Commentary: Reading Plomin and Daniels in the post-genomic age.

摘要

If there were a holy grail of research questions for human behavioural scientists it would probably be the following: To what extent are our life outcomes due to nature and to what extent to nurture? We have watched the proverbial pendulum swing back and forth over the decades with respect to this question. Today, where it rests is unclear: on the one hand, scientists are being inundated with enormous amounts of genetic data that would seem to augur for an intense focus on the hereditary roots of behaviour. On the other hand, genome-wide association studies have failed to (additively) account for prior broad sense hcritability estimates, sending human geneticists off onto a mystery novel plot in search of the 'missing hcritability'. Explanations have ranged from the salience of epigenetic processes to the importance of higher order allele interactions. And, of course, it could be that those broad sense heritabil-ity estimates were wrong in the first place.