How Do Genes Influence Our Behaviour? - Robert Plomin | Modern Wisdom Podcast 353

Robert Plomin, is a psychologist, geneticist and an author. Separating the influence of nature and nurture is something everyone considers. Robert is the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century and has run the largest and most clinically detailed twin and adoption studies in history to finally provide definitive answers to these fundamental questions. Expect to learn how much of who we are can be attributed to our environment and how much was predisposed by our genetics, why parenting doesn't make a difference, why the choice of school your child goes to only impacts 1% of their outcomes, whether penis size is heritable, if there is a gay gene or not and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Blueprint - https://amzn.to/3f2OYYk Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #behaviouralgenetics #twinstudies #naturevsnurture - 00:00 Intro 01:42 What are Behavioural Genetics? 04:22 Nature & Nurture 17:52 How Genetics Are Studied 22:39 Biggest Ever Twin Study 27:39 Do Genes Influence Behaviour & Health? 36:32 Heritability of Different Traits 50:09 Seeking Happiness 55:57 Heritability of Sexual Preference 58:41 Do Children Behave Like Their Parents? 1:03:22 Non-Genetic Impacts on Behaviour 1:09:54 Educating Children on Genetics 1:23:38 DNA Dating 1:29:51 Increasing Equality of Opportunity 1:35:08 Living With Acceptance of Genetics 1:39:49 Where to Find Robert - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Well, for IQ, siblings correlate about point three in childhood, about point four later on. How much do these adoptive sibs correlate? Because they grow up in the same family, they have the same parents, zero. So the fact of growing up in the same family isn't making them similar.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  You turned my world upside down last year when I read Blueprint. I have been looking forward to speaking to you ever since I read that book. And I'm hoping that today I'm going to be able to deliver the same uncomfortable, topsy-turvy world that I was, I sort of slowly ingested about 12 months ago. So I'm looking forward to seeing what the audience make of the insights that we're going to get from today.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's terrific that you got it, you know. Some people, I think, just get turned off. They just say, whoa, this is too weird. But it is really so rewarding for me when people, you know, persist with it. They're willing to deal with these difficult topics. And then when you get off on the other side, it isn't so bad. It's actually exciting. It's a new way of seeing the world, I think. So that's terrific. I'm really glad to hear it, Chris.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  Totally correct. Like, it is a whole new world. And you're also right to say that today there'll be some uncomfortable insights, especially when we're in a meritocracy, you know, a meritocratic society that's capitalist and you are your achievements, to hear that there are these immutable truths that you perhaps didn't choose, there are influences on you that you didn't elect. These things are uncomfortable. But you're also correct that it's very liberating. If you take it just a little bit further, it's so liberating to learn. So, okay, we've danced around it. How would you describe behavioral genetics to someone who's never heard it before?

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Well, behavioral genetics is like medical genetics. It's not the genetics of medicine, it's the genetics of behavior. And behavior is essentially psychology. So we're dealing with the major domains of psychology, like psychopathology, personality, cognitive abilities, even getting into education, educational achievement. But the main thing is we're focused on individual differences. Why are some people schizophrenic and others not? Why are some children reading disabled and others not? And it's an important distinction because Genes, we're ninety-nine point, say, nine percent similar for all our DNA. Three billion base pairs of DNA.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  We have exactly the same DNA at, these are the steps in the spiral staircase of the double helix of DNA. We're identical for well over ninety-nine percent of those bases. But for at least point one percent or so, which still means millions of these steps in the spiral staircase, we differ. And so what we're asking in behavioral genetics is the extent to which those differences in inherited DNA sequences make a difference in our behavior. Do they make us more likely to be susceptible to schizophrenia or depression or alcoholism? Or do they affect our personality? So it just can't be emphasized enough that we're talking about individual differences.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  The other ninety-nine point nine percent of the DNA is the same for all of us. That's what makes us human. And those are also important questions, you know? Is that, that, is that why, for example, humans are natural language users? Or we walk on two feet, which is very rare. We have eyes in the front of our head for depth perception. So those are questions about universals. Why is the human species like this or like that? Those are terrific questions, but we're not looking at that. We're asking about why people differ and the extent to which inherited DNA differences make them different.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy to think that all of the differences that we have come down to that point one percent. All of the idiosyncrasies, the way that we speak, the nature, the texture of our own mind, the interests that we have, any of the medical predilections that we have with regards to our behavior. Especially given that I've got a big interest in evolutionary psychology, which is looking at that ninety-nine point nine percent. And then your field just focuses on the tiny little. Final bit.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Right, so it would be perfectly reasonable to think that these this small amount of DNA difference doesn't make a difference. And psychologists always assumed inheritance wasn't important. They, from Freud onwards, assumed that we are what we learn. You know, it's the environment that makes us who we are. And that's called nurture, and especially the family environment. You know, when I was in graduate school in the seventies, textbooks actually said at the time that schizophrenia is caused by what your mother does to you in the first few years of life. And, you know, that's reasonable because schizophrenic mothers tend to have kids who are more likely to be schizophrenic. But what they didn't realize is that parents and offspring are 50% similar genetically.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  So the issue is, to what extent do inherited DNA differences account for some of these differences we observe? And you don't need DNA. It was only in the last 10 years we're able to use DNA. For the last 100 years, we've been able to use methods like the twin method that compares identical and non-identical twins. Adoption studies, where you study genetically related people, reared apart, like birth parents and their adopted away children. Or conversely then, adoptive parents of adopted children who share nurture, environment, but not nature. And so the shock was, in the seventies and eighties, that all of this evidence kept coming up with a general finding

• 5:50Speaker 00

  that individual differences in psychological traits are very substantially due to genetic influence. We now say about half of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. And the excitement now is with the DNA revolution, we're able to begin to find some of those DNA differences, which will allow us to make predictions at the level of the individual, which is going to be a very big thing.

• 6:15Chris Williamson?

  50%.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Fifty percent of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. Now, first, that means the other half is not due to DNA differences. It's due to the environment. But there's a big story there that the environment isn't what we always thought it was. So we can get on to that later. But we call it heritability, the extent to which genetic differences make a difference for a trait. And there's some important misconceptions.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  When you say trait, what's a trait?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yes, a trait is a measure of individual differences.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example?

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Like physical height, weight, psychological, psychopathology, personality. Okay, so when we say that these, that heritability is 50%, we're talking about differences between people. So the easiest one, take weight. People are often surprised. You say height, how heritable is height? Well, people aren't surprised to hear it's very highly heritable. How highly heritable? At least 90%. So that means of the differences you see between people in height, about 90% of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. So the first misconception is that that's not you. You didn't grow 90% because of your genes and the last 10% because of the environment.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And as funny as it sounds, you scratch the surface of what people know, and most people are making that mistake. So we're talking about differences between people in the population. Okay, so highly heritable, 90%. But how heritable is weight? Say body mass index. A lot of people think, yeah, maybe there's a little genetic influence, but it's mostly due to the environment. And it's not. It's 70% heritable. So of the differences you see between people in weight, about 70% of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  So that's kind of shocking to people and it makes a couple of points. One is, again, we're talking about differences between people in a population, given their environmental differences, you know, like some people are exercising and watching their diet and all of that. And other people, you know, just let it all go. But it's, and given the genetics that's there too. Different populations differ genetically. You know, there's immigration, emigration across time. We're just describing differences as they exist in a particular population at a particular time. We're not talking about what could be. So with weight, for example, and this is the second misconception. If it's genetic, it's deterministic, it's fatalistic.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And that's true of the thousands of single gene disorders. Like if you have this mutation in a gene at the tip of chromosome four, you know, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Our three billion base pairs of DNA are chopped up into these 23 blocks we call chromosomes. So at the tip of chromosome four, there's a gene for Huntington's disease, which is what Woody Guthrie had. It's a long-term degenerative disease that doesn't show up till later in life. So if you have that mutation for Huntington's disease, you will die from Huntington's. It is deterministic, hardwired. Unless something else kills you first, no matter what your diet is, there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Now, so it is deterministic.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  And that's the way people learned about genetics. That's what Mendel studied with his pea plants. These are hardwired deterministic, single gene, necessary and sufficient disorders. However, when we get to psychological disorders and most common medical disorders, they're not like that. They're not due to a single gene. They're due to thousands of tiny DNA differences. And that changes the story from determinism to probabilistic propensities. It gives you a risk. So, um, so that's the second misconception and go ahead. Sorry, I'm rabbiting on here.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. You've got a quote in the book, I think, that summarizes this beautifully. And it says, "DNA isn't all that matters, but it matters more than anything else. And it matters more than everything else put together in determining who we are."

