I read the New Yorker article you mention when it came out and thought that Harden’s ideas seemed very reasonable and I would have thought uncontroversial (and speaking as a behaviour geneticist, pretty much in line with my views). Yet every time the New Yorker tweets out that article (and they do like to tweet out the same articles a lot), all the replies are from (I assume) left wing people accusing Harden of being a racist/eugenicist. I really don’t understand how If we accept genes influence height, eye colour, health, etc, how could they possibly not also influence intelligence and behaviour? Anything to do with the brain requires neuronal communication, which requires proteins, which are encoded by genes. Therefore differences in how these genes may affect behaviour in some way. How can that possibly be controversial or debatable?
I can only put it down to strong political beliefs - the vast majority of people who have been attacking Paige and strongly denying any effect whatsoever of genetics on behaviour are hardly shy about their political views and their activism, so I think that gives a pretty parsimonious explanation of what's going on.
For sure. It’s just as someone who would (like most scientists) describe themselves as left wing it’s weird to see something that seems so obviously unarguable if you know anything about genetics attract such vitriol from people with whom you otherwise share most political beliefs. I guess the same is also true for fears over GMOs etc, maybe anywhere genetics and activism meet.
It is more acceptable to test intelligence heritability through a different species.
Dogs, for example, have a hierarchy of intelligence that can be studied.
On average, border collies are far more intelligent than say, beagles. Create a project whereby, randomly selected month old border collies and beagles are provided the same environment. Attention, food, and training can be identical, in fact, train the beagles twice as much. After 18 months, test both groups to determine which breed has accomplished more and by how much.
You could publicize the project and take bets on the outcome.
That was a fine skewering! The only thing that gives me pause is trying to reconcile how two very smart Stanford professors got it so obviously wrong. Feldman is a population geneticist - he can't be unaware of the glaring problems with his argument.
In these kind of culture wars, it's often explicitly left-wing figures (e.g. Steven Rose, Dick Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould) lobbing accusations of ideologically driven research at apolitical or centre-left scientists. Harden makes her liberal, pro-equality stance very clear. But her book gets painted as a mere front for a far-right eugenicist agenda. I can only guess that Feldman and Riskin's ideology has led them into a scientifically untenable position.
May 24, 2022·edited May 24, 2022Liked by Stuart Ritchie
What a delight to find this metareview.
I think the Feldman/Riskin review may deserve more scrutiny in its representation of twin studies. As a layman following this topic only very casually, I recall that some of the most compelling evidence for genetic influence on intelligence comes from these. Figures like those in https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/IQ_Correlations.html show how IQ correlation between pairs of humans is itself strongly correlated to their level of shared genetics.
In the Feldman/Riskin review, all mentions of "twin" are found in these two paragraphs:
> Before there were genome-wide association studies, people arguing for the genetic basis of social differences conducted studies comparing fraternal and identical twins raised together and apart. Harden continues in this tradition: she codirects the Twin Project at the University of Texas and invokes analyses of twin data as evidence that “genes cause differences in educational outcomes.” She cites a notorious 1969 paper by the American psychologist Arthur Jensen, who maintained that races differed in IQ and who used twin studies to argue that social interventions couldn’t overcome genetic deficiencies in scholastic achievement.
> Harden condemns Jensen’s racism and rejects his assertion that social interventions are futile, but she doesn’t question his basic claim that genetic differences produce an innate hierarchy of scholastic achievement. She also doesn’t acknowledge his dependence on fraudulent data from a 1966 paper by the English psychologist and geneticist Cyril Burt purporting to compare identical twins raised together and apart. And nowhere does she cite the Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin’s 1974 devastating debunking of Jensen and Burt or engage with the critical problems Kamin raised there regarding twin studies in general, because of the impossibility of isolating genetic factors from environmental ones. While Harden, who describes herself as a political progressive, repudiates Jensen’s overt racism, she resurrects the misconceived science underlying it.
