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How our social structures shape our DNA – and vice versa
If society is shot through with genetic influences, how should social inequality be addressed?
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Variations across hundreds, even thousands, of genes are combined into a “polygenic score” that captures the estimated heritability of a trait.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: UNSPLASH
Anjana Ahuja
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Genetics does not get much of a look-in when it comes to the social sciences. That is a legacy from the dark days of eugenics, when researchers like Francis Galton thought genius was hereditary and the future of humankind should lie exclusively in the hands – and wombs – of the elite.
But the omission, an international team of researchers suggests in a new analysis, glosses over a truth about the way societies are stratified today. Even though a person’s socio-economic status is broadly thought to reflect the influence of their environment, it cannot be neatly divorced from biology – and from genetics, in particular.