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Right, well, that's the heritability of 50%. If you look across all psychological traits, on average, they're about 50% heritable. Physiological traits, you know, weight, more heritable, 70%, height even more heritable.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  I need to stop you there. The heritability of weight being 70%, there are a lot of guys and girls listening that do fitness, there'll be PTs, there'll be dieticians that work incredibly hard to try and get themselves to their optimal BMI, to get their athletes down to a weight and a body fat percentage that they're supposed to. And you're saying that the best diet regime would have been to have different parents?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Well, absolutely. I mean, that would make the biggest difference. But see, again, the point I was getting to here is that we're describing what is. In this population, at this time, with people, some people who are fitness nuts or really watch their diet and all of that, and other people who don't. We're saying of those differences in weight, how much are due to inherited differences? And the answer is more than half, 70% on average across many different countries, for example. But it's also true in the UK. It's about 70% heritable. Now, the point, though, the third point is, it doesn't, it's, it's a confusion between what is and what could be. We're describing a particular population. We say, on average, 70% of the differences are due to genetic differences for weight. But that doesn't mean

• 11:49Speaker 00

  you can't control your weight, your own weight. It's, it's what is in the population. It's not what could be for one individual. Most obviously, if I was locked in a room and not allowed to eat, I would lose weight. And it's part of the problem, too, is people think, you know, I do have, we now have these genetic scores. We can predict about 10% of these differences in body weight with DNA alone now. It's about 70% heritable. So we've just started doing this. But, you know, predicting 10% is not bad. I mean, there aren't a lot of other things that will predict BMI to that extent. So, you know, it's a start, right, with this BMI. So my highest risk score for what we call

• 12:31Speaker 00

  polygenic, these DNA composite score, is for BMI. So I'm really meant to be a genetic fatty.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  But again, you know, people say, oh, well, you're just going to give up and say you can't do anything about it. But, you know, to the contrary, I find it's very motivating. I know why. I keep putting on, it's in videos, you know, I put on a few pounds every year, but then you don't lose those pounds. And, you know, for some of us, they tend to go to the belly and, you know, and, and, you know, people say, well, just pull your socks up, you know, just don't eat so much, exercise more. It's easy for thin people to say. But if you have this propensity to put on weight, I think really what it is, it's not even physiological, I think it's psychological. We've done some research saying that the

• 13:18Speaker 00

  genetic propensity is more, we talk about satiety, feeling full. I go out with people, we're eating at a restaurant, pray God we can do it again pretty soon, but, you know, and I'm full, and, but there's food on the table, we're talking away, and before you know it, I've eaten that food. I'm not hungry.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's, that's totally correct, because for even when you're talking about particular traits, the individual ways that you can contribute to that trait manifesting can occur in a number of ways. Let's say that, that 70% could be contributed to from some people who don't like exercise, some people who do have great agrelin release or leptin release or whatever in their stomach that encourages them to feel hungry, maybe some of them have bigger stomachs, maybe this particular selection of traits is associated with having a larger stomach, or what, pick your route moving forward, whatever it might be, they just have an all or nothing mentality when it comes to food.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  No, exactly right. There's lots of different ways in which these genetic effects can come in. It's highly unlikely to be a simple pathway. It won't be.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  Not, not everyone gets fat in the same way.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  That's right. And another major cue here that you didn't mention is responsiveness to food cues. So, you know, I can't, I used to like to make bread. I can't do it because the smell of fresh, and my mouth is watering now just even thinking about it, smell of fresh, warm bread and the thought of putting butter on it, it's irresistible to me, you know, and I say irresistible, I can resist it, but it's just other things being equal, they're not equal for me, you know, I go past the bakery and I smell the bread and stuff, if I go in there, I'm dead, you know, I can't help but buy these pastries. Yeah, and it is sort of free will in a way. I mean, people say that, but it's just on the fly in life.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  There's a lot of things impinging on us and we're bombarded by food cues for those of us particularly sensitive to it. So really, all of this does come down to suggesting that people ought to cut us a bit more slack. You know, there's fat shaming that goes on and people need to recognize there's a very strong genetic component to how much weight people put on, how easy or hard it is to lose that weight. And so I think it does suggest that we, you know, are a bit, you know, less judgmental, not just assuming. I mean, it is free will, but it's not in the context of life.

• 15:48Chris Williamson?

  It's constrained, Will.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So I find I just have to avoid having junk food.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  Don't walk past, don't walk past the bakery. You need to alter your route to work. So I think people, most people, especially when you talk about something like height or shoe size. Oh yeah, my dad's, my dad's a size 15 and mum's a size nine. So I, I had big feet as well. People are kind of accepting of that. I think that where it becomes more murky is behavioral traits. Right. You know, how people manifest their personalities, their level of happiness, their depression, their materialism, their status seeking, whatever it might be. I think that, do you find this when you're trying to communicate it to people?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  The nice thing about weight, body mass index, you know, which is weight corrected for height, is that it's kind of in between the hardcore physical things like height, which, you know, don't change much during development. I mean, you, you increase in height, but you don't go up and down in height the way you do with weight, you know, as I well know. But it is a very psychological trait because a lot of the mechanisms involved and a lot of the effects are psychological sorts of effects. So yeah, what I like about it is no one argues about how to measure weight. Whereas when you get into psychological traits, a lot of it's based on questionnaires, like depression, you know, someone would interview you and say, you know, how many times have you had these feelings, or have you ever had suicidal thoughts?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  And it's kind of self-report, and people say, well, but that's today, and yesterday, I didn't feel that way. You know, it's much more dynamic, and you'd think harder to measure. But I would say for people who just dismiss these psychological traits, that psychologist, because they know it's hard to measure these things, has spent a lot of time measuring them. And I think they do quite well, and they find a lot of stability for these things, even depression, which goes up and down. But if you talk about depression over the last year, that's going to correlate pretty highly with your experience of depression 10 years from now.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  How do you study this? Let's say that one of the first things that I thought upon swallowing the huge industrial-sized red pill that I had to read in your book was, yeah, but, I just had all of these yeah buts in there, yeah, but how are they studying this? So what, how are you able to separate out all of the different genetic influences on traits?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Well, there's two questions there. One is how do we measure it? The other is how do we separate out genetics and environment? On the first bit, I would just say that I particularly like to study cognitive abilities, because you can measure them, you know, like spatial ability and memory ability, and you can measure them accurately, and their maximum performance, you know, so you take this test, and you'd be trying to do as well as you can do on it. And your scores today will be highly correlated with your scores next month and next year. They're highly reliable, these sorts of scores. The problem with other sorts of measures like personality is, if I ask you, how shy are you? Well... You think of, "Oh, but what context do you mean?"

• 18:58Speaker 00

  So, we try to ask questions about many different contexts. You know, like we're at a party with strangers, which is the kind of key aspect of shyness. The shyest person on earth is not shy of someone they love, they live with or they're very familiar with. Shyness, anxiety, doesn't enter into that. So, it is difficult to measure, but without going into it in great detail, I would just say psychologists have spent a century trying to measure these things, and I think they do pretty well at it. But now, the issue of how... Okay, so now you've got to measure. I mean, weight's easy, people differ. And for most of these traits, they differ in what we call the normal distribution, a bell-shaped curve.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  So, for weight, there's some people who are extremely obese, and there's some people who are extremely thin. Most people are in the middle. That's this bell-shaped curve. That's the individual differences that I'm talking about. And if I use the word variance, that's a statistic that describes the extent to which people differ, the variance. So, you describe this distribution with a mean, the average, which is in the middle of this bell curve, and then this statistic of variance, which describes the extent to which people vary around that mean. Because a distribution, I don't know if you can see it here, a distribution that spreads out has a lot more variance than a distribution that's tight like this.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  So, the way we study variance and why people differ, as I mentioned, involves methods from a century ago, called the twin study, which compares identical and non-identical twins. So, identical twins are clones of one another. Their DNA is exactly the same. Fraternal twins or non-identical twins, like any brother and sister, are 50% similar genetically. So, of the DNA that differs, that 1%, they're similar for about 50% of that. So, if a trait's influenced by genetics, you'd have to predict that identical twins are more similar than non-identical twins because they're twice as similar genetically.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  So that's the twin method and the adoption method is even more straightforward. In families, nature and nurture runs together. So the fact that parents who are schizophrenic have kids who are more likely to be schizophrenic, it's always assumed to be nurture, but it could be nature. There could be genetic influences there. And one way to do, to tell that is to separate nature and nurture. So you can have birth parents who are, become schizophrenic later in life, who relinquish kids for adoption. And those kids are adopted away in an adoptive home where the parents are unlikely to have schizophrenia. So that is a direct estimate of the extent to which parent offspring resemblance is due to genetics. And the converse side of it is just as neat.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  You've got adopted parents of adopted children. They share nurture with those kids. They adopt them early in life. So they're the environmental parents of those kids, but they're not genetically related to those kids. So these two methods, what's nice is they're very different. They each have different problems, but the convergence of evidence from both of these measures, methods is really very impressive. And so that's how we get to this conclusion that across, if you take all psychological traits, say in twin studies, you get an average heritability estimate of 50%, which is just extraordinary, given that 30 years ago, most psychologists would have said, nah, there's really no important genetic influence.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  How many twins have you studied? Or how many people have you used in these adoption studies, in these twin studies? Am I right in thinking that you have been part of the biggest ever?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I came to England in 1994, part of the deal was they gave me a grant to study, to put together a huge sample, 10,000 pairs of twins at birth from birth records.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  10,000 pairs of twins, 20,000 people?

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, 1% of all twins births are twins. And there's say 7,500 births a year, at least there was back then when I started this 25 years ago. So that's just about what you'd expect. And a third of those are identical all around the world. And that means two thirds are non-identical. So we studied these kids 14 times between the ages of infancy at two through adulthood at 25. We most recently studied them at 25. They're all born in 94, 95, and 96. So we started with about 21,000 sets of twins. We excluded some because of illness, especially death. We spent a lot of time making sure we didn't contact.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Imagine if you had a new twins and one of them died. It wouldn't be too cool to get a message saying, oh, would you like to participate in this exciting new study of twins? So we spent a lot of time making sure we didn't do that. And so we ended up with about 85% participation rates, which in this sort of study is amazing, but that's because parents of twins know they're special.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Is this, sorry, is this just in the UK?

