An international team of geneticists has discovered alleles that contribute to the success of their host. The conclusion is made on the basis of an analysis of five groups of people from three countries with a total number of more than 20,000 people. An article with the results was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists have long been trying to figure out how genetics and the environment affect the success of individuals. In English, this problem is called “nature vs. nurture "- literally" nature versus education. " In the case of humans, the situation is complicated by the fact that alleles that correlate with a person's personal success may not be associated with biological causes, but due to conditions in the family. For example, children from wealthy families achieve success because of their social environment, and different wealthy families are genetically similar for completely different reasons.
In the new work, geneticists tried to separate these situations. They conducted a genome-wide search for associations, that is, the determination of relationships between different alleles and phenotypic traits, 20 thousand people from the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand. For each person, a polygenetic score was calculated, which made it possible to compare specific people for several factors of success, to which the authors attributed education, career and income.
It turned out that polygenetic assessment is a useful indicator of life achievement, regardless of social factors. People with high scores on this score did better than their parents or siblings with less scores. Moreover, the result did not depend on the level of family wealth. The authors conclude that just a few alleles can significantly affect a person's success. Nevertheless, human achievement is determined by far not only genetics: the authors were able to fully explain genes only 4% of the difference in social mobility between different people.
