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

in short

[MagicM]

TLDR: nurture

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.

Re:in short

[skids]

Epigenetics is more "nurture/environment altering the activation of genes you already have" which could explain a subset of the observed effect, but probably not the entirety.

Like most, this study needs a lot of followup work before it should be taken very seriously. But it is an intriguing twist. You can say "nurture" because there's no direct cause in the child's DNA, but, at the same time, the correlation is with the parents' DNA, not other factors, which would argue for "nature" on the part of the parents, with the unanswered question of how much is simply correlated induction from culture/older generations.

Re:in short

[ShanghaiBill]

Sounds more like epigenetics to me than just straight up nurture

Perhaps, but that is not what TFA is claiming. They are asserting that their method is analogous to disentangling nature from nurture using adoption studies, and twin studies (comparing the difference between identical and fraternal twins), But adoption/twin studies suffer from too few available subjects, while this new method makes collecting and comparing data much easier.

Re:in short

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, changes in gene expression can inherit as well, even if you move the infant offspring out of the environment. So, for example, an animal which is exercised a lot and develops high strength and endurance may pass on this trait without a DNA sequencing basis by changes to DNA expression in the sperm or egg cells. The cell cytoplasm may carry RNA or the DNA may have things bound to its structure altering expression to increase the rate and propensity to develop muscle as such.

Such a thing increases fitness: an adaptive organism--one which can make biological trade-offs by modifications to gene expression based on its environment--can bias its offspring to the environment it experienced, which is likely to continue. A thicker fur coat to protect against the colder environment, and thinner in warmer areas, means the milding of winter won't send your cat into full summer coat because its parents lived in a tundra. The cat thus is less-likely to thin its coat so much and freeze in the tundra. Spreading territory into other climates is easier because no genetic mutation is required to adapt: offspring are just pre-programmed to be fit for what their parents experienced.

That has the limits of genetics. You're not going to evolve something by simply exercising its parent to instill an ever-strengthening trait down the line. You're going to have to wait for genetic mutations, and cull the unfit.

Re: in short

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, here you are, with your iPhone smartquotes...

Re:in short

[cayenne8]

Extra, Extra...water is wet!!

And in other news, parents that raise kids in a good home, with sufficient attention, proper nutrition, discipline (to do the right things), and promote education raise successful children.

Man..what a shocker.

Re:in short

[HeckRuler]

Yes. This exactly.

It's not nature, it's the nature of the parents.... which nurture the child.

Let's say.... your parents have a cancer gene. Which thankfully you don't get. YAY!

BUT LO AND BEHOLD, that has an impact on the family which affects your upbringing. Tragedy sucks.

"genetic nurture", pft. That reeks of them trying to make up a fancy term for something that's dead simple and not surprising at all. I dunno, did I miss something in the article?

Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is "reducing social inequality" always the goal with some people rather than the more simple "helping people"? Because the only difference between the two is that the former leaves open the option of punitively damaging those who are successful in order to lower the perceived gap. This should be considered an immoral stance.

Re:Why

[PopeRatzo]

Because the only difference between the two is that the former leaves open the option of punitively damaging those who are successful in order to lower the perceived gap. This should be considered an immoral stance.

Well, now wait a minute. According to a first century moral philosopher by the name of Jesus Christ, the accumulation of wealth for its own sake is immoral.

Why does "moral hazard" only matter to you when we're talking about the possibility of people at the low end being helped?

Re:Why

[mschuyler]

Yeah, I thought that, too. The phrase "disease burden" is particularly telling. The idea here is that if your genes subject you to a "disease burden" that is more than the next guy, then that isn't fair and needs to be rectified. And if you happen to be born with ugly genes that make you less attractive, that also "isn't fair' and puts you in a disadvantaged class. It's a known fact that if you are taller, people respect you more and you do better, so short genes are also unfair. This could wind up to be a promising new field of study. Remember the "Selfish Gene"? The next bestseller: "The Unfair Gene.".

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there are do goodies who think everything should be equal. That's an absolute impossibility. To make everything equal, everyone has to be the same, that's not only pretty fucking boring, but it's an impossibility of epic proportions and would end up being the the end of humans as nothing and I mean, nothing would or could possibly get done.

