TRIGGERnometry - How Your DNA Made You Who You Are - Robert Plomin

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

SPONSORED BY:  *Ridge Wallet* Use Code “TRIGGER ” for 10% off your order at https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER Robert Plomin is a geneticist and psychologist best known for his work in twin studies and behaviour genetics. He is the author of many books including, most recently, 'Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.' Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think the DNA revolution hasn't quite sunk in. This isn't like a lot of medical things. You know, if you ever know, you hear of a discovery and they say, in 10 years this is going to be big, that means they have no idea if it's going to happen. If they say five years, it means maybe it'll happen. But the point about this is it's happening now. And this is really transformational. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It does not get any more fascinating than the brilliant guest we have for you today. He is a geneticist and the author of Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. Professor Robert Plumann, welcome to Trichonometry. Thank you very much. I'm really pleased to be here. Oh, we are so grateful to have you here. We can't wait for the conversation we're going to have. Before we do, though, tell everybody a little bit about your story through life. You've written this great book, of course. You're one of the most cited people in your field in the world. You've done incredible studies with twins. tell us about your life, your academic career, the history of how you are here talking to us? Well, that can take us a few hours. I'll try to give you the two-minute version of it. I've been doing research in this area for 50 years.

And when I started back in 1970, in psychology, you couldn't really talk about genetics, given Nazi Germany, and the fact that psychology was completely environmentalistic, the idea that everything we are is what we learned, what our mothers did to us in the first few years life. And so it's been very rewarding for me to see over the 40 years as data piled up and convinced most reasonable scientists and I think society as a whole that genetics is important. You know, I haven't been called a Nazi for 30 years probably. But back when I started, it was really dangerous professionally and politically to even talk about genetics. So that's been really rewarding to see. And that's why I wrote this book a few years ago, because after 50 years of

research in this field where I was kind of keeping my head down, I'm kind of embarrassed to say, because I wanted to do the research. I didn't want to get distracted, so I didn't respond to people who attacked me, you know, because I thought in the end, if psychology is going to be a science, it'll be convinced by data. So keep your nose down, collect the data, and that really did happen, you know, so much data piled up that any reasonable person looking at this amount of data from adoption studies, twin studies, now DNA studies, you just can't ignore the importance of genetic differences between people. So that's what my book is called, Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, and there's a lot to say

about that, you know. You sort of have to start in media res, you know, where there's so much background you have to try to fill in because nature, nurture makes us who we are, not as humans. We're talking about why we differ between each other, and we've got three billion base pairs of DNA that we inherit from our parents. we're only talking about the 1% that differs between us because that's what makes us different. So there's so many things like that to talk about and maybe we'll get into that as the conversation goes along. But is that enough of a... Oh, absolutely. Well, we'll get to that right away.

But actually, just very quickly, you mentioned, you know, not being called bad, terrible things for a while. What has, you know, you've been in that sphere for 50 years. How have you observed some of the sort of ebbs and flows of the ability to freedom of research and freedom of expression and that sort of thing in academia. Yeah, well, I'm puzzled by the current culture of academia. I don't know where that came from because I was always interested in science because you can explore anything and as long as it's empirical and there's issues like religious issues that, you know, you really can't tackle empirically. But I want to study things that are tractable empirically and then you have your view, I have mine, that's fun, let's do research, and figure out which, who's right?

You know, so that's the sort of stuff I'd like to do. And so it's been appalling for me to, well, when I was in the States, there was a rise in the religious right and you couldn't talk about God issues, not a big deal, but I felt it was less open and that bothered me a lot because, you know, if university should be anything, they should be a place where you can talk about anything, you know, as adults, you know, which is what I like about this podcast so much. I'd like to see you two guys disagree with each other and show people, you know, you can disagree about some pretty profound things and, you know, still be friends and actually enjoy the discussion. So I, in the early 90s, I had an opportunity to come to the UK and my wife

at that time was British and tried living in the States and didn't like it. And I had this view from my time, we spent most of our summers in Britain, and I got to, you know, she was from Cambridge, and so I got to know quite a few people. And I had the feeling that things were more open in the UK. And I have now come to realize that's only because Americans are not subtle, you know, and that it's more Chinese whisper stuff, you know, whereas in America, it's right in your face, you know, people coming up and disagreeing with you. So I don't think it's as open as I thought. it was but I'm at a place at the Institute of Psychiatry, it's some of the brightest people I know and there you really can talk about anything. So from a

genetics point of view I went from not being able to talk about genetics to now being asked to give talks to public groups and lots of people about genetics. So everyone seems to be interested in genetics and I don't know if I'm polyanish about it but I think it's partly because the data has just built up. I could have wasted my time, I think, trying to argue with people. But as a scientist, I thought, no, it's better. Just take a long view of it and collect the data and hope that it stays in empirical science. We're in the end data rules, you know?

And so I think that's kind of spread into society. The other thing that's come along that's been huge in the last 20 years is the DNA revolution. Because you can argue about twin studies, adoption studies. You can't argue with DNA. When you show that this bit of inherited DNA relates to that trait, what can you say, really? So for all those reasons, I think science has certainly become not just accepting, but really enthusiastic about genetics.

It's one of the hottest areas in the life sciences now. But I also think in society as a whole, when my book came on, I was really worried about the reception. And when I gave these public lectures, You know, people were very keen on it. I didn't get any flack, you know, whereas people thought I was going to get clobbered when I went to these talks. Well, some of your friends said it's a suicide note. Yeah. And I really didn't know how it was going to come out, you know, because I've spent, I've never been so open about it. You know,

after 50 years, I decided, you know, at my age, what have I got to lose? I'm just going to tell it like it is, you know? Tell it as I see it, which I think is the way it is. And so I was really pleased that the public reception was very good. The flack I got was more from academics, and my work is on cognitive development, so it touches on education, and education is still the backwater of really anti-genetics still. It's like psychology 30, 40 years ago,

where there's just a knee-jerk reaction against genetics, somehow thinking that if genetics is important, then features are useless. You know, I mean, where if they knew anything about this, they'd realize that's not at all true. Clinicians used to think that in psychology. Genetics is going to put them out of business, but it puts them in business in a way. I mean, if you can say, well, this disorder is different from that disorder, and maybe people who have a strong genetic propensity for vulnerability might respond to treatments differently,

maybe drug treatments or cognitive behavioral therapy. So I think education will go that way, event. But boy, it's slow going. And that's where I got the hostility more than any other area. Not from teachers so much, though. More from the academics. Do you know? So I know that's a very long-winded way of saying, I don't really know. But it's so interesting you bring up education, Robert, because everyone will drink now. But as a former teacher. Oh, right. So I remember talking to one of my head of department or head of years, I can't remember what it was, or the deputy head. And they went to me, Francis, why is it that this cohort hasn't done as well as your previous cohort? Your previous cohort did

really well, but this cohort not as well. Why do you think that is? And I went, well, they're just not as smart. And he just looked at me absolutely horrified. You can't say that. But we all have different capabilities. And that is genetics, isn't it, really? Yeah. Yeah. I think when you talk to teachers, not to higher level people or academics in education. You can't teach 30 kids in a classroom and not notice that some kids learn, you've just got to stay out of their way and they're going to learn lots of stuff.

