You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (2021) is a similar experience, as the author ingenuously points out. ‘Like a frog being slowly boiled alive,’ she observes, readers follow her argument ‘from an uncontroversial premise to a highly controversial one.’
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What follows is an edited selection of material from the NYRB review (April 21, 2022), “Why Biology is Not Destiny,” by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin of Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton University Press, 2021). The sample of comments from motley members of the chattering classes on the Amazon page reveals something bordering on feckless enthusiasm for her argument. Even the well-known philosopher Peter Singer joins the chorus. After the snippets I have a brief comment.
[….] “[Harden] introduces many comfortably room-temperature premises: measurement is essential to science; people differ genetically; genes cause conditions such as deafness; a recipe for lemon chicken produces variable results but never leads to chocolate-chip cookies. Lulled to complacency by such anodyne and often homey observations, we soon find ourselves in a rolling boil of controversial claims: genes make you more or less intelligent, wealthier or poorer; every kind of inequality has a genetic basis. Harden is right that such assertions are controversial, but they’re nothing new. The idea of a biological hierarchy of intelligence arose alongside the first theories of human evolution. It never goes away when discredited, just changes forms. [….]
Biological essentialism, aimed at demonstrating an innate hierarchy of intelligence, is going strong after more than two centuries of empirical failure. There’s always a new approach waiting in the wings. This time it’s ‘genome-wide association studies’ of people’s ‘single-nucleotide polymorphisms.’ A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a spot on the genome where people can have different variants: alternative nucleotides in their DNA. An average human has about 3.2 billion nucleotides and four million to five million single-nucleotide polymorphisms in their genome, and the genomes of any two people are about 99.9 percent the same. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) calculates a statistical correlation between patterns of DNA variants and a particular phenotype, or observable characteristic, among the sampled people. [….]
So far, these so-called polygenic indices haven’t indicated any therapeutic interventions, and their value is a matter of debate. But meanwhile, a growing number of social scientists, primarily in economics, psychology, and sociology, have seized upon the technique as a way of studying their own subjects. Social scientists engaging in ‘sociogenomic’ research exploit existing genetic databases, which have recently become cheap to produce and readily accessible, to conduct genome-wide association studies for ‘social-science-relevant outcomes’ such as the one Harden features most prominently in her book, ‘educational attainment.’ For a given life outcome—dropping out of high school, earning a Ph.D., having a teen pregnancy, becoming wealthy, going bankrupt—these writers claim they can use a genome-wide association study to generate a ‘polygenic index,’ or overall genetic score revealing a person’s likelihood of having that outcome.
Among other phenotypes associated with ’educational attainment’ for which Harden cites genome studies are ‘grit,’ ‘growth mindset,’ ‘intellectual curiosity,’ ‘mastery orientation,’ ‘self-concept,’ ‘test motivation,’ and especially ‘a trait called Openness to Experience, which captures being curious, eager to learn, and open to novel experiences.’ Harden doesn’t reveal just who calls this important trait ‘Openness to Experience’ or how they measure it. Surely, there must be disagreement among researchers about what constitutes this phenotype or others in the list, such as ‘grit.’ More so, at any rate, than about what constitutes macular degeneration.
Explaining how social scientists make genome-wide association studies and polygenic scores, Harden writes:
‘Correlations between individual SNPs and a phenotype are estimated in a “Discovery GWAS” with a large sample size…. Then, a new person’s DNA is measured. The number of minor alleles (0, 1, or 2) in this individual’s genome is counted for each SNP, and this number is weighted by the GWAS estimate of the correlation between the SNP and the phenotype, yielding a polygenic index.’
This alphabet soup in the passive voice implies that no one actively does all this estimating, measuring, counting, weighting, correlating—or that these are such technical processes that any human presence in them is irrelevant. But people are making interpretive decisions at every stage: how to define a phenotype and select people to represent it, how to count these people, which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate them. Interpretive decisions are of course essential to all science, but here there are a great many opinions dressed up in facts’ clothing. ‘This polygenic index will be normally distributed,’ Harden continues, now disguising an assumption—that there are intrinsic cognitive and personality traits whose distribution in a population follows a bell-shaped curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—as an objective fact. Harden then tells us that ‘a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes.’ All these trappings of scientific objectivity notwithstanding, a polygenic index ‘captures’ differences in educational outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s Summertime painting captures the season: as a reflection of its creator’s radically subjective view of things (which is just fine for abstract expressionism).
If you find a magical hammer that, whenever you swing it, rewards you with funding and professional advancement, you look at your research area and see nothing but nails. Genome-wide association studies are the social sciences’ new magical hammer. Macular degeneration seems plausibly to be a nail: genomic analysis revealed two sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that were importantly associated with having the disease. Schizophrenia appears not to be a nail, though it might have some structural features a hammer could help with. The things social scientists have been swinging at aren’t just non-nails. They are to nails as ships to sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To suggest that macular degeneration has genetic causes is to make an empirically testable proposal; to suggest that ‘grit’ or ‘openness to experience’ has genetic causes is to make a category mistake. These are interpretive descriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and practices, not molecules. [….]
