Abdel Abdellaoui: a behavior geneticist in the 21st century

Abdel Abdellaoui is a researcher in the Netherlands who works in the intersection of psychology and genetics. He’s a pretty active figure on social media, and because of his subject matter interests, he has become embroiled in a few controversies. When scientists talk about genetics and psychology, behavior genetics, the public listens and offers opinions.

Over the course of our conversation, I discuss how he got into behavior genetics, and what the lay of the land in the Netherlands is like for academic science. We also discussed the Netherlands’ Twin Registery, and how useful it’s been for behavior genetics in that nation, as well as the plethora of data available to researchers in 2021.

Abdellaoui’s 2019 paper, Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain, stirred a bit of controversy, and I asked him why people thought it supported eugenics. We also discussed a recent preprint that he was a coauthor on, Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans is Linked to Income and Substitution Effects.