Here’s how you’re influenced by the genes you didn’t inherit from your parents
The debate of nature versus nurture is never simple, and one reason is because nature influences nurture. A father’s genetically predisposed anxiety will affect the environment he creates for his daughter, even if he doesn’t pass down the trait itself to his happy-go-lucky child. Scientists are now quantifying these effects in humans, and showing how the genes your parents don’t pass on can still influence you.
The key to today’s research, published in the journal Science, is a dataset of information from 20,000 Icelanders that included people and their parents. It has not only genetic data, but information about educational attainment (as measured by how many years of schooling someone received). Half of our DNA comes from each parent,...