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we are.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Well, it's just England and Wales. Scotland had their own thing.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Is there any criticism around the fact that the heritability that is represented in England and Wales wouldn't scale across the rest of the world?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Now, it's a great question because, remember, I said we're describing what is in a particular population at a particular time. So it's an empirical question, but there have been studies around the world. There's been 3 million pairs of twins studied around the world in about 3,000 different reports. And it could be the results are very different, but it turns out they're not very different. And that's really remarkable. And I always struck, I studied cognitive abilities. And in India, you have studies in rural India where people are mostly illiterate. And then you have very urban societies in India. The results don't change much. You know, they're still coming up with very substantial heritability. And it didn't have to be that way.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  And it'd be quite interesting if it weren't that way. But on balance, it's quite, it's the most remarkable finding in relation to your point is that the results are so similar across many very different countries.

• 25:30Chris Williamson?

  Did you find or see any groups which are less heritable? Is there an area on the planet that seems to be statistically decreased?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Well, the one that's been of interest in the last decade or so. Is not different populations, but within a population, the thought that kids from very deprived backgrounds, lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, the heritability is lower, is what they were saying. And it kind of makes sense because you think the environment is so overwhelming, you know, at the extreme end of social. Discomfort, yeah. It could override. And so that was an interesting notion, but there's been a dozen studies since, and they generally don't confirm it. The one thing that's left is the guy who found it initially is in America.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  He's done several subsequent studies where he says he still finds it. And so the possibility exists that maybe it's less heritable for low SES kids in America, but not in the rest of the world, which is Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia. And, you know, again, it would be a great story if it's true. I'm kind of dubious that it's true. This is a guy kind of hanging on to a finding that everybody wanted to believe because it's a really cool finding, you know? Gene environment interaction, the idea of different strokes for different folk. But it could make sense because in the US, it's the most decentralized education system in the developed world. So every little school district,

• 27:08Speaker 00

  they just make all their own decisions. So you could imagine that creates a lot of environmental variance. And then you could imagine that the kids in the lowest SES schools are in the bottom of that pile, perhaps. So if it were true, it'd be interesting. So I guess the point I'm making, I don't have any, I don't have any skin in this game of trying to say it's the same result everywhere. In fact, I'd find it really interesting if we could find groups or countries where the results are very different.

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't seem to be that way, though. Okay, so how do genes influence our behaviour? Is there a violin-playing gene and a premature ejaculation gene and a dog-loving gene?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what people tend to think about. You say genetic and they think single gene. Well, for the single gene disorders, it is a single gene, you know? I mean, Huntington's, we know pretty much what that gene does and how it affects the brain. It starts creating, we call them repeat sequences, but it messes up the gene by reproducing not what it's supposed to reproduce, but extra bits. And those extra bits just start mucking up the proteins it creates. And then eventually, the brain just starts to degenerate as a result of having all this muck around. But when you get into complex traits in common disorders like heart disease, or obesity,

• 28:34Speaker 00

  or psychological traits, there's no example of a single gene disorder. And if there are thousands of genes involved, each contributing a tiny bit of risk, what are the chances you're going to find an intervention that works? Because, you know, people still think of the brain in this kind of simple-minded neurologising way. This does that, this bit of the brain does that. But, you know, I think if there's thousands of genes, they're going to work at the level of the brain, and they're going to make it very difficult to find any pathways. It's just, you know, which kind of makes sense, you know, from an evolutionary perspective.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  If you want to have a species evolve, you're not going to just say, oh, well, let's make it simple for neuroscientists and have this one simple pathway that makes all the difference. That would be disastrous, really. What you would do is natural selection, is take advantage of all the DNA differences that are there, and you'd select for behaviour. You'd select for people who are, say, brighter and solve problems more quickly.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  And you take advantage of all the DNA variation that exists everywhere, not even just in the brain, in the body as well. So I, I think it does make sense. It, it's a, it's not a happy story for molecular biologists who want to do a reductionistic

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  approach to gene, this gene does this, and that does this in the brain, and then that causes this in behavior. So, but as a psychologist, I'm interested in the behavior, you know, and so it's okay by me. And what's exciting now is we can predict these behavioral differences with DNA itself.

• 30:20Chris Williamson?

  I guess what you're saying there, the fact that it's, it provides a challenge for interventions. What you're referring to is that if you wanted to go in and edit the genes to make someone a thing, if you wanted to try and manifest a trait, you don't just get to go and poke one of them. You actually have to poke a lot of them. And I'm guessing that the 10% that you're now able to predict BMI in life is because you've managed to bundle together around about one fifth of the genes that are responsible for causing that weight.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Well, I agree with the second part of what you said about the first part. It makes interventions difficult. I don't think so, because an important, I don't know if it's a law, but I mean, for me, it's just about a law, is that cures aren't necessarily related to causes. Now, you'd always think, if you find out a cause, then you fix it. Now, that's true with single gene sorts of things. It's true with single environmental agents like SARS 2 and COVID. You only get COVID if you get infected with this virus. So you want to know who has it, who doesn't have it. It's dichotomous. And then you pick the people who've got it and you think, well, what can we do to prevent other people from

• 31:37Speaker 00

  getting it, to make the course of the illness less bad, to stop people from dying? So, you know, definitely knowing the cause. Helps a lot in knowing the cure. But now, what if you take common disorders and psychological traits, where we've got thousands of genetic differences? There is no single cause. There's a whole gamishia of causes. And I think it's going to be very difficult to have these causes tell you what to do about cures. But fortunately, cures don't, are often, most often, not related to causes. So if a kid has a reading disability, neuroscientists often think they're looking for the hole in the brain. They're looking for the bit of the brain that misfires.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  You know, and, um, long stories there. But if there's thousands of DNA differences involved, I think it's just some kids have more trouble learning to read. It's not that they're dyslexic, you know? If you want to make, medicalize it, you give it a Greek or Latin name. And then, then you say, "I'm sorry, madam, your child has dyslexia." You don't say they have reading problems because a psychologist could tell them that. And similarly with hyperactivity. You don't say your kid has poor attention span. You say, "Your kid has hyperkinetic disorder." You know, because it medicalizes it. And then you think there's a simple cause. And then you think there's going to be a simple cure.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  What people like is giving the name to it, wrangles the chaos into order, right? Okay, it's a thing. I know that it's a thing. I think you've got a quote that says, "There are no disorders. There are just quantitative dimensions."

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Yes. That's this bumper sticker of the normal, "The abnormal is normal." What the genetics suggests is that, more than suggests, it really, I think, necessarily implies that if there's thousands of genetic differences affecting a trait like reading disability, those genes are normally distributed. So some people will have a lot, just by chance, of those DNA differences that make it more likely that they'll have problems learning to read. Doesn't mean that, you know, going to have reading disability or be diagnosed with it. Just, it's a propensity. What I like about this is it's it's gonna be the nail in the coffin of diagnoses. So in medicine, the illness model, medical model, you know, work really well when you've

• 33:53Speaker 00

  got simple causes. So you wanna find out what causes cholera, someone figures out it's bugs in the water, you know, and then you stop the bugs in the water and you cure this. But it doesn't work that way for common disorders or quantitative traits. And although it might make people feel better to say, ah, I know why I've been having so much trouble in life, I have dyslexia, you know, or whatever. And it but it's it's the truth has got to be better. And that is that there is no, it's just all quantitative.

• 34:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  It's not a matter of either or.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  To drive that home, there's no point along this normal distribution at which after this point, somebody becomes labeled dyslexic or dyspraxic or whatever it might be. There are a whole bundle of traits that are normally distributed. Some people have a particular combination of those which has created a meal, and that meal is a restriction in their ability to read. But as we said before, that could come from a number of different pathways as well. The same ways you can gain weight by not liking exercise, or by liking food too much, or by doing both, or by any other number of things. You can be not very turned on by reading, or you can find it hard, or you can struggle to gain vocabulary, or you can da, da, da, da, da, da. And then the medicalization that you've got where you

• 35:10Chris Williamson?

  give particular terminology, what you're doing is bundling common disorders or orders into a title which combines those traits together, and and that's the outcome that you get.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  And it's dichotomous, you know, it's.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  You are or you aren't, yes.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  You are, you aren't. And what's bad, what I like about this normal distribution, this quantitative idea, is that it's not like those schizophrenics and us normal people. You know, we all have thousands of genetic risk factors for schizophrenia. It's just a question of how many you have and how you interact with the environment. Because even if you have a very high score, it doesn't mean you're necessarily gonna be schizophrenic. Partly because we're only explaining about fifteen percent of the liability to become schizophrenic. So it's not deterministic, it's probabilistic. But I, there's a lot of advantages to thinking about these things quantitatively. Because you're not trying to cure a disorder. There's no disorder, you're not trying to cure it.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  You're trying to alleviate symptoms quantitatively. You know, the, the, the output here, what you want to do is not just say, okay, they're cured. It's not going to happen, you know? And so there's many ways in which I think it is important. I think this medical model has been holding back psychological research.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  I want to give you a list of a bunch of different things that I've come up with. And we're going to see if you know how heritable they are, or if they are, or if they aren't. Well, they, they all will be, as we've already identified. So aggression or antisocial behavior, stuff like that?

