reflect the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language
you are, how religious, how liberal or conservative. General intelligence is heritable, and so
are the five major ways in which personality can vary . . . openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism.
And traits that are surprisingly specific turn out to be heritable, too, such as dependence on
nicotine or alcohol, number of hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing.
Thomas J. Bouchard, “Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits,”
Current Directions
in Psychological Science 13, no. 4 (2004), doi:10.1111/j.0963–7214.2004.00295.x; Robert
Plomin,
Nature and Nurture: An Introduction to Human Behavioral Genetics (Stamford, CT:
Wadsworth, 1996); Robert Plomin, “Why We’re Different,” Edge, June 29, 2016,
https://soundcloud.com/edgefoundationinc/edge2016-robert-plomin
.
