reimposed very shortly. it follows president trump's decision to pull out of an international agreement aimed at curbing tehran‘s nuclear ambitions. the other signatories say they remain committed to the nuclear deal. republicans and democrats in the united states are making some of their final appeals to voters, before tuesday's mid—term elections widely seen as a referendum on the trump presidency. the current and previous presidents are addressing campaign rallies. mr trump has been stressing his tough line against immigration. floods have killed 12 people on the italian island of sicily, including nine members of a single family. a week of extreme weather has now been responsible for the deaths of 30 people. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur.

it is an age old debate that engages scientists and philosophers too — which is the more powerful influence on who we are, nature or nurture? in recent years, genetic science has done much to reframe the debate by highlighting the connections between our individual dna and our traits and behaviours. at the forefront of this research is my guest, robert plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at kings college london. to what extent are our genes our destiny? theme music plays. robert plomin, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. you have just written an extraordinary book. we are going to talk about it at length. it's called bluprint but the subtitle is, how dna makes us who we are. now, that is a very grand statement. do you mean it as a sort of engaging headline or do you actually mean it as straightforward fact? well, it needs another clause or two to make it a straightforward fact. so guilty as charged, i think, in terms of being eye—catching. evolutionary psychology studies what makes us human and they are focused on the 99% of the dna that we all share. i am talking about the i% of dna that makes us different so it really should say, "how dna makes us who we are as individuals". why are we different? why are some of us more vulnerable to mental illness and why are some of us more sociable or better in terms

of spatial ability? it's those differences that interest me. so your contention is that, if we dig down deep into the psychological traits that we all have, that they are roughly 50% governed by our genetic material, by our dna? yeah. and those verbs are difficult, you know, "determined", "governed", "make us", you know, and really these are influences and because what we have learned is it's not one gene. we are talking about thousands of dna differences of tiny effect and the reason that is so important is it makes the genetic influence probabilistic rather than deterministic. that is such an interesting distinction because the many people, indeed your critics — and you would be familiar with them. i'm going to quote one of them to you, nathaniel comfort, who, i don't know if you engage with him very much but he's a professor of the history of medicine atjohn hopkins university in the us. he says that the message

of your book, bluprint, is "vintage genetic determinism". now, why are you arguing with that notion, that it is deterministic? because — i don't know if he read the book — but he didn't review the book, he just reviewed... he didn't like the message of genetic influence, and that was a review in nature, for example. it's easy to say, i can talk about genetic influences accounting for 50% of the differences between us, say, in schizophrenia, or personality or spatial ability. but i'm not saying it determines it. first of all because 50% is not genetic. but even the part that is genetic, it doesn't mean you can't do anything about your behaviour. it's just these are genetic nudges. you know, they push you. if you have met kids who are really good at maths, they make their world maths. theyjoke about maths, they talk maths, they think maths, so they create an environment that is kind of in line with their genetic tendencies. it is not this deterministic hardwired thing. and the best example in my book is i actually create

what we call polygenic scores. so based on my dna, i'm able to put thousands of these dna differences together to predict weight. so we can predict about 10% of the differences in weight and, when i do that for me, you can see that i'm on the portly side and i am at the 70th percentile in actual weight but my genetics score is at the 94th percentile. does that, you know, people say, "oh, that means you just don't to give up, you're a genetic fatty, you can't do anything about it". but to the contrary, you know, i find it very motivating... laughs... ..it‘s a lifelong battle of the bulge. we will get to this notion of giving everybody a polygenics score and what we're to do with that information late. but before we get there, i want people to understand a little bit more about the history of you work. much of your work has been actually with twins, and in particular with identical twins, and in particular, even within that subset, identical twins — and you found some — who were raised by different pa rents. i.e., they were separated at birth.