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's an interesting one. Aggression, it's hard to measure, but if you just do it the usual way with self-report personality questionnaires. Most personality measures, including aggression, are less heritable than other traits like cognitive traits. They're about forty percent heritable. I mean, forty percent, fifty percent, not much difference, but, you know, it's not a hundred percent. It's not eighty percent, and it's not ten percent or twenty. It's, you know, it's substantial, but it's not the whole story. But psychopathy is interesting because early in life, it seems to be very highly heritable. And you wouldn't think you could measure it early in life. It's not, these are the kids who, my colleague, S. E. Biding at UCL, has studied this for a long time.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  It, it's more technically called callous, unemotional psychopathy. These are the kids who tear wings off flies. They'll, they'll hurt animals, not, not because they like to hurt things. It's just, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't bother them. And so psychopaths aren't out to hurt you either, even as adults. They want something, and if you're in the way... You know, they'll push you aside because it just, there's no empathy there. So I think that's a really interesting one and it remains, it's not shown, but early in childhood, it's very highly heritable. Then when you get into middle adulthood, it gets mixed up with delinquency, which is almost normative.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Shoplifting, you know, doing stuff when you're an adolescent, destroying, vandalizing property. Yeah, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but you know, so many kids do it. Some people have said it's actually predictive of better mental health later, but that's a different story. But the point is, these kids who are cruel and doing bad things, they get sucked up into this adolescent delinquency thing, but then they come out the other end being more psychopathic, whereas the normative sort of usual delinquent behavior in adolescence tends to drop out.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, IQ.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  That is one of the more highly heritable traits. It's probably, it's interesting, over the lifespan. Well, first, we used to say it's 50% heritable, but almost all those studies involve kids just because it's easier to study twins and adoptees when they're living at home. But then when you got to adults, you find that the inheritability of IQ increases linearly throughout the lifespan. 20% in infancy, 40% in childhood, like the early school years, 60% in young adulthood, and some people say even 80% later in life. Now, that's really interesting. How can heritability change?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  But it makes the point, we're just describing differences as they exist in a particular sample. And so if you look at young samples versus old samples, heritability now consistently, we've done meta-analyses across all these, it consistently goes up in an almost linear way.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is?

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Well, it, nobody knows for sure. I think, and I think most people think, it's because genetics isn't, it isn't like hardwired in the brain. It's not, what it is, it makes you use your environment differently. So if you, if you study these really bright young kids and say, what are they doing? They're asking questions. They go into a room and they wonder about the angles at the corners of the room. You know, they just use their environment in a better way. They get a lot more information out of it. The classrooms, the teachers can teach something to kids, but some kids will get so much more out of it than others.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  And I think as you go through life, then, you, this is called gene-environment correlation. As you go through life, it's not that, it's not that the heritability is there at the moment of conception, you know, and it doesn't change. It makes you use your environment differently, so that you select environments, modify them, and create environments correlated with your genetic propensities. So kids who are academically oriented, they hang out with other academically oriented kids, they read books, they're interested in intellectual things, whereas other kids have other appetites. And increasingly, I think it's appetites.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  It's not aptitudes, it's not this hard-wired, you know, brain that's making the difference. It's just these sort of psychological appetites. It's what you like, and what you like, you do, and you tend to get better at that, so that the differences snowball until later in life. You know, I see my parents were 97 until they died a couple of years ago, and they were in an old people's home, and you really see the differences there. I mean, some of these older people are still very active intellectually, you know, they don't lobotomize themselves on television, they argue with people, they read the newspapers, you know, they're really alive, and the differences seem to be even greater, you know, later in life. So I think that's what happens.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  It's snowballing. These little genetic effects become bigger and bigger as you go through life, selecting and modifying, and even creating environments that are correlated with your genetic propensities.

• 42:09Chris Williamson?

  Are there any traits that do the reverse of that?

• 42:12Speaker 00

  We don't know of any. So when heritability changes, it goes up. Some people say that's true for body weight as well. Most of the time, like personality, there's no evidence that heritability changes. Across the lifespan. So it just, anyway. So cognitive abilities, more heritable than personality, maybe 60%.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Academic outcomes, is that the same?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  No, it's not. You know, the correlation between how well you do at school and your IQ is about 0.5 in hundreds of studies that have looked at this. But one thing that's interesting is in the early school years, educational achievement, which in England is great, you know, we have these national tests, not great for the kids maybe, but it's great for researchers because, you know, they're the most tested kids in the world. So you get very good educational achievement data, at least for what tests are measuring. And they're substantially more heritable in the first school years, like 60% heritable as compared to IQ, which is 40% heritable. And I think that's really interesting. But educational achievement stays at about 60% heritability all the way through GCSEs

• 43:24Speaker 00

  and A levels, whereas IQ is going up and up and up. And they cross somewhere in adolescence.

• 43:30Chris Williamson?

  Ah, that's so interesting. So you don't have as much of an increase in heritability over time with academic outcomes as you do with IQ?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yes. And so, again, I don't know why, but I wonder if it, this raises, it's worth going into this, like, why is that? Because it raises another issue I think that's important. And that is that I think what, educational achievements, what teachers teach, we have a national curriculum and their teachers have to teach certain things on certain days. You know, it's very prescribed. And so kids who come to school without much background, they very quickly do their phonetics, get into reading, but no one teaches IQ. I think they ought to, because IQ is general reasoning, abstract reasoning, the scientific method, I think. And I think we need a heavy dose of that.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  People need to recognize the importance of thinking logically and taking new facts and coming up with hypotheses and realizing you don't believe them, you test them, and you have to test it. So I think that has a lot to do with IQ. We don't teach it. So as a result, I think when kids come to school, you know, they're, well, they're not...

• 44:48Speaker 00

  They're not getting the full possibilities for expressing their genetic propensity. So again, it's just that, again, we're describing what is in a particular population. In this case, the early school years, the, you know, and then going on through key stage two, three, four. And one other thing I'll mention is, you know, Michael Gove, when he was Secretary of Education, what, almost a decade ago now, he instituted this idea of phonetic screening test. You know, a lot of the Tories, they think it's a, whatever was in the 50s, the good old glory days, that's what's gotta be good. And they taught reading by phonetics then. And somehow, in the 60s and 70s, educators began to teach reading through word recognition.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  And, you know, recognizing whole words and not worrying so much about spelling and phonetics. Well, so Michael Gove said, "Teachers gotta teach phonetics." And he instituted this test, a four-minute test of phonetics. And it's really kind of a cool test. Two minutes where you read age-appropriate words at seven, they're like dog, cat, you know? And, and then as fast as you can, as many words as you can in two minutes. And then, there's a list of matched non-words. So these are not words, they're like tep, T E P, um, gep, you know, G E P. They're phonetically and linguistically matched, but the only way you can say what the word is, if you can sound it out phonetically.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  And so Michael Gove thought, "This is gonna be a test of how well the teachers are teaching." And he was gonna name and shame those schools that didn't do phonetics. "It's the most heritable test we have." So at seven, when these kids have to take this test, that test is 70% heritable.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Which is amazing, given that it was, no one even questioned this. They said, "Well, okay, it's a phonetics test, so kids didn't learn phonetics by themselves, so this is a test of how well the teachers have taught phonetics." But instead, what it says is, "Some kids pick it up a lot better than others." I'm convinced there's individual differences all over the place. I bet you there are some kids who would learn to read better with whole-word reading. But we force all these different shaped pegs into this one round hole of the national curriculum. And I think that's the biggest lesson to learn in education. And teachers know it. You can't stand in front of a class of 30 kids and not recognize that some of them pick stuff up...

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Very fast and others just need a lot more help. So I'm particularly keen on education because that's the business end of these cognitive abilities. So I keep distracting you. We just said IQ.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  All right, so next one.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Change during the lifespan, but 50% heritable on average.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Next one, penis size. Did anyone research penis size?

• 47:38Speaker 00

  There have been studies on it, but I'm not aware of genetically sensitive studies.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  Shame, someone should do that. Diabetes.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's been studied a lot and it's maybe it's tricky when you're dealing with these disorders. Diabetes isn't a disorder, it's a quantitative trait, right? And so many of these disorders are like heart disease, they're not disorders. So hypertension, these are pretty normally distributed traits and things that work, work quantitatively too. So when you've got a dichotomy, it makes it much more difficult to say how heritable it is. Because all you've got is a zero and a one.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  At what point does diabetes become diabetes?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Well, but you take it for what it is and then you create these very complicated statistics called liability. But it's a liability to the disorder because you recognize it's not really a disorder. But if you look at simple concordance, you know, that's like if one identical twin has schizophrenia, what's the chance that the other one does? And even though you don't believe it's a dichotomy like that, and the answer is about 50%. The identical twins are similar and non-identical twins, their concordance for a diagnosis of schizophrenia is very much lower, about 7%. Now, they're half as similar genetically as identical twins, so you would have expected them

• 49:07Speaker 00

  to be about 25% similar because identical twins are 50% similar, but they're only 5%. But it's just because in a way, because these things are not very useful statistically when you're dealing with a dichotomy. It makes it makes it trickier, but the evidence is still very clear that genetics is important.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Got you. What about a happiness set point or sort of self-reported life happiness?

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Well, there's a lot of work about depression and well-being, which is what a lot of people mean by happiness, a sense of well-being. It's all a tricky business, but if you look across all those studies, they're about forty percent heritable when you measure them quantitatively. At least with happiness, you're not saying people are either happy or not. So you measure it quantitatively. And when you do for well-being, you find that about forty percent of the differences between people can be ascribed to these inherited DNA differences.

• 50:09Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy when you think about how much work people put into trying to make themselves happy. You know, it's one of the most common conversations that podcasts have. I actually quite err away from having it on this show, especially after reading your book. But also generally, it's just a bit of an icky topic to me to talk about happiness and this generation of it as if that's the only thing really that people should be aiming for in the world. There's a lot of other contributing factors to the sense of well-being. Have you got meaning in your life? Do you have connections? When does that become happiness, so on and so forth?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I suggest people do some meditation training or something, you know, to recognize that you don't become happy. You've only got this instant.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

  You be happy.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  And you can be happy, be here now, that sort of thing. I mean, as hokey as these things sound, like we mentioned Sam Harris, we were talking before. And, you know, I think his app, Waking Up App, it's really changed my life in a lot of ways. I was in philosophy and I took against it because it's not empirical. I can go into that a bit. But psychology is actually the empirical side of philosophy, but it can only deal with things you can test, right?

