10
votes
Analysis of Ludwig van Beethoven’s DNA revealed that he had a low genetic predisposition for musical ability
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- Title
- Beethoven's DNA reveals he just wasn't that musical
- Authors
- CC-BY 4.0
- Published
- Mar 27 2024
- Word count
- 794 words
Eh, seems like the proof is in the pudding. What I get out of this article is that we should not give so much weight to these kinds of studies (that is also what the article concludes by the way).
The title is misleading, analysis of his DNA revealed nothing, the study as a whole revealed a weird result that highlights the difficulty of using PGI.
If I understand it correctly, polygenic studies on most things so far are based on so little data that one has to be really careful when interpreting them. When a polygenic study says "we found that trait xxxx is 5% heritable!", what it really means is not "xxxx is only 5% heritable", it means "so far we know that xxxx is at least 5% heritable" because it's too early to tell what else is hidden to us.
In that context this study (whose data is less reliable than the above example) sounds like pure clickbait.
I think it's likely that musical ability is correlated to some heritable traits (I don't think that the fact that it's a human construct is particularly relevant to that), and that one of the most famous composers in history likely had those traits much more than the average population... But this study doesn't seem to actually say much regarding that.
Maybe I'm being ignorant but I feel like looking for a "music gene" is pointless. Music is a human invention and genes are ancient. It's like saying I have a genetic predisposition to be better at shitposting in a tildes comment section.
The whole point of music and art is that the beauty of it is subjective, and the context of human experience that the viewer provides is just as important as the technical skill of the artist.
The main thrust of the article is that we should be cautious about making strong interpretations of genetic data. The double-edged sword of these large datasets is that we can identify subtle connections, but they could also be noise or sensitive to environmental factors.
I certainly see your implication that reducing art to genes may suck some of the soul out of it, but I don't really see it that way. Now, I'm certainly not one to support biological essentialism, especially when it comes to something as complex as human culture, but I wouldn't say that looking for genes associated with certain technical aspects of a craft or skill is pointless. Beyond just knowing something for the sake of knowledge, understanding how gene networks interact with the environment to result in something like music can have many downstream applications involving learning and language and treating diseases associated with them.
Printing this gene sequence on a desktop DNA printer right now.
I wouldn't say that's more correct. You can still be great at something without having a predisposition towards it.
I don't mean to imply that it's more correct, but I certainly think it's no less incorrect.