Born and Raised

Do our genes become more important as we grow up? And do parents help their children overcome genetic disadvantages, or unintentionally make them worse?

Economist Marina Aguiar-Palma joins us to explore how genes and parental investments shape childhood development. We discuss why genetic influences seem to grow stronger with age, how parents respond to their children's genetic predispositions, and whether early childhood interventions can help reduce inequality. Plus: why might a cat be your best companion on a deserted island?

Genes matter. Environments matter. But what if neither really makes sense without the other? What if everything is ultimately gene-environment interaction?

Economist Pietro Biroli joins us to unpack how genes and environments work together to shape our lives. We discuss why gene-environment interactions are surprisingly difficult to detect, what polygenic indices can and can't tell us about them, and why finding an interaction is not the same thing as showing that it's causal. Along the way: genes as constraints, natural experiments, Mendelian lotteries, sign-flipping genetic effects, and why economists are so obsessed with causality.

By the end, you'll know what we mean when we say genes and environments "interact", and why demonstrating how they do so is much harder than it sounds. Plus: what do eight dislocated shoulders and the Big Mac index have in common?

What makes someone good at learning? Intelligence certainly helps. But as we grow up, curiosity, motivation, confidence, and interest seem to matter more and more. So does curiosity eventually beat intelligence?

Developmental psychologist Margherita Malanchini joins us to talk about the so-called “non-cognitive” side of learning. We discuss how genes and environments shape curiosity and self-efficacy, why these traits become increasingly important across development, and why “non-cognitive” may be the wrong label altogether. Along the way: gene-environment correlation, the mysterious non-shared environment, and whether grit actually exists.

By the end, you'll know why intelligence is only part of the story of how we learn, and why understanding the other part might change what we choose to nurture in schools.

If someone tells you a trait is 40% heritable, what have you actually learned? And why do twin studies, SNP-based estimates, and family designs keep returning different numbers?

Michel Nivard joins us for a crash course in all things heritability: broad-sense heritability, narrow-sense heritability, SNP heritability - even phantoms make an appearance. What do different measures capture, and what is the missing heritability problem?

By the end you'll know what a given heritability estimate licenses you to say, what it doesn't, and why it isn't the fixed quantity you might think it is.

In this wrap up of season 1, Aysu and Rafael sit down to look back on the conversations so far: what were the highlights, what did we learn about talking science with other scientists, and what's the plan going forward?

Can society shape the human genome? What happens when people move to opportunity? Why do genes associated with educational attainment cluster geographically? And what happens to the gene pool when educated people increasingly partner with other educated people? In this episode of Born and Raised, behavior geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui returns to the podcast to walk us through his paper Socioeconomic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences. Plus, a Born and Raised exclusive: Abdel reveals some very exciting news about what he's working on next!

The paper in question can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02150-4

What is musicality? Why do some people seem to have more of it? Did Beethoven have the genes for it? And which musical genre is most associated with depression? These questions and many more are covered in this episode of Born and Raised, where our hosts Aysu and Rafael talk to behavior geneticist Laura Wesseldijk about all things genetics and musicality!

Personality psychologists were doing behavior genetics way before it was cool. In this episode, Rafael and Aysu sit down with Eivind Ystrøm, personality psychologist at the University of Oslo, to talk about what personality actually is, how heritable it turns out to be, and why the field was so far ahead of the rest of the social sciences in taking genetics seriously.

They also dig into one of the most provocative findings in the field: the so-called "gloomy prospect" — the idea that a large chunk of what makes you you may come down to essentially random, non-systematic events that even siblings growing up in the same household don't share. What does this mean for the search for specific environmental causes of personality? And more importantly — what is the mysterious mutation that Eivind thinks he may have?

What do we mean when we talk about "non-cognitive skills," and what does genetics tell us about them? In this episode, our hosts visited Perline Demange to talk about the genetic architecture of cognitive and non-cognitive skills — how they relate to educational attainment, where they overlap with personality and psychopathology, and what that could tell us about the genetics of doing well in school. And also - what on earth do Christmas Elves have to do with it?

Perline also mentions work by:

Why did you pick your partner? Just right place at the right time, or deliberate process? Whatever the case, it turns out that your partner is likely to be more genetically similar to you than we would expect by random chance. Also turns out that this has a bunch of weird consequences for genetic research! In this episode, our hosts went to Oslo and had a chat with Hans Fredrik Sunde about all things assortative mating. What is it, why is it interesting, and how do we study it? And more importantly - what is the one weird item that Hans Fredrik has amassed a huge collection of?