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  Psychology is the empirical side of philosophy. I like that.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Right. Well, it was because I was at a place at DePaul University in Chicago that specialized in phenomenology. Now, that's the branch of philosophy that talks about the is-ness of things, like the desk-ness. What is it that's the essence of a desk? You know, okay, fair enough. But after I heard this about the third time, I kept saying, well, there's these huge arguments about it. And I'm saying, how do you know this guy is right or that guy's right? There's got to be some way to test it. And I ran into a stone wall because I realized finally that if you can test it, it's no longer philosophic. And I asked, what is it? It's psychology. If you can actually test it. So at that point, I decided, well, then great, I'll go into psychology,

• 52:03Speaker 00

  which is what I did. And I've, I've sort of been anti-philosophy.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've come full circle now.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  I have, yeah. Maybe that's a result of getting older or meeting Sam Harris and, you know.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  It's not the, you know, philosophy went bad in the seventies. It went into linguistics and, you know, it's not like, I'm really into Stoicism, which is the most ancient philosophy around, Confucianism. And I think it's very practical psychology, what they're talking about there. Well, modern philosophy, you know, is not that. I mean, it's really dealing with this very abstract, mathematical, linguistic sort of stuff. Fine, you know, everybody do their own thing. But there's got to be room here for philosophy in the old sense, you know, the ethical and moral and what does it mean to be human? And how can I be happy or

• 52:57Speaker 00

  become happy? And, you know, so I think it's a great point. And having said that, I agree completely, you know, that people are obsessed with becoming happy, and that's a losing proposition in a way. You know, the Stoics talk about this. William Irving has written some great stuff about Stoicism. And the Stoics, you know, we're talking about many, many centuries ago, they talked about hedonic adaptation. And if you live life because you'll just be happy if you can get X, Y, or Z, the new car, the new house, the new job. But then you get it, and yeah, you're a little bit happier for a while, but then there's hedonic adaptation. You get used to it.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  And again, it's not making you happy. In fact, if it could have made you happy, if something could have made you happy, you've been spending your life trying to be happy, and it hasn't made you happy, you might get the idea trying to get what you don't have is not the way to go. And the Stoics say it's the other way. It's to say,

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Use these techniques like negative visualization to want what you have. And to realize what you have, you may think is shit, but he'll say, there's about a billion, 10 billion, billions of people on earth who would do anything to trade lives with you.

• 54:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the thought experiment, right? Like the things that you now have are those which only once you dreamt of. And when you actually, when you reframe stuff like that. Yeah, I had Rupert Spira on the show recently, non-dualism guy. And I found him very, very clear and precise with how he put across non-duality as a philosophy, which is, can get a bit, get a bit messy at times.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  I'm still having trouble with that, you know, I'm struggling with this. Sam Harris has a new whole lecture series by someone on this.

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  I think it might be Rupert, so he's definitely.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Oh, it is. You're exactly right. It is.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  Very softly spoken British man.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. I started listening to that today.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Even with Sam, I still have trouble with this. Like, maybe I have too big an ego to deny myself.

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  Separate yourself from the experience. Yeah. Well, I mean, so the episode will be out. So I'll send it, I'll send it to you once it goes up. But, um, yeah, and he, he used this word and it really got to me. He used the word happiness. He was talking about the fact, uh, he said that the natural state of humans, once you strip away the, the egos, the preconceptions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is happiness. And I had a real problem with it because I felt like happiness to me is something in motion. It didn't feel like a stripping away. It felt like an action. It felt like momentum. And Rupert said he would be happy to interchange that for peace. And I was like, ah, okay. So for me, the word, if what he means by happiness is peace,

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  absolutely fine with that. Like, that's a still, that's a still calm ocean or a clear sky, as opposed to happiness, which is like, there's a boat in the ocean or there's a plane in the sky. Um, so we've, we've got sidetracked. Last two, I've got two more for you.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  Is infidelity heritable? Have you ever been able to look at this?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Well, David Buss, you know, studied at, a good friend of mine, from an evolutionary perspective, but divorce has been studied, and that shows heritable influence.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how much?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Uh, not, you know, not a lot, maybe thirty percent or so.

• 56:19Chris Williamson?

  That's quite a lot.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and again, it's not because you have genes for divorce, you know, you say that there's heritable influence on divorce, people say the divorce gene, or you talk about aggression, the warrior gene, for example, and it's not that, it's like, what makes people get divorced? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with joie de vivre, good things, you know, you get, maybe you get bored, you're a sensation seeker, or you just really like the fireworks of love and romance, these may have been the things that made someone attractive in the first place, but it could be that those same things make them more at risk for divorce.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  So, I don't know of a study of infidelity, I'm sure there are some though, but it's not something I have looked into.

• 57:11Chris Williamson?

  What about sexual preference? The gay gene is something that people have talked about for a very long time, what does, how does this come out in the research?

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Well, see, that got started, you know, when the DNA revolution was just happening, it was way premature, and it wasn't true, you know, that there's a gay gene, but Michael Bailey at Notre Dame has done most of the work on this, and there's, there is genetic influence on sexual preference, and I know some people get very upset about that, but I think most gays are happy to accept that, because it means it isn't just...

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  A lifestyle fashion choice.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, yeah, which, in the current identity politics day, it seems to be, getting to be more, more like that.

• 57:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  But there is a genetic component, I worked at an adolescent treatment center where we had three gay boys, when I was in graduate school, and, you know, they just tell you their story, from early in life, they just really knew they were different, and they hid it, they tried their best to be daddy's boy and everything, and then, fortunately, and by the sixties or so, it got a little bit easier for people to come out. So again, I think it's important to recognize there is a genetic tendency. It doesn't mean everybody who is gay has this genetic tendency. It's just overall in the population of gays, there does seem to be a genetic propensity. But it doesn't mean you're determined. It's not hardwired. It's just like all these other traits.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  The thing that I'm interested in here when talking about the genes is is a child's behavior like an aggregate of how their parents' behavior manifests. So or can you have genetic influences on behavior which kind of come out of nowhere? So could you have two very calm parents whose DNA combines to make an easily prone to anger or violence child? Obviously, we're talking on average here.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's a good point because a lot of people think, well, you get your genes from your mother and your father, so surely you have to be a blend between them. But the thing is, these are discrete units. That's what Mendel figured out long ago. Genes don't just blend. They're they're discrete. So you can have zero, one, or two. We call them alleles, form of a particular gene. Now you look at polygenic scores that involve thousands of these. Those scores will be normally distributed within a family. I mean, we can show this, and we've always known this to be true. So that means that, say, parents where one is very highly educated and the other isn't, it's not like the kids are all going to be in between.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  They're going to have a whole range of individual differences, including some that are some of the brightest, you know, they have the highest genetic scores, and some that have the lowest. And what I like about this is there's a concern about right now about genetic castes, you know, like the Indian caste system. And the idea is that meritocracy is getting us into genetic caste because the Silicon Valley people marry each other and they have these super bright kids. But what's I don't think it's true as long as there is mobility. Because if, say, two parents IQ is mean of a hundred and we call standard deviation of fifteen.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  So it means if you're at the eighty-fifth percentile, you have an IQ score not of a hundred, but of like a hundred and fifteen. And two standard deviations, an IQ score of a hundred and thirty. The average IQ of people with PhDs is a hundred and thirty. So suppose you have two parents with IQs of a hundred and thirty. What's gonna be the average IQ of their kids? It's not a hundred and thirty, it's a hundred and fifteen. It's fifty percent heritable. So the kids will regress to the population mean of a hundred. So on average, they'll have a considerably lower IQ than their parents. And, and then secondly, there's this big distribution of scores. Kids in a family with the same parents have genetic scores that differ a lot.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Not as much as anybody, any random people in the population, but a whole lot. So that you can get kids in the same, in a family with the same parents where one is genetically, has got all the goods and the other doesn't. And this is really comes home to me because my, my sister never liked school. Never, it was late to learn to read, didn't like to read, still doesn't much like to read. Whereas I read early, not because my, my parents didn't have anything to do with this, neither of them went to high school. They just barely finished high school in the depression in the United States. So just on my own, I started reading even before I went to school. I got books from the library and I always loved school because it was easy. I was good at it and, you know, got rewards for it. My sister just didn't like it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  And yet we have the same parents, we have the same nurture. And people say, well, but you've got the same genes too, when we don't. We can show this now with the DNA. And, you know, I think it's an important point to recognize that when university educated parents have kids who don't wanna go to university. And it's like the end of the world. But then, do we wanna force kids in, you know, with all their different shapes into these round, this one round hole of this golden yardstick of academics? I think there's a big movement now away from that. So we might talk more about that later.

• 1:02:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's so interesting, that, that point, I, I never even realized that. You, as a set of parents, providing traits to your child, you're competing or you're sort of almost aggregating them against where the centre of that normal distribution for the population is. So if you're an outlier on either side of that, it's either going to drag down or drag up on average from wherever you are.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  Yes, and then the other part of it, though, is that there'll be a big range of your kids don't all have that one mean score.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  It's not everyone's 150 IQ.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, and I think that's hard for some parents to accept. Like with my sister, we thought, well, you know, she just wasn't trying hard enough. But, you know, again, it's appetites, she just didn't like it. You know, she just didn't like academic training. She went on to do a good life. She was a lab tech in a hospital. She didn't save people's lives by doing these blood tests very carefully. And, and she's very good with, you know, fine motor stuff. She just likes that and she's good at it. And the world's a better place for it.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  All right, so outside of genetics, what are the other influences on our behaviour? How do they slot together?