If everyone was like Trump, Besos, Musk or any other powerful person running a company or government, etc, no work would get done. They are leaders (loose sense of the word when lumping Trump in there), they don't actually DO anything, they create nothing, but lead the people who do the actual work.

If everyone was like Mother Teresa, and others there would be no resources to help people. While many people have been helped by the likes of Mother Teresa, there would be no resources to help people if everyone was the same since there would be nobody to create the resources or leaders to get the people to create the resources.

We need diversity to get anything done, with diversity comes inequality. All we can do is treat people good and help people. Something people like Trump, Besos, Musk, and most of the other powerful people on this planet could learn to do better.

Re:Why

[known_coward_69]

Because it creates a larger pie for everyone and makes everyone better off

Re:Why

[ShanghaiBill]

According to a first century moral philosopher by the name of Jesus Christ, the accumulation of wealth for its own sake is immoral.

JC was a carpenter, not an economist.

I am sure he was a nice guy, and meant well, but the policies he advocated were based on "zero-sum" fallacies, and do not stand up to analysis, nor are they supported by empirical evidence.

Investment is better than charity. Profit seeking capitalists have done a lot more to help the poor than philanthropists.

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

We can make a strong society with a good social safety net and also have capitalism, you know.

Capitalism drives innovation and new wealth, but has some problems of focus; regulation tames those. Welfare is the third leg, and some have argued that the welfare state is responsible for modern wealth; this is incomplete: the welfare state has stabilized markets and enabled capitalism to bring more growth.

Socialism has been discredited for many reasons, such as the advent of global communication and trade eliminating the primarily-self-contained nation-state economy, and the rise of a new type of individualism which changes the moral basis on which socialism is founded. One of the most-powerful factors, however, was the realization that socialists severely underestimated the power of capitalism in driving innovation and using the market as a massive information processing system. Central planning doesn't work because it sacrifices these properties of free markets.

We're at a point where something simple as a Universal Dividend reshapes our economies in significant ways. In the United States, implementing such a policy in 2016 (pre-TCJA) ends poverty and cuts welfare costs, acts as a half-trillion-dollar tax cut, and does all this without increasing government deficit spending. Tax burdens actually fall--lower tax rates on the rich, a rolling tax refund to the middle-class, and a cash aid package to the poor. Welfare services continue, yet there are fewer claims and a greater span of effectiveness. The Social Security retirement and disability benefits, when refounded on this system, become permanently-stable.

Such a policy achieves this while ending all homelessness and hunger in the nation practically immediately (we have to wait for landlords to build apartments; effective demand outstrips supply). The Dividend grows with productivity increases--fueled by capitalism. The consumer market drives business and protects against recessions (demand-side economics, increased effective demand), creating jobs. Because of the continuous growth with productivity, the Dividend offsets the taxes taken--it grows faster than inflation, lowering the effective tax rate over time.

Socialists wanted central planning and collectivism. They didn't consider simply giving people a fair and equitable share--not an equal share, but enough to give them the opportunity to succeed and become the wealthy and powerful in our capitalist system. Our society's hierarchy remains; mobility in that hierarchy increases; and yet there's actually a bottom.

The socialists I know are quite nasty people, oddly enough. They hate my solutions. They keep trying to explain to me that capitalism is outdated and we won't survive if we don't end it and move to a superior system of equal public ownership of all things, and largely end the concept of "private property". Perhaps they know my example will permanently end the remnants of any real socialist movement in the world.

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

That depends if you start top-down or bottom-up.

Today, top-down is fashionable: you see outcries for CEO pay ratio limits, while people ignore that big-earner CEOs work for big companies and make a few dollars per employee. Get down to the small businesses with CEOs making barely 6 figures if you want to see thousands in cash comp per employee. People somehow argue that there's a huge win here if we take all their money and redistribute it as wage raises for their employees, making everyone 2.5 cents per hour richer.

That won't pay for healthcare.

