Spurious heritability of ability tilts: A comment on Coyle et al. (2023)

Ability tilts refer to within-individual differences between two abilities, e.g. math ability - verbal ability. Coyle et al. (2023) found ability tilts to be genetically heritable and concluded that ability tilts are genuine and, presumably, genetically coded individual characteristics. Moreover, Coyle et al. found a large portion of variance in ability tilts to be attributable to non-shared environmental factors (i.e. environmentability), which they interpreted to indicate that ability tilts are potentially generated by niche-picking. However, through simulations we show that heritability and environmentability of X-Y tilts are spurious consequences of heritability and environmentability of the constituent variables X and Y. Furthermore, we reanalyzed data used by Coyle et al. and show that the logic of their arguments would lead to the conclusions, for example, that the human genome codes for a difference between head circumference and verbal ability and that some individuals have picked a niche that includes a long nose at the expense of spatial ability. We do not find these conclusions tenable and propose, instead, that heritability and environmentability of tilts are spurious consequences of heritability and environmentability of the constituent variables.

Automated summary

Ability tilts refer to differences within individuals in different abilities, which have genetic heritability and environmental plasticity. However, it is shown through simulations that the heritability and environmentability of ability tilts are spurious consequences of the heritability and environmentability of the constituent variables.