Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic

By G. Davies, A. Tenesa, A. Payton, Jian Yang, S. Harris, D. Liewald, X. Ke, S. Le Hellard, A. Christoforou, M. Luciano and 22 more. Molecular Psychiatry, 2011

635 citations recorded by the source corpus.

General intelligence is an important human quantitative trait that accounts for much of the variation in diverse cognitive abilities. Individual differences in intelligence are strongly associated with many important life outcomes, including educational and occupational attainments, income, health and lifespan. Data from twin and family studies are consistent with a high heritability of intelligence, but this inference has been controversial. We conducted a genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549 692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation. Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ∼1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.

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Citations in the corpus

The ENIGMA Consortium: large-scale collaborative analyses of neuroimaging and genetic data (2014, unknown): “…similar kinds of “ polygene ” scores to the ones used to predict illness risk can be used to explain variation in related phenotypes, such as cognition (Davies et al. 2011), structural MRI (Holmes et al. 2012), neural activation on functional MRI (Whalley et al. 2013a) and white matter integrity…”
Ageing and Skills: A Review and Analysis of Skill Gain and Skill Loss over the Lifespan and over Time. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 72. (2012, unknown): “Otherwise, research supports the notion that genetics have a significant influence on differences in IQ scores, explaining about half the difference among adults (Davies et al., 2011).”
The Relationship between Genes, Psychological Traits, and Political Participation (2014, unknown): “8 In addition to twin studies, recent work has used molecular genetic data to estimate the heritability of cognitive ability and personality traits (Davies et al. 2011, Vinkhuyzen et al. 2012).”
A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data (2018, background): “Intelligence has a strong genetic component [5,26,27]; Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) suggest that intelligence is highly polygenic (no single gene accounts for a large fraction of the variance) [28,29].”
DEMONSTRATING THE VALIDITY OF TWIN RESEARCH IN CRIMINOLOGY (2014, background): “…in assessments of schizophrenia (Lee et al., 2012) and other psychiatric disorders (Lee et al., 2013), components of personality (Vinkhuyzen et al., 2012), behavioral inhibition (McGue et al., 2013), and intelligence in both childhood (Benyamin et al., 2013) and adulthood (Davies et al., 2011).”
Why expert performance is special and cannot be extrapolated from studies of performance in the general population: A response to criticisms. (2014, background): “(2012) stated that no single gene had been identified in GWAS studies, which would “meet conventional thresholds for significant associations with g (e.g., Butcher, Davis, Craig, & Plomin, 2008; Davies et al., 2011; Seshadri et al., 2007)” (pp.”
The Genetics of Investment Biases (2014, background): “, Heath and Tversky, 1991; Fox and Tversky, 1995) are potential explanations, but the home bias is not easy to explain (e.g., Lewis, 1999). The recent gene association study by Chew, Ebstein, and Zhong (2011) identifies several specific genes that affect ambiguity aversion and familiarity.”
Value versus growth investing: Why do different investors have different styles? (2015, unknown): “, De Bondt and Thaler (1985), Fama and French (1992, 1993, 1996), Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1994), and Daniel and Titman (1997)).”
The Nature of Race (2015, background): “Mayr and Bock (2002)); here, we mean phenotypic-based classificat ions.”
Essentially Biased: Why People Are Fatalistic About Genes (2017, background): “…there are no single genes that predict IQ to any appreciable degree (the strongest single predictor is associated with about 0.3 IQ points; Reitveld et al., 2014); instead, approximately 500,000 variants are estimated to be implicated in predicting one half of IQ variability (Davies et al., 2011).”
Genetics and Intelligence Differences: Five Special Findings (2014, unknown): “Moreover, GCTA heritability estimates are greater, although not significantly so, for verbal than non-verbal intelligence 42, 81 , which is consistent with the greater assortative mating for verbal than non-verbal intelligence.”
The Neuroscience of Intelligence (2016, methodology): “For example, one study based on 3,511 unrelated adults concluded that there are many intelligence genes that all together may account for 40%–50% of variance in general intelligence (Davies et al., 2011) although no one gene yet accounts for more than a tiny portion of variance.”