Deus Ex Anima: Could Your Parents' DNA Direct Your Whole Life?

dna personality inheritance clear chains on black

Photo: Dexter Fernandes, Unsplash

Psychological Inheritance. How Much Of The Past Really Is Prologue?:

Action/Adventure movies are often a high-speed cinematic blast.

But the really good ones, and especially the novels they’re based on, do a lot more than just “run & gun”.

They implicitly try to answer something that Magic 8-Balls, Fortune Cookies, and Zodiac signs have been trying for 2500 years.

~~Will I win the Powerball next week?~~ “Who am I?”

If we’re honest, it’s a question we all face; maybe more than once.

And the answers, or even lack of them or presence of The Unknown, can be unsettling at times.

Which is why a team of !SCIENCE! nerds at MSU decided to track it down right into your DNA…

The Short Answer:

Every good adventure movie or novel manages somehow to ask the oldest Human question: Who are we really?
You don’t have to wake up as Jason Bourne, but doing some self-evaluations might help.
An MSU team traced this in our DNA by analyzing over 1 million subjects across 46 groups around the world.
The study mapped more than 1,200 genetic variations directly to the Big Five personality framework.
That covers Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Every one correlates heavily with real-world behaviors and life outcomes.
High Openness correlates with everything from living in cosmopolitan cities to job hopping and acquired tastes in food.
A preference for predictability sits on the low end of O.
Conscientiousness links to lower substance abuse and cardiovascular risk alongside task completion.
Low scores there track with impulsivity and externalizing behaviors.
Extraversion drives social engagement and drug experimentation
Its opposite manifests as solitary focus and a deliberate work pace.
Agreeableness guards against social conflict and substance use.
Low A profiles show higher rates of anxiety and sports frequency.
Neuroticism is tied to stress, insomnia, and reduced income.
Low N provides psychological resilience.
Genetic variants also form complex combinations like high A & C often balance out Neuroticism.
Specific traits can sometimes cluster together near specific zip codes.
Student neighborhoods attract high O but lower C.
Affluent communities lean toward higher C.
Proactively choosing your environment can shape how much your traits get expressed or suppressed.
The work also showed 96.2% of your traits are inherited from your parents!!!
This might sound like a prison of biological determinism at first glance.
But those scores only drive about 10 to 15 percent of your trajectory.
This leaves 85-90% of life outcomes entirely in your hands.
Biological reality is so flexible that novice meditators change the expression of 1,500 genes in one week.
Finding your own starting-points means using a good assessment stack like: the Big Five, MBTI, and HIGH5.
The MBTI lacks strict statistical rigor, but it’s a fair sketch if you avoid thinking it’s gospel or some vanity badge.
The Real danger lies in turning temporary snapshots into permanent excuses.
The two worst things you could do are: 1) Surrender your agency to a test, or 2) Refuse to map the baseline at all.

Read on to find out the details…

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Meaning Can Be Found In Self-Tests, If You Actually Go Looking:

You don’t have to wake up with super-assassin evasion & recon skills like Jason Bourne to wonder about this.

Who among us hasn’t taken a personality test to find out which breed of dog we are most like?

Which of us has actually sat down and written out a top 10 list of work & study areas that hold the most meaning for us?

Or even a ranked list of our most preciously-held values?

The Big Five Trait-Map Mirror. What They Could Mean For You:

Here are the most conspicuous associations for both high and low amounts of each trait:

1) Openness:

High: Reduced sports frequency, Living in cosmopolitan cities, Educational achievement, Job hopping, Arts/Humanities Education, Adult Education, Autism, High night-owl tendencies, Acquired-tastes in food
Low: Preference for predictability, Low interest in unconventional ideas

2) Conscientiousness:

High: Low substance abuse, Low Psych problems, Sports frequency, Task completion, Daylight activity, Higher career/income stability, Lower BMI, Lower cardiovascular risk
Low: Distraction, Lack of follow-through, Impulsive + Externalizing behaviors, Higher career fluidity, Reduced nutritional-health

3) Extraversion:

High: Drug experimentation, Lower Anxiety, Some night-owl tendencies, Social drive, Adventurousness, Sports participation, Well-being, Early family formation
Low: Social fatigue, Solitary focus, Deliberate work pace, Lower external-stimulation drive

