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Drowning in shallow causality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2023

Hao Shen  and
Marcus W. Feldman Open the ORCID record for Marcus W. Feldman [Opens in a new window]
Hao Shen
Affiliation:
Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA shenhao@stanford.edu
Marcus W. Feldman
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA mfeldman@stanford.edu
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Abstract

It has been known for decades that inference concerning genetic causes of human behavioral phenotypes cannot be legitimately made from correlations among relatives. We claim that these inferential difficulties cannot be overcome by assigning different names to causes inferred from within-family and population-level genome-wide association studies (GWASs). For educational attainment, for example, unraveling gene–environment interactions requires more than new names for causes.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 46 , 2023 , e199
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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