Genes that Your Parents Don't Pass To You Still Shape Who You Are, Study Finds (sciencemag.org)

From a research paper published on ScienceMag journal on Friday: Children resemble their parents in health, wealth, and well-being. Is parent-child similarity in traits and behaviors due to nature (the genes that children inherit from their parents) or nurture (the environment that parents provide for their children)? Answering this enduring question can directly inform our efforts to reduce social inequality and disease burden. Kong et al. used genetic data from trios of parents and offspring to address this question in an intriguing way. By measuring parents' and children's genes, they provide evidence that inherited family environments influence children's educational success, a phenomenon termed genetic nurture.

Specifically, Kong et al. show that the part of the parental genotype that children do not inherit can nonetheless predict children's educational attainment. This genetic nurture effect is an indirect link between parental genotypes and children's characteristics, not caused by the children's own biology but rather by the family environment that covaries with parental genes.

Comments

Re:in short

[alvinrod]

Sounds more like epigenetics to me than just straight up nurture, only in this case even perhaps further removed as the summary makes it sound as though it is the parents environment that is having some effect that can be passed down to offspring. However, understanding this seems like something that would require a lot of reading beyond the article summary to understand precisely what is being described as "genetic nurture effect" seems like a fairly nebulous term that seems to be a bit of an oxymoron at first glance. It also sounds like something quite new, so it could definitely use some replication and additional exploring to fully understand what's going on.