Coon H, Carey G
Behav Genet. 1989 Mar;19(2):183-93. doi: 10.1007/BF01065903.
Analyses of musical ability data from the Loehlin and Nichols National Merit Scholarship study are presented. Musical ability is indexed by four measures: interest in a profession in music, performance in school, performance outside of school, and receiving honors in music. These variables pose a challenge for behavior genetic analysis since they do not conform to the assumptions of traditional linear models. For example, there is a dependent relationship between the honors and the performance variables; one cannot obtain honors without performance. Several methods were employed to deal with these relationships, and the following conclusions appeared regardless of the method used. First, twin correlations were always high, ranging from 0.44 to 0.90 in monozygotic (MZ) twins and from 0.34 to 0.83 in dizygotic (DZ) twins. Second, although there was evidence for heritable variation, the effects of common environment were almost always larger than the effects of heredity. Third, marital assortment was not of sufficient magnitude to account for these common environment effects. In the young adults in this sample, musical ability is influenced more by shared family environment than by shared genes.
本文呈现了对来自洛林和尼科尔斯国家优秀奖学金研究中的音乐能力数据的分析。音乐能力通过四项指标来衡量：对音乐职业的兴趣、在学校的表现、校外表现以及在音乐方面获得的荣誉。这些变量给行为遗传学分析带来了挑战，因为它们不符合传统线性模型的假设。例如，荣誉变量和表现变量之间存在依赖关系；没有表现就无法获得荣誉。我们采用了几种方法来处理这些关系，并且无论使用何种方法，都得出了以下结论。首先，同卵双胞胎（MZ）的双胞胎相关性始终很高，范围在0.44至0.90之间，异卵双胞胎（DZ）的相关性在0.34至0.83之间。其次，尽管有证据表明存在遗传变异，但共同环境的影响几乎总是大于遗传的影响。第三，婚姻选择的程度不足以解释这些共同环境的影响。在这个样本中的年轻人中，音乐能力受家庭共享环境的影响大于共享基因的影响。
