5 ms·

Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain (2019) [pdf]

62 points by djoldman 1y ago

djoldman 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Agreed, but this puts numbers on it.
chiffre01 1y ago
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 1y ago
  So, "brain drain" is real? There are "genetic predispositions" to higher learning? Don't tell the eugenicists that...
  - kingstnap 1y ago
    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 1y ago
Related commentary on societal and genetic interplay https://archive.vn/wSqd8 https://archive.vn/wSqd8
namenotrequired 1y ago
(2019)
HPsquared 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
Author here. Not sure why this turned up on HN today, but feel free to ask questions.
- usgroup 1y ago
  Does the paper claim that genetics somehow drives geographic clustering? E.g. due to emigration of those carrying certain phenotypes?
  - dash2 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
      - dash2 1y ago
        Yup, take a look at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01062-7.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01062-7.pdf
- timmg 1y ago
  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!
keiferski 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Oh yes - I wasn't being entirely serious - and of course the upper classes don't care about any of it!
- dash2 1y ago
  Wish granted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/2023.10.25.564036.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...
  - keiferski 1y ago
    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.
Merrill 1y ago
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 1y ago
Social class is genetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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/0691168377 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.
bendbro 1y ago
Tabula Rasa bros... our response?
pcrh 1y ago
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?

62 points by djoldman 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Agreed, but this puts numbers on it.

chiffre01 1y ago

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 1y ago
So, "brain drain" is real? There are "genetic predispositions" to higher learning? Don't tell the eugenicists that...
- kingstnap 1y ago
  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 1y ago

Related commentary on societal and genetic interplay https://archive.vn/wSqd8 https://archive.vn/wSqd8

namenotrequired 1y ago

(2019)

HPsquared 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago

Author here. Not sure why this turned up on HN today, but feel free to ask questions.

usgroup 1y ago
Does the paper claim that genetics somehow drives geographic clustering? E.g. due to emigration of those carrying certain phenotypes?
- dash2 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - dash2 1y ago
      Yup, take a look at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01062-7.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01062-7.pdf
timmg 1y ago
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!

keiferski 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Oh yes - I wasn't being entirely serious - and of course the upper classes don't care about any of it!
dash2 1y ago
Wish granted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/2023.10.25.564036.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/05/18/202...
- keiferski 1y ago
  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.

Merrill 1y ago

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 1y ago

Social class is genetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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/0691168377 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.

bendbro 1y ago

Tabula Rasa bros... our response?

pcrh 1y ago

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?