Now, I am only a layman and have never conducted a review of twin studies, but there are some strong odors here. Why do Feldman and Riskin see fit to represent twin studies with three studies from the 60s and 70s? Did the "1974 devastating debunking" end the field, with nothing more worth saying about it? Even if the 1974 debunking was in fact devastating, it seems unlikely that it served as an effective all-encompassing scientific invalidation of twin studies. I'm reminded of those creationists who know that there are no transitional fossils because the Piltdown Man is a fake.
Great review! I noticed in your book, you didn't discuss activism much as a cause of bad science. I wondered why that was (e.g. whether you don't think it is much of a problem).
It is in there (I talk about political party affiliation and also bias with reference to the research on stereotype threat). But if I'd written the book post-2020 and the huge flare-up of the culture war, I'd have included more on this issue, for sure.
Excellent metareview! You mention that lacking examples of cases where not controlling for genetics hobbles social science research is one of your criticism's of Harden's book. Can you elaborate on some ways where developmental psychology has gotten things wrong due to not controlling for genetics?
I'm a child and adolsecent psychiatrist, and in my world Attachment is the universal lens through which any and all childhood difficulty is viewed. Everything invariably boils down to mother-blaming and "trauma". However bad things are in the social sciences, it's 10x worse in the clinical practice. It's a monoculture.
Papers discussing ways to children's improve cognitive ability are the classic examples here. Things like the Mozzart effect, specific timing of when the family has dinner, breastfeeding (I think), making them learn chess, musical instruments, number of books in the home, etc.
I appreciate that you use fresher metaphors. "Cabbages and kings" and (with all due respect to your colleague) that face-stomping quote are really tired and make me think, geez people get over yourself.
I'm working through Harden's book and getting a ton out of it. I'm looking forward to her next book as well.
Ironically, Orwell himself warned in his “Politics and the English Language” essay that you should “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”…
I just read a good book by David Reich, one of the leaders in the field of genetic research. He makes a thoughtful evaluation of the evidence for genetic differences in various capacities between human populations and also provides an insightful reflection on how to engage the evidence for differences productively. The book is Who We Are And How We Got Here: Ancient DNA And The New Science Of The Human Past for those who might be interested.
That's a good recommendation. He also wrote a piece for the NY Times discussing the possibility of psychological differences being influenced by genetics.
Great post! Marcus Feldman has a history of exaggerated attacks against behavior genetics and sociobiology going back to the 1970's. And you are right to suspect that he and his coauthor have an agenda. He has supported a controversial version of evolutionary theory called "the extended evolutionary synthesis". He and his former student Kevin Laland have published some papers about it. I think he wants to convince the public that heredity is not that important.
The leftist critique that genetics fundamentally undercuts their philosophy and political program is essentially correct. Knowing this a truly committed leftist must attack the facts themselves.
You're living in denial if you think these facts can be policy neutral. In a way the denialists are being more honest.
For instance, if I know that education doesn't change IQ and without IQ education won't bring about productive skill development, I've basically proven that a lot of education spending today has very poor ROI. And if it's got poor ROI why wouldn't we shift those dollars to something with better ROI. There is no particular reason for instance that NY needs to spend $30k/pupil to get worse results than Utah gets with $8k.
And now you're at war with the groups that receive that funding today.
I could rattle off plenty of examples like this.
I think we have a pattern of how this plays out. Leftists will propose something that can't possibly work given genetics. They will get what they want because nobody can point out the elephant in the room. It will be a disaster in reality. That disaster will revolt voters. It will be at least partially revoked. Nobody will be able to explain the causality of why it didn't work, but an unprincipled exception will be quietly upheld for survival reasons. Then after a decade or two everyone will forget what a disaster it was, remove the unprincipled exception, watch it be a disaster, and then rinse and repeat.
