Hypothesis: Personalities are Epigenetic

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These two facts seem incompatible:

  1. Personalities are inherited. Identical twins separated at birth are statistically more similar than fraternal twins.

  2. The human population has almost zero genetic variation, and there is significant mixing so variations do not systematically cluster.

Therefore, it seems unlikely that subtle personality differences are due to genetic variation.

My hypothesis is that animal personalities are encoded in epigenetic changes.

This allows personalities to be inherited, crossover, and evolve. Life experiences can induce epigenetic changes, which allows animals to reliably adapt in a single generation. All of this without requiring any genetic variation. A population of clones could have diverse personalities encoded in their epigenome.

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