人类首次发现和智力有关的基因（图）
英国曼切斯特、爱丁堡和澳大利亚大学的科学家们联合首次通过生物学实验证实了确实存在和人类智力相关的基因。
在科学家之前对双胞胎的研究中，结果显示潜在有和思考方式相关的基因。在本研究中，他们通过测试不同人群在DNA上的遗传学差异，首次发现并证实了和人类智力有关的一群基因。这项研究的论文发表在最新一期的《journal Molecular Psychiatry》杂志上。
科学家们研究了两种不同的思考方式，研究的人数超过3500例，均来自爱丁堡、阿伯丁、纽卡斯尔或曼切斯特。结果发现40%至50%的人思维上的不同可以追溯到他们的基因型差异。
该研究中分析的每个个体的基因标记超过50万种。这种巨大工作量的测试通过使用一种由澳大利亚布里斯班的Peter Visscher教授发明的分析方法得以实现。他们不仅测试了来自苏格兰和英格兰的人群，还检测了来自挪威的人群进行进一步的验证。
曼切斯特基因研究所的负责人Pendleton博士说道：“通过测试这些健康人的智力，并进行全面的基因分析，我们首次找出了和人类思考有关的基因。”
这项研究的结果也证实了早期的双胞胎实验。但尽管如此，该小组还没发现哪些基因和人类的认知能力相关。
Pendleton博士说道：“我们的研究证实的影响人类智力的基因数庞大，数量和影响其它人类特征的基因数相当，例如身高。后续的实验里我们将更深入的理解这些基因之间以及它们和环境之间是如何相互影响的，以找出它们保持我们思考能力的生物学机制。”（生物探索 Jun译）
生物探索推荐英文论文原文摘要：
Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic
General intelligence is an important human quantitative trait that accounts for much of the variation in diverse cognitive abilities. Individual differences in intelligence are strongly associated with many important life outcomes, including educational and occupational attainments, income, health and lifespan. Data from twin and family studies are consistent with a high heritability of intelligence, but this inference has been controversial. We conducted a genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549 692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation. Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ~1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.
