ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of science2022
Half a century later and we're back where we started: How the problem of locality turned in to the problem of portability.
Article in Studies in history and philosophy of science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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.
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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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Schoolhouse risk: Can we mitigate the polygenic Pygmalion effect?Acta psychologica · 2024Trial
- Temporal shifts in polygenic traits track major epidemics in Western Eurasia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Reproductive options and genetic testing for patients with an inherited cardiac disease.Nature reviews. Cardiology · 2025Review
- The Geneticization of Education and Its Bioethical Implications.Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees · 2024Article
- How to Diagnose Abhorrent Science.The Hastings Center report · 2024Article
- Social and Behavioral Genomics: What Does It Mean for Pediatrics?The Journal of pediatrics · 2024Article
- Three legs of the missing heritability problem.Studies in history and philosophy of science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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1 author.
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Abstract
In the 1970s, Lewontin sparked a debate about a problem of locality, by making the case that any given heritability estimate is local to the original population and environment studied, and could not be generalized to other populations and environments. Nearly 50 years later, a new problem of portability has emerged: the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores diminishes when applied to populations whose characteristics are different from the original population sample. This paper briefly reviews the nature of each problem and analyzes their similarities and differences in three areas: 1) conceptual underpinnings, 2) causal explanations, and 3) practical, social, and political implications. Although conceptually and methodologically different from the problem of locality in important respects, the problem of portability facing contemporary genomics today should come as no surprise, as it is an inevitable outcome of the kinds of problematic inferences detailed by Lewontin nearly half a century ago.
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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.