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posted by martyb on Friday November 09 2018, @02:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-little-late-to-choose-your-parents dept.

Family tree of 400 million people shows genetics has limited influence on longevity

Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own. The research, from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry, was published in GENETICS, a journal of the Genetics Society of America.

"We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be," says lead author Graham Ruby. "It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask."

Ruby's employer, Calico Life Sciences, is a research and development company whose mission is to understand the biology of aging. They teamed up with scientists from the online genealogy resource Ancestry, led by Chief Scientific Officer Catherine Ball, to use publicly available pedigree data from Ancestry.com to estimate the heritability of human life span. [...] Previous estimates of human life span heritability have ranged from around 15 to 30 percent.

[...] The first hint that something more than either genetics or shared environment might be at work was the finding that siblings-in-law and first-cousins-in-law had correlated life spans -- despite not being blood relatives and not generally sharing households. [...] If they don't share genetic backgrounds and they don't share households, what best accounts for the similarity in life span between individuals with these relationship types? Going back to their impressive dataset, the researchers were able to perform analyses that detected assortative mating.

[...] The basis of this mate choice could be genetic or sociocultural -- or both. For a non-genetic example, if income influences life span, and wealthy people tend to marry other wealthy people, that would lead to correlated longevity. The same would occur for traits more controlled by genetics: if, for example, tall people prefer tall spouses, and height is correlated in some way with how long you live, this would also inflate estimates of life span heritability.

Calico Life Sciences is an Alphabet/Google company.

Also at Business Insider.

Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating (open, DOI: 10.1534/genetics.118.301613) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 09 2018, @03:53AM

    by legont (4179) on Friday November 09 2018, @03:53AM (#759698)

    I agree; mostly. I think though that some rather dangerous activities such as skiing, biking, mountain hiking and so on increase life span; if done by otherwise responsible folks that is. The reason might be that they prepare us to overcome challenges.

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