Whereas other kids need a lot more help to just get up to minimum levels of literacy and numeracy. And so I think we did a survey of teachers and how they feel about genetics. And although they get no genetics in their training, they don't even know about genetics other than a few very rare single gene mutations, which they'll never see, you know, that they don't get anything about genetics, yet they're quite, they accept the idea of genetic

differences. And they don't know much about it, but in general, they're willing to say, you know, as you're suggesting, that kids do differ. And to assume that those differences are only due to the teachers, or if you can't blame the teachers, you blame the parents, if you can't blame the parents, you blame the kids, or lazy or whatever. But, you know, it's so important to recognize and respect the fact that people differ and they differ genetically.

And that doesn't mean you give up. To the contrary, you know, it depends on your views, but it could be, and you say, well, we need to put, this is called the Finnish model in education, put all the resources needed to get everybody up to some minimal levels of literacy and numeracy so that they can participate in society. And, you know, Galton, who founded, Francis Galton, who's also a bad, name right now because of eugenics, but he started this field of genetics of human behavior and especially cognitive development. He said, ability will out, meaning you don't have to do much.

You kind of have to stay out of the way of if you seem like musically gifted kids or mathematically gifted kids. They don't need the best teachers in the world. They're just going to pick it up themselves. And with the internet now, you know, there's no stopping these kids. So I think the teacher's perspective on this is really good. Because the problem with parents is they only see a couple kids. In your case, three kids, is it? I've just got the one. Oh, right.

Just born a few weeks ago. Oh, right. I haven't seen much personality yet. I see. Well, there's a lot. But I take your point. I take your point. As a parent, you only see your kids.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, kids are different from adults. And, you know, if you ask them about their kid, they, oh, very active. Well, actually, you know, this kid's kind of a vegetable. I mean, it's a person about it. Whereas if you're a teacher and you see all these kids and you say this kid is really hyperactive, you can believe it.

But the thing that I always found interesting looking with kids is that you'd get kids from the same family, yet they're completely different. Exactly. And genetically, you go, well, they can't have the same father, they have the same mother, yet one kid is super bright. You don't know that. That is true. That is true.

Same father anyway. Same mother. And you have, so you see one kid who's super bright. bright and then the other one who comes along and it isn't as bright. And in many ways, we do those kids a disservice because then we compare them to the brother and the sister and they go, why aren't you like them? Exactly right. Well, there's a great saying that parents are environmentalists until they have more than one kid. So I know you're not an environmentalist. You don't think everything comes from what the parents do to the kids or that sort of thing.

But most parents, the problem with environmental theory is you can explain anything. So if If you're, is it a daughter, son, son, is shy, say or something, you can always explain it. You can say, oh, you didn't take him out enough when he was young or whatever. But then you have a second child and they're so different as you're saying, Francis. But genetics predicts that kids are different because they're 50% similar genetically, but that means they're 50% different genetically. And so when you have more than one child, you really see it because shyness is one of the most heritable characteristics in infancy.

And given that, if you have one child who's very shy, chances are the other one will be less shy. And, you know, you see these differences in personality. And you say, I didn't do that. And so that's why they say parents are environmentalists generally until they have more than one child. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore.

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To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to ridge.com forward slash trigger. That's ridge.com forward slash trigger and use our special code, which is, of course, trigger. So let's get into the core of your work because it's absolutely fascinating, so interesting in terms of understanding how we differ and why we differ and who we are. You talked about how teachers may not be taught genetics. What should they be taught? What should we all be taught about genetics at a base level as a society so that we understand ourselves and our friends and partners and other people, strangers, better?

And ourselves, yeah. That inherited DNA differences are the major systematic force making us who we are as individuals. And that has a lot of ramifications. But one part of it that's really important is we have less. control over our children say, then we think we do. Not just because of the genetics, but genetic research has shown the environment works very differently from the way we thought it worked. The environmentalism was dominated by the idea of nurture, that the way kids develop is the

way their parents treat them. A lot of it was mother blaming. If a kid becomes schizophrenic, you don't find out until they're 20 or so. And then you're told this because of what you did in the first few years of life, which as wicked as it can be, right? Because you did it, but you can't change, can't go back 17 years and do it differently. And it was wrong.

There's no evidence that that's what it's about. The environmental influences are important. They account for the other half of the differences between us. In all traits, psychopathology, cognitive abilities, personality, all these traits are about 50% we say heritable. That is, where the differences are caused by inherited DNA differences. The other half is environmental. but it's not due to these systematic family effects.

Whatever it is, it's making two kids in the same family as different from each other as kids in different families, even though, as you say, they have the same parents. That's probably what it's about. You know, the parents, they might be treating the kids differently, but it's more likely it's idiosyncratic, you know, stochastic sorts of factors, chance, basically. So that's a double whammy for parents,

because first, you don't have as much influence as you think you do because genetics is the major systematic force. And the environmental side, you don't have the levers to pull either because it's mostly chance. So this is a great talk for a new parent, isn't it? There's nothing you can do. I was going to make that, Joe, but it seemed insensitive. No, but that's it, you know, that is the point. So does that mean, as a parent, you just give up and say, I can't do anything? Right.

But to the contrary, you know, it just means if you, if, I'm sure you're not, you don't think, this, but there's a lot of parents, especially, you know, yuppie parents who, you know, are waiting until they're in their 30s or whatever, and then they have their precious kid, and they're so concerned about making one false move that's going to screw the kid up for life. And the other thing I see is that a lot of people still, they know it's wrong, but deep down, they still think the kid's a blob of clay, that they're going to mold to be what they wanted to be. And that doesn't work, because you don't do that. far better is to say, like with your spouse or your friends, you don't do nice things for them

because you want to make them into something you want them to be. You do it because you like them. And I think it's really important, it sounds cheesy, but it's important for parents to lighten up and to say, you don't have as much control as you think, but what that means is you do things for the kid because you want to make them happy. You want life to be nice for them. You're not trying to make them into what you want them to be. And, you know, imagine if you did that to your spouse, you'd say, well, this person's not too bad, and I can shape her up to be the way I want her to be.

You know, and that's a disaster, right? You do nice things for people you love because you love them and you want life to be nice for them. So that doesn't mean, you know, you let your kid do whatever they want to do. You say, no, if we go to a friend's house and you act like an ass, you know, it's not going to be nice. And it's going to make all of us kind of unpleasant. And why do that, you know? So I think the relationship is probably more important. and it's the longest relationship we have in life with our children.

