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. 2013 Apr;9(4):e1003451.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003451. Epub 2013 Apr 4.

The genetic correlation between height and IQ: shared genes or assortative mating?

Matthew C Keller  1 , Christine E Garver-Apgar, Margaret J Wright, Nicholas G Martin, Robin P Corley, Michael C Stallings, John K Hewitt, Brendan P Zietsch
Affiliations

The genetic correlation between height and IQ: shared genes or assortative mating?

Matthew C Keller et al. PLoS Genet. 2013 Apr.

Erratum in

  • PLoS Genet. 2014;10(3):e1004329

Abstract

Traits that are attractive to the opposite sex are often positively correlated when scaled such that scores increase with attractiveness, and this correlation typically has a genetic component. Such traits can be genetically correlated due to genes that affect both traits ("pleiotropy") and/or because assortative mating causes statistical correlations to develop between selected alleles across the traits ("gametic phase disequilibrium"). In this study, we modeled the covariation between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, their siblings, and their parents (total N = 7,905) to elucidate the nature of the correlation between two potentially sexually selected traits in humans: height and IQ. Unlike previous designs used to investigate the nature of the height-IQ correlation, the present design accounts for the effects of assortative mating and provides much less biased estimates of additive genetic, non-additive genetic, and shared environmental influences. Both traits were highly heritable, although there was greater evidence for non-additive genetic effects in males. After accounting for assortative mating, the correlation between height and IQ was found to be almost entirely genetic in nature. Model fits indicate that both pleiotropy and assortative mating contribute significantly and about equally to this genetic correlation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The full nuclear twin family design, with assortative mating modeled as primary phenotypic assortment.
See text for descriptions of parameters. Note that either F or S must be dropped to make the model identifiable.
Figure 2
Figure 2. The reduced nuclear twin family design, with assortative mating modeled as social homogamy.
All non-significant pathways and latent variables have been dropped.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The best fitting nuclear twin family model, with assortative mating modeled as primary phenotypic assortment.
All non-significant pathways have been dropped, and estimates of remaining pathways and latent variances are shown.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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