Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? | The New Yorker
"“You only have one life to live, but if you rewound the tape and started anew from the exact same genetic and environmental starting point, how differently could your life go?” She continued, “Overall, twin research suggests that, in your alternate life, you might not have gotten divorced, you might have made more money, you might be more extraverted or organized—but you are unlikely to be substantially different in your cognitive ability, education, or mental disease.” In the past few years, Harden noted, new molecular techniques have begun to shore up the basic finding that our personal trajectories owe a considerable debt to our genes...
Many of the left-leaning social scientists seemed certain that behavior-genetics research, no matter how well intentioned, was likely to lead us down the garden path to eugenics. The world would be better, Harden was told, if she quit. When their cohort went to see “Hamilton,” the others professed surprise that Harden and Tucker-Drob had enjoyed it, as if their work could be done only by people uncomfortable with an inclusive vision of American history. ..
The paper drew upon a major international collaboration that had identified sites on the genome that evinced a statistically significant correlation with educational attainment; Belsky and his colleagues used that data to compile a “polygenic score”—a weighted sum of an individual’s relevant genetic variants—that could partly explain population variance in reading ability and years of schooling. His study sampled New Zealanders of northern-European descent and was carefully controlled for childhood socioeconomic status. “Hope that you find this interesting food for thought,” she wrote.
William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke and perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality, answered curtly, starting a long chain of replies. Given the difficulties of distinguishing between genetic and environmental effects on social outcomes, he wrote, such investigations were at best futile: “There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”...
An admirer of Darity’s work—especially on reparations for slavery—Harden was surprised that she’d elicited such rancor from someone with whom she was otherwise in near-total political agreement. In the wake of the exchange, some of the other fellows stopped speaking to Harden, and the e-mail chain was forwarded to members of the foundation’s board. The next year, after winning the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, Harden applied for a grant from Russell Sage’s biosciences initiative, which had supported similar research in the past. She received enthusiastic peer reviews from its scientific advisers, and was given to understand that the grant’s disbursal was a fait accompli. During a contentious meeting, however, the full board voted to overturn the scientific panel’s recommendation. Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. In the end, the board chose to disband the initiative entirely. ..
"Genetic differences between us matter for our lives. They cause differences in things we care about. Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.”...
Virtually every time Harden gives a presentation, someone asks about “Gattaca,” the 1997 movie about a dystopia structured by genetic caste. Harden responds that the life of a behavior geneticist resembles a different nineties classic: “Groundhog Day.” ...
The idea of “peer pressure” as a driver of adolescent substance abuse was, at best, a radical oversimplification of an extremely complex transactional dynamic between genes and environment...
The largest GWAS for educational attainment to date found almost thirteen hundred sites on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores—about as accurate a predictor as traditional social-science variables like parental income...
She thinks that all the books about the minor decisions of parenting—whether to introduce carrots or broccoli first, say—are “an attempt to psychologically defend ourselves from how little control we have in the world, about ourselves and our children.”...
“Genetic data gets one source of human differences out of the way, so that the environment is easier to see.” For example, beginning in 2002, the federal government spent almost a billion dollars on something called the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which sought to reduce marital conflict as a way of combatting poverty and juvenile crime. Harden was not surprised to hear that the policy had no discernible effect. Her own research showed that, when identical-twin sisters have marriages with different levels of conflict, their children have equal risk for delinquency ...
In 1972, the U.K. government raised the age at which students could leave school, from fifteen to sixteen. In 2018, a research group studied the effects of the extra year on the students as adults, and found that their health outcomes for measures like body-mass index, for whatever reason, improved slightly on average. But those with a high genetic propensity for obesity benefitted dramatically—a differential impact that might easily have gone unnoticed...
Soon after the events at Middlebury, the Web magazine Vox had published a piece that rejected even Murray’s basic points about intelligence tout court. Harris’s podcast seemed designed to reveal that the left’s repudiation of Murray was motivated by politics rather than by science ...
The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia...
Harden’s outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes, genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”
In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”...
Behavior geneticists frequently quote an old disciplinary chestnut about how first-time parents are naïve behaviorists and that a second child turns them into convinced geneticists...
She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.As she put it to me in an e-mail, “Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we’ve only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.” She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them...
The perspective of “gene blindness,” she believes, “perpetuates the myth that those of us who have ‘succeeded’ in twenty-first century capitalism have done so primarily because of our own hard work and effort, and not because we happened to be the beneficiaries of accidents of birth—both environmental and genetic.”...
Plenty of twin research suggests a meaningful, if puzzling, genetic correlation with divorce"
The difference between the nature squad and the nurture squad is that the former acknowledge the role of nurture but the latter insist nature doesn't matter at all
Related:
"As Stephen Jay Gould points out, vision problems may be 100 per cent caused by genes but also 100 per cent fixable by eyeglasses. Measures of heritability then depend on availability of glasses."
""This is an example of why *good* genetic analysis matters for policy. If we didn't know that nearsightedness is genetic, we might have people worrying about inducing moral hazard from giving people glasses.