And the idea that you're going to mold your kid is really counterproductive to that relationship in a way. Far better to give the kid opportunities to find out what they like to do and then help them do what they like to do. Because increasingly, I don't think it's aptitudes as much as appetites. Do you know? I mean, they go together, sort of. But what determines what people do in life is more a matter of, I don't know, I just do it because I like it, sort of.

and that what you like to do, you do it more and you do it better, and you get better at it. The aptitude almost follows from the appetite. I don't know about you guys, but when I ask friends, what is it, why are you doing what you're doing? When you get down, people can tell you a story about it, but very often it's chance sort of stuff and sort of like, I don't know, I just kind of like doing it.

Like, I can't imagine liking to do comedy. I mean, that would be my worst nightmare, having to go up on a stage and try and tell a joke. I can never tell a joke. I can never remember a joke. I lose the punchline. I'm just not really, I guess, interested. You know, I love comedy, right?

But, I mean, I'm just not interested in producing comedy. Like, I'm not interested in producing high-level music as well. But I love music. I listen to music all the time. It's that sort of thing. It's so interesting what we're talking about. And this is a question that I really wanted to ask you. Because the more I read about your work, the more I researched it, the more I thought, is free will an illusion?

Are we just completely determined by our genetics? I like to think I've got free will. But you just go, a lot of the stuff I've done, is that just my genes? Well, the free will issue is a very big issue philosophically. But say just, and, you know, like Sam Harris and people are saying no such thing as free will, all determined, but this is a rabbit hole in a way. I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff there. But from a simple genetic point of view, I would say it's almost the opposite. Like, now that we have, with the DNA revolution, we have these polygenic scores. So I can predict

genetic risk from birth. So in my book, I present the world's first profile of these genetic risk scores for things like obesity, for example, or schizophrenia. And, My highest risk score was for obesity. And so people might be surprised to learn that body weight, obesity is nothing more than high body weight. It isn't like a disease or a disorder. It's a perfectly continuous distribution. So by having a high, well, first people might be surprised to learn how heritable individual differences in weight are. When we've done surveys, people think height, highly heritable.

Weight, nah, it's just free will. People who have problems with their weight, you know, they just need to get a grip, pull up their socks, you know. But it turns out it's about 60% heritable, meaning the differences between people in their body weight are 60% of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. So where this comes back to your question is, I have this high, like I'm at the 94th percentile of this genetic risk,

but I'm at the only 70th percentile of actual body weight. You know, that still gives me a BMI near on the cusp of obesity, really. But you're doing quite well given your genetic inheritance. Well, that's it. And instead of me giving up and saying, I'm destined to be a genetic fatty, I can't do anything about it, I find for that and for many other genetic risks, like heart disease or whatever, it actually motivates you to do better.

So I know that my weight isn't a matter of, you know, the, every year, it's invidious. You know, I put a few pounds on every year, but the problems they don't go away. And so by recognizing I'm in this kind of battle of the bulge, it's a lifelong battle. And so what I do is I arrange my environment. I just can't have junk food in the house. You know, with the best of intentions, you know, come home late one night, and those crisps start talking to you. You know, just one crisp, you know, and then the whole bag's gone. And, you know, you could say, I could have the self-control, but, you know, life, you kind of live it on the fly and things happen and sometimes you lose that.

And other people wouldn't have that sort of, those crifts they could leave on the shelf, you know. I just can't have them in the house. So I've learned that. I can't have biscuits in the house and stuff like that. And I still have to struggle with it, but it helps me to know I've got this genetic propensity for, for putting on weight. So I think weight is a good example of what you're talking about. Just because it's heritable doesn't mean there's nothing you can do about it.

And no trait is 100% heritable. Body weight is, you know, at the higher level, is 60%. Most traits are about 50% heritable. Personality about 40%. So there's still a lot of non-genetic influence, but as I said, those influences are largely champion. and idiosyncratic. But you can take advantage of those probably and say, you know, I'm going to work hard to keep my weight down. I could definitely work harder at it. But, you know, I'm only willing

to give that so much energy in my life. Plus, I love food, you know? And so... That was a strong yes, there for you, you know. Yeah, that is, yeah. So we've been talking about the inheritability of obesity and as a man who struggles with his weight. Thank you for telling me it's not my fault. I really appreciate that. We're going to have to up the fat shaming, mate. But what about addiction? Well, one thing, one common, one rule sort of is after 50 years of research is everything's heritable, but nothing's 100% heritable. So the work on addiction suggests it's moderately

heritable, you know, in general about 40% heritable. And people are trying to get genetic predict DNA predictors, we call them polygenic scores because these aren't, these genetic influences aren't due to a handful, they're not due to one gene or a handful of genes. They're due to thousands of genes with very tiny effects. And you can put them together in what we call a poly, multiple genic score, to predict behavior like alcoholism. And so they're not as strong as the predictors we have for, say, cognitive ability or school performance. But they're getting better all the time, and they're getting better by having bigger and bigger studies. The first study that was done was called the Welcome Trust Case Control Consortium Study in 2007.

And they had 2,000 cases of seven disorders, you know, like the big ones, like hypercholestrolemia, and, you know, six other disorders with 2,000 patients. And at the time, that was just thought, you know, mammoth samples. Well, now that wouldn't get published. It's gone to 20,000, 200,000. And in my area, cognitive, the latest study published last month is based on 3 million people. Wow. And the reason for that is if the effects are so small that you need huge samples to detect the effect, I don't know if people will understand that.

No, no, they will. If you had a single gene disorder, you know, you only need one family to find it. So that's been the, that's been what we've been up to in the last 10 years, getting bigger and bigger samples. Where collaborations among sometimes hundreds of studies, many hundreds of investigators, you know, where page after page of authors on these papers. But it's kind of cool in a way that people realize their sample, which they've struggled to collect for decades. is worthless because it doesn't have the power to detect these effects. So all they can do is throw their lot in with everybody else.

