The part of this research that really blows me away is the realization that our environment is, in part, made up of the genes of the people around us. Our friends’, our partners’, even our peers’ genes all influence us. Preliminary research that I was involved in suggests that your spouse’s genes influence your likelihood of depression almost a third as much as your own genes do. Meanwhile, research I helped conduct shows that the presence of a few genetically predisposed smokers in a high school appears to cause smoking rates to spike for an entire grade — even among those students who didn’t personally know those nicotine-prone classmates— spreading like a genetically sparked wildfire through the social network.
And:
We found that children who have genes that correlate to more success in school evoke more intellectual engagement from their parents than kids in the same family who don’t share these genes. This feedback loop starts as early as 18 months old, long before any formal assessment of academic ability. Babies with a PGI that is associated with greater educational attainment already receive more reading and playtime from parents than their siblings without that same genotype do. And that additional attention, in turn, helps those kids to realize the full potential of those genes, that is, to do well in school. In other words, parents don’t just parent their children — children parent their parents, subtly guided by their genes.
I found this bit startling, noting that context here is critical:
Looking across the whole genome, people in the United States tend to marry people with similar genetic profiles. Very similar: Spouses are on average the genetic equivalents of their first cousins once removed. Another research project I was involved with showed that for the education PGI, spouses look more like first cousins. For the height PGI, it’s more like half-siblings.
Dalton has a very ambitious vision here:
The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway.
I am not so sure about the postulated newness on the methodological front, but in any case this is interesting work. I just hope he doesn’t too much mean all the blah blah blah at the end about how it is really all up to us, etc.
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