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  So you're talking about the 50% of the differences that aren't due to genetics. That's the other big story that we haven't touched on. Because psychology for a century just assumed everything's nurture. The way you are is the way your parents treated you.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  You know, I mentioned schizophrenia before, but also kids do well at school because they have parents who did well at school. Why is that? Well, the parents helped them to do well at school. It's all environmental. Well, now we know half of the differences are not are genetic. The half that aren't genetic are not what we thought they were. They're not due to these systematic effects of parenting. Two, they make two kids in the same family as different as kids in different families. So the environment's important, but it's not this nurture, the systematic effects of the environment that psychologists always assumed was so important.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  And I know it's hard to get your head around that, but you can see it in many different types of studies, but the easiest way to see it is adoptive families, a third of them adopt a second child. So these two kids are genetically unrelated to each other, but they grow up in the same family. Well, for IQ, siblings correlate about .3 in childhood, about .4 later on. How much do these adoptive sibs correlate? Because they grow up in the same family, they have the same parents. Zero. So that's, so the fact of growing up in the same family isn't making them similar, yet the environment's important. And what is it?

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  We call it non-shared environment. That is, it's something that's not shared. It's not shared by kids growing up in the same family. So you can start to think of things, once you start thinking this way, you gotta ask, what makes kids in a family different? And you can think of things like peers, you know, when your kids get into adolescence, you can see that makes a difference. Accidents, illnesses, things like that. But after 30 years of looking for these things, we haven't found them. So one of the points of my book Blueprint is I've come to conclude what's called the gloomy prospect. I don't think it's so gloomy, but it's just, it's the role of chance that of the important environmental factors are sort of idiosyncratic.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  You know, they're, we call it stochastic.

• 1:06:06Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean though?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Chance events. So I was thinking of Bill Clinton says he got into politics because at the age of 16, he shook JFK's hand, John F Kennedy's hand. And that just really made him say, I, you know, I wanna go into politics. I mean, maybe it's just a retrospective history, but there are events like that where, you know, when people do their autobiographies and they look back on their lives, they say, ah, that was a real turning point. That teacher at school, that biology teacher, or this event where I was humiliated in the playground, or, you know, there are these events that you can't just Measure because they're kind of unique to an individual at a particular time. That's what I mean by idiosyncratic. It's the sliding door sort of phenomenon.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  There's several current books out, current novels. One that I just finished today is called The Midnight Library, which is by Matt Haig, H-A-A-I-G. He was the guy who wrote, what is it? Twenty Reasons Not to Die. He's a depressive. But this book is about alternative endings. And you know how things could just change a little bit, but then that is a tipping point that leads to other things and it could end up very differently. Lionel Shriver's new book too is about that, about alternate endings in life. So I think, and there's a great book by Melvin King, who was the former Bank of England head,

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  that's called, not random chance, what is it called? Uh, shoot, I'm blocking it. It's a great word, but it's like super chance. You know, it's that we need to recognize that chance plays a much larger life role in life. Physicists are getting into this too. You know, the idea that things are essentially unpredictable at some level. And I think it's good for us to know that. Like in Matt Haig's book, the woman who wanted to commit suicide goes to this library and tries out alternate lives, ends up coming back to her own life, having realized that every life could go many different ways. And it's again, what we're talking about with meditation.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  It's all you've got is what you're experiencing this instant. Everything else is either a thought or a memory that came from, it's, you know, it's sensations. It's not you that created these things. These are just sensations in your brain. So, I don't know. Maybe I, I, I know you might think I've been taking some psychedelics or something.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I get it. I mean.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  I like it when these things all come together like that.

• 1:08:45Chris Williamson?

  I agree. Yeah. The synchronicity is beautiful and it lends credence to the theory as well. Right. That if you have these particular narratives that coalesce, it's the same as when people talk about Buddhism and Stoicism and Stoicism and meditation and New World Practice and Confucianism. You go, okay, well, if multiple different parties from different times, from different geographic areas with different cultures all arrive at similar sort of conclusions. You probably got a fairly good amount of backup that that might be right.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And that's why I'm, I'm resolved to get a sense of non-dualism. But I'm having a hell of a time. I mean, I've only been at it a few months, but I find it really difficult. But I'm beginning to see, at least Sam Harris is saying, you don't get it all at once, you know, it comes. Some people have an epiphany, but for most people you just get it a little bit more and a little bit more. But it's exactly as you say, I mean, every ancient philosophy comes up with this.

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  Dissolve the ego. There is no self. Yeah. Be present. Find happiness in the moment. Yeah. All of these different things. You're so, you're so right. So there's the, my favorite sentence in the entire book that I think kind of drives this home. So we've put people into a coffin. We've put a couple of nails in and then this is the dirt that goes on top, I think, saying, parents matter, but they don't make a difference. What does that mean?

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, I'm glad. I think, are you saying you liked it or?

• 1:10:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I loved it. I, this is, I live for this stuff. Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Right. Um, because, uh, that's the four pages in the book that have by far gotten the most attention. So much so that I was going to write another book that would just focus on genetics and parenting. Are you a parent?

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  But, um, uh, when you become a parent or you know, people who are parents, there are thousands, literally thousands of parenting books. They don't mention genetics, whereas I have no doubt that genetics is the single most important thing that parents need to know. That is, not that it's all deterministic, not that they can't do anything about it, but they have much less control over their kids' outcomes than they think they have. Because genetics is genetics and the environment isn't the environment we thought it was. It's not.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  If it's chance and stochastic events, idiosyncratic events, parents don't have control over that. So I think they need to relinquish control to a greater extent and to spend more time figuring out what their kid likes to do and what they're good at and helping them do it, rather than preordaining, my kid's gonna be an Olympic athlete or a professional musician. It's not that you can't do it, you know, the tiger moms, it shows you can make kids do stuff to a certain extent. But why? I think it's analogous to like, if you have a partner and you pick them because you say, well, it's some pretty good raw material here, but I'm gonna make them into what I really want them to be, you know, it's a disaster.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Because you have relationships because you love people, and when you love people, you want to do good things for them, you want life to be nice for them on their terms. And so same with kids, I think, you know, it's better to focus on your relationship, it's a long relationship. And some of this tiger parenting or helicopter parenting is counterproductive to the relationship. And so I just think it's better for parents to realize they don't have nearly as much control as they think they have, and it's better to go with the flow. It's not to say you can't change things, but it's awfully good to recognize what kids, their appetites as well as their aptitudes, and to help them do what they want to do,

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  to be like a resource manager, to give them opportunities to find out what they like to do. So, I'll get off the soapbox now.

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Is there a way to game the stochastic idiosyncratic model?

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's partly what meditation is about, is to realize that things that happen to you, they're just happening. There are these events in the world, they don't have anything to do with you, these are things that are happening. And, you know, you don't want to... Read too much into them. You just say, like the Stoics would say, this is a challenge. They talk about Stoic challenges. Instead of just saying, oh God, not again, this is happening to me. I've lost my job, or I have to go on furlough, I've got Covid. You know, you can take that and say, ah, life is crap. Or, the Stoics would say, think about it as a challenge, you know, and do, do what you can with what you've got, is their motto, and

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  do it now, and make a plan, and don't waste your time with negative emotions, because they don't do any good.

• 1:13:35Chris Williamson?

  I was talking more from the perspective of the parent. So let's say that this, there are these chance incidents which occur in young people's lives. They can shape them in unbelievably disproportionate ways. As a parent, presumably one of the things that you could look to do with your child, there would be a big difference between a parent who sends their child to the same routine, week in, week out, for 18 years, and a parent that encourages the child to do a bunch of different things. The outcomes have to be different for that child, because the number of opportunities for different idiosyncrasies

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  and stochastic inference events to occur is wildly different. The one that does go and do summer camp, and every summer for, you know, throughout all of the years of school, and the one who is encouraged to go to this sport and then this sport, as opposed to, you will be a boxer, you will be a this thing. Like, that has to have it. So what I'm thinking about is, for the parents that are listening, or for the people that want to have kids in the future, what are some of the ways that you think people could maximize that kind of stochastic advantage, I guess?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Well, it is, it seems like oxymoronic to talk about systematic, unsystematic events. This is what we're doing here. I think it's more important for parents to recognize, there's just shit happens and stuff will happen.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  And you know, some things, so what we're saying is these things are heritable and they don't show shared environmental influence much at all, especially for personality and psychopathology. And that includes these parents who are doing what you say, who give their kids lots of opportunities or don't. But again, it's what is rather than what could be. So if you want your kid to be a sprinter or a musician, you can get the best teachers around, you can do as much as you can do, but you gotta say at what cost, you know? And I don't think we do that enough. And to recognize you're better off going with the genetic flow than spending a lot of time figuring out how you're going to systematize chance, because you really can't.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  That's a really, really good takeaway. I use Tiger Woods as an example a lot because he had such an extreme childhood and has continued to sport through. But look at the externalities that he's had in his life, like just hugely public marriage failures, he's fallen asleep on the side of the road because he's been on antidepressant drugs, he recently rolled his car and broke like everything. So yeah, I think you're totally correct. The price that people pay for extreme performance within narrow domains that they may not have chosen themselves, especially when it's deployed on them by a parent in early life, you do not know the potential externalities, the cost, the suffering that's

• 1:16:31Chris Williamson?

  going to occur from that. And I love the idea of genetic flow of look, like I am here to provide resources, to be open, to move with the child, to allow them to do what they want. I have some wisdom, I can say, maybe trying to do free running off the top of a building at four years old is a bad idea, Timmy. Like maybe we'll, you know, there are certain things that you know that are better and are worse, but also, yeah, I love the idea of being sort of like a kite in the wind, right? You're holding the kite, you can let it out, you can pull it back, but you allow the kite to kind of choose its own direction based on where it wants to go.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  And you recognize that there's very different sorts of kites.

