hckrnws

Author here. Not sure why this turned up on HN today, but feel free to ask questions.

Please elaborate on this quote:

      Regional religiousness shows higher genetic correlations with personality (openness and conscientiousness) and less with SES and health traits than political preferences do, which implies additional dimensions of geographic clustering beyond high versus low SES.

I’ve been curious, for a while, about how our genes affect outcomes. There are kinda two extremes “blank-slate-ism” and “genetic-determinism”. I assume it is always some combination, with a lean in one direction or another.

I know the discussions are politically fraught. But if I understand the summary, your findings lean toward the determinism side. Is that fair? How do you think of the dichotomy? Thanks!

> But if I understand the summary, your findings lean toward the determinism side.

Absolutely not. I don't think any serious geneticist is a genetic determinist, in fact it's hard to even know what that means... DNA without an appropriate environment is nothing but a long stringy molecule!

In fact, the main impact of this paper was to help make geneticists aware that genes are confounded with geographic environments. That (plus much other research!) is one reason why researchers are now putting a lot of emphasis on family-based designs. In those, you can get truly causal estimates of the effect of a genetic variant or of a whole polygenic score, due to the "lottery of meiosis" that randomly give you genes from either your mum or dad.

Now you could equally argue that the paper shows geographic environments are confounded with genes. That's true too, though sadly a lot of social science still proceeds as if it wasn't the case.

doesn't the lottery of meiosis randomly give you genes from each pair of grandparents, thus ending up with one random maternal grandparent choice and one random paternal grandparent choice at each position pair (maternal contribution and paternal contribution) in each cell (of course recursively happening during creation of haploid germ cells within each person) ?

Yes. But if you're suggesting that you could treat differences with cousins as random, the way we can treat differences with siblings, then no, because of assortative mating; e.g. if my cousin's "good genes" came from my uncle, then maybe he married my very rich aunt who left my cousin a large inheritance.

:)

(wasn't suggesting that)

Due to chromosome crossover, you do not inherit genes individually from ancestors, but instead you inherit segments of chromosomes containing many genes.

However, the randomness is great enough that first cousins do share approximately 1/8 of their genes, second cousins 1/32, third cousins 1/128 and so on. The rapid decrease of shared genes among relatives in successive generations also means that if mating in a population is really random, the population rapidly becomes homogeneous.

It is only assortative mating which generates and maintains distinctive subpopulations.

Would things like past class distinctions show up in data like this?

Like say everyone tended to marry withing their own class at different points in history, they might tend to be more related to other people with ancestors in similar classes, than in societies that abandoned it.

Not endorsing it but would be interesting if past social systems affected DNA.

> Individuals who leave coal mining areas carry more EA-increasing alleles on average than those in the rest of Great Britain.

To what extent can we tell this apart from the fact almost every university student leaves their hometown, to attend university?

That is an extremely good question. It's certainly part of it. I don't know if we ever divided the subjects up by university degree, but one could do that. IIRC this paper looks at Estonia and finds that even within different levels of educational attainment (e.g. university degree) people with higher EA polygenic scores are more likely to move to the capital:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...

Some of the maps have places like Scotland and Wales showing up quite clearly - do you think that is real or an artefact of how the data was collected?

You mean the principal components of the genetic data? That's probably real. It's well known that they cluster geographically, just because people tend to mate with other people close to them. There might also be stronger effects at borders, due to endogamy within Scots/Welsh/English in the past.

There's a famous paper where they map the first two principal components of a bunch of humans and get a map of Europe out.

>they map the first two principal components of a bunch of humans and get a map of Europe

Interesting!

Can you provide a link to this paper?

Does the paper claim that genetics somehow drives geographic clustering? E.g. due to emigration of those carrying certain phenotypes?

I think the causality is more the other way round. Originally our title was "genetic consequences..." but we were asked to change it. If you look at the part of the paper with coalfields, UK coalfields were laid down about a million years ago, before humans ever came to the area. So that was, loosely speaking, an "instrument" for an environmental variation that might then lead to genetic variation (at area level!)

