Polygenic selection on educational attainment: a replication

The genetic variants identified by three large genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of educational attainment were used to test a polygenic selection model.

Average frequencies of alleles with positive effect (polygenic scores) were compared across populations (N=26) using data from 1000 Genomes. The polygenic score of 161 GWAS significant SNPs in a recent meta-analysis was highly correlated to population IQ (r=0.863).

SNP p value predicted correlation to population IQ and factors from the two previous GWAS (r= -.25).

Factor analysis produced similar estimates of selection pressure for educational attainment across the three datasets. Polygenic and factor scores computed using the top 20 significant SNPs showed very high correlation to population IQ (r=0.88; 0.9).

Similar findings were obtained using 52 populations from another database (ALFRED).

The results together constitute a replication of preliminary findings and provide strong evidence for recent diversifying polygenic selection on educational attainment and underlying cognitive ability.