Galton 1869 hereditary genius; Fisher 1918 polygenic variance; twin method; narrow vs broad heritability; Bouchard Minnesota twins; A/D/I components; shared vs non-shared E; polygenic-trait model; behavioural GWAS; polygenic scores; IQ…
Behavioral Genetics
Galton hereditary genius (1869)
Galton 1869 Hereditary Genius; pedigree analysis of eminent families; founded behavioural genetics and quantitative study of inheritance of…
Fisher 1918 polygenic-variance synthesis
Fisher 1918 Trans R Soc Edinb 52:399; reconciled Mendelian and biometrical approaches via polygenic infinitesimal model; founded…
Classical twin method
Galton 1875 'History of Twins'; Siemens 1924 formalised; comparison of MZ and DZ concordance / correlations partitions trait variance into…
Heritability (narrow / broad)
Falconer 1960; narrow-sense h² = additive-genetic variance / phenotypic variance; broad-sense H² adds dominance and epistasis;…
Bouchard Minnesota reared-apart twins
Bouchard et al 1990 Science 250:223; comprehensive testing of MZ twins reared apart; substantial heritability of personality, cognitive…
ACE variance decomposition
Plomin-DeFries-McClearn-Knopik; partition of trait variance into A (additive genetic), C (shared environment), E (non-shared environment);…
Non-shared environment surprise
Plomin-Daniels 1987 BBS; behavioural-genetic finding that within-family environmental variation contributes more to outcomes than…
Polygenic quantitative-trait model
Falconer-Mackay; many small additive-allele effects sum to continuous trait distribution; underlies most behavioural traits.
Behavioural GWAS
Plomin-Stumm 2018 Nat Rev Genet; large-N genome-wide association studies of cognitive ability, educational attainment, psychiatric traits;…
Polygenic-score prediction
Wray et al 2007; weighted sum of trait-associated SNP allele counts; predicts trait value out-of-sample; useful but ancestry-bias and…
IQ heritability
Plomin-Spinath 2002; meta-analytic IQ heritability ~0.5 in adults; rises across development; substantial across multiple populations and…
Psychiatric twin heritabilities
Sullivan-Daly-Posthuma; schizophrenia ~0.8, bipolar ~0.75, MDD ~0.4, ADHD ~0.7; consistent across studies and across major Western and…
Caspi 5-HTTLPR x stress
Caspi et al 2003 Science 301:386; 5-HTTLPR short allele moderates depression risk from stressful life events; later large-N meta-analyses…
rGE (gene-environment correlation)
Plomin-DeFries-Loehlin 1977; passive (parents transmit both genes and environment), evocative (genotype evokes responses), active (genotype…
Genetic nurture (Kong)
Kong-Thorleifsson-Frigge et al 2018 Science 359:424; non-transmitted parental alleles affect offspring outcomes via parental behaviour;…
Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance
Heard-Martienssen 2014 Cell; few well-documented cases (Agouti viable yellow, ash-1 in C. elegans); behaviour-relevance contested in…
Plomin-Stumm 2018 nature-of-nurture
Plomin-Stumm 2018 Nat Rev Genet 19:148; review reframes 'nature of nurture' in light of GWAS and PGS; argues genetic transmission underlies…
Behavioural QTL mapping
Flint-Eskin-Mackay; QTL mapping in mice/rats and Drosophila for behaviours such as open-field activity, alcohol preference; bridges genetic…