Can society shape the human genome? What happens when people move to opportunity? Why do genes associated with educational attainment cluster geographically? And what happens to the gene pool when educated people increasingly partner with other educated people? In this episode of Born and Raised, behavior geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui returns to the podcast to walk us through his paper Socioeconomic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences. Plus, a Born and Raised exclusive: Abdel reveals some very exciting news about what he's working on next!

The paper in question can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02150-4

What is musicality? Why do some people seem to have more of it? Did Beethoven have the genes for it? And which musical genre is most associated with depression? These questions and many more are covered in this episode of Born and Raised, where our hosts Aysu and Rafael talk to behavior geneticist Laura Wesseldijk about all things genetics and musicality!

Personality psychologists were doing behavior genetics way before it was cool. In this episode, Rafael and Aysu sit down with Eivind Ystrøm, personality psychologist at the University of Oslo, to talk about what personality actually is, how heritable it turns out to be, and why the field was so far ahead of the rest of the social sciences in taking genetics seriously.

They also dig into one of the most provocative findings in the field: the so-called "gloomy prospect" — the idea that a large chunk of what makes you you may come down to essentially random, non-systematic events that even siblings growing up in the same household don't share. What does this mean for the search for specific environmental causes of personality? And more importantly — what is the mysterious mutation that Eivind thinks he may have?