now, why have they been so very important to the work you have done over the years? well, the identical twins who grew apart are important because they are dramatic but, as you can imagine, they are quite rare. identical twins are abouti in 1000, something like that, and then how many of those are separated at birth? you know, it's very rare. but they are dramatic in making the case that these clones — because they are clones — identical twins, if you sequence their dna... 0ne fertilised egg that is separated. exactly right. so it is a clone. that is what a clone is. so it's very dramatic when you bring these identical twins together and you just see how similar they are. there is a film that is going to be released in england — it was released in the states in the summer and it won a sundance award for documentary, called three identical strangers.

so these three identical twins are put into the same adoption home and a wicked psychiatrist decided to do an experiment — put one in a lower class home, one in a middle—class home, one in an upper—class home, and didn't tell the parents about the existence of the identical siblings. so this guy goes to college in upstate new york, dave, and everyone is calling him eddie and he says, i'm not... he thought it was a joke or something. next day he met eddie and it was an identical twin of his. and he says it was like looking in the mirror. but the neat thing is it isn'tjust physical... no, that's the point. ..their personality, they are all very outgoing, they all go into acting and, in terms of mental health, they are all subject to depression. your work and teasing out the importance of the genetic material within us and how it relates to our most basic personality traits and everything that goes with it, it gets into very treacherous moral and ethical territory because, to many, it raises the spectre of notions of race superiority, genetic theory that go back to the nazi era that then, perhaps if we fast forward, involved things like the theory of the bell curve that was peddled to explain intelligence in the 1990s,

which had a racial element to it. can you understand why people listening to you and the focus you have on genetic material and dna, they worry about the implications? i don't know that they do so much. i was really worried when this book came out. i could see that things are changing, you know, that the zeitgeist is not so much a knee—jerk reaction against genetics, and i have been astounded by the reaction to the book. you know, giving public lectures at festivals... but you do acknowledge that, i mean, you used the word "cowardice". you said, "the reason it took me a long time to write this book and i sat on some of this materialfor a long time is because i was worried about the reaction i would get." that was then, this is now. that was 30 years ago,

i was asked to write this book. and i thought back then, we didn't have as much data and that is one thing. but i am so glad i waited because the dna revolution wasn't even thought of them, and that's what is changing everything now. we can look at dna itself. but, you know, i take your point but nature had an editorial last year, about a year and a half ago, that basically said we shouldn't brand modern genetics with the sins of the past, and you wouldn't brand environmentalism — which is what most people believe in, from freud onwards — by totalitarian environmental governance like the soviet union or north korea or mao. so i don't think it is as much of a problem as you might think, at least among the lay public now. isn't there something deadening and maybe even worrying about your explanation of who we are because, in so many ways, it challenges fundamental sort of aspirations and ambitions we have for ourselves as human beings, notions of betterment. i mean, you in an interesting

paragraph which i have written down, you talk about common aphorisms, particularly in the west, things like, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again". or the famous us army phrase, "be all that you can be". and you take these phrases and you say, you know what? — i'm paraphrasing — you know what, they're rubbish. they are actually dangerous to us because they give us an idea of how we can change ourselves that is not true. another one of those is "anyone can be president" and, given the current situation, you'd think that might be true but that ends with a quote from wc fields who says, "try and try again". .. "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again but then don't be a damn fool, give up". that's the point though. your theory would, in a way, lead us all to be fatalistic, be full of weary resignation because, frankly, we'd all get these polygenic readouts that you have already referred to, we'd see what our dna tells us

are our strength and our weaknesses, both physical and mental, and we would accept that this is our destiny. you can change but isn't it better to go with the grain, to go with the flow, don't swim upstream, if you don't have to? you can change yourself. i mean, you could be like me, i'm no good at languages. we can learn foreign languages, it's just going to take us a lot more effort to do that. it's not that we can't do it, but why should we, especially seeing as i'm interested in education, why do we force one universal curriculum on all children? why don't we recognise strengths and weaknesses and try to minimise the weaknesses and go with the strengths? why make everyone beat their head against the wall of mathematics, for example? i do see what you're say but i am also interested in the degree to which, if one brings the very long and serious academic study you've done into the real world of everybody‘s lives, how it connects.

