Carl Zimmer

There are other traits that are much less heritable, but there's still some heritability in them, like your personality.

Are you kind of a neurotic person, for example?

You get some of that genetically from your parents, but there's a lot of it is just

environmental variation.

And so it's not that heredity is meaningless.

It's just that it's really complicated.

And it's really interesting, too, especially because now we can look at individual genes.

So for height, I can give you a list of genes and say, I know that each of these genes plays a role in how tall you are.

Now, each one might only, you know, make you maybe an eighth of an inch taller on average.

So they're all tiny.

But together,

they are influencing your height in really profound ways.

And we're going to find other lists of genes for all sorts of things, for risks of diseases and so on and so forth.

So we're just at the beginning of really drilling into this side of heredity.

So it's an exciting time to be writing about this.

I think for individual cases at this point, it probably usually doesn't matter.

But it may be that in the future, there may be ways of learning how to better deal with those disorders by understanding those genes that put us at risk.

No, I don't.

In a sort of, you know, casual individual basis, no, I don't think that anybody can really know that.

There are definitely like some clear-cut cases, like let's say Huntington's disease, okay?