Genome Wide Association Studies of Behavior are Social Science

Population-based behavioral genetics has demonstrated that genotype and behavior can be expected to covary. Although the epigenetic developmental pathways linking gene products to complex behavior will in general be almost unimaginably complex, modern molecular genetics has made it possible to detect small covariations between alleles and behavior that span the complexity of the causal network..... Such associations are real and potentially interesting, but they remain correlations— and small ones— not evidence of substantial causal pathways between individual alleles and complex behavior or evidence of genes for extroversion or intelligence or evidence that future scientifi c efforts will be most productively applied at a genetic level of analysis. If the history of empirical psychology has taught researchers anything, it is that correlations between causally distant variables cannot be counted on to lead to coherent etiological models. (Turkheimer, 1998, p. 789)