Polygenic scores … can predict a person’s intelligence or performance in school. Like a credit score, a polygenic score is statistical tool that combines a lot of information about a person’s genome into a single number. Fears about using polygenic scores for genetic discrimination are understandable, given this country’s ugly history of using the science of heredity to justify atrocities like forcible sterilization. But polygenic scores are not the new eugenics. And, rushing to discuss polygenic scores in dystopian terms only contributes to widespread public misunderstanding about genetics.
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Here are four reasons why dystopian projections about polygenic scores are out of touch with the current science:
First, a polygenic score currently predicts the life outcomes of an individual child with a great deal of uncertainty.
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Second, using polygenic scoring for embryo selection requires parents to create embryos using reproductive technology, rather than conceiving them by having sex.
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Third, and counterintuitively, a polygenic score might be using DNA to measure aspects of the child’s environment.
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Finally, the phrase “DNA tests for IQ” makes for an attention-grabbing headline, but it’s scientifically meaningless.
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Equating your intelligence, a cognitive capacity that is tested behaviorally, with your polygenic score, a number that is a weighted sum of genetic variants discovered to be statistically associated with educational attainment in a hypothesis-free data mining exercise, is misleading about what intelligence is and is not.
Editor’s note: Paige Harden is a tenured professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is the Principal Investigator of the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project
Read full, original post: Genetic Test Scores Predicting Intelligence Are Not the New Eugenics
