Ancestry releases study on longevity from partnership with Google life-extension startup Calico

Yulia Mayorova/Shutterstock

• Genealogy and DNA site Ancestry
  once partnered with Google’s stealthy life extension
  spinoff, a company called Calico, to study the genetics of
  longevity.
• The new study suggests that our genes play less of a role in
  how long we live than previously believed.
• Instead, traits and behaviors that include everything from
  
  diet and exercise to
  how friendly we are appear to play a strong role in
  longevity.
• But surprisingly, we still pass these traits on through
  generations — mostly by picking partners who look and act like
  us, the researchers suggest.

The road to achieving a long life is littered with hype.
The usual life-extension suspects include pricey pills and
supplements; the peculiar involve 
infusions
of young blood
 and chambers pumped with sub-zero
temperatures. 

Then there’s science. And one scientific factor that has
long been presumed to dictate much of how long we live is our
DNA. For decades, it was assumed that the genes we inherit from
our parents explain anywhere from 15% to 30% of the variations in
longevity that are observed between people.

But a new study that came
from a
quiet collaboration between genetics company Ancestry and a
Google life-extension spinoff called Calico suggests that our
genes play less of a role in our lifespan than we
thought.  

Instead, traits and behaviors that include everything from
diet
and exercise to
how friendly we are appear to play a strong role in
longevity. Surprisingly, we still pass these traits on through
generations — mostly by picking partners who look and act like
us, the researchers report.

In essence, the findings suggest that people effectively transfer
longevity from one generation to the next much in the same way
that wealth and socioeconomic status are passed from parents to
children: by choosing partners with attitudes and attributes that
mirror our own, regardless of how different their DNA may be.

Picking partners who act and think like us

seyfettin dincturk /
Unsplash

For decades, researchers studying longevity and genetics had
estimated that the genes we inherit from our parents play a
significant
role in determining how long we live. Previous studies
suggested that genes account for as much as 30% of the total
variability in life span between individuals.

But the new study from Ancestry and Calico indicates that our DNA
may be much less important in determining longevity than traits
and behaviors like diet,
exercise, and
personality. After looking at data from more than 54
million family trees and included the birth and death information
on over 400 million individuals, the researchers concluded that
our DNA accounts for less than 10% of life span variability.

Instead, we pass on longevity through generations by choosing
partners whose attitudes and attributes look much like our own.
In research parlance, that’s known as “assortative mating.”

“The true heritability of human longevity for birth
cohorts across the 1800s and early 1900s was well below 10%, and
… has been generally overestimated due to the effect of
assortative mating,” the scientists wrote.

Put another way, we tend to pick partners with attitudes and
attributes — from eating and exercising to friendliness — that
mirror our own. And as a result, we tend to live similar amounts
of time, and have children who do as well.

How friendly we are and how often we workout may play a stronger
role in our longevity than our DNA

Shutterstock

Previous studies shed light on how important lifestyle factors
are when it comes to how long we live. In a
recent study
published in the journal Circulation, for example, scientists
pinpointed five lifestyle factors that appear to be linked with a
significantly longer lifespan, judging by the outcomes of two
long-term studies that involved about 123,000 adults.

People in the study who lived long lives tended
to:

• Do at least 30 minutes of cardio exercise every day
• Eat a Mediterranean diet
• Never smoke
• Stick to a healthy body weight
• Drink no more than 1-2 alcoholic beverages a day

As part of several
other recent studies, scientists have uncovered a handful
personality traits that also appear to be strongly linked to
longer-than-average lives. They include:

Taken together, the findings suggest that how long we live may be
less a matter of what we’re born with than the circumstances in
which we live and the choices that we make. Those choices, as the
Ancestry and Google researchers acknowledge in their new paper,
tend to be based on everything from social status to wealth and
then, just like genetics, passed on from one generation to the
next.