Millions of amateur genealogists assembling family trees on Ancestry.com probably figure they’re just finding lost relatives and assessing their genetic proximity to Prince Harry, but in fact they have unintentionally made a significant contribution to science. An analysis of 54 million of the website’s public family trees finds that the heritability of life span, a hot research topic for decades, is considerably less than widely thought.
Scientists reported on Tuesday that genes accounted for well under 7 percent of people’s life span, versus the 20 to 30 percent of most previous estimates.
That low heritability “implies that it would be harder” to affect life span through genetic tinkering or other life extension ideas, said computational geneticist J. Graham Ruby of Calico Life Sciences, lead author of the study published in the journal Genetics. Google founded Calico in 2013 to find ways to combat aging.
Scholars who study the contributions of genes and environment to health weren’t surprised at the tiny heritability. “Welcome aboard!” said Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, who has studied the limits of genetic influences on complex outcomes like life span. “As long as you accept that genetic factors co-occur with environmental ones, it limits the influence that genetics can have.”
Calico and Ancestry researchers analyzed 54.43 million family trees, amassing birth and death dates for 406 million people (all de-identified, so no personal data were revealed) who were born from the 19th century to the mid-20th century. Most people born more recently are still alive, their life span TBD.
The researchers calculated the correlations of the life spans of spouses and of parent-child pairs, of siblings and first cousins, and of more distantly related pairs such as a person and his sibling’s spouse’s sibling or his spouse’s sibling’s spouse.
The first tip-off that genes aren’t the dominant influence came from the life spans of spouses: They were more similar than the life spans of sisters and brothers. Since spouses share relatively few DNA variants, that suggested a strong influence of non-genetic factors that they do share, like living far from disease outbreaks, having access to clean water, being literate, eating healthy food, and not smoking.
Even more striking were the high correlations of the life spans of people related even more remotely by marriage and not by blood, such as siblings-in-law, first-cousins-in-law, aunts- and uncles-in-law, and first cousins-once-removed-in-law. If a person lived to a ripe old age, or died young, so did his or her sibling’s spouse’s sibling, spouse’s sibling’s spouse, or other distant in-law.
“As we got out to more and more distant relatives, the correlations didn’t drop by as much” as they should have if genes determined life span, Ruby said. One way to explain that, as well as the high correlation between the life spans of in-laws, is if people are choosing spouses with whom they share traits that are important for life span. If income boosts life span (it does), and 1 percenters marry other 1 percenters (especially in the eras the scientists analyzed), then spouses’ life spans would be highly correlated for that reason, as would in-law life spans.
“You’re more likely to have a life span similar to that of your in-laws than to an equally unrelated stranger,” said Catherine Ball, Ancestry’s chief scientific officer and the study’s senior author. In addition, by choosing spouses like themselves, people in effect give their kids double doses of factors that affect life span but are not genetic, such as attitudes about risk-taking or consuming alcohol.
It’s rare “for a teetotaler to marry a party girl or an ultra-marathoner to marry a couch potato,” she said.
These hundreds of millions of birth and death dates let the Calico and Ancestry researchers calculate that factors passed down from generation to generation explain 7 percent of the difference between one person’s life span and another’s. The genetic contribution, however, is even smaller: In addition to genes, people in the U.S. and other societies with low (and declining) economic mobility also inherit non-genetic contributions to life span such as education, income, access to health care, and other sociocultural influences.
The finding that the heritability of life span from factors of all kinds is no more than 7 percent means that genes explain even less (but it still pays to pick your parents, because of the non-genetic inheritance of life span).
“This is a very nice work that again demonstrates the power of crowd sourcing genealogy,” said computational biologist Yaniv Erlich, who last year took a leave of absence from Columbia University to become chief science officer of genealogy site MyHeritage. “I also praise the authors for their scientific integrity. Most of them work in a company that tries to understand the genetics of longevity and they basically claim that the heritability of longevity is really low.”
Ancestry’s family trees contain the largest data set ever analyzed in a life span study, but smaller analyses have been ratcheting down the estimate of its heritability, too, from 20 percent or more in the 1990s. A 2011 study of Alpine populations came up with 15 percent, and a 2018 study of family trees on the genealogy site Geni.com, led by Erlich, came up with 15 percent.
Although genes seem to have only a small influence on life span, they might play a larger role in whether someone lives to a super-old age. Research on centenarians has reported a strong influence of genes, identifying a couple dozen variants that are especially common in those who live to 100.
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When a spouse dies very often their partner dies soon after, perhaps because they lose the will to live. Partners may die because they are together at the time of an incident (car crash, natural disaster, infectious disease, etc). How much do you think factors like this would influence the similarity in life expectancy of spouses rather than similarities in lifestyle?
Any study is only as good as the data. From my 20 years of experience with family history, I believe the data from Ancestry.com, geni.com, and MyHeritage is basically junk genealogy. The data is all data contributed by individuals and is not based on good genealogy. The situation is so bad that several years ago, I signed up the domain junkgenealogy.com, but I was so overwhelmed at the extent of bad genealogy that I didn’t know where to start filling in the content. There are books and books on “how to” do genealogy, but not much if anything at all on the multitude of everyday errors people make in their efforts.
