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Separating Measured Genetic and Environmental Effects: Evidence Linking Parental Genotype and Adopted Child Outcomes

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Abstract

There has been widespread adoption of genome wide summary scores (polygenic scores) as tools for studying the importance of genetics and associated life course mechanisms across a range of demographic and socioeconomic outcomes. However, an often unacknowledged issue with these studies is that parental genetics impact both child environments and child genetics, leaving the effects of polygenic scores difficult to interpret. This paper uses multi-generational data containing polygenic scores for parents (n = 7193) and educational outcomes for adopted (n = 855) and biological (n = 20,939) children, many raised in the same families, which allows us to separate the influence of parental polygenic scores on children outcomes between environmental (adopted children) and environmental and genetic (biological children) effects. Our results complement recent work on “genetic nurture” by showing associations of parental polygenic scores with adopted children’s schooling, providing additional evidence that polygenic scores combine genetic and environmental influences and that research designs are needed to separate these estimated impacts.

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1991, the WLS has been supported principally by the National Institute on Aging (AG-9775, AG-21079, AG-033285, and AG-041868), with additional support from the Vilas Estate Trust, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1992, data have been collected by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center. A public use file of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is available from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 and at https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/data/. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors. This research was supported by core grants to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P2C HD047873) and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P30 AG017266) and by award 96–17-04 from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The authors thank Ron Lee and participants at the Population Association of America 2018 conference for helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Benjamin W. Domingue

  2. La Follette School of Public Affairs, Department of Sociology, and Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Jason Fletcher

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Correspondence to Benjamin W. Domingue.

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Benjamin W. Domingue and Jason Fletcher declares that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Stanford IRB #39751 & University of Wisconsin Madison Minimal Risk IRB 2013-1477) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Domingue, B.W., Fletcher, J. Separating Measured Genetic and Environmental Effects: Evidence Linking Parental Genotype and Adopted Child Outcomes. Behav Genet 50, 301–309 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-020-10000-4

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