4) Agreeableness:

High: Low substance abuse, Low Psych problems, Reduced social conflict, Resistance to antisocial behavior, Cooperative
Low: Increased sports frequency, Anxiety, Alcohol use

5) Neuroticism:

High: Insomnia, Psychological problems, Substance abuse, Reduced sports participation, Reduced income, Reduced self-employment, Stress
Low: Recovery from setbacks, Resilience, Stability

But WAIT! Combinations Of Traits Get Even Weirder:

What’s even more interesting is the author’s note on how these variants balance or clash in trait-clusters.

Psych Health: In many cases, high A+C are the total opposite of N.

Substance Use: C & A seem opposite to E & N.

Risk, Well-Being, Antisociality: N & A are almost the opposite of E and O.

Job Market: N is basically the opposite of O & E. Especially for Self-employment.

Physical Health & Athletics: The big outliers had C opposite A&O for Sports Frequency. E was opposite N in Sports Participation.

The Water You Swim In. “Geography Is Destiny” Isn’t Just History:

But there’s also one sneaky dynamic hiding in the data. Geographic sorting.

Openness and Conscientiousness seem to dominate activity there in a weird, neighborhood version of “Birds of a feather flock together”.

Cosmopolitan Student Neighborhoods: Highest O, Lower C
Low-Income Communities: Low C
Aging Zip-Codes: Low C
Students/Early-Career Renters: Higher O
Young Professional Urbanites: Lowest C, Highest O, Low N
Affluent Communities: Higher C
Comfortable Suburbia: Slightly-Higher C, Low O

Geographic Sorting Changes The Expression Of Your “Personality Code”:

And why does that matter?

Because you often self-select for some of these.

And then the Environment can exaggerate both your good and bad points by then acting on you.

It’s like the Chinese concept of Earth Luck. Choosing/Changing your environment to work with you instead of against you.

And changing that is one of the easiest ways to help yourself, because it acts just like Epigenetics! Changing or influencing the components of you that get expressed or suppressed the most.

First The Bad News. The Sins Of The Father Are Inherited By The Son:

That brings us quite strangely to the concept of Choice.

Because there is both good news and bad news buried inside the study.

At least for this work, the authors drop a pretty controversial stat that sounds like Calvinist predestination when it comes to these traits.

96.2% of them were explained by the DNA you inherit from your parents!

-BOOM.

But here’s where the story gets even more interesting than that…

The Achilles Heel Of Inheritance. It’s Weaker Than You Are:

Even though 96.2% is a big number, the story does not end there.

Those genetic scores only account for 10-15% of your total behavioral trajectory.

So 85-90% of your actual-life outcomes are still in your hands!

They are the “Human Luck” of environment, actions, habits, and execution.

Even the source material for personality frameworks says that the results are tendencies, not handcuffs.

You always have the power to modulate the baseline your parents gave you.

Even novice meditators aren’t stuck. Within 1 week, they can change the biological expression of 1500 genes.

To Fix The Problem You Must First Stare Fate Right In The Face!:

But figuring out your baseline means actually taking the measurements.

Like the following assessment-stack:

The Big Five – The statistical gold-standard.
The MBTI – Not rigorous or consistent, but helpful as a rough sketch.
The High Five – A real-world strengths list.

Together, those should give you a broad, high-altitude picture of your starting points.

85/15. It’s All Up To You After You Find The Flaws:

But after that, The Bad News is the rest is entirely up to you.

You are The Chosen One who has to take those temporary snapshots and decide what you want to do with them.

As Jen Sincero said in, “You Are A Badass”, “It’s not your fault if you are f**ked-up. It Is your fault if you stay f**ked-up.”

Self-help frameworks constantly warn us to be extremely careful about the labels we put on ourselves.

Even those shiny MBTI vanity-badges can easily backfire and turn into convenient excuses for things like Ego-defense, inaction, etc.

Because the entire point of this exercise is the opposite of saying, “Well, I couldn’t help it! My test said I’m DESTINED to be a WXYZ-type low-Conscientiousness Introvert!”