Bottom-up approaches are things like the ACA (which is a mess) and my own Universal Dividend. If we tighten up the ACA employer mandate, more people get healthcare--which is important in a world where the $12/hr employees can pay half their paychecks for insurance with copays they can't afford. A public option covers those who can't get affordable care for cheap but, like the proposed Medicare-for-All, would inevitably get its funding from the middle-class (that's okay). It's the Universal Dividend that ties it all together.

A Universal Dividend, implemented in 2016 (before Trump and his tax bullshit), doesn't increase tax burdens. It cuts taxes at the top a little (1.9% on the top bracket in an unadjusted rough model), and pays enough throughout the year to leave everyone in the middle-class with something extra. When you get to the very bottom, they get the whole dividend--and it's $7,500 per adult in 2016.

The Dividend grows faster than inflation without raising taxes, and so offsets more and more of the middle-class tax burden. It grows with productivity gains. Because it raises bottom income, it cuts back on welfare eligibility. That means welfare reaches more people and, in total, ends up spending less money--and even less year after year. The Federal spending on welfare goes down. Refounding retirement and disability on top of the Dividend makes them immediately and permanently solvent.

Immediately, you have no homeless and no hunger in the United States. You have more consumer spending, thus more effective demand, thus more jobs. Wages, raised when the Dividend goes up past half of full-time wage, grow. Recessions become weaker and shorter (if they don't stop happening altogether--this might cause full employment, not sure yet).

What you have is, essentially, a tax cut. A tax cut everywhere, with all its consequences except an increased deficit and decreased services. A tax cut so big the poor get back thousands more than they pay in.

In fact, it's over $500 billion. That public option? It costs $200 billion. Healthcare and an end to homelessness and hunger, and less taken in taxes.

I want to cut working hours (which reduces wealth generation and makes the pie smaller). That's going to take time, maybe a decade to get to 35 or 32 hours. With this new economic policy... it should be doable rather easily. We'll grow faster like this, and the shortening of working hours is an offset: we take some of the growth as pie, and the rest as time to enjoy eating the pie.

It's not equality we need; it's equity. Everyone needs a fair share.

Re:Why

[Anne Thwacks]

We can make a strong society with a good social safety net and also have capitalism, you know.

Not if you are American.

Re:Why

[Anne Thwacks]

People somehow argue that there's a huge win here if we take all their money and redistribute it as wage raises for their employees, making everyone 2.5 cents per hour richer. That won't pay for healthcare.

Some people MAY argue that.

I argue that if you are not paying your employees enough to survive on - so they need social security benefits - then you are probably undercutting your competitors who pay decent wages, which are taxed to provide said benefits to your workers.

If your employees cannot live on their wages - then it should be illegal to distribute profits to your shareholders, as this is stealing from your competitors as well as mistreatment of your employees. The shareholders can deal with the CxOs if they find they are not getting dividends because their management team is delighting in abusing the employees. This approach would solve a load of evils in one go.

However, being nasty to the underdog is "the American Way".

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm going to undo the damage this congress has done. I'd like to say the delay actually makes implementation easier (it does), but the delay has also resulted in thousands of people dying (in ONE DAY here in Baltimore, five homeless froze to death in one encampment. About 700 in the US each year).

One day.

Re:Why

[HornWumpus]

Without sin.

Punchline: 'Mother...'

Re:Why

[HornWumpus]

You just put every low productivity 'worker' out of work. Congratulations.

Re:Why

[ShanghaiBill]

We can make a strong society with a good social safety net and also have capitalism, you know.

Sure, but that is not what JC was advocating. From Matthew 19:21: Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

If JC really wanted to "help the poor" he should have advised the rich young man to invest his money wisely and maximize ROI, so as to generate sustainable employment for as many people as possible, and perhaps even issue stock options so the former-poor can have capital of their own.

What JC was advocating (total liquidation of capital and a massive diversion of resources into immediate consumption) would have been a disaster if practiced widely.

Also instead of just commenting on taxes by saying "Give unto Ceasar what is Caesar's", he should have noted that the Romans were giving the people the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, law and order, etc. Of course the government has a proper role, and Infrastructure investment is far more helpful to an economy than charity or redistribution.

