Drew Burney

So it's somewhere between five and 60%.

That's what we can tell you right now.

We really don't know.

The point is we really don't know how much of our personalities and who we are is actually genetically determined.

And it probably changes based on the environment a lot, okay?

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

I know there is evidence that it is definitely heritable, that it is somewhat genetically determined.

It's at least influenced by genes.

We just don't know the extent to which it is.

Pretty much everybody in the field has come to the conclusion that, yes, genes matter.

The debate is really around the degree of what's going on.

That said, yes, it still looks like for whatever reason, your personality does get fairly well solidified through a combination of genes and environment fairly early on.

And it is harder to change over time.

Personality is one of the most, uh, what they call polygenic features of humanity that we've studied so far, which means there's like thousands of genes that go into this and not, you can't point to one of them for any of that.

Even, even like the SSRI genes, which we thought in the eighties and nineties, like, oh, this is like a mental health.

This, this explains neuroticism.

That's what we thought for the longest time.

That's not even true.

You know, which was like, is like a single gene or small set of genes anyway, that determines those, that variation.