Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Last question. I believe your chosen mechanism for it transmitting over time to be, in fact, genetics. How do you reconcile the very low estimates of heritability from genome-wide association studies with the much higher estimates that come from twin studies? These genome-wide studies, amazingly, even with something like, is it up to 4 million people that they have genotyped, where they have measures of their educational outcomes, still don’t identify that well what the genetic basis of this is that we know exists from these twin studies. In some sense, what it’s saying is, these studies — we still have very imperfect measures. Even though they’re identifying a thousand different loci on the genome that are affecting educational outcomes, we’re still somehow not capturing everything that’s happening here. They’ve also studied whether it’s combinatoric effects that really matter, but I think they’ve largely been ruled out, that it’s mostly just the additive impact of what’s happening at each particular location. So, all I can say is that it has this weird implication that you may need studies that are bigger than the whole of humanity [laughs] to actually finally figure out what are all these genetic influences because there are such rare permutations that are actually affecting outcomes. It also, actually surprisingly, means that if you have very small populations, say Native Americans, that you might not be able to do these kinds of studies because you wouldn’t have enough people to actually be able to say very much about, say, the genetic basis of illnesses or the genetic basis of height and other things like that. But it is a puzzle in that literature, which is that even with this amount of data, and even though knowing that there is this genetic basis that is quite strong, they still cannot actually find mechanically what the location of that basis is.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.