But it makes for much better signs, really. Yeah. So, Robert, we've talked about some of the more physical things, like obesity and perhaps addiction. People would argue has a strong physical component. I want to go to psychology in a second. But first of all, what about something as strongly related to identity as, say, sexuality? The narrative in society, which is frankly one that I'm,

I'm sort of invested, not invested in, but one I go with, is that, you know, if you're gay or straight or buy or whatever it is, that's 100% genetic. There is no environmental influence. How true is that? Well, in this research, the first twin studies and then adoption studies were done on sexuality 30 years ago or so, that wasn't the prevailing view. I mean, it was more that it was a matter of lifestyle choices and how your mother treated you in the first few years of life. So the research coming out showing that there's genetic influence on it, not real high genetic influence, moderate genetic influence, that created quite a storm. And then when someone said they found a gene on the X chromosome that's related to that, which turns out not to be true,

that really up the ante a bit. So people were not, you know, they were quite hostile to the idea, but the gay community liked it because, you know, it wasn't just a lifestyle choice, and they were making life difficult for their parents and other people or whatever. So it's interesting to hear you say that you think if we did a survey now, most people would think that it's very highly heritable. I have no doubt that most people would answer that way, yeah. Yeah. I worked at an adolescent treatment center where we had several boys who were gay,

and they were almost in the treatment center because they were gay, and they created such problems in their life. This is back in the 70s. But their stories were they just knew from early on. Right. you know and so I tend to agree with you but um it's it's a difficult thing to study because even now I think people aren't totally open about their sexuality I think but anyway the data that exists not surprisingly suggests there's some genetic influence but it is not it's not at all 100% heritable

I mean it's a long way from that but there might be chance factors involved as well and you know one One way to get at this is with identical twins because they're, that's what the twin studies about comparing identical called mono-zygotic twins. It's the same fertilized egg, so same sperm and egg combined to create this embryo and it splits in the first few days of life. So these are genetically identical individuals. If you sequence them, they have the same DNA, both individuals. So to what extent are they different?

And for homosexuality, can we call it homosexuality? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a worry about, I can't keep up with terms. But for identical twins, they're only, I think, about 60% concordant for her sexuality. What does that mean, Robert, concord? The same. So if one, if you find one identical twin male who's gay, what are the chances that the

other identical twin are gay? And certainly not 100%. Wow. But then people say, you know, well, but maybe if you grow up with someone who's a, you People confuse you all the time if you're an identical twin. The easiest way to tell if a twin is identical or not is one question. When you were growing up, that people have trouble telling you apart. Sure.

Because that aggregates a lot of characteristics, height, weight, hair color, which is all identical for identical twins. So it may be that by having this identical person around, maybe you forge a separate identity or something like that. But I don't know. I mean, there aren't any traits, complex traits that are 100% heritable. So it doesn't surprise me that identical twins differ. I mean, they're not always the same for sexual preference.

Wow, that's really interesting. And so moving on to psychology now, which is obviously an area you focused on heavily in your work, how heritable are things like political beliefs, for example, cultural positions, things of that nature? Yeah. World views, if we might describe it that way. Well, people are surprised if everything's heritable. And people were surprised, though, to find out that attitudes are also heritable.

Now, unlike a lot of other traits in psychology, attitudes, especially political attitudes, and religiosity, shows some influence of the nurture, of the family in which you're brought up. But they're also substantially heritable. And that still bothers people, I think. But, you know, there's so many studies now showing that. it's incontrovertible. But it's common sense, isn't it, Robert? Like, we hear all our lives when we're talking.

They'll say, or you just remind me just of your grandfather when you do that or of your mom when you say it that, when you say that thing. You're just like your dad when you do this. Yeah. It's common sense, isn't it, really? I mean, you could say that's environmental, though, couldn't you? You could, yeah. Yeah, but what's impressive with these identical twins are rarely reared apart,

but there's several hundred pairs that have been found that have been reared apart. There's a famous Minnesota study that brought identical twins who had been reared apart until adulthood. They bring them together for the first time and keep them together for a week and test them on something like 50,000 bits of information. And it's amazing when you see them first come together. I mean, it's like mind-boggling. Or there's a film that won one of those film awards. It's a documentary film called Three Identical Strangers. So that's a more recent example of just this identical triplets.

So identical twins happen when the same fertilized egg splits in the first few days of life. Sometimes one of those will split again. Wow. And you get identical triplets. It's very rare, one in 10,000 of twins, so it's very rare. But there was a case, there was an adoption agency in New York that in the 50s and going into the 60s thought it was difficult to adopt kids, probably wrong, but then it was particularly difficult to adopt twins. So they said, well, we'll adopt the kids separately, but was wicked, they didn't tell the

adoptive parents. And it was really a rogue psychiatrist who thought this would be the perfect nature-nurture experiment. And because he actually reared them, adopted them into very different homes. Like in the triplets, one went into a lower-class home, immigrant parents, the other one in a middle-class home, high school teacher, and the third went into a home of a lawyer and a surgeon, I think, in Long Island, one of the wealthiest areas. So their environments differed as much as could be. But as you see in the film, when these guys get together, you know, it's like they found themselves, really. I mean, within an hour or so, they're wrestling on the floor, these 20-year-old males, you know, they're just, they were all into wrestling, wrestling, wrestling, you know, they're just, you

But they had that stocky sort of build, and they didn't mind, I find it important, you know, to be cuddling with these. It's not cuddling, I suppose, with these sweaty men and stuff. But they just, John Irving, the author, was also very much into wrestling, and he talks about that same sort of thing. It's this appetite's issue again, that, you know, you kind of go with what feels right for you. But they all went to wrestling. There's so many examples like that, though. They all, when they got together, they realized none of them. They were all very smart.

They read a lot. They just didn't like university. So they all dropped out of university, decided they're kind of entrepreneurial. They started a nightclub called triplets in Manhattan. Wow. And, you know, because they love that sort of thing, staying up all night and having a lot of, you know, they lived together in a bachelor pad that was real wild with sex drugs and rock and roll while it lasted. And so it's a great, I really recommend that film, the first half of the film.

which is what I've just been telling you about, the second half of the film and a new book that's just come out explores, why were these guys separated? And, you know, talks about this very wicked story. That was before the days of ethics permission for things. And so that's a very dark story. And Robert, for these twins, are the outcomes roughly the same, even though they got placed in a lower class, home, middle class, home, upper class. Did they all end up in the same place, or the first? fact that one kid ended up getting the best possible education and connections mean that they did slightly better. Yeah. Well, that one kid in that very wealthy family had all the opportunities you're suggesting, but didn't really do much better at school because it just didn't turn him on.

I mean, you know, he didn't want to go an academic route. So they ended up being amazingly similar in personality, in education and cognitive abilities, which is my interest in particular, but also psychopathology. One committed suicide while this film was being made, shortly, I guess, before the film was made. And you'd say, whoa, then the other two didn't. But then it turns out, all three of them lived in different families, not knowing the existence of the others.

All three of them had therapy for depression in adolescence, which in the 50s was extremely rare. So that's an example of how, one committed suicide, but they were all depressive. And what we know about suicide is it's often a spontaneous act in a way, you know? Like there's a BBC documentary on it that I think is very good about the epidemic of male depression. And there's a lot of contagion there. And I mean, it seems weird that someone could take their life on a whim in a way.

But lots of stories about a guy who decides he's going to jump off this bridge. But if someone just smiles at him, he just says, okay, I won't. You know, so the fact that one committed suicide and the others didn't doesn't surprise me too much. What does surprise me is the fact that despite these very different backgrounds, all three were treated for depression in adolescence. Wow. That's so interesting, isn't it? It's just an anecdote, though, isn't it? It's just one case.

