SignificanceGenome-wide association study (GWAS) discoveries about educational attainment have raised questions about the meaning of the genetics of success. These discoveries could offer clues about biological mechanisms or, because children inherit genetics and social class from parents, education-linked genetics could be spurious correlates of socially transmitted advantages. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we studied social mobility in five cohorts from three countries. We found that people with more education-linked genetics were more successful compared with parents and siblings. We also found mothers’ education-linked genetics predicted their children’s attainment over and above the children’s own genetics, indicating an environmentally mediated genetic effect. Findings reject pure social-transmission explanations of education GWAS discoveries. Instead, genetics influences attainment directly through social mobility and indirectly through family environments.

We undertook a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of parental longevity in European descent UK Biobank participants. For combined mothers' and fathers' attained age, 10 loci were associated (p<5*10−8), including 8 previously identified for traits including survival, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. Of these, 4 were also associated with longest 10% survival (mother's age ≥90 years, father's ≥87 years), with 2 additional associations including MC2R intronic variants (coding for the adrenocorticotropic hormone receptor). Mother's age at death was associated with 3 additional loci (2 linked to autoimmune conditions), and 8 for fathers only. An attained age genetic risk score associated with parental survival in the US Health and Retirement Study and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and with having a centenarian parent (n=1,181) in UK Biobank. The results suggest that human longevity is highly polygenic with prominent roles for loci likely involved in cellular senescence and inflammation, plus lipid metabolism and cardiovascular conditions. There may also be gender specific routes to longevity.

We use unique longitudinal data to document an economically and statistically significant positive correlation between the facial attractiveness of male high school graduates and their subsequent labor market earnings. There are only weak links between facial attractiveness and direct measures of cognitive skills and no link between facial attractiveness and mortality. Even after including a lengthy set of characteristics, including IQ, high school activities, proxy measures for confidence and personality, family background, and additional respondent characteristics in an empirical model of earnings, the attractiveness premium is present in the respondents’ mid-30s and early 50s. Our findings are consistent with attractiveness being an enduring, positive labor market characteristic.

Tobacco and alcohol use are heritable behaviours associated with 15% and 5.3% of worldwide deaths, respectively, due largely to broad increased risk for disease and injury1–4. These substances are used across the globe, yet genome-wide association studies have focused largely on individuals of European ancestries5. Here we leveraged global genetic diversity across 3.4 million individuals from four major clines of global ancestry (approximately 21% non-European) to power the discovery and fine-mapping of genomic loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use, to inform function of these loci via ancestry-aware transcriptome-wide association studies, and to evaluate the genetic architecture and predictive power of polygenic risk within and across populations. We found that increases in sample size and genetic diversity improved locus identification and fine-mapping resolution, and that a large majority of the 3,823 associated variants (from 2,143 loci) showed consistent effect sizes across ancestry dimensions. However, polygenic risk scores developed in one ancestry performed poorly in others, highlighting the continued need to increase sample sizes of diverse ancestries to realize any potential benefit of polygenic prediction.