Identical twins share almost all their DNA, but genes are only part of what shapes personality. (lambada/E+/Getty Images)
One of the biggest existential questions an individual can ask is "What makes me, me?"Identical twins have near-identical genetics, yet can still develop quite different personalities – about as perfect a demonstration as nature could offer that DNA isn't destiny.Nevertheless, some part of who you are is written in A-T-C-G – the question is not whether DNA and personality are linked, but by how much.Now, the largest genetic investigation of the Big Five personality traits to date has found more than a thousand genetic variants associated with the ways we tend to think, feel, and behave.But that doesn't mean scientists can divine your personality from scraps of DNA like genetic tasseographers. The results don't work that way on an individual level; rather, genetics can reveal patterns in personality across populations."If we'd want to know someone's personality at an individual level, genetics isn't really a fruitful path; we can simply measure personality and get a very clear picture, genes wouldn't add anything there," genetic epidemiologist Michel Nivard of the University of Bristol in the UK, a senior author of the study, told ScienceAlert."What genes do offer us is a way to link personality, in the aggregate across groups of people, to all other outcomes we have ever previously studied with a genome-wide association study."
