After years of waiting, the drought is finally over: we have a new intelligence GWAS! I downloaded the results and tested its scores against the older Pan-UKBB fluid-intelligence score on the same 51 populations I used before. [1] The improvement is large: the correlation with population IQ rises from 0.619 to 0.814, and reaches 0.846 when the new study is combined with COGENT.
The paper, by David van den Berg, Daniel Malawsky, Wei Huang and colleagues, with Abdel Abdellaoui among the senior authors, is called “Imputation of fluid intelligence scores reduces ascertainment bias and increases power for analyses of common and rare variants”[2]. Its main innovation is to make better use of the UK Biobank participants who have incomplete intelligence-test data.
The new scores also correlate more strongly with GDP and with three education scores. That is promising. I wanted to know how much of the improvement came from having more SNPs, and how much came from the SNPs that intelligence and education share. These are comparisons of population averages; testing prediction in individuals would require a separate analysis.