But it is backed up by other systematic studies of identical twins reared apart, which are very dramatic. but because their situations, their circumstances are so unusual to have identical twins adopted apart that the other methods are actually more valuable in terms of basic science, like comparing identical and non-identical twins, although they're all reared together in a home. The fact is, they're all born in the same womb, they're all the same age, they're reared in the same home, and there's a big difference, though. One group is twice as similar genetically as the other group. Identical twins are 100% similar,

and non-identical twins, like any brother and sister, are 50% similar. So if genetics is important, you'd have to predict that the identical twins are more similar than the non-identical twins. And then the adoption method is neat because it's completely different. It's taking genetically related people

reared apart or reared together. So, for example, parents and offspring are 50% similar genetically, but the children, up in the home of those parents. So that's why for a century, psychology has interpreted resemblance in families as nurture. You know, it's not crazy. And especially at a time when no one was thinking about genetics, no one said, well, they are 50% similar genetically. Could it be genetic? They never thought about that. But the adoption method, which first study was done

in 49, and I did a very large study in the 70s in Colorado, you take, in those days, this was like in the early, well, you know, in the United States, I won't go into the whole story, but with the swinging 60s, there was a lot of illegitimate births because birth control wasn't really available then, and abortion wasn't really an option either. So there were a lot of kids being put up for adoption. And so we studied, I studied, the birth mothers who at that time went away from their home because it was such a negative thing to have a baby out of wedlock. They go into these homes for unwed mothers for the last trimester when they were showing. And we tested them in these homes and then studied the kids and their adoptive parents as the kids grew up into their teenage years.

So that you've taken parents who share genes in environment with their kids, and we know they're similar for everything. But you then almost experimentally divide the genetics and the... environment. You've got nature parents, the biological parents, and they're adopted away kids, who in those days, you have to say you'll never see the kid again. It's not like today where birth parents are involved in the raising of their child. And then you've got the nurture parents, the adoptive parents, who adopt these kids. And just to give you one concrete example, we were talking about weight. You know, the correlation between parents and offspring for weight

is 0.4. So it's a correlation is a statistic that goes from 0.0. to one. So point four is a moderate correlation. Now parents and offspring are only 50% similar genetically so from a genetic point of view you don't expect it to be much higher than that. So anyway that's point four. Isn't nature or nurture? Well it's always been assumed to be nurture. Not crazy. I mean parents give the kids their diet and give them role models for lifestyles of exercise and all of that. So what about birth parents and they're adopted away kids? They correlate exactly the same. Point four. And then you say, but then does that mean it's all nature? And the answer is yes.

The correlation between these adoptive parents who raised the kids from the first few months of life and their adopted kid for weight is zero. There's no correlation. Wow. So that's a kind of neat way of showing that what runs in families is DNA. And TLC is important, but it doesn't make a difference. On that particular issue. On that issue, but most of the other issues too.

But what about something like one of the things we've explored on this show, for example, we've talked to people like Warren Farrell, who's the author of The Boy Crisis. And one of the things he talks about is the impact of fatherlessness on boys in particular, but also on girls. What happens, statistically speaking, and someone who grows up without a father is far more likely to end up in prison, far more likely to misbehave in school, and a whole host of other negative outcomes. So how would you explain that then?

Well, if you, I'm trying to think of the shorter version of this, but you can't assume that environmental factors are all environment. Now, the fatherless home is a tougher issue, a tougher example for me to work with. But let me start with another example. One of the items that in terms of cognitive, development, one of the items that is best predictive of kids' cognitive of kids' cognitive development is number of books in the home.

And that's always been assumed to be environmental. I mean, books don't have DNA. So if the number of books in the home correlates with how well kids do at school, doesn't they have to be environmental? And it's not. It's mostly genetic. And the reason for that is books don't get on the shelves by themselves. Who are the parents who have more books?

People with genes which cause them to have books in the house, pass those Gs onto the kids. Right. Now, it's a lot harder to think about that. So most of the environmental measures we use in psychology, life events, you know, is used in, I think last count was 5,000 studies. It's used as an environmental measure. It shows as much genetic info.

It's not as heritable as behavioral traits, but on average, the environmental measures we use in psychology are about 25% heritable. And life events, you know, the big items are things like, financial disruption, getting in conflicts with people, losing your job. Well, that's not the environment out there independent of us. We have something to do with that environment. And so I think it's very important to recognize that just because we give something the name, a label of environment, doesn't make it environmental.

In fact, you're safe for saying there's probably genetic influence. So, Robert, just so that we don't lose the audience and also don't lose me, because you're very clever and I'm not, I'm struggling to keep up. are you sort of saying that the fatherlessness is a genetic issue? See, that's what I was going to say. It's a harder one to go to. But you have to consider the possibility that there's genetic influence on that. In other words, and this is going to sound very sort of blamie and whatever.

I'm just trying to get to the truth. We're not trying to judge anyone or whatever. People have their own individual circumstances. But correct me when I say. So what you're saying is a person who might end up being a single parent. passes certain genes onto their child that a person who will less likely underpers a single parent passes onto their child

and therefore the life outcomes are different. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, basically. Okay. But, I mean, you have to consider that possibility. It's a hard thing to study. But a thing that has been studied is divorce, which is part of this.

Sure. Now, fatherless homes are a bigger issue than divorce. Yes. But if you take divorce, divorce is related to lots of problems in kids. Right? Yes. And people say, well, clearly that's an environmental factor, right?

I mean, most people assume they don't even think about the possibility there could be genetic influence. Several studies now show, like everything, there's heritable influence on divorce. And when you ask, well, where does that come from? It's a better example because it may be positive. The sort of people like me, I can talk about this because I've been married three times. So people who get divorced, this is on average, they tend to be kind of risk-taking, joie de vivre,

things that probably make them attractive initially, but probably make them less safe bets for long-term relationships. Right. Because the joie de vivre kind of goes away after a few years, you know? So, oops. There's a confessional. Except for my current, you know, current life is perfect. I see. So, well, that actually makes sense. Sorry, Francis, I just want to just finish this line of inquire, I suppose.

So that, well, I suppose that makes perfect sense because whether you get divorced or not is a product of your personality. And if your personality is a product of your genes. See, that's the thing, though, they think that divorce happens to you. Right. But, I mean, if you've been divorced, divorce doesn't happen to you. I mean, that that's your life. That's your relationship, you know? You manifest it in the world. You know what? This is the thing that is really great about having on the show. I haven't thought about these things nearly carefully enough, and therefore I'm going with a lot of narratives that I haven't actually examined. So it's fascinating to have the data.