for example, let's talk about parenting, which you have got children, right? yes, i do. so do i. so this matters to both you and me. you say and, again, i may be putting it rather bluntly, but you essentially say, parents do matter but they don't make a difference and, as a parent of three children, who are now grown up, i find that very hard to believe. i could ask you why but that might be getting too personal. but let me make it more abstract. . .you want to? no, because this is about you not me and let's not detain ourselves with me. 0k, well, when i was back in graduate school, in the early 70s, i was taught that schizophrenia is what your mother does to you in the first few years of life. which is amazing now because there is absolutely no evidence for that. you mean but not giving you enough love? exactly, being a refrigerator mother, cold and hot and that sort of thing.

since then, a mountain of evidence has built up that schizophrenia is very substantially due to inherited dna differences — not entirely but maybe 50%, 60% of the liability to be schizophrenic is in the original cell with which you began life. the dna in that cell. i understand that but one cannot extrapolate from that very reasoned explanation of schizophrenia, one cannot extrapolate from that to say that parental love doesn't matter? no, but that's the second part of it, though. what runs in families is dna. the environment is important. on average, heritability, that is the extent of genetic influence, is about 50%, that means 50% is not genetic. that environmental influence though is very different from the type of environment that the environmentalist, from freud onwards, assumed was important. they assumed the environment where these systematic effects, like mothers treating you badly as an infant, for example, but we now know that cannot be important because kids growing

up in the same family who are not genetically related, adoptive siblings, we call them — a third of adoptive families adopt a second child who isn't related to that child — they are not similar, even though they grew up in the same family. like, for body weight — the correlation in body weight between two kids growing up in the same family, who are not genetically related, is zero. and yet, those adopted kids, if you look at their correlation with their birth parents who gave them up for adoption at birth, it is just as great as the correlation in weight between parents who rear their own kids. so all the data together, really,... but don't you go to an extreme and you basically say to me, as a parent, you're going to find this hard to believe but it would not really have mattered if your children had been taken out of your family and plonked into somebody else‘s family when they were very little, as long as they were not abused, you say — that is a caveat, abuse is bad and it does have long—term effects — but you say, as long as they were not abused in that new environment, frankly, it would have made no difference.

even more than that, i'm saying that the upshot of these findings i've discussed, that genetics is very important, that the environment does not work the way we thought it worked, it is essentially random — the way you can remember it is that, if we were adopted at birth and raised in a different family, and gone to a different school and had different jobs, we would be essentially the same person. there would be environmental differences, like illnesses that knock you off the trajectory, but you tend to go back to the trajectory. so i know it is a lot to take on board but the data are really solid behind this. and what about schooling? because again, those who have — perhaps it was the prevailing opinion in much of the 20th century, those who focused on nurture rather than nature, they've talked about the family environment and they've talked about the educational, the school environment, and they've talked about how important it is to have good teachers, decent schools where the classrooms are not too big, where there is a real focus on the child. you're saying, again, as long as the school isn't abusive or doing actual physical harm to the child, and is teaching them the basics, you're saying that it

doesn't really matter. if you pay for a selective, expensive, fancy school, you are wasting your money? that's correct. i am saying that. and i'm saying that schools matter that they do not make a difference. schools matter, that is why we have universal education around the world. we say kids have to go to school to learn basic sorts of skills and inculturation. but does going to a good school make a difference? so, that's why we have this paper, for example, on selective versus non—selective schools. selective being fee—paying and grammar schools. they have a full grade gcse difference. this is the national test at the age of 16. an average of a— and average of c+. there's big difference between kids in comprehensive schools and not. and people assume well, that's environmental. thos are just better schools that teach better. if you just simply correct for what the selective schools select on, which is prior achievement and ability, there is no difference.

