Drowning in shallow causality

Abstract

It has been known for decades that inference concerning genetic causes of human behavioral phenotypes cannot be legitimately made from correlations among relatives. We claim that these inferential difficulties cannot be overcome by assigning different names to causes inferred from within-family and population-level genome-wide association studies (GWASs). For educational attainment, for example, unraveling gene-environment interactions requires more than new names for causes.