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.

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: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.