• Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? (1/2)

    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Sun Sep 12 19:48:34 2021
    From The New Yorker, a quite liberal publication,
    but open to contradictions.
    It is long, but interesting.

    from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters

    Profiles
    September 13, 2021 Issue
    (this was Published in the print edition of the September 13,
    2021, issue, with the headline “Force of Nature.”)

    Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?
    The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front
    campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on
    her right those who insist that they’re everything.
    By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

    September 6, 2021
    Kathryn Paige Harden
    “Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand,” Harden writes.
    Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker

    Until she was thirty-three, Kathryn Paige Harden, a professor of
    psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, had enjoyed a
    vocational ascent so steady that it seemed guided by the hand of predestination. When she first went on the job market, at twenty-six,
    her graduate-school mentor, Eric Turkheimer, a professor at the
    University of Virginia, recommended her with an almost mystified
    alacrity. “More than anyone else who has come through my lab, I find
    myself answering questions by saying, ‘We should check with Paige,’ ” he wrote. “I am absolutely confident she will be a successful addition to
    any faculty, and she brings a significant chance of being a superstar.”
    Her early scholarship was singled out for prestigious awards and grants,
    and she was offered tenure at thirty-two. In 2016, she began co-hosting
    an Introduction to Psychology class from a soundstage, in the style of a morning show—she and her colleague drank coffee from matching mugs—that
    was live-streamed each semester to more than a thousand students. She couldn’t cross campus without being stopped for selfies.

    Harden works in the field of behavior genetics, which investigates the influence of genes on character traits (neuroticism, agreeableness) and
    life outcomes (educational attainment, income, criminality). Such
    research has historically relied upon “twin studies,” which compare identical twins with fraternal ones to differentiate genetic from
    environmental effects. As a new professor, she co-founded the Texas Twin Project, the first registry engineered to maximize representation of
    low-income families from ethnically diverse backgrounds. In a recent
    paper, Harden asked, “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.

    On sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, Harden and Elliot
    Tucker-Drob, a colleague to whom she was married at the time, were
    invited to New York City with their two young children—a three-year-old
    boy and a nine-month-old girl—as visiting scholars-in-residence at the Russell Sage Foundation. Russell Sage, which occupies a handsome Philip
    Johnson building in Manhattan, primarily supports sociologists,
    journalists, and economists, but it had recently launched an initiative
    to integrate the biological sciences. Harden felt almost immediately
    unwelcome at the regular fellows’ lunches. 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.

    Harden assumed that such leeriness was the vestige of a bygone era, when
    genes were described as the “hard-wiring” of individual fate, and that
    her critics might be reassured by updated information. Two weeks before
    her family was due to return to Texas, she e-mailed the fellows a new
    study, in Psychological Science, led by Daniel Belsky, at Duke. 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.”

    Harden remarked that being called a climate skeptic was marginally
    preferable to being called a Holocaust denier. She offered to host a
    lunch to discuss the uncontroversial basics of genetics research for
    anyone interested. Darity was reluctant to let the matter go: “One final comment from me, and then I will withdraw into my pique.” In 1994, he
    wrote, the political scientist Charles Murray and the late psychologist
    Richard Herrnstein “published a bestseller that achieved great
    notoriety, The Bell Curve. Apart from its claims about a genetic basis
    for a ‘racial’ hierarchy in intelligence, the book claimed that social outcomes like poverty and inequality in earnings had a genetic
    foundation. Personally, I thought the book was outrageous and a
    saddening resuscitation of ideas that had increasingly been dismissed as ‘pseudoscience.’ Belsky’s work strikes me as an extension of the Murray-Herrnstein view of the world.” He concluded, “At some point, I
    think we need to say enough is enough.” (Darity told me, of his e-mails,
    “I stand by all that.”)

    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. (A spokesperson for
    Russell Sage told me by e-mail that the decision was based on the “consideration of numerous factors, including RSF’s relative lack of expertise in this area.”)