It would be really good to talk about it as a new parent. And I think I was going to write a follow-up book to Blueprint because the four pages in the book about parenting have gotten more attention than anything else. And I don't know if you've looked around at parenting books. But, you know, there are literally thousands of parenting books. Hardly any of them even mentioned genetics. Whereas I think the most important thing for parents to know is that they have less control than they think they do

because genetics is a very, you know, it's the most important systematic source of differences. The environment's important, but the environment that makes a difference isn't really systematic. That means you as a parent, you know? So I think it's really important for parents to understand that message. So it'd be kind of fun to think about whether this has an impact on you. And have you thought about these issues at all?

No, because the way I think about it, I suppose, is I've always seen it as my job as a parent. And maybe, look, I'm three weeks into it. So what the hell do I know? But the way I see it is about observing what my child's aptitudes and appetites are and facilitating them in that journey. So I don't want my child to be a lawyer or a basketball player. Well, I do want them to be a basketball player.

But like a thing that I've decided for them. But what I hope to be able to do is to pay attention. enough that I can see this and give them opportunity enough that they can find what they're good at and what they're interested in and then facilitate that journey as best I can as a parent that's that's the way I've always looked at it well and that was the message I had in those four pages in blueprint but um a lot of parents don't want to hear they don't have control but um one percent of the population gets diagnosed as schizophrenic and you don't as a parent you don't find

out about that until late adolescence early adulthood so things are going along well and then suddenly you know this train hits you and if you think you're totally responsible for everything that happens to your kid that is a tough tough task to the tough thing to swallow and so and I do get a lot of letters from people who say you know everything seems to be going well but then in adolescence the kids hit drugs and other peers and stuff and you know they're blaming themselves for this but you know that's that's one of those sort of idiosyncratic things that you just don't have control about you hope if you make things good enough and stable enough for your kid I think in some ways you got to write off adolescence I worked at an adolescent treatment center for three years and you know kids parents doing well before and and then things just fall apart in this case they were in the judicial system these kids and put into these homes but then afterwards most of the time they stabilize. And sometimes I think, you know, if we could put kids away

on some South Sea island and have them come back, you know, so there's hope for parents. There's a lot of parents will sign up for that with teenage kids. Well, in England they do, don't they? They send in a boarding schools. That is how we deal with it indeed. Hey, Francis, do you like books?

I tried one once. Wasn't for me, Mike. Not enough pictures of fit brown birds. Never working with you again. But if you like fantasy, check out the Ripples in Reality series by J.S. Powell. They're absolutely brilliant and they have a five gold star rating on Amazon. I've heard of them. They're beautifully written and completely original. If you want a book that allows you to delve into different worlds

and helps you escape the insanity of real life, then Ripples in Reality is for you. See, I know the word delve, so I do read books. Amazing. Just imagine books written in the style of Game of Thrones, of the Rings, forgotten realms, with an added pinch of Stargate. It's catnip for people like me. Virgins. She started a publishing company named Poppy Field Publishing, and her novels are a massive hit with fans who want to read books that are a great read

and are not woke. Book one is Shadow Step. And Book 2, Gave Shadows. She's currently writing book number three. I can't wait. I don't read books because I can talk to girls. Your mum doesn't count, mate. And by the way, J.S. Powell is a big supporter of Chicanometry. She is a moderator on our channel, and we really appreciate all her help. You can find her books online at Amazon, Lulu.com, and other bookseller websites.

If you enjoy the books, please leave a review. The links are in the description. Thanks, yours too. What does Ravs stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle. Really? To me, it's the runway-approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo? Or really admired vehicle? Oh, or really awesome vehicle.

It really is the recreational activity vehicle. The stylish 2026 Toyota RAP4 Limited. What's your Rav for? But Robert, we've been talking about things like mental illness and obesity and, you know, these are very important topics, but they have a slight negative edge. So let's look at something more positive, which is talents. Things like musicality, a particular gift in sport or art. Are those heritable?

Everything's heritable, but it's harder to study the extremes. So, you know, if you're talking about super athletes, there's just a few of them in the world. But there's a huge interest in that in terms of athletics with the DNA revolution. Because if you can predict, it's like with race horses, they're really keen on the genetics. Because if you can predict the tiniest little edge, that could be the difference between a winner and a loser.

So there's a lot of interest in making those. predictions genetically. But the data as they exist suggests that the extremes of any of these distributions, like incognitive ability or sports to the extent it's been studied, there's a little bit on musicality now. But the extremes are not ideologically different from the rest of the distribution. So do you know what I mean? No. People used to think, well, geniuses, you know, really gifted people, tops athletics. They're just a different species. You know, there's some weird, some unusual gene that they have or something like that. It's not the case. I mean, within the range that we can study, which as I say is not the one in a million, but we're probably

getting into the one in 10,000 sort of area, which in athletics might be regional champions, you know, but they're not going to be Olympic stars at that level. But at that level of individual differences. The genetics is the same. And so when we get these polygenic scores, there's no break point. It's just a normal distribution. So the more of these positive genes that you have, of which there are thousands that affect any of these traits, the higher you'll be. The propensity is there. It doesn't make you be a super athlete or not. So I think that's really interesting. And the other end of it is important, too, that this genetics work is kind of like the name in the coffin for diagnostic approaches where the medical model has made us think that the most

important thing is to diagnose something properly. And that's true if like in England the first case of, you know, cholera, what causes cholera? And then to say what is the cause of cholera? Well, you want to start by making sure you know who has cholera. A lot of people have tummy problems, but you know with cholera, you're talking about something more serious. So you diagnose it.

Then you find the cause. turns out it's contaminated drinking water. So that's the medical model of a disorder. And, you know, if you have a single influence, it could be a single gene influence as well, you want to diagnose it carefully and it's dichotomous. This all started with Mendel. You know, if you think of his 7-P plant traits that he studied, they were dichotomous. You either have wrinkled seeds or smooth seeds, and that's a single gene causing it. But for common disorders, as well as behavioral traits, it's not like that. There are thousands of tiny effects, and that makes it all probabilistic and not deterministic. You know, there are thousands, 7,000, 10,000 single gene disorders in humans,

where a single gene causes a disorder, necessary and sufficient for the development of the disorder. So those are dichotomists, you know, necessary and sufficient. You'll only get Huntington's disease if you have this mutation on the tip of chromosome four. And conversely, if you have that mutation, you will get Huntington's. And, you know, you'll die from Huntington's, regardless of how much you exercise or whatever. It's a single gene disorder. And that's, in a way, a problem for us, that's the way people think about genetics. You say genetics.

