A team of researchers from the University College London recently found that children's educational success depends on the genes of their parents, both inherited and not inherited. The study has been published in 'The American Journal of Human Genetics'.
Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the study confirmed that genes a person inherits directly are most likely to contribute to their achievements in education. But parent genes that aren't directly inherited, yet have still shaped parents' own education levels and subsequently influenced the lifestyle and family environment they provide for their children, are also important and can affect how well a person does at school and beyond.
Children resemble their parents because of nature (the genes they inherit) and nurture (the environment they grow up in). But nature and nurture effects are intertwined. Mothers and fathers each pass on half of their genes to their children, and although the other half of their genes are not passed on, they continue to influence the parents' traits and ultimately influence the traits in their children. For example, parents with a higher genetic propensity for learning may have a greater interest in activities such as reading that, in turn, nurture learning in their offspring.
This concept — when parents' genes influence outcomes for their offspring by shaping the environment that they provide for them — is called genetic nurture. It describes how parents' genes indirectly affect their children's characteristics.
For the current paper, researchers reviewed and analysed 12 studies in several countries and used a method called polygenic scoring to study the influence of millions of genetic variants on educational attainment in nearly 40,000 parent and child pairs. The researchers found that genetic nurture had about half as much impact on education success as genetic inheritance.
Genetic nurture effects captured by polygenic scores in the studies explained at least 1.28 per cent of the variance in educational outcomes, while direct genetic effects explained at least 2.89 per cent of the variance in educational outcomes.
The researchers said that the findings are underestimated given that polygenic scores only capture a fraction of heritability in educational outcomes; the actual genetic effects could be multiple times higher, but direct genetic effects would probably still be roughly double those of genetic nurture effects.
