Natural Selection Is Making Us Stay in School Longer - David Reich

Why It Matters

Understanding that schooling length has a genetic component reshapes education policy and research, linking human capital to evolutionary biology.

Key Takeaways

• Genetic propensity for longer schooling links to diverse health traits.
• Study finds consistent genetic signal across British and Chinese populations.
• Correlations include age at first childbirth, obesity, walking pace.
• Researchers ruled out measurement error, confirming natural selection influence.
• Extended education may reflect evolutionary adaptation rather than pure intelligence.

Summary

In a recent talk, geneticist David Reich argues that natural selection has favored alleles that increase years of schooling, challenging the view that education length is purely cultural.

He explains that polygenic scores for educational attainment correlate with a suite of health and life‑history traits—age at first birth, obesity risk, walking speed—suggesting a broader biological architecture. By comparing white British cohorts with a large Chinese dataset, the same genetic signal predicts schooling years despite divergent histories, confirming its robustness.

Reich notes, “We were incredulous at first… the correlation persisted across continents,” highlighting the cross‑population validation. The analysis also ruled out confounding by testing alternative models and confirming that the signal is not an artifact of measurement.

If longer education is partly genetically driven, policymakers must consider that educational reforms intersect with underlying biological variation, and researchers should treat schooling as a proxy for a complex trait network rather than pure intelligence.