And for a long time, we had to fight in media that you have a story in the paper about it. And the headline writer, who's always different from the guy who writes the story, would always say, the gene four. No, it's not a gene. We're talking about, for complex medical disorders, the vast majority, maybe 95% of the medical burden, is not caused by these single gene disorders because they're very rare because natural selection gets rid of them if they have reproductive repercussions. So we're talking about these common disorders, and yet psychiatry has been held back by the medical model where you say, are you schizophrenic. or not. Are you depressed or not? Are you alcoholic or not? But if you know people who are alcoholic, depressed, it's not an either-or thing. You don't wake up one day and you're alcoholic. It's a long, slow process, and some people function a lot better with, you know, at very high levels

of alcohol than other people. So it's really a quantitative thing, not qualitative. And that has a lot of implications, but there's a strong sense in psychiatry now that we've done a disservice to people by pretending that we can diagnose these things precisely so that the mother whose kid has trouble reading can say, oh, I've just found out from the doctor, my child has dyslexia. It doesn't mean anything. It just means they have reading problems. But by giving it a medical diagnosis, and especially you give it a Greek or Latin name, that makes it sound really medical. You don't It's called hyperactivity, you call it hyperactivity attention deficit disorder, or math. It's called, it has a problem with math.

It's dyscalculia, you know, to make it sound more medical. But it really does a disservice to pretend that there's those people who are schizophrenic and us normals. And the polygienic scores really show that. We all have thousands of risk factors, tiny genetic risk factors for, say, schizophrenia. In fact, my polygenic score for schizophrenia is quite high. It's maybe at the 85th percent of it. Oh, wow.

But only 1% of the population gets diagnosed as schizophrenic. So it's a long way from 99%. But still 85% seems high. And what's cool about that is there's three studies now that say, well, let's look at these people throughout the distribution. And what if you have a high polygenic score? It turns out people from creative professions have higher polygenic score, for schizophrenia. Oh, we could have told you that from our comedy industry experience.

But it's not that they're schizophrenics, perhaps it's that they think outside the box. Yeah. You know, and maybe if you start thinking too far outside the box, yeah. You go off the deep end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember watching this program since we're talking about single genes, and maybe you can disabuse me of this, is I watch this program on the BBC where they said psychopathy could be tracked down in particular to one gene. They called it the warrior gene. Yeah. Is that true that if you have this particular gene, you're far less likely to be empathetic, far less likely to be caring of your fellow human being, and more focused on your own needs. Yeah, no, it's totally wrong. I mean,

there was a phase in the 90s when people, when scientists were first able to genotype these genes, and they would focus on a few neurotransmitter genes. I think that's the MAO monoamine oxidase A or B mutation. Took the words right off my time. And so there was a phase there where people were, because it was very expensive to genotype. And they couldn't afford to genotype large samples. So they found, there were several studies that reported the so-called warrior gene. But since then, in the late 90s, people realized these things aren't replicating. And the reason is that this is genetics contribution to the replication crisis.

I don't know if you guys have gotten into this at all. but so many major findings don't replicate. Well, that was genetics contribution to the replication crisis because they did everything wrong. The samples were too small. They only could have detected large effects, and they only published stuff when they got the result that they expected to find worse yet.

They analyzed things a bunch of different ways to show the one that reached this magical statistical significance level of 0.05. It's all nonsense stuff that the replication crisis has tried to solve. You should get some guys, like my colleague, Stuart Ritchie wrote a book called The Great Titles, Science Fictions, about the replication crisis that came out last year. It's such an important issue from a science point of view. And I think from the public to realize that a lot of these classic findings, not just in psychology, but worse, in pharmacology, drug studies, medical studies as well. You know, they're not doing science right. I mean, they're not, they're not, it's not, um, fraud.

It's more a matter of, you know, you just, there's lots of ways to analyze stuff and they're, they're doing everything to increase the probability of getting this result, in which case statistics is out the window. So it's not fraud, but the outcomes are fraudulent. Or they're wrong anyway. Yeah, yeah, I see. But, you know, science is self-correcting. Sure.

So that's cool. I mean, you know, that we are able now to say a lot of these findings you see in textbooks are wrong. Yeah. That's fascinating. Robert, we could talk for hours and hours and hours, but before we head towards the end of the interview, one of the things I wanted to talk to about is the future. What is genetics going to help us do? And what are we going to be able to achieve as a result of the research you've been doing and your colleagues are doing in terms of medical practices, social policy, cultural attitudes, all of these parenting, all of these areas of our lives. What does the future hold for us and what are some of the benefits of genetic

research? Right. Well, I'm glad you asked that because the first 30 years of my career were basically just showing people genetics is important. And that has some implications, you know, like in education, for example, and recognize the kids are different. I would have been happy if my career ended with that. I mean, that was really quite a radical transformation of psychology. But then the DNA revolution came along with the ability to sequence the human genome, to find the millions of DNA differences between us to use them to be able to predict genetic influence. And so the future is here now. I mean, there's an 80 million-pound pilot project with the NHS to do the DNA testing,

and in areas like cardiovascular disease, which everything is heritable. That's a little more heritable than most things. The neat thing about DNA is you can predict from birth. and if you can predict, you can prevent. And so all of medicine is moving away from the model or you wait until someone has a heart attack. And it's said that a severe heart attack costs the NHS 700,000 pounds,

not counting the loss of quality of life, you know, all in on it. So if you could predict and prevent a heart attack from occurring, you know, it's just a no-brainer. So all of medicine has moved towards this prevention sort of model and DNA is the best early warning system. in town. We know interventions for everything work better earlier than they do later. And we're not that good at fixing things. I mean, we can patch up your heart, but you still had a massive

heart attack, and your heart isn't going to be the way it was before that. So that's where it's happening. And the neat thing is, you just get, it costs about real cost, about 40 quid to do this DNA testing. It's the cheapest thing you can do. And yet that one where you get, you get, It's called a SNIP chip, size of a postage stamp, and it can genotype, say, 600,000 DNA markers throughout the whole genome. That's what we're basically talking about. It's now moving towards whole genome sequencing, where you'd get all 3 billion base pairs of DNA,

which is the end of the story. That's all you inherit. But you can do a lot with these SNIP chips, and that's what the NHS is currently piloting. Some countries, like Finland and Estonia, already make this a routine part of medical care. go into a hospital, you're asked, would you like us to do these polygenic score predictors? We're only going to tell you if it's something you can do something about. And you know, with heart

risk, I mean, I'm in this category of, you know, reasonably high cardiovascular risk, which is, the DNA is a lot better information than just my family, because I don't think anyone had a particular heart problem in my family, but I do, and the cholesterol and stuff, blood pressure corresponds to that. So if I know that, then, I might just pay. more attention to the stuff you hear that we're all supposed to do. Eat better, exercise more, lose weight, which is a factor in all these things. So, you know, it just seems to be a no-brainer that we want to go that way. And so it'll happen first in medicine. It's happening already. But people aren't waiting for that. 25 million people have paid about 100 quid to have

a direct-to-consumer company test their DNA using the same approach. And so dozens of these companies have sprung up to provide information about athletics, cosmetics. I didn't know that. That was a huge area. A lot of, you know, that women might prefer some cosmetics based on their genetics. I guess some cosmetics are more dangerous. I don't know. But then also diet.

