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.
There are "genetic predispositions" to higher learning? Don't tell the eugenicists that...
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.
Before DNA analysis, anthropologists used language patterns as a signal of genetic relatedness.
But yes the key message is, there is geographic clustering at genetic level.
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!
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.
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.
To what extent can we tell this apart from the fact almost every university student leaves their hometown, to attend university?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...
NB Class traditionally in the UK is not mainly about money...
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.
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]"
It seems just as likely, more likely, that nepotism and legacy networks are responsible for the continuation of certain families maintaining their social class.
djoldman•2h ago
> ...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.
api•1h ago
I've also seen papers that talk about the fingerprint of past wars, genocides, and migrations on the genome.
mannykannot•1h ago