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  And first I was kind of figuring out what's what kind of kite you've got and what they like. You know, rather than in these parenting books are really, they're bad. I mean, you know, they want.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you disagree with most about the parenting books?

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  Just about everything. I mean, they mostly are all implying that parents are completely in control. And it's always by doctor so and so, so they appeal to authority, but they don't appeal to data. Very few of these books have any evidence base. There's a few now starting to come out, but parents think it's really bad for psychology because all you gotta do is go to the bookshop, pick up two books from that pop psychology shelf about parenting. And one will doctor so and so will say things very dogmatically about you must do this about sleeping and eating. And the other one will say things dogmatically too, but that are completely different. And neither one is based on evidence. And the evidence is that these things don't have much of an effect, partly because kids are so different.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  You know, what do you do about night waking? I say the answer is it always depends on the kid. And, you know, you sort of go with the flow of what works for you and the kid. You don't do things because some doctor so and so said, this is what you must do because you can bet it's wrong.

• 1:18:20Chris Williamson?

  That's a perfect example. You could create a lifestyle in which you, parent, are miserable and it, child, is also miserable because you're trying to fit into some preconceived idea that's been written down in a book.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  And you fail.

• 1:18:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you both have an absolutely miserable year or couple of years for the outcome to be the same in the end, in any case. But that's so it's this is and this starts to get us toward the reason that I felt it was liberating. Um, as long as you can avoid the nihilism and the fatalism, I think the liberation that you can get from this is is really strong. I want to put one final nail in the environmental coffin, which is some of the work that you did to do with schools and outcomes between different schools. And obviously being in the UK with us having such a formalized education system, key stages and the way that's, who's what's the awarding body? What's the company called?

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  Um, uh, what is it? Um, I'm blocking out NSQ. And anyway.

• 1:19:17Chris Williamson?

  Another one that I mean.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. I do. The ones that create these tests.

• 1:19:21Chris Williamson?

  When you were a kid and you came, no, no, the way they come around and they assess the schools and they say how well the schools are doing.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Oh, Ofsted.

• 1:19:26Chris Williamson?

  Ofsted, that was it. Yeah. Remember when you were a kid in school, if you were British in school, you used to have to be really, really well behaved and the teacher would award you afterward if you'd been super well behaved. So they gave the system.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Now they don't give you notice when they come, or they give you just notice of the day before.

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  No way. Is this like a random drugs test now?

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  It is, yeah. I mean, in fairness, you couldn't do a better job assessing schools. They interview the kids, the teachers, the janitors, you know, parents, they observe kids in the classroom, um, you know, which might be fake to some extent, but not when you don't have any notice about it. So I think they're very good ratings, but um, that's, that's getting, that's in aid of what you're about to say, right?

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So different schools, different outcomes. What did you learn by looking at that?

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, uh, well, I guess the main point here with Ofsted is that parents change their lives because of Ofsted. It's the essence of these school league tables and parents will move house and pay like a 15, 20% premium because that house is in a better catchment area. So no one had asked, how much of a difference does it make? We know there is average differences between the schools, but if you just take all the kids in the UK, thousands, thousands of kids, and you look at the schools that were in the Ofsted quality ratings they had, how much variance in the GCSE scores, say, just to start with,

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  is due to that? The answer is 4%. And if you correct for socioeconomic status differences, because kids are not randomly assigned to schools, some school districts have a lot more money than others, it's 1%. With DNA alone, we can explain 15% of the variance of GCSE scores. So it probably what that's about is that because Ofsted's been around for a while. We've gotten rid of the worst schools. So most schools are pretty much good enough. But then there are these private schools that have tremendous resources. Their kids do a lot better at GCSEs. But what we also showed is that there's no added value of these very expensive private schools.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  The kids get a whole higher average grade for GCSE. But it's a self fulfilling prophecy. They select the kids who do very well at school. They interview them. They get bright kids who are, you know, stable and motivated. It's a no brainer. These kids are going to do well at GCSEs. The question is, how much is added by the school? And the answer is about nothing. Now, maybe kids have a better life there and certainly have a lot more resources. But I really think we should get rid of private schools or make them not be charities unless they take like 50% of kids from lower, who are less advantaged, you know?

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  And that's the way these things started. The private, you know, what we call public schools here, but the fee paying schools. They started that way. They were going to get money from the rich ones to educate other people. And the Grammers, they were started very much that way. Giving kids a chance, you know, who couldn't, whose parents couldn't afford that. So I do think the selective school thing is bad because that gets you into meritocracy as well. And meritocracy only comes into the issue when you select. If you didn't select kids, you don't have to select on the basis of merit, which is a bad word. I mean, it's talent or skill because they don't merit anything. Genetics is a lottery.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  You know, the fact that you had a particular genetic hand at birth, nothing to do with you. That's just as much chance as these environmental events. It's all chance really. So it's not merit. But, well, we could go on and on about meritocracy. But the main point is if you don't have to select. Don't, and there'd be a lot of good things that would come from getting rid of selective secondary schools, which we don't have in the rest of Europe, really, nor in the United States.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  All right, so what we've talked about here is the implications of the other partner that you choose and your genetics really, really influencing the outcomes that your child gets, more so than the school that you choose, more so than the way that you bring them up, how many parenting books you decide to read, so on and so forth. What are the implications here for make choice then? Is DNA dating a thing?

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  Oh, it is. I mean, it was in the last five years or so, it's one of the hotter new things. There's like a 20 or so companies that add DNA to their dating sites. And the problem is that the DNA is very predictive, well, highly predictive of cognitive things, but for personality, it's not very predictive yet. And yet they're selling it as if this is the one objective indicator you have on dating websites. Now, there's, so it will happen eventually. I mean, and it is starting to happen now. I mean, if you, it's, it's got some advantages over just, you know, people's own statements, which God knows

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  how true they are. But there's a neat aspect to this. I just wanted to mention, it's DNA dating, but there's this famous biologist, George Church at MIT Harvard, who is setting up a dating service. Any couple that's about to get hooked up or thinking about having kids, if you send your DNA, which is just a cheek swab, you know, you just put this cotton bud in your mouth and, and you get a few cells there, he will do whole genome sequencing. That is not just looking at a few hundred thousand DNA differences, but all three billion base pairs of DNA. And the reason he's doing that is because

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  There are thousands of single gene disorders, but most of them thankfully are very rare. But with whole genome sequencing, we could determine the extent to which you and your prospective partner have the same mutation, because most of them are recessive, meaning you need a copy, two copies to show it. If you get one, you're a carrier. But you and your spouse will both be carriers for maybe a half a dozen or so of these very bad single gene disorders. You won't show it though, because you're just a carrier. And you won't show it if your spouse has different mutations. But what if you have the same mutation, then

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  your kids have a 25% chance of having that disorder. And you can then prevent it with in vitro fertilization or whatever. So, um, Askenazi Jews have done this for about 10 years now, and they've basically eliminated Tay-Sachs. You know, we already have to take, in the US, we have to take blood tests for sexually transmitted diseases and stuff. You know, so there is some testing that goes on. And I do think you won't even have to pass laws. I mean, if couples become aware of this, they'll find out and they'll do it, because they'll do it for free. And you have to agree to have your DNA be part of research, but you might as well be part of a, a good academic outfit than one of these

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  companies, you know, that sell your DNA for billions of dollars. So I do think that's something for people to consider, um, getting this DNA screening. Because in the past, you only find out about it when you have a kid who has the disorder. And then you go to a genetic counselor.

• 1:27:01Chris Williamson?

  It totally doesn't surprise me that DNA dating is a thing, because if we actually look at what the fitness signals are that we look for in a partner, all that we're doing there is using very, very hardwired in evolutionary signals to tell us that. So, for instance, David Buss, I absolutely love him, he's been on the show, friend of yours, um, he told me that symmetrical faces are genetically more difficult.

• 1:27:29Chris Williamson?

  To manifest that a symmetrical face is something aesthetically which pleases us. But also it's an indicator of fertility. So is more feminine features in a woman that if you have larger eyes, red, fuller lips, rosier cheeks. That is correlated with higher fertility. So all that you're doing now is as opposed to using the way that someone looks, which is quite a rough hewn. Statistic, you're peering underneath the hood and you're going, okay, so what are the contributing factors that actually create these traits?

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  But there's one big difference is that evolution is normative. We're talking about the human species. So we're talking about faces are more attractive when, you know, they're symmetrical or not. What I'm talking about is individual differences and that's called assortative mating. And in general, like attracts like, so taller people you can see tend to be attracted to each other. The correlation there is about point two. But do you know the trait that shows the greatest assortative mating is IQ? Its correlation is about point four, five. And so people who'd say, oh, there's no such thing as IQ. It's just what IQ tests may measure. They're doing it, they're measuring.

• 1:28:42Chris Williamson?

  Who's your partner? Yeah. What's your partner's IQ?

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  You see, I mean, you know, when you go to a singles bar or something within the first few sentences. I mean, you can sort of tell someone's verbal intelligence.

• 1:28:53Speaker 00

  And vocabulary alone is the single most heritable cognitive measure.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Pardon me?

• 1:28:59Chris Williamson?

  What percentage is that at?

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  It's about sixty, seventy percent heritable vocabulary, which is kind of neat because people say, how can that be heritable? You have to learn words. Well, the point I've been making is DNA is it, these genetic effects are never hardwired in. It just means you tend, I've got one grandchild who's a star at this. She, she wants to know everything about nuances of words. Why did you use that word and not that word? You know, and then I have other grandchildren who say, whatever, you know what I mean? You know, and who's going to get a better vocabulary? It's that one who's really keen on the, the language channel. So assortative mating is an interesting phenomenon and we could talk a lot more about it.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  But it is interesting that cognitive abilities is one of the most highly, the traits that show the most assortative mating.

