Genetic influences on behavioral traits are not immutable or deterministic.
The mechanisms through which genetic variants are associated with social and behavioral outcomes is poorly understood and are not divorced from environmental or social processes.
Genetic variants identified by GWAS have miniscule effects, typically ranging from .01-.03%.
PGS for complex behavioral traits are not currently useful predictors of individual outcomes–i.e., polygenic scores are not “fortune-tellers.”
The results of genomic studies listed here do not provide the genetic bases of ancestral, racial, or ethnic differences in human behavior.
Genetic ancestry is not synonymous with the socially defined concept of race.
Almost all genomic studies listed here were conducted in populations of European descent and cannot be meaningfully extrapolated to other populations.

Even if you were switched at birth, you'd still be the same person, says Robert Plomin. Because it's mostly your DNA that makes you the individual that you are. 

DNA tests are cheap and ubiquitous. For some donor-conceived people, they can unearth long-buried truths about their ancestry — and lead to unorthodox reunions.

Fifteen years ago, a boy finding his anonymous sperm donor was a sensation. Now it's commonplace.

"The Donor Sibling Registry connects families who use the same donor, so I’ve known about most of my half-siblings since I was two. We all live in different places, but we keep in touch over social media and in a group chat. Last January, things changed for our group. The genetic testing site 23andMe matched some of us with Donor 893."

When you match on a DNA site, you often don't know if your 15%-30% relative match is a half-sibling, an aunt/uncle, or a grandparent until you reach out to determine the relationship. Also, when people don't reach out, it's frequently assumed they don't want contact. It's extremely important to give your DNA match the opportunity to make the decision about whether to connect, as well as to define the relationship.

"Thousands of children conceived by anonymous sperm donation still have no right at all to know their biological fathers. But they are turning to DNA sites to track them down — and Wendy Kramer has made it her very personal mission to help."

"DNA testing and the internet have made donor anonymity almost impossible nowadays."

(starts at 1:15)

"The surge in popularity of services like 23andMe and Ancestry means that more and more people are unearthing long-buried connections and surprises in their ancestry.... It’s all about the desire to fill in empty spaces, to find connection, to know more about yourself. For children cut off from their origins because of a closed adoption or an unknown sperm or egg donor, those answers are harder to get. And if a person’s origin was a secret that they discover later in life, ... they may feel that everything they knew about themselves and their roots was a lie."

"All Ryan Kramer had to do was to swab his cheek and embark on nine days of genealogical research to identify his biological father, a man who thought he would remain anonymous when he donated his sperm and never took a DNA test himself. The year was 2005, when consumer DNA tests were in their infancy. Kramer was 15. Thirteen years later, the explosion of individual DNA test kits has opened the floodgates for people who were born from sperm or egg donations. Increasing numbers of people are using the technology to uncover the identities of their donors."

This is a great article about nature and nurture and what makes us who we are: "One of the country’s top psychologists and behavioural geneticists, Professor Robert Plomin, of King’s College London, offers an emphatic conclusion. It is drawn from 45 years of research and hundreds of studies. He says the single most important factor in each and every one of us — the very essence of our individuality — is our genetic make-up, our DNA. The basic building blocks of life that we inherit from our parents are what determine who we are — not how much they loved us, read us books or which school they sent us to. DNA accounts for at least half the variance in people’s psychological traits, much more than any other single factor. Put simply, ‘nature’ trumps ‘nurture’ every time, and not just marginally, but by a long, long chalk. Our DNA, fixed and unchangeable, determines whether we have a predisposition not just to physical traits — from how tall we are to how much we weigh — but also to our intelligence and our psychology, from a tendency to depression to having resilience and grit."

Sitting in her doctor's office one day, Wendy Kramer picked up a copy of Genome Magazine and thought it was very interesting and that it related to a lot of what we do at the DSR. She contacted the magazine to ask if they could write an article about the DSR, and they said they already had an article underway about the search for family with DNA testing. They were interested in adding a segment on the DSR and asked for a specific story. Wendy asked Jen Moore if she would tell her story to the writer, and voila — the DSR was featured in Genome Magazine's Winter 2015 edition. Genome Magazine is in doctors' offices across the country, and anyone can request a free subscription.

A great how-to, step-by-step document by DSR member Stephen T. Nelson on DNA testing and searching for your genetic family.

Ryan's biological father speaks publicly for the first time about being found through DNA testing.

by Misha Angrist: "An article in Science last month raised doubts about the privacy of volunteers who hand over their genetic data (M. Gymrek et al. Science 339, 321-324; 2013). 'Oh my God, we really did this,' said Yaniv Erlich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to The New York Times, after his group managed to cross-reference information from public databases to put names to samples of DNA donated to research. Yet what the scientists did is not shocking or all that new. The DNA re-identification bogeyman has lurked at the door for years. The warning signs were there in 2005 when a precocious 15-year-old boy called Ryan Kramer found his sperm-donor father. Just as Erlich and his colleagues would do years later, Kramer used a combination of Y-chromosome data — his own in this case — and genealogical searching of public records to track down a donor dad who had almost certainly been promised anonymity by the sperm bank."

"DNA testing makes them easy to trace."