Evaluate Whether Genes that are Associated with Fluid Reasoning and Spatial Cognition in Humans are Conserved in Other Non-Human Species that Exhibit These Cognitive Abilities

The study seeks to determine whether genes associated with human cognitive function have been conserved in other species, and what the pattern of conservation reveals about the evolution of intelligence. The study uses 350 genes obtained from the intersection of the Davies (2018) and Savage (2018) Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) related to general cognitive function. It then tracks their orthologs across nine other species, spanning over 600 million years of evolutionary divergence, finding that the human cognitive genes were significantly more conserved than the genome average in every species tested. Furthermore, the paper has tested whether the human cognitive genes overlap with independently compiled gene sets of three other species. This included the mouse, fruit fly, and mountain chickadee. The research has found that the human, mouse, and fly cognitive genes overlapped much more than the genome average. However, the chickadee gene set shared no genes with the other three sets. The gene ontology enrichment analysis identified 178 pathways that were independently enriched across all three species. However, functional Annotation demonstrated that only 6.2% of the conserved mouse and 3.5% of fly orthologs have documented cognitive roles, which supports the theory that sequence conservation does not necessarily imply functional conservation. The results of the study support the theory that an ancient molecular toolkit for learning and memory is shared across most ani