Heritability of facial attractiveness and masculinity-femininity

Estimating the Sex-Specific Effects of Genes on Facial Attractiveness and Sexual Dimorphism (pdf)
Human facial attractiveness and facial sexual dimorphism (masculinity–femininity) are important facets of mate choice and are hypothesized to honestly advertise genetic quality. However, it is unclear whether genes influencing facial attractiveness and masculinity–femininity have similar, opposing, or independent effects across sex, and the heritability of these phenotypes is poorly characterized. To investigate these issues, we assessed facial attractiveness and facial masculinity–femininity in the largest genetically informative sample (n = 1,580 same- and opposite-sex twin pairs and siblings) to assess these questions to date. The heritability was ~0.50–0.70 for attractiveness and ~0.40–0.50 for facial masculinity–femininity, indicating that, despite ostensible selection on genes influencing these traits, substantial genetic variation persists in both. Importantly, we found evidence for intralocus sexual conflict, whereby alleles that increase masculinity in males have the same effect in females. Additionally, genetic influences on attractiveness were shared across the sexes, suggesting that attractive fathers tend to have attractive daughters and attractive mothers tend to have attractive sons.

Population genetics talks

Some videos from a "Computation-Intensive Probabilistic and Statistical Methods for Large-Scale Population Genomics" workshop that happened over the past few days.

The most broadly accessible talk is probably that of Nick Eriksson from 23andme (Crowd-sourcing Genetic Discovery).

Also potentially of interest:

Calculation of Joint Allelic Spectra
Nick Patterson, Broad Institute

Genetic Variation in Gene Regulation
Jonathan Pritchard, Stanford University

Mutation Rates and Generation Times in Humans
Molly Przeworski, Columbia University

Coalescent Approaches to Selective Sweeps
Graham Coop, UC Davis

Natural Selection in a Spatial Continuum
Alison Etheridge, University of Oxford

Any Way You Want It: Applications of Whole Genome Capture to Ancient DNA, Metagenomics, and Orthogonal Validation
Carlos Bustamante, Stanford University

Population Genetics of the Neanderthal Genome Project
Montgomery Slatkin, UC Berkeley

Analysis of Haplotype Sharing and Recent Demographic History with Examples from the Netherlands
Itsik Pe'er, Columbia University

Probabilistic Models for Spatial Geographic Localization
Eran Halperin, Tel Aviv University

Quantifying the Extent of Geographic Signature in the Human Genome
Lior Pachter, UC Berkeley

Robust Demographic Inference from Genomic and SNP Data
Laurent Excoffier, University of Bern

A Population Reference Graph for Human Genetic Variation [video supposed to be available next week]
Gil McVean, University of Oxford