Yes, but... Sequencing the full human DNA sequence (not just protein coding parts) was only completed recently. It would be nice to know how the DNA actually works. How, for example, is a phobia implemented in DNA, and translated to connected neurons in the brain? Certainly, correlation between the DNA sequence and the phobia outcome is nearly impossible to trace, because presumably the "DNA for the phobia" establishes a multi-step process of neuronal "context detectors" and "triggers" and "situational behaviors". So I suggest you take a phobia like Trypophobia and explain how the DNA implements it in the brain, and explain why some people have it and others don't (is the trigger itself a SNP, or does the DNA create and spin an internal roulette wheel?). Once you can explain how DNA actually creates traits & phobias & motivations & drives & passions, you can better fend off silly objections from the Feldman and Riskin crowd.
It would be nice to know, yes, but the same applies for countless questions across evolutionary biology, like "Is appreciation for eyespots coded in the peahen genome?" It wasn't necessary to wait for the decoding of the peafowl genome and the untangling of the genetic pathways to start shedding some light on that question, and people made some headway on that before they even knew about the existence of DNA.
There's been a little bit of work done along theses lines. See Harden's book, and the recent EA4 paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z). They find e.g. more enrichment of genes in neurons compared to glial cells, which hints that the genes under selection are doing something functional in how the brain works. But a complete gene-to-phenotype map for many complex traits is probably a long way off.
As far as I can see, the problem is one of prior commitment to the position that there are absolutely no genetic determinants that may differ between races or sexes and that might affect academics, behavior, or other factors contributing to present social inequality. It is my experience that prior commitments to *anything* science-related, a la Lewontin in his New York Review of Books article, tend to obscure judgement and close one off to an objective consideration of the facts. Thanks for an honest review of the review, though I wouldn't call Feldman and Riskin nihilists. Their point of view may close down scientific inquiry, but does it mean they think life is pointless? (Of course they may, but I don't think the review made that point.)
"The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe."
How hubristic of those people! We know from chaos theory that cohesion occurs alongside chaos from sufficiently complex systems. Why that cohesion should end at the human brain, and why we can't see brains in networks with other brains, natural processes, culture, and technology as other sorts of objects with vastly greater complexity, is beyond me. Actually, to be honest, I suspect I know the reason already. Humans don't like entertaining the possibility that they're not at the center, nor the apex, of the evolution of complex phenomena.
Part of the reason some researchers have an "environmental bias" is these macro dynamics are something the dominant culture, for decades, trained us to ignore. Of course genetics are important too and we should look at them, but I share the skepticism that the science of behavioral genetics is anywhere near as advanced or useful as claimed. We shouldn't dismiss it for moral reasons, but we should be appropriately skeptical of whether it serves the interests of larger superstructures, and how those superstructures influence what sort of research is funded and encouraged.
If transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has validity, it's extremely challenging to ideas of meritocracy that have been popular in western academia, the sorts of worldviews that folks like Pinker express. It would also mean the practices of slavery and colonization were damaging to the human family on a scale that is hard to comprehend without one's heart breaking with sorrow. That, of course, doesn't make it more valid. However, it does mean that prominent institutions would have an incentive to look for other explanations for persistent inequality.
Many parents assume speaking English to children makes them more likely to speak English, whereas speaking French to them would better yield Francophonic children. But can we really know whether their vernacular is from the chosen sequence of books or inherited sequence of DNA?
This exact example is in the Pinker essay (referenced in the post), too:
"For every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is ‘some of each.’” Not true. Why do people in England speak English and people in Japan speak Japanese? The ‘reasonable compromise’ would be that the people in England have genes that make it easier to learn English and the people in Japan have genes that make it easier to learn Japanese, but that both groups must be exposed to a language to acquire it at all. This compromise is, of course, not reasonable but false, as we see when children exposed to a given language acquire it equally quickly regardless of their racial ancestry. Though people may be genetically predisposed to learn language, they are not genetically predisposed, even in part, to learn a particular language; the explanation for why people in different countries speak differently is 100 percent environmental."
