Guo Guang, Lin Meng-Jung, Harris Kathleen Mullan
Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2022 Sep 9;7(1):22. doi: 10.1038/s41539-022-00137-8.
This research examines how the human genome and SES jointly and interactively shape verbal ability among youth in the U.S. The youth are aged 12-18 when the study starts. The research draws on findings from the latest GWAS as well as a rich set of longitudinal SES measures at individual, family and neighborhood levels from Add Health (N = 7194). Both SES and genome measures predict verbal ability well separately and jointly. More interestingly, the inclusion of both sets of predictors in the same model corrects for about 20% upward bias in the effect of the education PGS, and implies that about 20-30% of the effects of parental SES are not environmental, but parentally genomic. The three incremental Rs that measure the relative contributions of the two PGSs, the genomic component in parental SES, and the environmental component in parental SES are estimated to be about 1.5%, 1.5%, and 7.8%, respectively. The total environmental R and the total genomic R are, thus, 7.8% and 3%, respectively. These findings confirm the importance of SES environment and also pose challenges to traditional social-science research. Not only does an individual's genome have an important direct influence on verbal ability, parental genomes also influence verbal ability through parental SES. The decades-long blueprint of including SES in a model and interpreting their effects as those of SES needs to be amended accordingly. A straightforward solution is to routinely collect DNA data for large social-science studies granted that the primary purpose is to understand social and environmental influences.
本研究探讨了人类基因组和社会经济地位（SES）如何共同且交互地塑造美国青少年的语言能力。研究开始时，这些青少年的年龄在12至18岁之间。该研究借鉴了最新全基因组关联研究（GWAS）的结果，以及来自“青少年健康纵向研究”（Add Health，N = 7194）中丰富的个体、家庭和社区层面的纵向SES测量数据。SES和基因组测量指标单独或共同使用时，都能很好地预测语言能力。更有趣的是，在同一模型中纳入这两组预测指标，可将教育多基因分数（PGS）效应中的约20%向上偏差校正过来，这意味着父母SES效应的约20 - 30%并非环境因素造成，而是由父母基因组导致。衡量两个PGS、父母SES中的基因组成分以及父母SES中的环境成分相对贡献的三个增量R值估计分别约为1.5%、1.5%和7.8%。因此，总的环境R值和总的基因组R值分别为7.8%和3%。这些发现证实了SES环境的重要性，同时也给传统社会科学研究带来了挑战。不仅个体的基因组对语言能力有重要的直接影响，父母的基因组也通过父母的SES影响语言能力。因此，几十年来将SES纳入模型并将其效应解释为SES效应的蓝图需要相应修正。一个直接的解决办法是，对于以理解社会和环境影响为主要目的的大型社会科学研究，常规性地收集DNA数据。
