genetic inheritance of interests

do you think you can geneticly inherit interests and habits? not just physical
traits?
cuz i did and my dad's been in jail since i was 2 so i couldnt have learned them from him.

 

That might be possible. Such as a trait that has been seen in all members of a particular family that none know of the other. Like in my family, I believe that there is a certain affinity that all the male members of my family share...As to what it is, I'm not sure.

 

probobly. my entire family is addicted to softball. i don't know why they just are. but like in most trait, it skips a generation: me. i'm not really into sports, since i'm not allowed to play them.

 

Yeah, me and Dual Wielder think girls with black hair are hot. Unless they're those creepy emos and goths.

 

As of right now, there doesn't exist a gene for liking soft ball or a preference of girls with black hair. It's certainly possible what with the human genome barely even unraveled, but for the most part most of those preferences are either emulated from others around you or pure coincidence.

 

I definitely believe a lot more is inherited from our parents than it's currently fashionable to believe. Most people nowadays seem to be of the idea that it's wrong and biased to say that people do inherit things such as preferences from their relatives because it means things like racism or classism are justified. But it doesn't mean that at all. Just because you inherit a tendency to become addicted to alcohol, for example, doesn't mean that you will turn out just like your Grandpa Fred who used to come home every night from work, crack a beer and beat on his wife for burning dinner.

The people we turn out to be are defined by choices, not genes. And we continue to make choices our entire lives, so there's always that chance of changing our decisions. The choice to spend your money on getting blitzed or buying your kids' food can be influenced heavily by genes, but they don't MAKE the choice for us. Meaning, a person who makes a living as a thief does not produce children doomed to be thieves or criminals in any way. That will depend on the choices they make, and sometimes those choices are predetermined by the environment. If there's no other way whatsoever to feed yourself, it's extremely likely you're going to steal, for example, whether you Aunt Mamie was a shoplifter or not.

But as far as I can tell, one of the most important things that helps us make choices aside from our genetics is the kind of people in our own age group that we had around us until we reached adulthood. The people we choose as friends, the ones we keep at a distance, the ones we'd treat like a city sidewalk if we saw them face down in a pool of their own blood; these people that school officials always referred to as our 'peers' have an enormous impact on our lives. They can make or break us in terms of the roles we fill in society in an environment where standing out from the norm in any way makes you a target.

If the rule is most kids in your class have a different set of fashionable clothes to wear each day for two weeks straight, then being seen wearing the same jeans two days in a row means you and your family are poverty-stricken filthy scumbags. So chances are that in order avoid awkward situations you'll choose to set up your clothes so there aren't any repeats.

The way we are raised by parents or guardians is a lot less important than they'd like to think. They can force certain choices on us for a while, but it doesn't mean that when we're on our own we won't do all the foolish things they always told us not to. It doesn't even mean we'll even think twice about it, though chances are every time we're confronted with that choice, we'll still hear the voice of Mom or Dad saying "You are so grounded for life!"

 

No, a child doesn't always have the same interests as his or her mum or dad, see in my family I'm the odd one out, most of my intersets are seen as wried in my family, since no one else had the same ones as me.

 

I think it's possible. I have a fear of driving. My mother, grand mother , aunt, and cousin (all on my mothers side.) all have this fear, My cousin and grandmother have never learned to drive, and my mom and aunt don't drive long distances, or in big cities. I got my licence, but now I can't drive anymore because of panic attacks.

 

oh damn you can't drive!! that sucks
here are some examples
i despise short hair,on me
i dont take school ersiously
i like the same music
this on is coincidence but i hang out with one of his friend's son
and we act a LOT alike
and i haven't seen him anywhere but a prison visiting room since a long as i can remember

 

Poor you, whats weird is I'm barely like my family- interest wise. I don't like my Mums taste in Music, I don't like motorbikes like my Dad and I'm not into Guild wars like my sister is. All my family are completely different but I act alot and talk alot like my sister, I think that is because I learnt it off her.

 

Your personality is actually 60%-80% genetic, meaning you certainly can obtain interests from parents.

 

That hasn't been proven, but merely an hypothetical estimation made based off several theories of genetic inheritance, one facet including intelligence.

 

I know it isn't definite, but it is the current estimate (I think)...

 

Well, it hasn't been proven that personality is genetic in nature at all, much how the talk of whether or not 'intelligence' was genetic blossomed throughout the 90s. Our current technology and research on genetic inheritance doesn't support any substantial evidence that we inherit traits from our parents other than physical features.

Like most claims about human development, most are still just 'suggested correlations'.