I read the New Yorker article you mention when it came out and thought that Harden’s ideas seemed very reasonable and I would have thought uncontroversial (and speaking as a behaviour geneticist, pretty much in line with my views). Yet every time the New Yorker tweets out that article (and they do like to tweet out the same articles a lot), all the replies are from (I assume) left wing people accusing Harden of being a racist/eugenicist. I really don’t understand how If we accept genes influence height, eye colour, health, etc, how could they possibly not also influence intelligence and behaviour? Anything to do with the brain requires neuronal communication, which requires proteins, which are encoded by genes. Therefore differences in how these genes may affect behaviour in some way. How can that possibly be controversial or debatable?
I can only put it down to strong political beliefs - the vast majority of people who have been attacking Paige and strongly denying any effect whatsoever of genetics on behaviour are hardly shy about their political views and their activism, so I think that gives a pretty parsimonious explanation of what's going on.
For sure. It’s just as someone who would (like most scientists) describe themselves as left wing it’s weird to see something that seems so obviously unarguable if you know anything about genetics attract such vitriol from people with whom you otherwise share most political beliefs. I guess the same is also true for fears over GMOs etc, maybe anywhere genetics and activism meet.
It is more acceptable to test intelligence heritability through a different species.
Dogs, for example, have a hierarchy of intelligence that can be studied.
On average, border collies are far more intelligent than say, beagles. Create a project whereby, randomly selected month old border collies and beagles are provided the same environment. Attention, food, and training can be identical, in fact, train the beagles twice as much. After 18 months, test both groups to determine which breed has accomplished more and by how much.
You could publicize the project and take bets on the outcome.
That was a fine skewering! The only thing that gives me pause is trying to reconcile how two very smart Stanford professors got it so obviously wrong. Feldman is a population geneticist - he can't be unaware of the glaring problems with his argument.
In these kind of culture wars, it's often explicitly left-wing figures (e.g. Steven Rose, Dick Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould) lobbing accusations of ideologically driven research at apolitical or centre-left scientists. Harden makes her liberal, pro-equality stance very clear. But her book gets painted as a mere front for a far-right eugenicist agenda. I can only guess that Feldman and Riskin's ideology has led them into a scientifically untenable position.
What a delight to find this metareview.
I think the Feldman/Riskin review may deserve more scrutiny in its representation of twin studies. As a layman following this topic only very casually, I recall that some of the most compelling evidence for genetic influence on intelligence comes from these. Figures like those in https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/IQ_Correlations.html show how IQ correlation between pairs of humans is itself strongly correlated to their level of shared genetics.
In the Feldman/Riskin review, all mentions of "twin" are found in these two paragraphs:
> Before there were genome-wide association studies, people arguing for the genetic basis of social differences conducted studies comparing fraternal and identical twins raised together and apart. Harden continues in this tradition: she codirects the Twin Project at the University of Texas and invokes analyses of twin data as evidence that “genes cause differences in educational outcomes.” She cites a notorious 1969 paper by the American psychologist Arthur Jensen, who maintained that races differed in IQ and who used twin studies to argue that social interventions couldn’t overcome genetic deficiencies in scholastic achievement.
> Harden condemns Jensen’s racism and rejects his assertion that social interventions are futile, but she doesn’t question his basic claim that genetic differences produce an innate hierarchy of scholastic achievement. She also doesn’t acknowledge his dependence on fraudulent data from a 1966 paper by the English psychologist and geneticist Cyril Burt purporting to compare identical twins raised together and apart. And nowhere does she cite the Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin’s 1974 devastating debunking of Jensen and Burt or engage with the critical problems Kamin raised there regarding twin studies in general, because of the impossibility of isolating genetic factors from environmental ones. While Harden, who describes herself as a political progressive, repudiates Jensen’s overt racism, she resurrects the misconceived science underlying it.
Now, I am only a layman and have never conducted a review of twin studies, but there are some strong odors here. Why do Feldman and Riskin see fit to represent twin studies with three studies from the 60s and 70s? Did the "1974 devastating debunking" end the field, with nothing more worth saying about it? Even if the 1974 debunking was in fact devastating, it seems unlikely that it served as an effective all-encompassing scientific invalidation of twin studies. I'm reminded of those creationists who know that there are no transitional fossils because the Piltdown Man is a fake.
