Can you blame genetics for your report card?
Hi everyone, Crystal Dilworth here with DNews. Were you born to be good at school? Well straight
up intelligence might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Studies are discovering a plethora
of other biological factors that influence our success in school and they say most of
them are heritable.
It seems obvious, to succeed in school you simply have to be born with intelligence,
and then the environment takes over and molds you into the upstanding citizen you’re going
to become. But scientists at King’s College in London are saying that’s not entirely
true, and other genetic factors may be more important than we first thought.
In a paper recently published in the proceeding of the national academy of sciences, researchers
made a controversial assertion that our performance on standard assessment tests is determined
by our DNA. In their paper they state “genetic thinking counters the deplorable tendency
to blame teachers and parents rather than recognizing that learning is inherently more
difficult for some children and that differences in children’s educational achievement are
more a matter of genes than schools or home environments” ... Wow…
They came to this conclusion by examining the performance of six thousand six hundred
and fifty three pairs of twins on a nationwide examination of academic achievement administered
in the UK at age 16 (the GCSE for you brits out there, if you live in the US just think
SAT). The twins were already registered in an early development study and so additional
genetic and cognitive information was available for study participants. Each pair of twins
lived at home with the same parents, so the researchers were able to control for environmental
factors and examine only the effect of genetic variation on exam scores.
Now here is where it gets interesting: the scientists broke the pool of twins into two
groups, identical twins (who share 100% of the same genetic composition) and fraternal
twins (who share only 50% of the same genetic composition) in this way they were able to
show that genetic similarity was a greater indicator of test performance, than a similarity
of home environment.
The study looked at the twins’ intelligence scores, but also confidence, personality,
self and parent reported behavior problems, and more, and they say that what on the surface
seems like an environmental influence, like behavioral problems, can actually be linked
to causal genetic traits like attention and extroversion or introversion.
Furthermore, they assert that education is not a passive process and children actively
choose what experiences they are exposed to. This link between experience and preferences
determined by genotype is known as genotype–environment correlation.
Obviously there is a lot that needs to get unpacked here, but this study introduces a
great nature vs. nurture issue. The authors clearly argue that nature, (genetic factors)
are more powerful and important than nurture, or environmental factors.
Personally? *I* think that genetics gives us a baseline, but doesn’t dictate how far
we can go.
What do you think? Are you team Nature or team Nurture? Subscribe to D News and let
us know in the comments down below! You can also come find me on twitter at Poly Crystal
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