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Science

Genes that Your Parents Don't Pass To You Still Shape Who You Are, Study Finds (sciencemag.org) 57

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
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.
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Genes that Your Parents Don't Pass To You Still Shape Who You Are, Study Finds More

Genes that Your Parents Don't Pass To You Still Shape Who You Are, Study Finds

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  • TLDR: nurture

    • Re:in short (Score:5, Informative)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @02:16PM (#56009057)
      Sounds more like epigenetics [wikipedia.org] 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: (Score:2)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        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 par

        • 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 increas

        • 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 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @02:37PM (#56009231)

        Sounds more like epigenetics [wikipedia.org] 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.

    • 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 (Score:1)

    by 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.

    • 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?

      • 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.

        • 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

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

            Not if you are American.

            • 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.

          • 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

            • 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.

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 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 sens

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

      • 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 p

        • 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 o

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

            • 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.

          • 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

  • ...to simply say that parenting affects children.

  • ... that's about all you need to say.

  • 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? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @02:23PM (#56009117) Journal
    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.

    • 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 tha
    • 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?
    • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Citations:

    https://peoplespolicyproject.o... [peoplespolicyproject.org]

  • 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.

  • 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.

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