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JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017
ARTICLE
DEFEND YOUR RESEARCH
Your Success Is
Shaped by Your Genes
An Interview with Daniel Belsky by Alison Beard
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IDEA WATCH
DEFEND YOUR RESEARCH
YOUR SUCCESS IS
SHAPED BY YOUR GENES
PROFESSOR BELSKY,
DEFEND YOUR RESEARCH
BELSKY: Though DNA isn’t destiny, it does
have something to say about the kind of
people we become and what we achieve.
When we studied this existing data set
from a group of people who were all
born in a single city and then surveyed at
regular intervals throughout the first four
decades of their lives, we found that those
who carried certain genetic variants—
ones that had already been linked to
educational attainment in other studies—
hit developmental benchmarks earlier as
children and held higher aspirations as
teenagers. Then, as adults, they attained
more education, held more prestigious
jobs, earned higher incomes, partnered
with better-off mates, were more socially
and geographically mobile, managed their
If other, presumably cheaper, methods
work better, why study genes in this
context? We want to understand
how genetics shape our lives and what
causes some people to be successful and
others to flounder. The advantage of
looking at DNA is that it’s defined at
birth and fixed throughout life, so it
gives us an anchor on which to build.
Ultimately, we hope to yield actionable
insights for policy makers—to help them
devise interventions that will improve
social mobility.
money more effectively, and accumulated
more assets. All of that does suggest our
What kind of interventions? For
genes can affect our future. But we also
example, in our study we found that
know that human development stems
kids who had higher polygenic
from a complex interaction of
scores started to master language
the genes we inherit and the
FINDING
at a younger age; they talked
environments we encounter.
PEOPLE WITH
CERTAIN GENETIC
earlier and read earlier and
Nature and nurture combine to
MARKERS EARNED
faster than their peers. Perhaps
make us who we are. We’re just
HIGHER INCOMES.
interventions that increase
beginning to understand how that
all children’s language skills at
interplay operates.
younger ages might help more
So you’re not suggesting we test
people follow successful trajectories.
people at birth or in utero to see who
Going forward, bigger data sets may help
has the aptitude to, say, earn a PhD
us understand why some kids with low
or become an effective executive? No.
polygenic scores nevertheless achieve
We’re still a long way from being able
successful outcomes or why some kids
to accurately estimate human potential
with higher scores still struggle. These
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When Duke University School of Medicine professor
Daniel Belsky and his colleagues cross-referenced data
from a longitudinal study of 918 people from Dunedin,
New Zealand, they discovered a connection between
the presence of specific genes and the achievement of
better socioeconomic outcomes. Their conclusion:
with a genetic test—and even if we could,
there are lots of reasons that it wouldn’t
be a good idea. To develop our predictive
model, we started with the results of
large data-mining studies involving tens
of thousands of human genomes, which
identified gene variants linked with
particular educational outcomes and
the strength of those links. We used that
information to create an algorithm that
calculates something called a “polygenic
score” for individuals, which indicates
how many of the variants they have.
When we looked at the Dunedin study
data, we did find that participants with
higher polygenic scores were slightly more
successful than those with lower scores,
but the effect was very small—just 1% to
4% of the variance.
Also, we’re talking about average
outcomes. Some people with low
polygenic scores went on to have very
successful lives, and some with high scores
did not. There are many other nongenetic
tests you can administer to children and
adults that will give you a much better read
on their ability to achieve than we can get
out of the genome.
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“outliers” can provide clues to how we
might change children’s environments to
improve their outcomes.
Where would these bigger data sets
come from? The United Kingdom has
developed a national biobank that now
includes genetic data and a wealth of other
information from half a million
people. In the United States,
President Obama’s Precision
FINDING
KIDS WITH
Medicine Initiative aims to
THE MARKERS
develop a similar resource.
MASTERED
But these big data projects
LANGUAGE
can’t
completely replace
EARLIER.
cohort studies like the one
we focused our research
on. For starters, they can’t
get the same level of detail, especially
about early life. For another, participants
self-select in, so they don’t necessarily
represent the full population. This issue
of representativeness is important. For
example, a big question about our findings
is whether they will generalize beyond
populations of European descent. They
might not apply to people who have
different ethnic backgrounds or live in
other regions of the world.
It sounds as if we’re on the frontier
of a whole new body of research into
genes and socioeconomics. What else
is being studied? This new field—it’s
You said that the genes you looked at
had already been linked to educational
attainment, which is, of course, linked
to IQ and socioeconomic status. Do we
really need scientific research to tell us
that smart, wealthy people get more
schooling and therefore achieve more as
adults? I think one important contribution
of our work is to document that the
genetics originally discovered in studies
of educational attainment are not about
education specifically. Instead, they relate
to a range of personal characteristics—
including IQ but also noncognitive skills,
like self-control and being able to get along
well with others. These traits enabled kids
with high polygenic scores to succeed not
just in school but well beyond. In fact,
differences in education explained only
about half the effect on long-term
life success we found. Also, even though
kids born into better-off families did
tend to have slightly higher polygenic
scores, higher scores predicted success
no matter what kind of conditions a child
grew up in.
This is still giving me pause. Aren’t you
worried about a Gattaca-like future,
where people with “good” genes are
favored over those with “bad” ones? As I said, given the weak power of
our predictive models, Gattaca is not
possible today. But I do think the time
called sociogenomics—is advancing
for conversation is now. I agree that
in several directions. Largethe idea of using genetics as a
FINDING
scale consortia like the Social
sorting mechanism is scary. So
THE MARKERS
Science Genetic Association
it’s important to talk about what
PREDICTED
Consortium, which is headed
this kind of research should and
SUCCESS NO
by Dan Benjamin at the
shouldn’t be used for. But let’s
MATTER THE
ENVIRONMENT.
University of Southern California
recognize that we already do a
and Philipp Koellinger at Vrije
lot of sorting today. We rely on
University of Amsterdam, and
all kinds of rubrics to pick winners
projects like Sociogenome, led by Melinda
and losers before people have a chance to
Mills at the University of Oxford, are
actually prove themselves. Schools use
investigating genetic influences on risk
aptitude tests to sort kids into “gifted and
taking, entrepreneurship, reproductive
talented” programs. Early problems with
behavior, and more. Another major
attention or behavioral control can track
area of inquiry is how genes shape
kids in the opposite direction. Maybe the
our social relationships. My colleague
genome can help us understand where
Ben Domingue at Stanford, along with
these social rules go wrong, when we’re
sociologists Dalton Conley and Jason
limiting human potential, and who we’ve
Boardman and economist Jason Fletcher,
inappropriately left behind.
has been working on the question of
So how are your genes looking? whether friends and spouses tend to be
Follow-up is ongoing. more similar genetically to one another,
and why that might be the case. And
there are more social scientists joining
Interview by Alison Beard
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