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

I argue that if you are not paying your employees enough to survive on - so they need social security benefits - then you are probably undercutting your competitors who pay decent wages, which are taxed to provide said benefits to your workers.

That's actually a thing, although I want to start on a Universal Dividend (a type of social security benefit) that pays to everyone. The difference between wage and something like EITC is wage is paid by people who buy products (i.e. the consumers, the 90%), while something like EITC is paid from the progressive tax system (i.e. it moves rich-folk money downwards). The Dividend is funded by a flat FICA tax on all income (personal and corporate), and so it pays back to the middle-class (mainly neutral-ish) and moves down more money from the top: you get $7,500 per adult, but pay 14% of your income regardless, and 14% of a million is a lot more than $7,500.

People with jobs shouldn't be getting food stamps and housing vouchers, but they're often that poor. I built a growth-based Dividend, and I want minimum wage to rise whenever a full-time job pays less than twice the Dividend. That means minimum wage rises with productivity, and workers get a fair share. That minimum wage is still (for quite a long time) lower than the COLA-adjusted $15/hr at 2023, but the take-home total of one full-time minimum wage plus the Dividend should have parity with a $15/hr wage in 2023. The immediate next year, the take-home should actually be higher than the COLA-adjusted minimum wage.

Over time, those welfare services will become unloaded due to people being much less poor, even at the bottom.

If your employees cannot live on their wages - then it should be illegal to distribute profits to your shareholders, as this is stealing from your competitors as well as mistreatment of your employees.

That's more of an emotional argument than an economic argument, and doesn't really solve anything. Blunt raising of the minimum wage (and wages in general) reduces jobs. That's why economists currently favor EITC when we talk numbers above $10.10/hr, and why you see $15/hr wage plans that talk about a $1/hr increase each year, as well as the recent laddering in Maryland's wage increases: the policymakers all know that a shock adjustment upwards will create that unemployment all-at-once, before the labor market can adjust.

It doesn't adjust by those wage recipients having more to spend, either. It adjusts by reducing the labor market. Fewer people working into late retirement, fewer people leaving college early to start careers, fewer work visa authorizations, and the like. The labor market is actually quite agile and can cut out a bunch of workers in a few months if there's too much unemployment pressure. It is, however, quite discriminatory: old people (retirement at 70 instead of 72) and young people (more full college degrees or grad school attendees) go first, along with immigrant workers. That's kind-of okay, because it's an economic process involving resource (job) scarcity and individual decisions, rather than hiring discrimination by employers--i.e. people react this way to hard times.

I like correlating minimum wage to productivity growth because it grows with growth, and so reduces how many new jobs are available rather than reducing how many total jobs are available. The risk of creating unemployment by wage raise in that model is lower.

It's weird, isn't it? Either you have things like EITC and other assistance paid for by the rich because businesses pay low wages to get a competitive advantage (and profit), or you have higher wages paid for by the middle-class. At the same time, while it may sound good to have the rich pay for everything, wages definitely need to be something resembling fair, and so need to come up.

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

Not really. The cost to employ a worker under this model is actually lower--payrolls are lower--while the worker takes home more income and has guaranteed access to healthcare.

Re:Why

[bluefoxlucid]

he should have advised the rich young man to invest his money wisely and maximize ROI, so as to generate sustainable employment for as many people as possible

That also increases the number of people in need of employment due to weird economic behaviors. Zeroing out the number in poverty is a little more complex than that, although it also creates the maximum ROI; it requires taxes and welfare systems.

Lots of words...

[msauve]

...to simply say that parenting affects children.

Re:Lots of words...

[Anne Thwacks]

No, it says "you inherit your mother's cooking"!

Anyone actually work in this field?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

If so, is this the slow-grant-day, jargon-filled restatement of millenia of common knowledge that it appears to be, or is there actually something interesting here?

Sage gems like this don't give me much hope:

The environment that parents provide for their children could reflect the long arm of nurture by previous ancestors.

Collective golf clap from the Kennedys.

