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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find this study boring (or interesting, depending on your take) for an entirely different reason: this trait is only 15% heritable. Thus, almost all variation in your ability to maintain a beat is learned from your environment. There’s hope for us all!

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This reminds of a previous music study. The professor teaching my genetics class in grad school said he thought that musical ability was heritable- look at all the children of musicians who are good at music! Several of us sort of looked at each other like "did he really just say that and not think that perhaps exposure to labelled examples during a time of neural plasticity would dominate?"

Then everyone clapped in perfect rhythm.

Also — Even for that 15%, how much of that is also nurture? Musical parents rock their kids to a beat, play and sing music, etc… I’m not sure if this is mentioned in the study, but this would be nearly impossible to control for.

"reared apart twins" studies to the rescue! though it would probably take a loooong time to get a sample size that has actually some statistical power.

Just because 85% is environmental doesn't mean that there's hope for us all. It's a common mistake to think of genes as unable to be changed and environment to be changed. But, for example, maybe if your mother smokes during pregnancy, it inhibits the part of your brain that handles beat. In that case, the trait is environmental AND innate. For another example think of one-armedness. Most people with one arm will have lost it in an accident, the fact that the trait isn't genetic doesn't mean there is hope for them to have a second arm.

Conversely, that a trait is very heritable doesn't mean there isn't hope for us. Language and dialect are very heritable, but we can learn new languages and even adapt our dialect.

Even if something is actually "genetically" heritable, we don't how heritable it would be over the space of all possible environments, just the ones we test.

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