Genetic differences are definitively the cause of differences in life span between species, self-evidently so. But within our own species, a few decades of earnest investigation has failed to turn up much evidence for genetic variants to be all that important in determining natural variation in human life span. If anything, the development of large genetic databases, such as the UK Biobank, has led to a reduction in the estimated contribution of genetic variation to life span variation. Near all associations between gene variants and longevity have tiny effect sizes, and also fail to replicate in other study populations, suggesting that there is little here to find, or at best a l…
Gene Variants are Just Not Important Enough to be Interesting in the Matter of Human Life Span
Genetic differences are definitively the cause of differences in life span between species, self-evidently so. But within our own species, a few decades of earnest investigation has failed to turn up much evidence for genetic variants to be all that important in determining natural variation in human life span. If anything, the development of large genetic databases, such as the UK Biobank, has led to a reduction in the estimated contribution of genetic variation to life span variation. Near all associations between gene variants and longevity have tiny effect sizes, and also fail to replicate in other study populations, suggesting that there is little here to find, or at best a l…