Great review! I noticed in your book, you didn't discuss activism much as a cause of bad science. I wondered why that was (e.g. whether you don't think it is much of a problem).
It is in there (I talk about political party affiliation and also bias with reference to the research on stereotype threat). But if I'd written the book post-2020 and the huge flare-up of the culture war, I'd have included more on this issue, for sure.
Excellent metareview! You mention that lacking examples of cases where not controlling for genetics hobbles social science research is one of your criticism's of Harden's book. Can you elaborate on some ways where developmental psychology has gotten things wrong due to not controlling for genetics?
I think studies of Attachment are a really good example. A few years old now, but this brief paper (which is a comment on another paper) lays out the issues really nicely: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797617717041
I'm a child and adolsecent psychiatrist, and in my world Attachment is the universal lens through which any and all childhood difficulty is viewed. Everything invariably boils down to mother-blaming and "trauma". However bad things are in the social sciences, it's 10x worse in the clinical practice. It's a monoculture.
Papers discussing ways to children's improve cognitive ability are the classic examples here. Things like the Mozzart effect, specific timing of when the family has dinner, breastfeeding (I think), making them learn chess, musical instruments, number of books in the home, etc.
I appreciate that you use fresher metaphors. "Cabbages and kings" and (with all due respect to your colleague) that face-stomping quote are really tired and make me think, geez people get over yourself.
I'm working through Harden's book and getting a ton out of it. I'm looking forward to her next book as well.
Ironically, Orwell himself warned in his “Politics and the English Language” essay that you should “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”…
I just read a good book by David Reich, one of the leaders in the field of genetic research. He makes a thoughtful evaluation of the evidence for genetic differences in various capacities between human populations and also provides an insightful reflection on how to engage the evidence for differences productively. The book is Who We Are And How We Got Here: Ancient DNA And The New Science Of The Human Past for those who might be interested.
That's a good recommendation. He also wrote a piece for the NY Times discussing the possibility of psychological differences being influenced by genetics.
Excellent review of a review! I enjoyed Harden's book a lot!
Great post! Marcus Feldman has a history of exaggerated attacks against behavior genetics and sociobiology going back to the 1970's. And you are right to suspect that he and his coauthor have an agenda. He has supported a controversial version of evolutionary theory called "the extended evolutionary synthesis". He and his former student Kevin Laland have published some papers about it. I think he wants to convince the public that heredity is not that important.
The leftist critique that genetics fundamentally undercuts their philosophy and political program is essentially correct. Knowing this a truly committed leftist must attack the facts themselves.
You're living in denial if you think these facts can be policy neutral. In a way the denialists are being more honest.
For instance, if I know that education doesn't change IQ and without IQ education won't bring about productive skill development, I've basically proven that a lot of education spending today has very poor ROI. And if it's got poor ROI why wouldn't we shift those dollars to something with better ROI. There is no particular reason for instance that NY needs to spend $30k/pupil to get worse results than Utah gets with $8k.
And now you're at war with the groups that receive that funding today.
I could rattle off plenty of examples like this.
I think we have a pattern of how this plays out. Leftists will propose something that can't possibly work given genetics. They will get what they want because nobody can point out the elephant in the room. It will be a disaster in reality. That disaster will revolt voters. It will be at least partially revoked. Nobody will be able to explain the causality of why it didn't work, but an unprincipled exception will be quietly upheld for survival reasons. Then after a decade or two everyone will forget what a disaster it was, remove the unprincipled exception, watch it be a disaster, and then rinse and repeat.
Yes, but... Sequencing the full human DNA sequence (not just protein coding parts) was only completed recently. It would be nice to know how the DNA actually works. How, for example, is a phobia implemented in DNA, and translated to connected neurons in the brain? Certainly, correlation between the DNA sequence and the phobia outcome is nearly impossible to trace, because presumably the "DNA for the phobia" establishes a multi-step process of neuronal "context detectors" and "triggers" and "situational behaviors". So I suggest you take a phobia like Trypophobia and explain how the DNA implements it in the brain, and explain why some people have it and others don't (is the trigger itself a SNP, or does the DNA create and spin an internal roulette wheel?). Once you can explain how DNA actually creates traits & phobias & motivations & drives & passions, you can better fend off silly objections from the Feldman and Riskin crowd.
