evolutionary override by environmental effects and underscoring that evolutionary predictions in modern human societies are not straight forward. It emphasizes the necessity for an integrative research design from the fields of genetics and social sciences in order to understand and predict fertility outcomes. Finally, our results suggest that we may be able to find genetic variants associated with human fertility when conducting GWAS-meta analyses with sufficient sample size.
REPLY TO MORRIS Engzell, Per; Tropf, Felix C.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
11/2020, Letnik:
117, Številka:
46
Journal Article
Genetic and environmental factors both make substantial contributions to the heterogeneity in individuals’ levels of cognitive ability. Many studies have examined the relationship between educational ...attainment and cognitive performance and its rate of change. Yet there remains a gap in knowledge regarding whether the effect of genetic predictors on individual differences in cognition becomes more or less prominent over the life course. In this analysis of over 5000 older adults from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the U.S., we measured the change in performance on global cognition, episodic memory, attention & concentration, and mental status over 14 years. Growth curve models are used to evaluate the association between a polygenic risk score for education (education PGS) and cognitive change. Using the most recent education PGS, we find that individuals with higher scores perform better across all measures of cognition in later life. Education PGS is associated with a faster decline in episodic memory in old age. The relationships are robust even after controlling for phenotypic educational attainment, and are unlikely to be driven by mortality bias. Future research should consider genetic effects when examining non-genetic factors in cognitive decline. Our findings represent a need to understand the mechanisms between genetic endowment of educational attainment and cognitive decline from a biological angle.
•Older adults with higher scores perform better across all measures of cognition.•The relationship is robust after controlling for phenotypic educational attainment.•The genetic effect on episodic memory diminishes with age.•Future research should consider genetic effects when examining cognitive decline.
The Dutch are the tallest people on earth. Over the last 200 years, they have grown 20 cm in height: a rapid rate of increase that points to environmental causes. This secular trend in height is ...echoed across all Western populations, but came to an end, or at least levelled off, much earlier than in The Netherlands. One possibility, then, is that natural selection acted congruently with these environmentally induced changes to further promote tall stature among the people of the lowlands. Using data from the LifeLines study, which follows a large sample of the population of the north of The Netherlands (n = 94 516), we examined how height was related to measures of reproductive success (as a proxy for fitness). Across three decades (1935–1967), height was consistently related to reproductive output (number of children born and number of surviving children), favouring taller men and average height women. This was despite a later age at first birth for taller individuals. Furthermore, even in this low-mortality population, taller women experienced higher child survival, which contributed positively to their increased reproductive success. Thus, natural selection in addition to good environmental conditions may help explain why the Dutch are so tall.
When genes and environment disagree Courtiol, Alexandre; Tropf, Felix C.; Mills, Melinda C.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
07/2016, Letnik:
113, Številka:
28
Journal Article
A large body of literature has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and age at first birth. However, this relationship may be partly spurious because of family background factors ...that cannot be controlled for in most research designs. We investigate the extent to which education is causally related to later age at first birth in a large sample of female twins from the United Kingdom (N = 2,752). We present novel estimates using within-identical twin and biométrie models. Our findings show that one year of additional schooling is associated with about one-half year later age at first birth in ordinary least squares (OLS) models. This estimate reduced to only a 1.5-month later age at first birth for the within-identical twin model controlling for all shared family background factors (genetic and family environmental). Biometrie analyses reveal that it is mainly influences of the family environment—not genetic factors—that cause spurious associations between education and age at first birth. Last, using data from the Office for National Statistics, we demonstrate that only 1.9 months of the 2.74 years of fertility postponement for birth cohorts 1944-1967 could be attributed to educational expansion based on these estimates. We conclude that the rise in educational attainment alone cannot explain differences in fertility timing between cohorts.
In modern societies, individual differences in completed fertility are linked with genotypic differences between individuals. Explaining the heritability of completed fertility has been inconclusive, ...with alternative explanations centering on family formation timing, pursuit of education, or other psychological traits. We use the twin subsample from the Midlife Development in the United States study and the TwinsUK study to examine these issues. In total, 2606 adult twin pairs reported on their completed fertility, age at first birth and marriage, level of education, Big Five personality traits, and cognitive ability. Quantitative genetic Cholesky models were used to partition the variance in completed fertility into genetic and environmental variance that is shared with other phenotypes and residual variance. Genetic influences on completed fertility are strongly related to family formation timing and less strongly, but significantly, with psychological traits. Multivariate models indicate that family formation, demographic, and psychological phenotypes leave no residual genetic variance in completed fertility in either dataset. Results are largely consistent across U.S. and U.K. sociocultural contexts.
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