You don't want to look at the fact that many people are nearsighted and then say "well, it's genetic — nothing to be done!" But understanding the issue helps understand what solutions make sense. We don't need vision tutors, or to encourage poor seers to develop more "grit."
My life would be an endless nightmare if we understood my poor vision to be a sociological problem rather than a biological one. And even though glasses are great it's not perfect — I face tougher tradeoffs than people with good vision around swim goggles, contact sports, etc."
Why Resist Blank Slate Thinking? For One, Look to No Child Left Behind
"If human beings are in any sense unequal in their innate cognitive and behavioral abilities, in the way we all accept they are in their athletic abilities, then this has massive policy and politics implications. I wrote a whole book about one obvious place where there are profound policy consequences, which is in education. And nowhere was blank slate thinking more destructive in education policy than with No Child Left Behind.
NCLB was, notoriously, a massive disaster. It was so obviously a disaster, in fact, that when the endless war between Barack Obama and the Republican Congress was at its height, the two sides still came together to get rid of the law. What made NCLB such a profound failure? Well, for one thing, the collision of Common Core and NCLB created onerous testing requirements that drove parents to rebel and passed down huge costs to states, resulting in the opt-out movement that has become woven into today’s social justice movement. More relevant here, NCLB essentially mandated perpetual improvement in student scores and in effect demanded 100% compliance with state standards. Schools that failed to meet these requirements faced harsh sanctions. This resulted in both states and the feds devising workarounds for what was the law of the land - states set standards that were so low it strained the very definition of a standard, and the Obama Department of Education issued exemptions by the bushel. It turns out that you can do a lot of talking tough about how you’re going to insist on excellence, but that doesn’t change the fact that excellence can never be mandated, particularly when dealing with the crooked timber of humanity. And while NCLB is gone, its replacement (the Every Student Succeeds Act) still enshrines unmeetable goals for our education system, just largely toothless ones. Meanwhile, states, schools, and teachers continue to shoulder the burden of the “no excuses” rhetoric that led to No Child Left Behind.
I really must underline this point. A little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that more than 100,000 public school teachers in this country operate under merit pay systems. Those teachers are seeing their wages fluctuate based on the outcomes of their students. Thousands of teachers in this country have been fired (or had their contracts not renewed) on the basis of poor academic performance in their classrooms, and hundreds of schools nationwide have been closed based on test scores and other quantitative educational metrics. But this whole edifice depends on the notion that student outcomes are more or less under the control of schools and teachers. If, on the other hand, we pay attention to decades of research, the experience of many teachers, and common sense, we would rather assume that different people have different levels of intrinsic underlying academic ability, and that this inequality prompts the remarkable stability of relative academic performance over time. And if we thought that way, we would have never passed NCLB in the first place. A truly ruinous law, passed with great fanfare by liberals and conservatives working together, would have been avoided had we taken genetic influence on cognition seriously. How could you say that this scenario doesn’t have policy relevance, Dr. Quiggin?
“No excuses” thinking was always based on blank slatism. The entire school reform movement was predicated on the assumption that talk of inherent ability was just excuse making, lazy teachers and corrupt unions trying to shirk their professional responsibilities. That movement, though wounded in the present moment, has had immense political and policy consequences. Meanwhile, speaking as someone who reads a lot of education research, the topic of student ability sort of flits around the field, not expressly forbidden but rigorously avoided. In study after study, including ones that expressly seek to understand parental influence, the question of any given student’s inherent tendency to struggle or excel is studiously avoided. Similarly, wonks of all types who work at nonprofits and in media conspicuously avoid discussing whether everyone has the same academic potential. When inherent ability is referenced at all in the literature it tends to be a vague handwave that does not factor into the final analysis. But if what we’re interested in is how people learn and why some succeed and some fail, this is totally nuts!...
I do not need to share the extremely durable research showing that more highly-educated parents have more highly-educated children, which has serious consequences even if you suppose that influence is entirely environmental. If it’s even partially genetic, the consequences are civilization-altering. But how can we think through that condition if we must pretend genes and behavior are totally disconnected?...
There is a fortune to be had in selling rich parents the most genetically fit version of their babies. Screening for the embryos that are most genetically fit from among those that have been produced by in vitro fertilization is not even a next-half-century thing, it is likely a next-decade thing. What will all of the decent liberals do when living, breathing human beings walk the earth who have been engineered to be smarter and stronger and healthier and more productive? Continue to deny that genes matter, when the evidence that they do can shake your hand?"
Comment: "I want to take this opportunity to share some stories about a colleague from my philosophy department.
This
colleague told me once that the discipline of chemistry is
intrinsically white supremacist because it was started by white males.
That when we teach the problem of evil to our intro students, we should
say that it works against Christian theism but not against Islam,
because saying it worked against Christian theism would force Christians
to interrogate their privilege, but saying it worked against Islamic
theism would marginalize the Muslim students. This colleague also told
me that s/he thinks that everyone actually agrees with her/him about
politics, they just refuse to admit it. I had another colleague who
stopped her/himself because s/he said "trailblazing" and "pioneering",
which were "colonialist" words. I know yet another colleague who thinks
the word "jungle" is racist, at least when you use it in phrases like
"it's a jungle out there"."