• 1:29:51Chris Williamson?

  That's hilarious. So, rolling it forward, I don't want to get too deep into the sort of policy implications for this, but I'm sure that everyone that's listening has thought to themselves, "Okay, there's a lot of talk about equality of outcome at the moment", and that if you take what we've learned today and apply that to the world that we're in, you could actually roll forward to find a world where there was zero environmental inequality. But what that would actually cause is all of nurture would be out of the way, every difference would simply be due to genetics, and that seems super unfair as well.

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point. You know, it's equality of opportunity can be indexed by heritability, because as you say, if you get rid of all the things like privilege and wealth and access, you get rid of all the environmental differences, you don't get rid of the genetic differences. So of the differences that remain, they're going to be entirely due to genetic differences. And it's an interesting, especially in education, that's a really interesting principle, in a way, for people to get their heads around. So I'm glad you raised that point. But you said equality of outcomes, and the more fundamental point is that it's equality of opportunity that's important, but you're never going

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  to have equality of outcome. So you can give kids all the same environment, teachers in a classroom see this all the time, they're going to differ in their, how well they do, say, in terms of educational achievement. So equality of opportunity doesn't translate into equality of outcome. And in fact, as you say, if you achieve equality of opportunity, you actually increase the heritability of the outcomes.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  So if heritability is an index of equality, does this mean that as we improve societal conditions, people will become more and more entrenched in their social positions, and that social mobility will slow down? Have you thought about this?

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's sort of what we were saying before about genetic cast, people worry about this.

• 1:31:53Chris Williamson?

  Silicon Valley effect, yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  I was saying at a genetic level, parents of kids will have, on average, the kids will have a lower IQ than them, and there'll be a wide distribution. So as long as we have social mobility... downwards as well as upwards it will be okay but there is evidence to suggest that you know parents are able to use their wealth to help the kids who ordinarily wouldn't have done so well you know Galton who founded behavioral genetics in England in the late eighteen hundreds he had this phrase ability will out it means if you've seen really gifted kids like a musically gifted kid you almost can't keep them down I mean they don't have to have the best teachers in the

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  world they'll bang on pots they'll sing to themselves they'll hang out with friends who like music I mean now with Spotify and all of that you know there's no limit to what they can get on their own so ability will out but at the lower end it's a reasonable model of education to say we should really focus our resources on the lower end which is called the Finnish model where you do what it takes to get everybody up everybody up to minimal levels of literacy and numeracy because without that you really can't be a participant in our increasingly technological society so that's a matter of value you know but it is one way of handling this genetics it's teachers need to recognize kids are

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  different and they differ genetically doesn't mean you throw up your hands it just means you notice those differences you don't expect them to all do the same with the same curriculum and I think you put more energy into the lower end of the distribution because at the higher end ability will out now parents of gifted kids are going to be screaming at their screens now but you know I do believe that and sure you can help the kids at the higher end to give them even more opportunities but basically they'll probably do alright and if if you have to choose and maybe we don't but I'd say the resources really ought to go into the lower end of the distribution

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea where the biggest impact is can you make a smart kid smarter easier than you can make a dumb kid smart?

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  I hate to say the answer is probably yes. I mean, you know, you don't have to do much with the smartest kids and they'll just take off. So any program that comes even like Head Start in the United States, or what was it called here? Early Start or, you know, that program they had to take kids at three or four.

• 1:34:20Chris Williamson?

  Gifted and talented type thing, yeah.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  No, it was the other way. It was for kids with lower SES.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:34:27Speaker 00

  And in the States, it was called Head Start and it went on for 20 years or something like that. It began here about 10 years ago in England and it's pretty much fizzled out. And it's fizzled out because it was meant to give kids from disadvantaged environments a leg up. But instead, the middle-class families figured out the system and they got their kids in free. So, you know, again, it's.

• 1:34:50Chris Williamson?

  The bourgeoisie, man. They're a snidey bunch.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  So it is hard, but I think it's a worthy goal to think about helping the kids at the lower end because, you know, it just doesn't take much for the kids at the upper end to do well. You just sort of got to stay out of their way.

• 1:35:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's the implication of this? Someone's been introduced to what we've spoken about today, the fact that behavioral genetics is this huge kind of unseen, unspoken about influence on our outcomes in life, on our day-to-day experience. How has this informed the way that you lead your life and see life and the way that you tell your sort of research associates and your students as well to lead theirs?

• 1:35:33Speaker 00

  Well, I don't tell my, we do science, you know? We don't do personal counseling, I'm afraid to say. But it's a good question. I think that you can answer it at different levels, but it's just, I think the first step is just to recognize, I mean, maybe you don't, listeners don't accept it, but realize there's this huge body of evidence that says inherited DNA differences account for a lot of variance. In fact, is the major systematic force making us who we are, which is why my book is called Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. It should say as individuals. The environment's important, but I believe it's not these systematic effects we thought were important.

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

  So if DNA is the major systematic force making us who we are, we've got to pay attention to it. We ought to listen to our genetic whispers and realize we're all different. And partly meditation might help you think about who you are and. What you like and not being molded by what people want you to be or what you think you ought to be. And in the end, I think it will make people happier if they live more harmoniously with their genetic propensities. Again, it's not to say you can't struggle against them. You can. I mean, like alcoholism, no matter what your genetic risk for alcoholism, you cannot become alcoholic unless you drink a lot of alcohol over a long period of time.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  So, you know, if you stop drinking alcohol, you can't become alcoholic. So there are definitely things you could do. It's just like me and body weight, though. Easy to say that for people who don't have those genetic risk factors, but for those of us at the front line, you know, it's really tough. Coming home late at night, being tired and just saying, oh, there's a bag of crisps. And then it's gone.

• 1:37:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think I've been talking a lot about releasing the tiller, which is a term from Jed McCann's book Spiritual Enlightenment. And what he's talking about is the tiller attached to the rudder on a boat. A lot of the time, people grip it very hard as if steering more efficiently would get them through the current more easily. But when you actually just sort of release and relax and allow things to occur, but think about, think about the people that you love to watch on television or at a sports game or comedians up on stage or a dancer or even a friend that just has sort of this effortless social grace. What they're doing, they're not gripping the tiller. They're just there in the moment.

• 1:38:06Chris Williamson?

  I had a guy that focuses on the biology of flow, Stephen Kotler on the show not long ago. And he said that he thinks 10% of the entire world's GDP is people watching other people in flow, in one form or another, whether that be reading a book or watching a sports game or supporting somebody on TV or whatever that might be. And all of this, we talked earlier on about synchronicity and sort of different narratives coalescing. And it really feels like this to me, like there really is something to it. Just, I was given this cue ages ago by an embodiment practitioner that said, a lot of the time when we're focusing, especially on a screen, we lose the awareness of our peripheral vision. But for everybody that's listening now, if you just focus on where your peripherals

• 1:38:51Chris Williamson?

  are, whatever it is that you're doing, unless you're driving. And you just take one breath out and you go, oh my God, there is so much more here. I'm so much more relaxed. I'm so much more open to this. And I think that what you're saying here, using the genetic current, what do you want to be interested in? Like genuinely, what would, what would you like to do? You don't need to take society's preconceptions and norms and ideas of what you should be doing. Like your life can be lived by design, not default. And you can also do that in reverse. You can, you can have faith in the embodied version of you. That will drag me forward. And I think that confidence in ourselves should have been very much reinforced by what we've gone through today.

• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  Well, I really agree. That kind of brings us to a good point of closure, I think, with the philosophy as well as the psychology and the genetics. So it's been great talking to you. I really enjoyed it very much. There's so much more to say, but that's a, a good starter anyway.

• 1:39:45Chris Williamson?

  Robert, it's been absolutely awesome. Blueprint will be linked in the show notes below. Where can people keep up to date with the work that you're doing at the moment? Have you got a website or something like that?

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  Yep. And I'm easy to find, just Robert Plomin. And you can Google me and I have 900 papers and 12 books. So you can get sick of me pretty quickly. But there's a lot of new and exciting stuff that's happening, but mostly I do the hardcore science part of it. But it's an exciting field and I feel very lucky to have been in this field. Just on, on the rocket ride, you know, from where, when I started, psychology didn't accept genetics at all. And now most psychologists accept there's a strong genetic component. And then the DNA revolution came along where we can actually find the bits of DNA that predict these differences.

• 1:40:34Speaker 00

  So it's, it's been a great ride and it's lovely to see the science work out like that. But again, I was just there for the ride in a way. I mean, you know, and it's sort of what you're saying is, you know, if you're going with the flow, you can see, oops, I'm going that way. You know, you've got your hand loosely on the rudder. I'm a sailor, so I know exactly what he means. The boat actually knows better than you. If you hold it hard, the boat wants to go up and down the waves a little bit. But if you're making it go straight like that, it doesn't actually sail very well. So I think it's a good analogy, a good metaphor for life.

• 1:41:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, I appreciate you for dragging yourself out of the illustrious towers of doing research and coming to, going, coming into the trenches to talk about it. I think that stuff like this, it is without someone like you, like an academic communicator, intellectual, who's able to actually just get this stuff across in a way that people can understand. No, no one's digging into this research. It's so complex and it would be too far too hard. So you are doing awesome work and whenever whatever comes out next comes out, book number 325 or whatever it is, I will be harassing you to bring you back on. Robert, it's been so good. Thank you.

• 1:41:45Speaker 00

  Well, thank you, Chris.