Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and IQ

The chief limitation of polygenic scores is currently that the GWA studies were carried out on overwhelmingly European descent samples and this is responsible for a few issues, chiefly: 1) The GWAS will fail to capture population specific variants. Signals of polygenic selection can be identified by various methods, such as correlation of allele frequencies [ 5 10 ] and the regression of population average of trait values on polygenic scores (PGS) [ 9 ]; these have been successfully applied to human stature [ 3 12 ] and cognitive abilities [ 9 ]. Subsequently, pairwise population IQ differences were regressed on Fst and PGS distances to test if the observed relationship appears only because both variables are “spatially” structured by intrinsic effects (random drift or migrations) or if the two matrices are “causally” related, indicating positive directional selection or diversifying selection.

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