From Nature last May, a paper I’ve referred to in one or two other posts recently:

Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment Nature 533, 539–542 (26 May 2016) doi:10.1038/nature17671

Received 24 June 2015 Accepted 16 March 2016 Published online 11 May 2016 Educational attainment is strongly influenced by social and other environmental factors, but genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals.

Number of years of schooling is a measure that can be found in many recent medical studies that look at genes. It’s not an ideal measure from a qualitative standpoint for studying the genetics of intelligence, but quantity has a quality all its own when it comes to ferreting out the impact of genes on intelligence. Huge sample sizes are crucial:

Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank.

If all goes well, the sample size in this research project could be expanded to a million or so in the near future.

We identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period

See, I’ve been telling you that the really important period for education isn’t pre-K like everybody says these days, it’s pre-natal: 8 months and 29 days before birth. But not a day sooner!

, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development.

In other words, most of these genetic variations of small but significant effect on educational attainment are found exactly where you’d expect them to be found: in genes known to affect prenatal neural development.