Is academic achievement written into your DNA? It’s complicated
By Sharon Begley,
STAT
| 05. 11. 2016
Untitled Document
The largest study of its kind has found 74 genetic variants that influence how many years of school people finish, scientists reported on Wednesday, but their effect is relatively minor, underlining how a complex behavior like going to college is not written in our DNA.
Although such behavioral genetics studies might once have been trumpeted as “genes for going to college,” the international consortium of 253 researchers reached a more modest conclusion: Altogether, the 74 genes explain slightly less than one-half of 1 percent of the differences between people’s education levels.
Behavioral genetics has long been notorious for producing spurious findings. It has also been controversial, with critics calling it pointless (because environmental factors exert stronger effects on behavior) and even dangerous, misleading the public into thinking that complex behaviors such as getting divorced or committing crimes or being a political liberal are the inevitable product of inherited genes.
...
Benjamin and his colleagues emphasized that social and environmental factors had a much stronger effect on educational attainment than the 0.43 percent accounted for by the 74 variants.
...
The weak effect of...
Related Articles
By Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, The New York Times | 09.08.2026
It is one of biology’s most ingenious rhythms: Every baby is born young. No matter how much wear and tear their parents’ DNA accumulated over their lifetimes, reproduction erases the molecular scars, handing a clean slate to the next generation...
What We Inherit by Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko; and Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden have a great deal in common, with substantial differences in style and emphasis. Both books attempt, in different ways, to show the reader just where current research into human genomics stands, where that might be going, and why the authors are interested. In short, the influence of genomic research on our societies is already large and seems likely to change them in ways...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.30.2026
As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.23.2026
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave...
