[HN Gopher] Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great...
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Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain (2019)
[pdf]
Author : djoldman
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-08-04 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (research.vu.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (research.vu.nl)
| djoldman wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Agreed, but this puts numbers on it.
| chiffre01 wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| So, "brain drain" is real?
|
| There are "genetic predispositions" to higher learning? Don't
| tell the eugenicists that...
| kingstnap wrote:
| 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.
| gef wrote:
| Related commentary on societal and genetic interplay
| https://archive.vn/wSqd8
| namenotrequired wrote:
| (2019)
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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.
| tjpnz wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| Author here. Not sure why this turned up on HN today, but feel
| free to ask questions.
| usgroup wrote:
| Does the paper claim that genetics somehow drives geographic
| clustering? E.g. due to emigration of those carrying certain
| phenotypes?
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| timmg wrote:
| 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!
| dash2 wrote:
| > 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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) ?
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| :)
|
| (wasn't suggesting that)
| arethuza wrote:
| 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?
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| pcrh wrote:
| >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?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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?
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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 interpret this is as saying while those with low social
| economic status vote Labour and higher SES vote Conservative,
| social economic status does not correlate with religiosity --
| instead regliosity correlates to the BIG five personality
| traits. Is this correct? Can you expand on this?
| lawlessone wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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...
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| Oh yes - I wasn't being entirely serious - and of course
| the upper classes don't care about any of it!
| dash2 wrote:
| Wish granted:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| Merrill wrote:
| 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.
| mikert89 wrote:
| 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]"
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| I have read the book, and also several of his other
| papers :-)
| keiferski wrote:
| 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?
| pcrh wrote:
| 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.
| bendbro wrote:
| Tabula Rasa bros... our response?
| pcrh wrote:
| 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?
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