Key points from article :
Genetics has less influence on life span, according to a study that aggregated family tree data of over 400 million people.
Calico Life Sciences teamed up with Ancestry to use publicly available data to estimate the heritability of human life span.
Previous estimates of human life span heritability ranged from around 15% to 30%.
Participants were largely Americans of European descent - each connected to another by a parent-child or a spouse-spouse relationship.
Estimates in spouses were more similar than in siblings -- may be due to non-genetic factors in shared household.
However, siblings-in-law and first-cousins-in-law had correlated life spans -- despite not being blood relatives nor sharing households.
Correlations in person's sibling's spouse's sibling or their spouse's sibling's spouse were also similar -- something else was at play.
Assortative mating means that people tend to select partners with similar traits, says lead author Graham Ruby. The choice could be genetic or sociocultural.
By correcting these effects, the study found life span heritability is likely no more than 7%, perhaps even lower.
The upshot? How long you live has less to do with your genes than you might think.
The research from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry was published in GENETICS.
