(2015-Nov-18, 03:20:27)Zoidberg Wrote: I said I wouldn't post any more about epigenetics in this topic, but I changed my mind.
They are attacking the entire genetic model of heritability studies and these additive SNP correlations, with epigenetics as their main proof against it. They are getting published on major scientific journals now and also being cited by potential reviewers of the work here.
Heres a correspondence.
Attack:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...12060/full
Defence:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...9/abstract
The defence failed by the way, since they try to play off epigenetics as GxE and rGE, which it isn't.
I knew this was coming, you are lucky they don't have the silver bullet... yet.
What does it matter? Firstly, biometric modeling can incorporate epigenetics as a variance component. So pointing out that epigenetics is a possible factor does not decrease the utility of the method. In fact, it increases it. If researchers want to show the epigenetic factors account for a substantial portion of the variance in a given trait they should employ a biometric model instead of pointing to local associations.
Second, present methodologies can partition variance in a way that can exclude possible epigenetic effects. For example GCTA can not be so confounded, nor can kinship estimates of AM and dominance. Nor can estimates of share environment based on unrelated sibs reared together. Nor can estimates of measurement error. Epigenetic effects could explain some portion of unshared environment -- it would just count as another form of intrauterine effect. But so what? And it could explain some residual H^2 as H^2 - (h^2SNP + H^2D + H^2AM) but for traits like g, there is not much here. For other traits e.g., personality, that's another issue. But Hereditarians don't usually focus on these -- because there aren't large differences between the groups of interest! Indeed, given this, epigenetics could salvage some hereditarian positions, by offering an explanation for the lacks of apparent differences i.e., a masking effect.
Third, whole genome comparisons will substantially narrow the uncertainty since they will capture rare variants, which are thought by many to account for the "missing H^2kinship".
IMO, you're being silly.
(Also, as I have noted numerous times, epigenetic differences are perfectly consistent with a racialist model since, for one, early such models prior to Darwin (who adopted a Lamarckian frame) were mostly epigenetic, at least when races were conceptualized as intraspecfic divisions.)