But yes the key message is, there is geographic clustering at genetic level.

I'm curious how much genetic geographic clustering could have influenced the baseline associations identified in the UK genome wide association studies you selected as a starting point (not sure they typically control for region when associating traits?), particularly with traits like conscientiousness and openness, which obviously can be influenced by polygenic factors, but are also highly influenced by regional cultural variation.

Migration and reassortment events in the US would include depopulation of Appalachian coal fields, the migration of farm kids from rural counties as farm size increased, and core city to suburban movement in rust belt cities as manufacturing decreased.

Most of my high school mates from a rural county who went to college never returned to a rural area. Those who stayed behind were disproportionately from the lower half of the class.

Related is how different social classes literally talk differently. People learn to speak from their relatives.

Before DNA analysis, anthropologists used language patterns as a signal of genetic relatedness.

There's an old documentary series from the UK where they sent kids from disadvantaged areas to the same schools as the wealthy. Took them all of a couple of months to pick it up and it would work in reverse too.

Yup. The physically, economically and socially mobile class is derived principally from people who moved from the working classes, mostly in the centuries following industrialisation.

The genetic divide goes more the other way - of course there’s going to be some positive selection for educational attainment/intelligence for people who left the village, but more generally the local populations are quite insular, migrate little (especially the ones who remain, of course - self-selecting), and have quite a few children, and in a population like that, you get genetic drift, resulting in more distinctive alleles compared to a generally larger mobile population, compared to the individual sedentary populations.

Where I live in Portugal this process has been going on for nearly a millennium - and you can tell if someone is from village X or Y 5km apart but separated by a river, just by looking at them - specific alleles get more and more prevalent in a small, largely closed population, quickly.

This doesn’t show that social mobility is broken - if anything, the opposite - it shows that a great many people have left the village and joined the mobile elite.

Social class is genetic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)

"The book follows relatively successful and unsuccessful extended families through the centuries in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile. Clark uses an innovative technique of following families by seeing whether or not rare surnames kept turning up in university enrollment records, registers of physicians, lists of members of parliament, and other similar contemporary historical registers. Clark finds that the persistence of high or low social status is greater than would be expected from the generally accepted correlations of income between parents and children, conflicting with virtually all measures of social mobility previously developed by other researchers, which Clark claims are flawed. According to Clark, social mobility proceeds at a similar rate in all of the societies and in all the periods of history studied – with the exceptions of social groups with higher endogamy (tendency to marry within the same group), who experience higher social persistence and therefore even lower social mobility.[1][2]"

I don’t agree with the author’s/your use of genetic here, which to me implies that it is somehow embedded within the individual itself, and would have the same results in any scenario.

It seems just as likely, more likely, that nepotism and legacy networks are responsible for the continuation of certain families maintaining their social class.

That's an obvious alternative hypothesis, but Greg Clark has done quite a lot to support the genetic hypothesis, though never directly with genetic data IIRC.

I haven’t read the book so I am not familiar with his specific argument.

However he’s an economist, not a geneticist. And the description of the book on Amazon focuses on last names and ancestry, not genetics.

https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/...

This book looks to me like it’s arguing that social policies don’t do much to affect familial networks, not that it’s arguing that the elites all have magical genes that keep them on top.

I have read the book, and also several of his other papers :-)

Okay, in that case can you give a summary of why the data doesn’t show family networks and weak wealth redistribution policies aren’t the reason for why certain family names stay in elite classes?

Family names are not as strongly correlated with genetics as you might be assuming.

Consider that for each generation the genetics of the family founder are diluted by 50% (assuming that consanguineous relations are excluded). So after 5 generations or so, only ~3% of the heirs' DNA is specific to the family founder.

So, the fact that names per se better predict outcomes than DNA very strongly points to social factors as the major determinants.

