Australian researcher conducts a meta-analysis of ALL the twin studies ever done, concludes it's half and half overall but some things are strongly nature or nurture.

Which is what we suspected all along.

yeah.  duh.

If only "suspecting all along" were, you know, SCIENCE.

true.  like colorado's success with legalizing marijuana.  we suspected all along it would be a thrilling success, but it is nice to have some numbers to back it up.

And yet not as big a success as it could be:

http://pandawhale.com/post/60287/five-charts-explain-colorados-first-year-of-legalized-recreational-weed

aww man!   i thought it was thrilling?  no?

The future possibilities are thrilling. They really need lounges, bars, and cafes. 

I wonder how  many of the studies looked at environmental factors that affect gene expression?  The article doesn't give any insights there - and you'd probably need to dig into each individual study to see.  Anyway, though, they're finding a lot of gene expressions that are influenced by environmental factors:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080422150659.htm

I haven't heard of any studies that looked at environmental factors that affect genes.

Makes sense that there would be causes and effects there.

By the way, that's a LOT of twin pairs studied.

University of Queensland researcher Dr Beben Benyamin from the Queensland Brain Institute collaborated with researchers at VU University of Amsterdam to review almost every twin study across the world from the past 50 years, involving more than 14.5 million twin pairs.

The findings, published in Nature Genetics, reveal on average the variation for human traits and diseases is 49 per cent genetic, and 51 per cent due to environmental factors and/or measurement errors.

14,500,000 pairs!!  to find out it's equally nature and nurture.

glad we got that settled.

Not quite settled because environment might affect genes like CJ said. 

So environment probably has more influence if we look at generations rather than a single generation. 

well, now we can go in circles for a while .

environment affects everything, including our genes (nature) and our behavior (nuture).  and we affect our environment... and our environment affects our genes... and our genes affect our behavior... and our behavior affects our environment... and our environment affects our behavior... and our behavior affects our genes... and well, you get it.

interconnectedness, yo.

as for those ladies up top: the one on the left looks considerably more bored than her twin.

She does!

I think the key concept is feedback loop.

Every actio has reactions.