Comment by derbOac
Yeah this paper came across to me basically as "if you ignore environmental causes of death, the heritability of death goes up"... which seems kind of circular.
Yeah this paper came across to me basically as "if you ignore environmental causes of death, the heritability of death goes up"... which seems kind of circular.
I really like everything Uri Alon (last author) publishes, but these types of studies have a history of inflating genetic contributions to phenotypes. Decoupling genetics from environment is not easy as they are both highly correlated.
In fact, the article discussion states: "Limitations of this study include reliance on assumptions of the twin design, such as the equal environment assumption". My take on this is that the main result of the article is probably true, but the 50% figure is likely to be inflated.
I hit the jackpot with the ultrasound technician who spoke passionately about what she believed about lifestyle risk for cardiovascular conditions and she believed quite strongly that heart disease runs in families more because lifestyle runs in families than because of genetics. She's not at the top of the medical totem pole but I can say she inspired me to take responsibility for my health than the specialist who I talked to about the results.
There's no prior reason to expect the cited conditions to have any specific relation to genetics. Any of them could easily be caused or accelerated by environmental conditions.
And, in fact, it looks like they half-of-are.
I thought the implication was lifestyle isn't as important as we previously believed.
Not necessarily. It could be the case that randomness plays a huge part in non-environmental caused deaths, and if that were the case we would see very little heritability.