Assortative mating on educational attainment leads to genetic spousal resemblance for polygenic scores

David Hugh-Jones, Karin J.H. Verweij, Beate St. Pourcain, Abdel Abdellaoui

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

41 Citations (Scopus)
13 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~ 1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p < 2 × 10− 16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 × 10− 8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 × 10− 14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 × 10− 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)103–108
Number of pages6
JournalIntelligence
Volume59
Early online date29 Aug 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2016

Keywords

  • Assortative mating
  • Educational attainment
  • Polygenic scores

Cite this