Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Executive functions mostly heritable?   posted by Razib @ 5/13/2008 09:37:00 AM
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99% Genetic? Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable:
The results from this approach are jaw-dropping: variance shared among each variety of executive function (inhibition, updating, and shifting) is nearly perfectly heritable: the contribution of the "A" component to those correlations is 99%. This heritable variance in the common executive function predicts nearly all of the genetic variance in the inhibition factor, consistent with the idea that those constructs are isomorphic from a heritability standpoint. Second, genetic influences on updating and shifting were roughly half due to the common executive function (43% and 44%, respectively) and half due to unique genetic influences (56% and 42%, respectively). Thus, the overall picture is that executive functions, in both their unity and diversity, are somewhere between 86 to 100% heritable.



I wonder if such high heritabilities imply many adaptive equilibria in terms of personality phenotype with all populations? (remember the rule of thumb that the more heritable a trait is the less fitness implication it has)