Harden’s purpose in The Genetic Lottery is to popularize the claim that social inequalities have genetic causes, and to argue that if progressives want to address inequality, they’d better confront this fact. In presenting her case, Harden revives central features of the earlier, now-discredited biological theories of intelligence: the presentation of interpretive opinions as objective facts, as we’ve seen; spurious reduction to a biological mechanism that is not only hypothetical but unspecified; and a claim to be writing in the interest of social progress.
Regarding spurious reduction to an unspecified mechanism: although Harden pays lip service to the principle that correlation is not causation, she both implies and explicitly argues that correlations of genetic differences with social ones indicate genetic causes of social differences. When merely implying causation, she uses weasel words: genes are ‘relevant’ for educational attainment; they are ‘associated with’ first having sex at an earlier age; they ‘matter’ for aggression and violence; social and economic inequalities ‘stem from’ genetics. Harden also says it directly: genes ‘cause’ differences in educational outcomes; genetic differences ‘cause’ differences in social and behavioral outcomes; a ‘causal chain’ links a genotype with the social behavior of going to school, and another such chain joins genetics to performance on intelligence tests. [….]
Such talk of entanglements and braids is misleading, implying that genetics and environment are discrete strands, when in fact living things are in continual interaction with their environments in ways that transform both at every level. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin used the concept of the “reaction norm”—a curve expressing the relation between genotype and phenotype as a function of the environment—to describe this interaction and its implications. Lewontin showed that since the relationship between genotype and phenotype depends on the environment in which the phenotype is measured, one can’t infer genetic causes from correlation and regression calculations. Harden mentions Lewontin as a critic of behavioral genetics, but she implies that he didn’t approve of the field simply on ideological grounds. She never mentions or engages with his substantive refutation of the core assumption that genetic and environmental causes of behavior are separable.
With an admirable poker face, Harden writes that what behavioral geneticists really care about is environment: they want to identify the genetic causes of different life outcomes just to get them ‘out of the way, so that the environment is easier to see.’ This is impossible, even as an ideal, because the environment is in the genome and the genome is in the environment. We can no more unbraid genetics and environment than we can unbraid history and culture, or climate and landscape, or language and thought.
Progressives, Harden says, shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge genetic causes of inequality; instead, they should work to narrow ‘genetically associated inequalities’ with programs specially benefiting the genetically disadvantaged. She implies it’s a new departure for a political progressive to espouse the idea of inherent differences in intelligence, but in fact scientists arguing for a biological hierarchy of intelligence have traditionally invoked progressive values. Harden indeed sounds like Spencer, who said his science would help rectify ‘ignorant legislation’ and ‘rationalize our perverse methods of education.’
Just how can behavioral genetics serve the interest of social progress toward greater equality? Harden never says. She does mention three examples of programs or policies that she claims have helped to rectify natural imbalances in intelligence, but none involve genomic analysis. [….]
Harden was right to compare her reasoning to the reasoning of the frog boilers. Both the logic and the experimental program of frog boiling exemplify the essentialist tradition in which she is a participant. But the theory doesn’t hold up in experiments: the frog, if intact and in a vessel it can escape, will actually jump out rather than be boiled alive. Our message to you, reader, is accordingly simple: jump out.”
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This sort of sullied science, while perhaps at points rhetorically shrewd (when not vague or ambiguous), involves both speculative reductionism and deterministic behaviorism, including rather simple-minded conceptions of human nature and agency, as well as socio-cultural and economic circumstances and situations. Instances of such sullied science stubbornly persist, periodically reappearing to make extravagant theoretical claims while assuming an unwarranted scientific confidence which in part stems from a surprising dispositional failure to properly digest the history of science. Thus we need to remind ourselves of earlier arguments made by Stephen Jay Gould, R.C. Lewontin, John Dupré, Hilary Rose, Steven Rose, Mary Midgley, Philip Kitcher, among others. Our co-authors do a fine job in steering us in the right direction. Some form of “reductionism” is unavoidable in the natural and especially social sciences, yet, as Jon Elster notes, objections to reductionism “can be well founded” if they are “prefixed by ‘premature,’ ‘crude,’ or ‘speculative.’” He proceeds to provide examples in the literature (e.g., mechanistic physiology, natural selection as an analogy for social phenomena, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology…; cf. too what Deidre McCloskey once termed the ‘secret sins of economics’ which, thanks to her and others, are no longer ‘secret’). Alas, “The idea of a biological hierarchy of intelligence arose alongside the first theories of human evolution. It never goes away when discredited, just changes forms.”
Further Reading (bibliographies and other material)
- Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
- Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
- Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology
- Global Distributive Justice
- Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
- Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
- The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
- Marxism
- Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
- Notes and Science and the Sciences
- Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences
- Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
- Social Security and the Welfare State
- Sullied (natural and social) Sciences
- Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
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