Its well known that some areas of the UK arepoorer than others.
These include Wales and northern Britain, which used to becoal-mining areas.
Genetic clustering has existed in all past societies.
People have typically been relativelygenetically similar to others nearby.
But most of this was because of limited mobility.
Before motorized transport, most people married and had children with someone else near to them.
But in the 19th and 20th centuries, people started to move about more.
Societies opened up geographically, and socially.
This new mobility has created a new kind of clustering what the American authorThomas Friedmancalled a great sorting out.
Talented people have moved to big cities and up-and-coming areas to be with others like them.
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Polygenic scores can have a good amount of predictive power.
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For example, polygenic scores for educational attainmentcan predicthow many years of education a person received in total.
These scores arent completely accurate, but they have a considerable amount of predictive power.
Among the 10 percent with the lowest scores, less than one fifth had such a degree.
We found that those with high polygenic scores for educational attainment tend to live near others with similar scores.
This clustering isnt like the ancestral differences in DNA.
And it is increasing.
And their scores are much higher than those who stayed in or moved to these areas.
Not just education
In itself, this is not so surprising.
Why is this happening?
Our data suggests that educational attainment is the real driver.
Dystopian future?
At the turn of the 20th century, European societieswere very unequal.
That sounds like a good thing, and it is.
But in the 1950s, the sociologistMichael YoungwroteThe Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033.
The book was a dystopian satire.
In Youngs vision of 2033, the new meritocracy had become more deeply unequal than the old aristocracies.
Before, the elite were on top by sheer luck, from being born into the right social caste.
But now, the elite had got there by their own efforts.
They deserved to be elite, they knew it, and they passed their advantage on to their descendants.
Young may have been prescient.
Rich and poor areas in Britain are not only divided by wealth, income or access to public services.
The differences now extend into the very DNA of people living there.
In some ways, this new inequality reaches deeper than before.
Its time we start.
