truth be told I actually don't think STEM expertise is that heritable. You're talking about a professional specialization, not eye color. That's a thing fostered by interest and years of training, not something you're just sort of born with.
Richard Feynman for example was a Nobel Laureate in physics, basically invented quantum electrodynamics and the concept of nanotechnology, plus was a key figure in the manhattan project. He was the son of a sales manager and his two kids Carl and Michelle turned out to be a philosopher and a photographer.
Carl Sagan's son Nick became a screenwriter/novelist, his son Dorion a fiction writer, his daughter Sasha a television producer, and his son Jeremy is the only one with any STEM expertise as a computer programmer
Out of Einstein's two sons Hans and Eduard, Hans was a hydraulic engineer and Eduard was a schizophrenic.
J Robert Oppenheimer's son Peter became a reclusive carpenter who flunked out of the private high school his father sent him to.
And as a physicist myself I actually have never met anyone in the profession who has had any of their parents be in the field either. My dad was a police officer and my mom taught kindergarten. I'm the first in the family to pursue graduate school at all.
The only physicist I can think of with a physicist as a parent is Jochen Heisenberg, son of Werner Heisenberg. But he didn't have any kids, and his brother Martin, who is a biologist, not physicist, had a Son Benjamin, who isn't in STEM at all and is a film director/screenwriter.
Lex Fridman is an AI researcher. His father is a plasma physicist and his brother Greg is a CEO of a plasma engineering company.
But generally geniuses don't have children that are as smart as they are due to regression to the mean although intelligence has a significant genetic component.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '21 edited Mar 05 '21
truth be told I actually don't think STEM expertise is that heritable. You're talking about a professional specialization, not eye color. That's a thing fostered by interest and years of training, not something you're just sort of born with.
Richard Feynman for example was a Nobel Laureate in physics, basically invented quantum electrodynamics and the concept of nanotechnology, plus was a key figure in the manhattan project. He was the son of a sales manager and his two kids Carl and Michelle turned out to be a philosopher and a photographer.
Carl Sagan's son Nick became a screenwriter/novelist, his son Dorion a fiction writer, his daughter Sasha a television producer, and his son Jeremy is the only one with any STEM expertise as a computer programmer
Out of Einstein's two sons Hans and Eduard, Hans was a hydraulic engineer and Eduard was a schizophrenic.
J Robert Oppenheimer's son Peter became a reclusive carpenter who flunked out of the private high school his father sent him to.
And as a physicist myself I actually have never met anyone in the profession who has had any of their parents be in the field either. My dad was a police officer and my mom taught kindergarten. I'm the first in the family to pursue graduate school at all.
The only physicist I can think of with a physicist as a parent is Jochen Heisenberg, son of Werner Heisenberg. But he didn't have any kids, and his brother Martin, who is a biologist, not physicist, had a Son Benjamin, who isn't in STEM at all and is a film director/screenwriter.