*Variations in individual “educational attainment” (essentially, whether students complete high school or college) cannot be attributed to inherited genetic differences. That is the finding of a new study reported in Science magazine (Rietveld et al. 2013). According to this research, fully 98% of all variation in educational attainment is accounted for by factors other than a person’s simple genetic makeup. This implies that most of student success is a consequence of potentially alterable social or environmental factors. This is an important and perhaps surprising observation, of high interest to parents, teachers, and policymakers alike; but it did not make the headlines. The likely reason is that the authors of the study failed to mention the 98% figure in the title, or in the summary. Nor was it mentioned in the accompanying press release. Instead, their discussion and interest focused almost entirely on a different aspect of their findings: that three gene variants each contribute just 0.02% (one part in 5,000) to variation in educational attainment. Thus the final sentence of the summary concluded not with a plea to find effective ways to help all young people to reach their full potential but instead proposed that these three gene variants “provide promising candidate SNPs (DNA markers) for follow-up work”. This is as spectacular a misdescription of a scientific finding as is to be found anywhere in the scientific literature. But the question is why? Why did the more than two hundred authors decide to highlight the unimpressive 0.02% and bury the 98%? The easy answer is that the authors are geneticists and that geneticists will not have distinguished careers if variation in genes is irrelevant to health and human achievement. The full answer, however, is considerably more interesting, and much more significant, than simple conflicts of interest...
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:47:16 +0000
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