there's no added value of going to these expensive schools which i think is a liberating message for parents. to a point, but it gets very political. it gets political because a few years ago now you went to see the department of education in the uk and you even had a meeting with the secretary of state for education and afterwards, one of his key advisers came out was clearly influenced a great deal by your work and said, you know what? we in britain, our education system pays far too little heed to genetics and is far too hung up on the ratio of pupils to teachers and that sort of thing. we should spend much more time talking about genetics in our education system. he got pilloried for that because to many people it sounded like he was opting out of a political effort to make our schools better. yes. well, i'm all for making our schools better because they matter. we want it to be a nice place for kids to be. we want them to love to learn, and to learn to learn.

you know? instead of that, what do we have? we have a national curriculum being shoved into kids heads with a prescribed curriculum and the thing i hate the most is teaching to the tests. my granddaughter... i'm overwhelmed by a feeling, as you talk about the detail of what you'd like to see in a good education system, that it does not really matter. because whether they have a contrived narrow curriculum or a very open liberal one, in the end, you say, the genetics of this will come out and the bright kids will be bright and they will develop their mathematical skill if that is what they are hardwired to do. if your criterion is to improve individual scores on gcse tests, you know, that's a problem. butjohn dewey, the famous educator in the united states last century, he said that it is notjust a means to an end, education. it is an end in itself. a big chunk of people's lives. they should enjoy it. that is how i feel about parenting as well. it is not a factory producing kids. we give them a good enough environment so that they can flourish, they can learn

what they like to do. rather than assuming that, you know, it is the instruction — instruary, shoving it in — versus the education — which is educary, drawing it out. there are people again who take your work and draw conclusions from it. some see a dystopian future. you're spoken already about the testing one can get to look in detail at your own dna and how it stacks up. should that, in the dystopian view, that will start happening to everybody but will actually start happening even in the womb before new human beings are born and those parents who are determined to maximise their child's intelligence or height or whatever it might be, will start using selective processes before birth. how are they going to do that? with in vitro fertilisation? it happens already.

well, it does. but have you gone through it? it is not fun. it is a really difficult process and ifind it hard to believe that we will have designer babies. the reason i wrote the book is so that we have these discussions now. so that we say go there, no further. however, i think the dystopian view comes from people of our generation, from gattaca, the 1996 film which was a totalitarian government who, on the basis of dna, divided or the people into valid... with all respect, it doesn't come from movies. it comes from our knowledge of the nazis. it comes from dr mengele. from human weakness and flaws and all of the things that are hardwired into us that are bad, which we know are out there. but all those examples you gave are totalitarian governments. totalitarian governments do not need an excuse to be bad to its people. witness the other side, mao and north korea, for example. you don't need a genetic predisposition to do bad things.

no doubt about that. but all i'm saying is that with your research and many others who are giving us this new capacity to understand the power of dna, and genetic material. the capacity for employing that badness in the most dangerous dystopian directions is increased. or is it outweighed by the positive? i'm a cheerleader for this stuff because i see a lot of good coming from it. there are plenty of people with that view who have a dystopian view of it, but that is not necessarily the correct view. there's also very positive thing that can happen if we all had our polygenic scores. so is your recommendation for everybody watching this around the world and listening that they should, and it's about $100 now to get a readout, a map of your own dna, your own genome, are you recommending we should all do that to better understand ourselves? well, it's happening. 4 million people have paid the $100 to do that. but i think that's where a lot of problems come in. direct consumer testing. you could find out, for example, if you are at risk for alzheimer's. people divide down the line.

