Is creativity something you inherit from your parents?

By Alex Fradera Jeb Bush’s failure to secure a Presidential triple-play is memorable perhaps because it’s an exception to a familiar routine: the family dynasty. It’s a routine especially common in the arts, where a writer’s family tree is apt to contain a couple of actors, a director, and maybe a flower arranger to boot. This might simply reflect upbringing – or maybe the powers of nepotism – but creative success also owes to temperament and talents, some of which may have their origins in our genetic makeup. The journal Behavioural Genetics has recently published a heritability study that explores how deeply a creative vocation sits in our DNA. Mark Roeling and his colleagues at Oxford and Vrije universities, drew on data from the Netherlands Twin Register, covering around 1800 monozygotic (identical) twins who share the same genes, and 1600 dizygotic or non-identical twins who have only 50 per cent of their DNA in common, just like non-twin siblings. The register includes information on the twins’ professions, which were coded as artistic if they fell into the categories of dance, film, music, theatre, visual arts, or writing. This applied to 233 of the individuals on the register. The question that Roeling and his colleagues were interested in was: if an individual has an artistic profession, how likely is it that their twin does too? If the answer is the same for monozygotic and dizygotic pairs, then this would suggest genes exert no effect on the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: biological Creativity Occupational Source Type: blogs