It would be nice to know, yes, but the same applies for countless questions across evolutionary biology, like "Is appreciation for eyespots coded in the peahen genome?" It wasn't necessary to wait for the decoding of the peafowl genome and the untangling of the genetic pathways to start shedding some light on that question, and people made some headway on that before they even knew about the existence of DNA.
There's been a little bit of work done along theses lines. See Harden's book, and the recent EA4 paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z). They find e.g. more enrichment of genes in neurons compared to glial cells, which hints that the genes under selection are doing something functional in how the brain works. But a complete gene-to-phenotype map for many complex traits is probably a long way off.
Thanks. I spelled out my thoughts a bit more here: https://philogen888.medium.com/everything-we-know-about-genetic-traits-is-wrong-a3211d798212
As far as I can see, the problem is one of prior commitment to the position that there are absolutely no genetic determinants that may differ between races or sexes and that might affect academics, behavior, or other factors contributing to present social inequality. It is my experience that prior commitments to *anything* science-related, a la Lewontin in his New York Review of Books article, tend to obscure judgement and close one off to an objective consideration of the facts. Thanks for an honest review of the review, though I wouldn't call Feldman and Riskin nihilists. Their point of view may close down scientific inquiry, but does it mean they think life is pointless? (Of course they may, but I don't think the review made that point.)
I'd like to do a review of your review of the review, but find myself stuck with only 24 hours in the day.
"The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe."
How hubristic of those people! We know from chaos theory that cohesion occurs alongside chaos from sufficiently complex systems. Why that cohesion should end at the human brain, and why we can't see brains in networks with other brains, natural processes, culture, and technology as other sorts of objects with vastly greater complexity, is beyond me. Actually, to be honest, I suspect I know the reason already. Humans don't like entertaining the possibility that they're not at the center, nor the apex, of the evolution of complex phenomena.
Part of the reason some researchers have an "environmental bias" is these macro dynamics are something the dominant culture, for decades, trained us to ignore. Of course genetics are important too and we should look at them, but I share the skepticism that the science of behavioral genetics is anywhere near as advanced or useful as claimed. We shouldn't dismiss it for moral reasons, but we should be appropriately skeptical of whether it serves the interests of larger superstructures, and how those superstructures influence what sort of research is funded and encouraged.
If transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has validity, it's extremely challenging to ideas of meritocracy that have been popular in western academia, the sorts of worldviews that folks like Pinker express. It would also mean the practices of slavery and colonization were damaging to the human family on a scale that is hard to comprehend without one's heart breaking with sorrow. That, of course, doesn't make it more valid. However, it does mean that prominent institutions would have an incentive to look for other explanations for persistent inequality.
I've decided to buy a "The Gene Lottery" when I was reading your review:)
Thank you for your really wonderful review, the best one I've ever seen.
Many parents assume speaking English to children makes them more likely to speak English, whereas speaking French to them would better yield Francophonic children. But can we really know whether their vernacular is from the chosen sequence of books or inherited sequence of DNA?
This exact example is in the Pinker essay (referenced in the post), too:
"For every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is ‘some of each.’” Not true. Why do people in England speak English and people in Japan speak Japanese? The ‘reasonable compromise’ would be that the people in England have genes that make it easier to learn English and the people in Japan have genes that make it easier to learn Japanese, but that both groups must be exposed to a language to acquire it at all. This compromise is, of course, not reasonable but false, as we see when children exposed to a given language acquire it equally quickly regardless of their racial ancestry. Though people may be genetically predisposed to learn language, they are not genetically predisposed, even in part, to learn a particular language; the explanation for why people in different countries speak differently is 100 percent environmental."