Assortative mating on educational attainment leads to genetic spousal resemblance for polygenic scores

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Hugh-Jones, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8360-8884, Verweij, Karin J.H., St. Pourcain, Beate and Abdellaoui, Abdel (2016) Assortative mating on educational attainment leads to genetic spousal resemblance for polygenic scores. Intelligence, 59. 103–108.

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Abstract

We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~ 1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p < 2 × 10− 16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 × 10− 8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 × 10− 14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 × 10− 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: assortative mating,educational attainment,polygenic scores
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Environment, Resources and Conflict
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 24 Sep 2016 00:30
Last Modified: 21 Aug 2023 01:12
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/60069
DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2016.08.005

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