Next summer I’m going to be giving a talk at the ISIR meeting. I’m a little bemused about this since, to be honest, I don’t talk much about behavior genetics and intelligence anymore.
Until August of 1998, I had rather conventional views for someone of my education and social background on psychometrics. Then I read Chris Chabris’ article in Commentary. From that, I began to conclude the “orthodoxy” that was presented in the elite media really wasn’t representative of what was going on in the field of psychometrics. It’s kind of like thinking that you get a balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict from reading Commentary.
Over the next few years, I read some books, review papers, and updated my views. Every few years I read a book or checked out a paper to see if anything had changed…and usually not to my eye as someone who is not in the field. About a decade ago I read What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect. More recently I read Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence and Richard Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence. And other things here and there.
I’ll be reviewing Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, but I do wonder if it’s nothing more than an incremental improvement upon The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.
Incrementalism isn’t a problem. I am a big fan of genomics. But its impact has been variable. And frankly in some fields less than you might think. I don’t believe it has changed our understanding of evolutionary process qualitatively (rather, it has allowed a finer-grained resolution to certain arguments around particular hypotheses). Educational attainment 3 is great. But does it change how heritable I think intelligence is in a qualitative sense? Not really. We already knew it was a heritable trait, and we’ve known it for a long time.
Contrast this with the advances in the field of ancient DNA and consumer genomics, two other interests of mine. These two fields did not really exist when this blog was founded in 2002 (I am aware some ancient DNA work was done earlier, but a few publications of dubious validity does not a field make). Ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding of human demography in the past since 2010. Personal genomics is now a thing. It wasn’t before the middle 2000s and very much niche before 2010. The first human genome cost $3 billion dollars. Now you can get one for less than $1,000 as a consumer.
In behavior genetics, in deep ways, I’m not sure we’re much beyond where we were 20 years ago. Researchers have confirmed the suspicion by many that behaviors are polygenic quantitative traits whose variation is due to the additive effect of lots of genes of small effect. There were some people who argued that the genomic “missing heritability” meant that these traits weren’t heritable at all. But most people never accepted this frankly stupid view.
Where does this leave us? I recently expressed my frustration that we continue for decades to have the same debate about “genetic determinism” that we have had for decades. Nothing ever changes. It’s always the same. Researchers who work in the field emphasize the importance of gene-environment interactions, norms of reaction, and the complex nature of these traits. Or, the modest heritability of the traits in question. They are so focused on these nuances that interesting facts such as the high fraction of nonshared environment get lost in the muddle.
Consider obesity. It’s actually a moderate to highly heritable trait. But traveling internationally, or looking at pictures from the past, make it clear that there isn’t a blueprint for your final weight. Different people have different propensities based on common environments. Yes. But to say your weight is “determined” by your environment or your genes is kind of weird and “not even wrong.” It’s complicated. And yet less than 10% of dieters keep the weight off. There is something that feels inevitable, determined, about this, but it may not be genetic.
These are knotty issues that need unpacking. But having to portray yourself as a non-evil person who doesn’t think that genes are the one key to rule them all means that time is wasted on ass-covering that could be allocated to education.
Outside of media presentations to knock-down a strawman literally no one is a genetic determinist. Similarly, aside from Ash Sarkar and George Ciccariello-Maher almost no one called a Communist is literally a Communist. Most people called Nazis aren’t really Nazis. And so forth.
Of course, people can redefine things however they want. One of my readers in a fit of stupidity declared that they were an environmental determinist for thinking religious fervor was ~0% heritable and I was a genetic determinist for thinking it was ~50% heritable. This was such an act of blatant and sincere stupidity that it’s been seared in my memory 15 years later. Yes, people are that stupid when they haven’t thought deeply about something. Talk to them about anything. Awe-inspiringly stupid. It’s all of our superpowers in the right moment and time.
Writing here in 2018, and thinking back to 2002, it doesn’t look good to me. Researchers have more results, more interesting findings. But they are having to get ahead of the same stupid charges, aspersions, and implications. Graduate schools are now dropping the GRE, in part because of an N = 29 study which confirms their prior beliefs. We learned a lot from the replication crisis, didn’t we?
The media doesn’t want to write-up stories about the complex inscrutability of causality. The conditional expression of genetic effects on other parameters. The public is too stupid to think in a statistical manner because they were assigned trigonometry in secondary school. You’re either with them. Or against them. And your enemies and they exist, take your instinct to play fair and address plausible concerns to kill you with a thousand small cuts of obfuscation and misrepresentation. Don’t blame them. They are the scorpion. To sting is their way.
(this won’t be the general thrust of my talk at ISIR!)
The media doesn’t want to write-up stories about the complex inscrutability of causality.
Brad Delong has a number of recent small posts on Judea Pearl recently, basically hints that he is trying to get on top of his work, and (reading between the lines) finds it both fascinating and difficult. Have you read this yet? Care to write up a more detailed post than BD – for the rest of us?
I disagree about behavioral genetics making progress. While the newer PGS work merely confirms what already made sense, by pointing to particular genes, many of which are plausibly related to particular metabolic pathways and behavior, those outside the core field are being slowly convinced. This is a big and important change.
Now. If your argument is the core field is merely confirming what was expected, then in that sense of course you are right. So probably we don’t disagree here.
My point is that in terms of wider public acceptance, we’re in the middle of a gestalt shift. Or at least that’s my impression as someone who follows this from the outside. The hereditarian left is being birthed now. And PGS is one of the key drivers of this shift. Generally I think that’s a good thing as the possibility space is opening up.
“I disagree about behavioral genetics making progress.”
If nothing else, the purveyors of conventional wisdom are having the galling experience of seeing their cherished truths questioned by top scientists in The New York Times. But it will take a lot of such experiences, and much more backbone from both scientists and the media than has yet been seen, to reach a tipping point.
Maranatha!
Also, congrats on your upcoming speech at ISIR, Razib! I really, really hope it will be recorded and put on youtube.