And now, a bit scary is the go-to shower gift in Southeast Asia is DNA testing for kids, parents who want advice on. the genetic strengths and weaknesses of their children and these companies provide parenting information. It's all, I'm kind of doing an exposee on that now because I think the results aren't there yet. You can tell a little bit. But, you know, you can make a pretty good prediction about your kid's height, for example. And even the way... Yeah, he's going to be about five foot eight, I promise you.

No, six to eight, probably. But, and so it's kind of fun to find out about some of these things. but it can also go over the top. And the weird thing is it completely unregulated. There's absolutely no regulation. We could just set up a company today, start getting DNA from people, advise them on being comedians or whatever.

So it's all kind of wicked. And then the parenting information they give people is not based on any science. So they need to be rained in a bit. But it shows you that there's a tremendous interest people willing to pay to have this information themselves. I should say that a lot of the people who are paying of the 25 million or so, it's to get ancestry data.

But the same DNA chip gives you all this other stuff as well. So they get that too. Because I think this is undoubtedly going to be an error based on my very layman understanding in which there's a lot of progress made in terms of helping people deal with disease and prevent disease and so on. But I always sort of, there's a hesitation in the back of my mind, if I'm honest with you, Robert, where I worry that we're at some point going to get to a minority report sort of situation, where it's like, oh, you have a, you're in the 96 percent of for committing violent crime, off to the prison you go, type of situation. Is that something we should be, you know, extra careful about when we're exploring these issues? Yeah, well, people usually bring up the movie, the 1996 movie, Gattaca, along those lines.

because that's probably more relevant, because that was GATs, GATs, and C's are the four nucleotide letters in the DNA alphabet. And so that's all about this. As well as 1984 was, really all these utopias have a view on this sort of thing.

But I know what you mean with Minority Report if they had these polygenic scores. And Minority Report was silly with the neural sort of thing. But you're absolutely right. You could substitute DNA there. But if you did, you'd know that you never have 100% prediction.

So that's a big difference. It's only a propensity. And even that propensity is not deterministic. I mean, I think a good example is alcoholism. We can't predict too much now, but we can make some prediction. I know what it is, four or five percent of the variance. And if you knew you were at risk for alcoholism, you would also know you cannot become alcoholic if you don't drink alcohol.

A lot of alcohol over a lot of time. It's not like you drink one drink and you're alcoholic. So if your kid had a high risk for alcoholism, even though it's not very predictive, you might just... I mean, he's Russian genes, so he's 100%. I was thinking that way. And you could say, well, we all hear the advice. You know, drink sensibly, take holidays from it to see how much you're dependent on it. But if you knew you had the genetic risk, it's such a low-tech, low-cost intervention to say,

maybe you'll pay more attention to it. So when your son reaches adolescence, you say, you know, it doesn't mean you're going to become alcoholic, even if you have a high polygenic score for alcoholism, but maybe you're a little bit more at risk than your friends. So when they all get bombed out of their minds, you might want to stop and say, well, is that really worth it? Is it worth taking that risk?

You know, so I think you can do these things with body weight, cardiovascular alcoholism. You can do it at a low-tech level, and then maybe eventually we'll go to higher tech approaches to it. But I can, so what I'm saying is I'm a cheerleader for this stuff because there's so many people who worry about so much of this. You know, not just the concern you have, but data, you know, stealing data and, you know, big data, finding out everything about us.

You know, so there are a lot of things to be concerned about. For me, the positives just so outweigh the negatives. And I don't know why everybody focuses on the negatives. We need some people like me saying, but wait a minute, there's some incredibly positive things here. Like, wouldn't you want to know that, what is it something like, 5% of the male population is like at a 5, 6fold greater risk of having a severe heart attack based on this genetic information?

Wouldn't you want to know that? It just seems to me like such a non-brainer. When I give a public lecture and I talk about like Alzheimer's, for example, if you do 23 and Me, which is the most popular of these direct-to-consumer companies, one of the things you find out about is you risk for alcoholism. Now, there's just a couple of genes there that make a big difference, but it goes from having, say, 10, 15% risk of Alzheimer's at 80-85 in late in life from 10-15% to 60-some percent. That's not 100%, but as medical risks go, that's astronomically. And so if you do 23 and me, they finally made you have a triple lock on it. You had to say, yes, I want to know about it. And then, yes, I read this stuff you gave me a link for.

And yes, I won't hold you responsible for it. But then you find out if you're in the unlucky 1% of the population that has this 60-4% risk. And you can find that out for your kid. I mean, so you can find it out very early in life. So I ask a public audience, would you want to know? And it's interesting. It splits right down the middle. half of the people say, you know, definitely not.

There's nothing you can do about it. But the other half like me says, yeah, knowledge is power. I want to know. And, I mean, for me, you can do something about it. Maybe you can't do anything medically about it. But if you knew that you were at this very substantial risk for having Alzheimer's when you got older, you'd arrange social care, you'd try to set yourself up economically. And importantly, I think, a little bit more carpe diem, you know,

where people say, I'm not going to spend my whole life so that I set myself up when I'm in my 80s. You know, I'm going to live life now a bit more. So I think there are things you can do about it. But it is interesting how people split down the middle on that. It is. Robert, it's been fascinating. We must have you back soon. I'd love to come back.

It's been about your kid and how he's developing. Well, and perhaps you'll write that parenting book that I can use. I started, but I just can't write like that. To write a parenting book, you really have to. write you have to get down with the people. And my book, I thought, Blueprint, I thought was very low level. I had a hold my nose on some of the stuff talking. You know, they want you to talk about yourself and your life and talk about a sailing trip across. And with the kids, you know, the parenting books, God, they're so low level and condescending. I just can't do it, you know.

So, well, we'll bring you back and talk about it at least. Okay, I'd love to do that. Yeah. But our final question is always the same. What is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, we have talked about parenting, which is important. I think the DNA revolution hasn't quite sunk in. I don't know how many people know this. It's 80 million pound trial in the NHS for this. And so the reason I wrote the book, Blueprint,

is I wanted to give people the literacy they need to discuss these important issues. This isn't like a lot of medical things. You know, if you ever know, you hear of a discovery and they say, in 10 years this is going to be big. That means they have no idea if it's going to happen. If they say five years, it means maybe it'll happen. But the point about this is it's happening now. And this is really transformational.

So I think people need to know about it. And I just hope we can have podcasts like years where you teach people how to discuss these firmly held views as adults and just say, these aren't simple issues. You know, there are things to discuss. But can't we just discuss them reasonably? Not at the moment, it would seem. But we are trying and you're trying. Robert, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. The book is, of course, Blueprint. I really recommend everybody gets it. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters,

for our supporters, but for now, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure. And thank you for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or also all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available with the podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Is it theoretically possible that the genetic component of intelligence could be edited pre or post conception?