 

I think this is true because my father is interested in science and my brother does too.Engineering just to be more specific.

My mother loves to read,so do I and she is better in the Arts and language,which I have an interest in.She was also an ex-dancer and I own my friends at DDR.My father has an interest in history,I do too.

So maybe this is true.

 

Actually, the best research we have in use today is pretty low-tech. It's called twin studies, and it follows the life histories of identical twins separated at birth and raised with no knowledge of or contact with their twin. Because identical twins share the exact same DNA, it is possible to draw some conclusions about how genetics contribute to our patterns of behavior, not just our phenotype (outward appearance).
One of the most controversial of these conclusions is that genetics, not parenting, is responsible for about 50% of how our personalities develop. When you have a pair of genetically identical humans who are raised in two vastly different socio-economic environments without having any idea whatsoever that their 'other' exists, and they choose to pursue the same education and career path, choose friends and spouses of similar temperament, even select the same kinds of clothes to wear or the same hairstyle, it doesn't take a rocket scientist with super advanced futuristic technology to see there is a clear relationship between personality and genetics.
That being said, let me also mention that the current 'technology' that we have for testing IQ is well, to be blunt, crap. I don't even want to talk about IQ being an inherited quality, really, because I don't accept the term as being valid in the first place. And that is what most people use as a measurement when they talk about 'intelligence'.
IQ tests are ALL based off of a century-old exam developed as a way of diagnosing the degree and severity of mental ******ation in the developmentally disabled populations of public schools. In fact, the psychologist who developed it was emphatic that it would be a useless tool when it came to 'normal' children or adults.
I won't even get into how racially and economically biased these tests and many others such as the SAT are. But the debate that blossomed in the 90's was mainly over such pieces of tripe as The Bell Curve, which 'correlated' genetics(read: race) with intelligence(read: IQ). I can't state it more clearly than this: You can find correlations anywhere, but there is NO cause and effect relationship between 'race' and intelligence.
You will never catch me claiming such a thing as 'race' even exists, let alone that purported members of its population are dummies. We are all members of the human species, which may possess different population subgroups with exaggerated phenotypes, but does not contain anything as cloudy, vague, and subject to human bias and mis-perception as a race. It is an invented, inaccurate, and dated term that for some reason is still widely used even by scientists that know better, simply as a linguistic convenience.
To paraphrase the late Stephen Jay Gould, the most well-known paleontologist of our time, there is a correlation between inflation and my age. Both seem to be increasing at the same rate: yearly. But few people would say I am getting older because of inflation, or inflation is getting worse because I am getting older. And maybe there is a 'correlation' between 'race' and 'IQ', but whether one has anything to do with the other is just as unlikely.

 

As mentioned above, tests on identical twins is pretty well the best data that science can use to observe these sorts of things, since they share common DNA because they are divided from the same egg. These tests show that quite a few identical twins do exhibit, when grown apart, the same sorts of likes for foods, clothing preferences and such. Of course, these studies are also not done by putting the twins in environments that are different by much. A middle-class family has one twin...and conveniently so does another. These tests are at best inconclusive in that regard because the children are not placed in environments that would show their developments and if they would remain similar or not. However, it does at least to me show that we do indeed inherit some likes and dislikes from our parents and/or others in the genetic line.

Coincidentally, on a side note, twins grown together often explore other options and do not duplicate each other mentally so well. Part of this though I blame because parents often try to dress twins the same and others expect it. I am a twin, though fraternal, and can say people often expected us both to be in the same clothes and things, which is just weird. Twins that grow together often love each other but want their own identities, but even as that is said, if they were analyzed by checking out their parents too, it all is reasonable and within bounds to say that one might do more and enjoy more things than one parent while the other goes more with the other parent. It makes it though hard to say what's inherited though and not just done out of preference.

We do inherit traits of phenotypes and genotypes from our parents and submissive traits from even before that which we may have as a dominant feature or not. It makes sense to me that if someone inherits traits such as a stocky build or a wiry build, or a dancer's build etc they may be prone to similar likes since they can accomplish these feats as well or maybe better than their parents. Allergies can be genetic, some diseases are carried genetically, and studies do reveal that psychological conditions can be inherited as well. With all that said, it seems obvious to me that we can inherit 'likes and dislikes' too.

 

yes, identical twins have been proven to have similar interests and such. but there's no correlation for regular siblings. the siblings' interests can be as different as two random ppl's interest on the street. the same goes for their parents.

 

I doubt it, as the DNA does not include interestbut the growth path intended.

Interests come from surrounding and personal judgement.

 

Hmm... possibly