they don't want to know or they do want to know because there's nothing you can do about it. so that's where these problems come up. they offer no counselling. so what if you find that you have two of those mutations and that means you are at an 80% risk of having alzheimer's later in life? there are many things we have to worry about here and that is why i want to raise the discussion now. the point i want to make is i'm not saying people should go out and do this. i think, even probably more provocatively, the nhs should do it for everybody. again, it comes back to whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. your dna, i dare say, makes you an inveterate optimist, i guess that from the way you have couched the importance of what you have discovered. i, perhaps, am a hardwired pessimist. to me, as a pessimist, human experience tells us that many of the most dominant traits that come from our hardwiring

are selfishness, greed, manipulative behaviours and it seems to me the thing you are uncovering about the power of dna is open to those... you are a pessimist, aren't you? but look at the record of humanity. what about intelligence and creativity and humanity and all the positive things? they are just as genetic. why do you worry about the negative? i take your point absolutely. but there is, within all of us, this tension, certainly within the species, this tension. why, as a final point, are you so sure that the good traits that are wired into so many of us will mean that the knowledge you put forward will be used in a benign, not a malign way? i know that this is going to happen and i know what will happen because it will be led by the medical area. right now with cardiovascular risk, we can predict whether you will have a heart attack better with dna than with anything else. so that there is now 8% of our population in england who have a threefold greater than average risk of having

a heart attack. francis collins, head of the nih, said we will look back a few years and that was unethical that we did not do this now. you do it once and you get a, it costs about 30 quid if the government did it, tests, and it is good for everything. once you've read the dna that is all there is. if they knew you were at a threefold greater risk for cardiovascular disease, wouldn't you want to know that? and then once you do this, those dna data will be available to talk about alcoholism. wouldn't you want to know you're at a genetic risk for alcoholism? these low—tech preventative solutions, that is the big thing about dna. it is the only predictive game in town. and to prevent, you need to predict. i predict that we could talk for many hours about this but unfortunately we have to end there. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. hello.

nature's very own light spectacular, the aurora borealis, or northern lights, in full display across the northern isles. also, some parts of eastern scotland and eastern england under clearer skies, but further west, a different story. this area of low pressure in the bay of biscay, we have a frontal system extending across western fringes of the uk, continuing to bring outbreaks of rain. this will ease from northern ireland through the morning and things get dry across wales and south—west england and outbreaks of rain continue to push their way north and eastwards across scotland as this too pulls away. behind it, we'll see the cloud thinning and breaking. bright and sunny spells and a scattering of showers, but very mild for the early

part of november. temperatures generally between 10 and 15 celsius, up to 16 or 17 in east anglia and south—east england. after the windy conditions of the weekend, a gentler south or south—easterly breeze through monday afternoon. we'll keep that gentle breeze as we go on through the evening. for many, it will be dry with clear spells. a bit of patchy rain continuing across parts of northern ireland, western scotland, maybe the far south—west of england. but if you do have plans for firework or bonfire displays on monday evening, for most, it will be dry, it will be mild and there'll be a gentle locally moderate breeze. as you go from monday into tuesday, we have another frontal system in the atlantic working its way towards the uk. it does have limited eastward progress, so on tuesday, the heaviest and most persistent of the rain will be across the western side of scotland, northern ireland, eventually into wales and south—west england. meanwhile, further east, it stays dry, breezy

and bright sunny spells. look where those winds are coming from, all the way from the south. we're going to keep that mild air, temperatures again reaching 1a to 17 celsius. but some persistent rain further west on tuesday. as we go from tuesday into wednesday, that front does begin to work its way eastwards across the uk, so overnight, we'll see outbreaks of rain and a squeeze on the isobars. strong winds at midweek and slowly through wednesday, our outbreaks of rain will start to ease the way towards the east, become lighter and patchy so something dry here through the day and central areas too. further west, we will see the heaviest and most persistent of the rain. it is an unsettled feel as we go through the week. wednesday afternoon, temperatures up to between 12 and 1a celsius, not as high as what we see on monday and tuesday but still quite mild for the time of year. and that is the theme for the week ahead. it's going to be mild and also windy and there will be some rain at times. that's all from me. bye— bye. this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock.

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