Many genes for academic success have been found

There are more than 1250 places on human DNA where hereditary variation influences the duration of a school education. There are genes that are almost all involved in the growth and functioning of brain cells. They are genes for the construction of nerve cells for birth, for the formation of connections between nerve cells (synapses) and for the production of messenger molecules in the brain.

However, the small heritable variations in and around these hundreds of genes together account for only 11 to 13% of the differences in the duration of training. This is demonstrated by research among more than 1.1 million people whose genetic data are known and who know how many years of school education they have had. The result was published Monday in Nature Genetics .

This research on the genes of the social characteristics is important for the understanding of the nature and nurture on the construction and the environmental influences. The same researchers looked for genes in training in smaller groups of people whose genetic data and duration of education are known.

In 2013, they found the top three places on DNA that have influence, in the search for more than 100,000 people. This was the first study, published in Science in which social characteristics were linked to heritable traits with reliable methods. In 2016 followed the discovery of 76 DNA locations from the analysis of hereditary information of 400,000 people. Now, there is expansion to 1.1 million people.

The larger the group, the more discoveries

What do you have? First and foremost, the approximately three hundred researchers involved, many of whom come from the Netherlands, show how much a property of many genes can depend on. The larger your research group, the more genes you will find. It happens again and again, but eventually you find genes with "non-trivial predictive power". Maybe some of these genes have a lot of influence for an individual, but in the whole group their influence is negligible

in the lab to fully work at unraveling unknown brain processes.

And with respect to construction and environmental influences, this research, combined with other research, clearly shows that nature and culture overlap in complex ways. In countries where education is good and easily accessible, the influence of genes is greater. But the duration of a child's education also depends, for example, on genes that parents do not pass on to that child. Because they also obviously determine the environment in which the child grows up.

Before this research began, it was feared that a gene would have a great influence on the duration of the training and, hence, on the intelligence. The researcher Philipp Koellinger, involved in the three studies on the duration of the study, now affiliated with the University VU of Amsterdam, stated in the [NRCHandelsblad] the first publication of three genes: "There are no determinant genes Genetic selection, for example for school education, can not really be done."