Say you come across an article saying that having a certain gene, one that makes you go to bed earlier, correlates with a lower risk of depression. Can you conclude from this that if you start going to bed earlier, you'll also be less likely to get depressed? No.

If you see an article saying that intelligence is largely determined by genetics, should you give up when it feels like you're not getting anywhere? Or should you stop bothering with your kids' education? No.

None of these studies saying that something depends on genes should have any effect on your everyday life. First and foremost, you are a universal computing device capable of anything if you set your mind to it. And if you can't, it means you need to find your own way.

You shouldn't even bring up how things depend on genes in casual kitchen-table chats. Because the conversation will immediately turn to who is capable of what and who isn't, and all that without any DNA sequencing! Even horoscopes would be more accurate than that kind of talk.

The only genetic information that's useful to you is knowing your predisposition to certain diseases (for example, drug addiction or alcoholism), or lactose intolerance.

Leave the rest of the genetic information to sociologists and genetic engineers: for ordinary people, knowing it isn't just unnecessary, it's actually harmful.


There's a good video on this topic that supports this point of view: genes and environment have a very strong influence, but you have to believe you're capable of anything, otherwise success is impossible:


Also, genetic information actually can be useful if a woman wants to have especially good offspring and is willing to look for a man with exactly the right genes for that.

For example, in a podcast with the Russian science journalist Asya Kazantseva, she said she wants to marry someone with a PhD, because according to genetic research, long-term intelligence (your ability to make it all the way to a PhD and defend it, not your intelligence in general) depends very heavily on genes.

So she figures that if she finds a man with a PhD, her children will probably also turn out smarter in the long run than if she had them with some random person.

Yes, in this case it's useful to know and to draw conclusions, but it's a pretty exceptional case. We're more likely to live to see officially sanctioned genetic engineering than to see this kind of behavior go mainstream.