Introduction to Human Behavioral Genetics

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Below are the top discussions from Reddit that mention this online Coursera course from University of Minnesota.

Offered by University of Minnesota. Behavioral genetic methodologies from twin and adoption studies through DNA analysis will be described ... Enroll for free.

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Taught by
Matt McGue
Regents Professor
and 7 more instructors

Offered by
University of Minnesota

Reddit Posts and Comments

0 posts • 5 mentions • top 4 shown below

r/AcademicPsychology • comment
5 points • RedditforMyHobbies

I have followed https://www.coursera.org/learn/behavioralgenetics , was interesting.

r/Destiny • post
35 points • raby5
Race realists love talking about IQ heritability, so watch these videos before engaging them

I strongly believe these two particular units from an online human behavioral genetics course taught by Matt McGue, Regents Professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, are essential viewing for anyone on this subreddit interested in engaging with race realists. The videos are rather short but are high quality, informative, and when taken together provide excellent counters to race realists' claims that IQ heritability and lower relative IQ scores indicate inferior biology among blacks and other minority groups (although this is not the material's specific aim).

My recommendation for watching these videos is to download each part and then play them back in something like VLC Player where you can change the playback speed. You can do this by clicking play, pausing, then right-clicking on the video and selecting "Save Video As" in Chrome or Firefox. The Coursera video player is really bad in my experience.

Course: Introduction to Human Behavioral Genetics

Unit 3: Heritability

Unit 6: General Intelligence - Genetics and the Environment

r/WTF • comment
1 points • uberpro

> It doesn't need sourcing.

Look, if it doesn't have scientific sources, it's not science. That's how science works. If there was actual evidence, people would publish on it.

> I think you're accustomed to being clever on the internet, but it's a Dunning-Kruger problem.

I don't think this is a case of a Dunning-Kruger problem on my end. I'm literally begging you to show me how I'm wrong (with evidence) or refute any serious points I've brought up (you seem to want to ignore them?).

If I'm wrong, I want to know. Do you?

I can tell that you're passionate about human behavioral genetics from this conversation. I feel like you might not have as much information about it as you think, though. If you ever have some free time, maybe consider checking out Matt McGue's online course on the topic. It's free, and you can go at whatever pace you want.

r/medicine • comment
1 points • gardenofjew

At this point in time we don't have a handle on complex polygenic traits, which are actually the traits of the most importance-- like IQ, diabetes risk, schizophrenia risk, autism risk, obesity risk, etc.-- but with larger and larger GWAS studies we're going to know a lot more in 5 years, 10 years, etc.

Regarding complex genetic interactions: we can quantify how much of the variance is additive versus non-additive. The former is termed narrow-sense heritability and is the portion that contributes to parent-offspring resemblance. The reason this distinction is important is because the latter is the unpredictable part of genetic engineering--the non-linear interaction effects that people are afraid of, the strange effects that might result from certain combination of genes, etc. The former (additive variance) is the variance that's exploited in animal breeding to produce higher breeding-value cows, chickens, etc. in a mostly predictable fashion.

From this coursera course on behavioral genetics

>>So, the difference between MZ and DZ twin correlations, corresponds to half the additive genetic effects. I told you that there is a very general pattern in the behavioral genetic literature. MZs are more similar than DZs. The MZ correlation is greater than the DZ correlation. By putting in this biometric formulation, what we can actually do is begin to quantify. That impression that we get just by looking at the correlations. And this is telling us how to quantify it. The difference corresponds to half the additive genetic effect. Therefore if we double the difference. We get an estimate of the additive genetic variance.

>>The added genetic variance is estimated as taking the difference in, in the two correlation and doubling it. And for height, the heritability estimate here is roughly 70%. Again, this is going to vary. It's a proportion between zero and a hundred. Her IQ is a little bit less. It's about 60%. What do, how do we interpret that? We say that, about, 60% of individual differences in IQ, appear to be associated with genetic differences among individuals, additive genetic differences. It turns out, just coincidentally, in this particular dataset, the estimate of shared environmental effects is just 20% in both cases. Non-shared environmental effects, 8 about 10% here, 20% there. And note that these do add up to 100% as they should. So, what the biometricians are giving us here, is a way to begin to quantify these underlying sources of individual differences. And, and interpret I'll just focus on IQ here, because it's the a behavioral trait, one that we'll be interested in, in this course. What, this would say is that, it looks like roughly 60% of the variance in IQ is associated with genetic factors.

From a 2017 GWAS study with ~78k people:

>>Our calculations show that the current results explain up to 4.8% of the variance in intelligence and that on average across the four samples there is a 1.9-fold increase in explained variance in comparison to the most recent GWAS on intelligence6.

If we end up with, say, enough knowledge to predict 1/3 of the additive genetic variance in IQ, and we combine that with Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, depending on the # of fertilized zygotes available, success rates of implanation, $ willing to spend, etc. you could very feasibly do some very interesting things.

TL;DR

I agree we don't know much about those polygenic traits quite yet but I think we will know a whole lot more in 5 or 10 years, and people aren't quite ready for it...

Reccomended reading:

  1. 4th law of Behavioral Genetics

  2. 3 laws of Behavioral Genetics and what they mean