By Quinn Fucile
There are a variety of factors that determine the number of years a person goes to school – personality, finances, life circumstances, country of origin and social norms. One factor that may be less obvious, however, is genetics. Around 40 percent of the variance in educational attainment can be explained by a person’s DNA, according to previous research. Now a new study is the first to identify specific genes that influence educational achievement. This research falls under the category of social-science genetics, a topic that includes everything from genes for political affiliation to genes for criminality. Previous studies in the field, however, have found relatively weak associations between specific gene variants and behavior, since behavior is influenced by the accumulation of small effects from many genes. To counteract that problem, this study was especially large – 125,000 Caucasian people from the United States, Australia, and 13 European ...