Having quickly scanned the paper.... it does not appear to have studied social class, but educational attainment and geographic mobility. Further, for the genetic correlation with educational attainment r^2=0.06 (Fig. 2) which is perhaps not exactly a high correlation?

Related commentary on societal and genetic interplay https://archive.vn/wSqd8

It would be interesting to compare this to former communist countries. Personally I live in a modernized “commie block” style building in one such country (as a foreigner) and I very much appreciate the fact that residents come from a wide variety of social classes. There is certainly still a class system here, but it definitely is orders of magnitude less embedded than in Britain.

Wish granted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...

Well it’s in Estonia but isn’t really what I meant, as it’s comparing urban and rural, as far as I can tell. I am interested in the idea that urban design which brings social classes together (in cities) has some (or doesn’t) effect on genetic distribution. Maybe it does, or maybe the intellectuals end up pairing up with intellectuals anyway.

The way I look at is: almost nobody claims to be working class, there are so few actual upper class people so we are all middle class!

NB Class traditionally in the UK is not mainly about money...

I think this is a middle class viewpoint, actually. The actual working class people I know are not really that concerned with presenting themselves as middle class, unless they were raised middle class and don’t want to appear as having fallen into the lower class.

Oh yes - I wasn't being entirely serious - and of course the upper classes don't care about any of it!

The modernized "commie block" sounds like the average London street, except with fewer nationalities represented. The extent of the class system in the UK gets exaggerated. We had some very serious people care about it a lot in the not too distant past, but as others have pointed out nominal social class isn't actually coupled that closely to incomes nowadays, and ethnic and regional identities and are also typically stronger and associated with at least as much stereotyping, and it's not like many other countries don't have similar stereotypes based on occupations/accents/tastes/incomes that map neatly to 'social class' whether they use that term or not.

Looks like the urban/rural divide in incomes and politics is actually stronger in quite a few ex-communist countries. Agree it would be interesting to see to what extent that's represented genetically, though I guess the picture is complicated by the amount of ethnolinguistic minorities eastern Europe has.

Abstract

> ...Here we investigate the geographic clustering of common genetic variants that influence complex traits in a sample of ~450,000 individuals from Great Britain.... The level of geographic clustering is correlated with genetic associations between complex traits and regional measures of SES, health and cultural outcomes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that social stratification leaves visible marks in geographic arrangements of common allele frequencies and gene–environment correlations.

Social stratification affects who people choose to have children with, with people usually preferring and/or being restricted to their own strata. Seems obvious this would leave artifacts in the genome similar to geographic isolation of different groups.

I've also seen papers that talk about the fingerprint of past wars, genocides, and migrations on the genome.

Agreed, but this puts numbers on it.

TLDR:

This study analyzed genetic data from ~450,000 British individuals and found that genetic variants associated with traits like educational attainment, personality, and health are geographically clustered across Great Britain, with the strongest clustering seen for education-related genes. The researchers discovered that people with genetic predispositions for higher educational attainment tend to migrate away from economically disadvantaged areas (like former coal mining regions), while those with lower genetic predispositions are more likely to remain in or move to these areas. This migration pattern based on socioeconomic factors has created visible geographic clustering of trait-associated genes that correlates with regional differences in education, health, income, and even political voting patterns - essentially showing how social stratification leaves genetic "footprints" on the geographic landscape.

So, "brain drain" is real?

There are "genetic predispositions" to higher learning? Don't tell the eugenicists that...

There are genetic predispositions for everything.

Your genes are what separate you from being a dog, so if you can do something a dog can't, like reading, you were predisposed to doing so by your genes.

You might think it's not like that, and there's some sort of discontinuity in it, but there's a genetically smooth way to arrive at the ancestors of you and a dog.and there is the exact same sort of genetically smooth way to go between any two humans, just with a much shorter path.

(2019)

Tabula Rasa bros... our response?