Mr. Barton,
I have heard that version of a disclaimer before, it may account for some discrepancy, but it was cooked up by the industries, to confound the facts. it is a fact that the US has few reporting standards, and certain industries have cleverly learned to impede data collection.
The CDC just released the latest death statistics containing a lot of disclaimers. The tech industry has been advertising a “Data Revolution” yet we have to extrapolate how many people have actually died. The healthcare industry engages in lots of dirty tricks in order to hide deaths or avoid reporting them. They claim that we have an opioid crisis in the US, yet they still refuse to collect clear data, and improve reporting requirements. This contributes to fake or biased news, and misinformation.
Face it, we are in post science and post fact America. These numbers are inconvenient for corporations, so they did everything in their power, to interfere with data collection, and misinform the public.
The US has the most expensive and least effective healthcare system in the developed world, and most Americans support healthcare for All. The corporate media owners profit from the lies, misinformation and confusion. The media is not keeping any of us informed, instead they peddle useless and dangerous products, while protecting industry profits.
The numbers are very likely a lot worse than we think they are. After all industry insiders are interfering with data collection, they told congress that collecting fact based data, is government overreach.
Genetics was a really good cop out. Just the other day the New York TImes ran a pseudo science article about Genes and the Placebo Effect. I don’t see to many of the smart people on here critiquing the amount of marketing or other nonsense tied to pseudo science. No one seems to aware of how damaging and misleading so many of these perpetuated myths are.
Genetics have been highly marketed, even on here some joker is trying to sell his book, or peddle something. As we speak there are hucksters selling at home genetic modification kits. Once again the Market Based Healthcare Model continues to misinform and create alternate beliefs.
thanks for this clear and well-written reporting on some well-done science. keep up the good work.
Dr Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief… Looks like he was way ahead….
That’s very interesting. However, several generations of my female relatives lived to their mid-eighties, then died of a stroke. Coincidence?
I wonder how you work-in to your calculations the fact that spouses or in-laws, or spouse’s in-laws all have incompetent or negligent, or otherwise inept physicians that misdiagnose, use irrational methods of investigation in their attempt to diagnose and, inexplicably, administer simultaneous infusions with two drugs, both of which are contraindicated in that case. With the Medical Records sitting right in front of them. I used to think that genetics had the most impact on health and length of life. Now I think it is a big roulette wheel, which is loaded with physicians that use personal idiosyncrasies and other cognitive flaws — all of which are easily avoided if rational thinking is employed — to diagnose and treat people with life-death implications.
Other factors that could influence longevity are lifestyle and diet. Check out The Blue Zones Solution by Dan Buettner.
that’s a bummer!
I have kind of a feeling that the two Calico’s authors will be looking for a new job pretty soon!
Genetics was the go to explanation for Race, Income Inequality and Poverty in our Post Fact world. Marketing has replaced fact based healthcare information anyway. The US has the worst health outcomes in the developed world, and that is getting worse. This reads more like an advertisement for those deceptive genetic tests, and genealogy sites.
Mavis – Most often, the claim that the US has the worst health outcomes is based on infant mortality and life expectancy. In the US a baby that dies at birth is counted as a death at age zero. In some developed countries, perhaps in most, babies that die in their first few days or weeks of life are not counted as infant mortality, hence that countries calculated infant mortality appears better than in the US. Remember that life expectancy is the average lifespan of those who died. Removing the infants who died in their first few weeks of life from the calculation raises the average life span, hence increases the calculated life expectancy. That’s the calculated life expectancy, not the real life expectancy.
From Wikipedia – Infant Mortality [Rate]- “However, the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries, and is based on how they define a live birth and how many premature infants are born in the country. Reporting of infant mortality rates can be inconsistent, and may be understated, depending on a nation’s live birth criterion, vital registration system, and reporting practices. The reported IMR provides one statistic which reflects the standard of living in each nation. Changes in the infant mortality rate reflect social and technical capacities [clarification needed] of a nation’s population. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a live birth as any infant born demonstrating independent signs of life, including breathing, heartbeat, umbilical cord pulsation or definite movement of voluntary muscles. This definition is used in Austria, for example. The WHO definition is also used in Germany, but with one slight modification: muscle movement is not considered to be a sign of life. Many countries, however, including certain European states (e.g. France) and Japan, only count as live births cases where an infant breathes at birth, which makes their reported IMR numbers somewhat lower and increases their rates of perinatal mortality. In the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, for instance, requirements for live birth are even higher.”
I call complete BS. Here’s an article that is merely filling space and keeping the so-called author busy. Another misleading pseudo-scientific Progressive ideological piece of tripe. 👍
How on Earth do you declare this piece “Progressive,” “pseudo-scientific” and “ideological?” It examined a large data set to determine the influence of genes on length of life. Not pseudo-scientific. They came to conclusions based on the examination of the data set, not proving that up to 30% of longevity is due to genetics. Is it ideological to wonder about lifespan length? And Progressive? Think you vaped too early today.