Article ID: CBB779949655

Half a century later and we're back where we started: How the problem of locality turned in to the problem of portability (2022)

unapi

In the 1970s, Lewontin sparked a debate about a problem of locality, by making the case that any given heritability estimate is local to the original population and environment studied, and could not be generalized to other populations and environments. Nearly 50 years later, a new problem of portability has emerged: the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores diminishes when applied to populations whose characteristics are different from the original population sample. This paper briefly reviews the nature of each problem and analyzes their similarities and differences in three areas: 1) conceptual underpinnings, 2) causal explanations, and 3) practical, social, and political implications. Although conceptually and methodologically different from the problem of locality in important respects, the problem of portability facing contemporary genomics today should come as no surprise, as it is an inevitable outcome of the kinds of problematic inferences detailed by Lewontin nearly half a century ago.

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Authors & Contributors
Sober, Elliott R.
Bangham, Jenny
Beatty, John H.
Bino Paul, G. D.
Chadarevian, Soraya de
Derry, Margaret Elsinor
Journals
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Agricultural History
Biological Theory
Biology and Philosophy
Current Anthropology
Publishers
University of Pennsylvania
Harvard University Press
Princeton University Press
University of Toronto Press
Concepts
Population genetics
Heredity
Theories of knowledge
Biology
Evolution
Controversies and disputes
People
Lewontin, Richard C.
Arbuthnot, John
Crow, James Franklin
Penrose, Lionel
Kim, Wook
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
19th century
Modern
Places
Latin America
United States
South Korea
Institutions
Human Genome Project
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