ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences2021
Cultural evolution of genetic heritability.
Article in The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Interplay of Genes and Environment Across Multiple Studies (IGEMS) Consortium After Fifteen Years.Twin research and human genetics : the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies · 2026Article
- Early-career-researcher-led best practices for social science and behavioural genetics.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- When life began with fully acquired heredity: a non-standard hypothesis of evolutionary origins.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025Article
- Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Confounding Fuels Misinterpretation in Human Genetics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- The impact of climate change on skin cancer incidence: mechanisms, vulnerabilities, and mitigation strategies.Frontiers in public health · 2025Review
- Genes, culture, and scientific racism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Methodological concerns underlying a lack of evidence for cultural heterogeneity in the replication of psychological effects.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Attachment and Political Personality are Heritable and Distinct Systems, and Both Share Genetics with Interpersonal Trust and Altruism.Behavior genetics · 2024Article
- Article
- Linking gender differences with gender equality: A systematic-narrative literature review of basic skills and personality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Genetic structure correlates with ethnolinguistic diversity in eastern and southern Africa.American journal of human genetics · 2022Article
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- More Thumbs Than Rules: Is Rationality an Exaptation?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Populations, Traits, and Their Spatial Structure in Humans.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Review
- Cognition in context: Pathways and compound risk in a sample of US non-Hispanic whites.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior - largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene-environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature-nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.