Is it all that unexpected?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The parent's behavior is controlled by all the genes of the parent, not just the genes that were passed on to any particular offspring.

Parent's behavior influences the child.

So the genes not passed on still influence the child. What is so unusual about this? It looks like publishing a paper claiming water is wet.

Re:Is it all that unexpected?

[alvinrod]

After reading a bit of the article, it doesn't appear as if this is some surprising big revelation unto itself, but is something that other researchers who are trying to study particular genes and their effects need to consider in their own study designs. For example, suppose you are looking at some gene(s) suspected of increasing height, but that it is only activated under certain environmental circumstances or is at least mediated in some way by environmental factors. If parents also have another gene that makes those environmental factors more likely, but do not pass that particular gene to their offspring it can act as a confounding factor as there is a more complex interaction that is responsible for an effect than may be expected otherwise.

I'm not sure I fully understand it, but that's what I'm thinking is going on. The article doesn't provide much information in terms of the size of this effect either. It looks like the full text of the actual research is available though and a quick glance at the abstract includes the following: "Using results from a meta-analysis of educational attainment, we find that the polygenic score computed for the nontransmitted alleles of 21,637 probands with at least one parent genotyped has an estimated effect on the educational attainment of the proband that is 29.9% (P = 1.6 × 1014) of that of the transmitted polygenic score."

From that, it does sound as though this isn't something that's completely trivial.

Re:Is it all that unexpected?

[butchersong]

I don't really see how they can easily claim to link this to nurture rather than nature. How do we know that gene x in combination with gene y and z doesn't influence the expression of gene b that is passed on the child?

Re:Is it all that unexpected?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You need to improve your spelling.

American Council Of Fundie Christian Alliance is not spelled UNESCO

Re:Is it all that unexpected?

[Solandri]

While that's most likely what's going on, it would be interesting to do this type of statistical analysis on identical twins adopted by different families as a counter-case. It's possible some of the mother's non-passed genes influence the development of a fetus, and could influence twins in a similar manner even if they're raised by completely different families.

First hand account:

[Narcocide]

Being raised by parents that are really stupid sets you back a long way in life. Maybe more so than being raised poor. But if your parents are both poor and stupid, man is it a lot more work just to learn to interact productively with normal people.

Re:First hand account:

[bluefoxlucid]

Trump supporters?

Re:It isn't genes.

[alvinrod]

The same thing for any behavior, you are not born a smoker, you are not born rich, you are not born gay, you are not born honest, you are not born fat.

Perhaps the only one in that list that's true is that you are not born rich, but you can obviously be born into wealth.

Otherwise there's plenty of evidence to suggest that susceptibility to things like smoking (or addictive behaviors in general), personality, and bodily response to types of nutrients have strong genetic components. Sure, those don't guarantee anything, but if you're a betting man you know that someone who's Samoan is going to have a hell of a lot harder of a time keeping their weight in check.

Sexual preference doesn't have any direct genetic cause based on anything I've read, but it's almost a certainty that people are born straight or gay based on our current understanding of sexual preference being tied to how the brain is wired. There are some who suspect that there may be genes carried by a mother that make it more or less likely for her offspring to be homosexual as it is currently believed that the improper prenatal exposure to sex hormones during key parts of fetal brain development may be responsible for explaining things like deviations from heterosexuality or other conditions such as gender dysphoria.

Unless your childhood environment is utter hell, genetics have a fairly large role in who you are as a person. When you make environment as controlled and equal as possible, you essentially just create room for genes to express themselves to their greatest extent.

~40% of inequality is easily solved

[liquid_schwartz]

~40% of the 1% got there directly by inheritance. Simply limiting inheritance would go a long way towards solving inequality.

Citations:

https://peoplespolicyproject.o...

No Shit

[apoc.famine]

I'm not tall and handsome, and the lack of those genes definitely shaped who I am. Not getting an extra chromosome also shaped who I am.

Oh, this is just poorly rehashing nature vs nurture? Carry on.

Oh True

[Greyfox]

Lots of genes have influenced who I am. Some of those include walking bags of genes of varying and arguable worth. They know who they are.