alt Hacker NewsOne quick piece of semantic and linguistic housekeeping for the commenters…
Heritable != Molecular / Genetic Mechanism
There is a conflation of these terms in popular discourse that does a disservice to the field of statistical genetics, imo. There are mechanisms of inheritance that operate various length / time scales other than that of biological macromolecules. For example, if you tell me what language your parents natively speak I can tell you your primary language with >90% accuracy.
So before we start getting 3 replies deep into any thead, please remember that retrospective observational data measured with unqualified instruments is notoriously confounded and that we can barely infer causal structure in controlled functional genomics experiments (much less a GWAS of phewas). So let’s all please keep an open mind and not be so certain about our beliefs.
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The accurate version of the result would be something like: “if you model lifespan as aging + i.i.d. noise and dial the noise to zero, heritability of the aging component is ~40-50% in our model.” Which is barely a finding, since by construction reducing i.i.d. noise has to increase heritability of whatever non-noise remains.
I believe that your example of "what language your parents natively speak" is incorrect.
Some ways of measuring heritability would have trouble detecting this as environmental, but that is considered a deficiency in those measures, not part of the definition of heritability. Any serious study into heritability of language would quickly find it is largely due to the common environment.
> Heritable != Molecular / Genetic Mechanism
Hmm let me just check Wiktionary for "heritable"
> Genetically transmissible from parent to offspring
Ok then. Maybe it has some specific meaning in biology? A search for "heritable meaning in biology" let me to this page: https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...
> In medicine, describes a characteristic or trait that can be passed from a parent to a child through the genes.
IMO this post is dumb and the paper is perfectly clear to non-pedants.
This comment reads as if it were dropped into a generic "genetics of lifespan" thread,. The Dynomight article is already making a much more sophisticated version of some of these same points. The article's central argument is precisely that heritability is a contingent observational statistic, not a Platonic form. This particular article isn't conflating heritability with genetic mechanism at all. It's interrogating a simulation model and its assumptions. The warning about "unqualified instruments" and "retrospective observational data" feels off as this paper isn't a straightforward observational study. it's a parametric simulation fitted to twin registry data.
This comment might be very useful in a Reddit thread full of people saying "50% of lifespan is in your DNA," but it's a bit off-target as a response to this particular article.