Study finds genes involved in education are becoming rare

If this were carried out by anyone with a lesser dataset or less germline genome experience than deCODE, I'd be super skeptical. As it is, I would expect the science itself to be solid (if early), I'm just super skeptical of the spin put on it when it's reported in the popular press.

The final paragraph should be the primary take home, IMHO:

>“Although the effect of the polygenic score for educational attainment on fertility is weak and needs replication in populations other than Iceland, this study is a harbinger for the new directions in research that will be possible as bigger and better polygenic scores come online,” Plomin added

As you might guess from my username, I'm pretty skeptical of single-gene explanations for complex traits. The idea of "genes for education" is such a simplification of a very complex phenotype that it's hard to make sense of it.

That said, polygenic studies are the future IMHO, but we're just hashing out methods. Studies like this, though preliminary, are the first steps towards that.

Humans are going through a huge population boom, which can be a catalyst for faster evolution. It will be very interesting to see what happens in 10,000 years. Maybe by then we'll even have models and understanding enough to figure out the extent that "education genes" exist as positive causal predictors rather than correlative associations.