All my life, I’ve had this dichotomy staring me in the face: my mother’s side of the family tends to live to a ripe old age, I knew my maternal great-grandparents, my grandmother lived on to old age despite a rough life, and my mother is still around (she may outlive me). On my father’s side, though, it’s like the grim reaper marks everyone for death as soon as they hit their fifties. My paternal grandfather died when my dad was a kid, my paternal grandmother died when I was 12, and my father died when he was younger than I am now. So I’ve always wondered which side of the family I was going to take after.

It turns out it doesn’t matter! There’s a new analysis of the genetics of human longevity with a gigantic data set.

Starting from 54 million subscriber-generated public family trees representing six billion ancestors, Ancestry removed redundant entries and those from people who were still living, stitching the remaining pedigrees together. Before sharing the data with the Calico research team, Ancestry stripped away all identifiable information from the pedigrees, leaving only the year of birth, year of death, place of birth (to the resolution of state within the US and country outside the US), and familial connections that make up the tree structure itself.

The SAP included almost 500 million individuals (with a single pedigree accounting for over 400 million people), largely Americans of European descent, each connected to another by either a parent-child or a spouse-spouse relationship. The scale of the data allowed the researchers to get accurate heritability estimates across different contexts; they could stratify the data by birth cohort or by sex or by other variables without losing the power needed for their analyses. They employed structural equation modeling—a technique that hasn’t often been applied to this problem due to the amount of data required for it to be productive—to calculate life span correlations and heritability across the giant pedigree.

Yadda yadda yadda. OK. I’m impressed with the methods. Now I want the answer: tell me my fortune, how long will I live? And the answer is…

By correcting for these effects of assortative mating, the new analysis found life span heritability is likely no more than seven percent, perhaps even lower.

The upshot? How long you live has less to do with your genes than you might think.

You can’t really tell from the genes. Environment and experience matter more.

This is good news: my paternal genetics aren’t a death sentence. But it’s also bad news: my maternal genetics don’t mean I can coast into my 90s. I have to try and replicate the life history of my maternal relatives.

Let’s see…

• Live in a cold northern climate, like Minnesota. Check.
• Eat more lutefisk.
  Uh, we might have a problem here.

Note: This result does not mean that genetics doesn’t matter. It means longevity is a complex, multifactorial trait, that many genes work in concert to allow for a long life, and that we inherit a mix of genes, some deleterious, some beneficial, such that you can’t easily estimate the role of the combinations you get from looking at your relatives. Also, as we all know, there is a huge environmental component: I could have the best suite of longevity genes, but if I start smoking cigars and drinking a quart of whisky every day while practicing a high wire act without a net, I may not last for long. There’s also a component of just simple chance.

So forget about genetic determinism. Just live the best life you can.

You can’t do anything about global warming, he says. Might as well burn more coal, otherwise you’ll have to start burning trees. There’s nothing anyone can do to mitigate climate change.

Jordan Peterson regurgitates Koch brother BS when asked about climate change. He is basically that Republican idiot who stood in Congress with a snowball in his hand as proof global warming doesn't exist, except he's considered a brain-genius by his lobster boy fanbase pic.twitter.com/QoF2qCB54Y

— ☀️👀 (@zei_nabq) November 4, 2018

There are more trees in the Northern Hemisphere^* than there were 200 years ago, which says to me that we do have the power to enable changes in the environment. Where he goes off the rails is in implying that it would be worse to burn trees than to burn coal. Trees are a renewable resource. There is no net gain in atmospheric CO₂ if you plant trees at a rate equal to or faster than the rate you burn them, while burning coal releases CO₂ that has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years.

No, you don’t have to turn off your heat (Minnesota, in the winter? No, thanks). But you can get your heat from renewable sources that don’t contribute to greenhouse gases. About a third of US electricity generation is from coal, another third from natural gas, and the other third is from renewables and nuclear power. We can shift that — in Germany, about half their power is generated from renewables and nuclear, so you can clearly work in that direction without compromising industry. One thing we could do is phase out new coal power plant construction and encourage more solar and wind power (and nuclear, maybe — although that’s guaranteed to start arguments among environmentalists). It’s going to take time, but it doesn’t help to have apologists for the fossil fuel industry advocating for giving up.

It also helps to set personal limits and long-term goals. That was the whole point of the Paris climate agreement, to set goals and provide practical guidance in meeting them. You know, the agreement our President* reneged on to keep his coal and oil friends happy.

And that Peterson guy has a packed house listening to him babble garbage.

^*You should ask yourself, what about the Southern Hemisphere? Why doesn’t he say anything about that? Aren’t most of the planet’s trees in the tropics? Asking us to pay attention to a success story on the fringe while ignoring a net loss of 10 billion trees per year in the core is a classic right-wing distraction tactic.

There’s a federal court case, Juliana v. United States, in the works in which the plaintiffs argue that the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness obligates the government to maintain a sustainable, livable atmosphere — or, at least, support legislation in good faith that limits how much we can poison it. That sounds like a good idea to me.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

How can you argue against that? The Trump administration has a simple defense.

By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’ — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

That is not the answer I expected. Hemming and hawing about the practicality of limiting greenhouse gasses, sure; endless lying about whether climate change is a temporary phase, or about the desirability of warming up the planet by a few degrees, or claiming that we might be getting a little warmer, but there is no threat to our existence…I could imagine all that coming out of Republicans in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

But to announce that they feel no compulsion to provide an environment compatible with life? That’s a new one.