First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Something is deeply flawed about genetic method and theory and I doubt any serious progress will be made until that fundamental problem is solved. Some traits like intelligence and body height are highly inherited, studies on families and twins consistently find inheritance to account for 50 % and more of the variation. Intelligence and success in school and education are highly correlated and inherited is generally understood to mean genetic. So when Rietveld et al. regress full genomes of more than 100 000 people against educational attainment and find an R2 of 0.02 % or explain one month of total education (not sure how those two numbers are meant to fit together) this result can only be called a total failure. You’d be hard put to construct two sets of completely random numbers yielding a correlation as low as that. So whatever it is about genomes that determines inherited traits, we are currently very obviously looking in completely the wrong direction for it. How Rietveld et al. come to call their complete non-result “promising” is utterly beyond me.