Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
Looking at the Nature paper in the rearview mirror
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Sundet, Jon Martin |
| Copyright Year | 2016 |
| Abstract | Thirty years have passed since the publication of the paper “Education policy and the heritability of educational attainment” in Nature. This paper probably deserves a place among the classics. It has been cited around 150 times, most recently in 2015 (1). Using data from a comparatively large sample of Norwegian MZ and DZ twins and their parents, it was one of the earliest papers documenting the contribution of both genetic and environmental factors to the variance in educational attainment. Arguably, the most important result was that the impact of genes and environments varies across birth cohorts. In the cohorts before the last world war (1915-1939) genetic factors explained about 41% of the variance in educational attainment. If we use data only for the twins (the classic twin design), the (broad) heritability estimate will be even lower (mean heritability across sexes was 0.23). In one of the models tested, gene-environment correlation accounted for 19%, and common environments accounted for 28% of the total variance. In another model, there was no gene-environment correlation, and the effect of common environments accounted for 47% of the variance (64% using twin data only). The impact of genes and common environments changed dramatically in the cohorts after the war, especially for males. Collapsing the two postwar cohorts (1940-1949 and 1950-1960) into one and calculating means, the impact of genetic factors among males (excluding parental data gave similar results) increased to 72% of the variance, whereas the effects of common environment decreased substantially (11%). The heritability for females hardly changed at all and remained around 0.40, and common environment accounted for 45% of the variance. Two studies of Norwegian twins (born in 1967 or later) concerning the heritability of educational attainment have been done since the publication of the Nature paper. Tambs et al. (2) did not report female and male data separately, and found that genes accounted for 59% of the variance in educational attainment. This is quite close to the postwar mean of the heritabilities of males and females found in the Nature study. The other study (3) found that the heritability was lower for males than for females (0.40 and 0.55, respectively). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.5324/nje.v26i1-2.2013 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/norepid/article/download/2013/2002 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.5324/nje.v26i1-2.2013 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