    Harden has spent the last five years thinking about Darity’s objections.
    As she put it to me recently, “When I reread his e-mails, it all struck
    me as very Chekhovian. Like, here are all the guns that are going to go
    off in Act V.” Harden understands why the left, with which she
    identifies, has nurtured an aversion to genetics. She went to graduate
    school in Charlottesville, the birthplace of Carrie Buck, a
    “feeble-minded” woman who was sterilized against her will, in 1927,
    under a state eugenics program sanctioned by the Supreme Court. But she
    does not believe that a recognition of this horrifying history ought to
    entail the peremptory rejection of the current scientific consensus. The left’s decision to withdraw from conversations about genetics and social outcomes leaves a vacuum that the right has gaily filled. The situation
    has been exploited as a “red pill” to expose liberal hypocrisy. Today, Harden is at the forefront of an inchoate movement, sometimes referred
    to as the “hereditarian left,” dedicated to the development of a new
    moral framework for talking about genetics.


    ADVERTISEMENT

    This fall, Princeton University Press will publish Harden’s book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality,” which attempts to reconcile the findings of her field with her commitments to social
    justice. As she writes, “Yes, the genetic differences between any two
    people are tiny when compared to the long stretches of DNA coiled in
    every human cell. But these differences loom large when trying to
    understand why, for example, one child has autism and another doesn’t;
    why one is deaf and another hearing; and—as I will describe in this book—why one child will struggle with school and another will not.
    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.”

    Harden understands herself to be waging a two-front campaign. On her
    left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things
    that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. When the discipline first began to coalesce, in the early nineteen-sixties, the memory of Nazi
    atrocities rendered the eugenics threat distinctly untheoretical. The
    reigning model of human development, which seemed to accord with postwar liberal principles, was behaviorism, with its hope that environmental manipulation could produce any desired outcome. It did not take much,
    however, to notice that there is considerable variance in the
    distribution of human abilities. The early behavior geneticists started
    with the premise that our nature is neither perfectly fixed nor
    perfectly plastic, and that this was a good thing. They conscripted as
    their intellectual patriarch the Russian émigré Theodosius Dobzhansky,
    an evolutionary biologist who was committed to anti-racism and to the conviction that “genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource,
    not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.”

    VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

    Re-creating the Syria of His Memories, Through Miniatures


    The field’s modern pioneers were keen to establish that their interest
    lay in academic questions, and they prioritized the comparatively
    clement study of animals. In 1965, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller
    reported that, despite the discernible genetic differences among dog
    breeds, there did not seem to be categorical distinctions that might
    allow one to conclude that, say, German shepherds were smarter than
    Labradors. The most important variations occurred on an individual
    level, and environmental conditions were as important as innate
    qualities, if not more so.

    This era of comity did not last long. In 1969, Arthur Jensen, a
    respected psychologist at Berkeley, published an article called “How
    Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard
    Educational Review. Jensen coolly argued that there was an I.Q. gap
    between the races in America; that the reason for this gap was at least
    partly genetic, and thus, unfortunately, immutable; and that policy interventions were unlikely to thwart the natural hierarchy. The Jensen
    affair, which extended for more than a decade, prefigured the
    publication of “The Bell Curve”: endless public debate, student
    protests, burned effigies, death threats, accusations of intellectual totalitarianism. As Aaron Panofsky writes in “Misbehaving Science,” a history of the discipline, “Controversies wax and wane, sometimes they
    emerge explosively, but they never really resolve and always threaten to reappear.”

    The problem was that most of Jensen’s colleagues agreed with some of his basic claims: it did seem that there was something akin to “general intelligence” in humans, that it could be meaningfully measured with
    I.Q. tests, and that genetic inheritance has a good deal to do with it.
    Critics quickly pointed out that the convoluted social pathways that led
    from genes to complex traits rendered any simple notion of genetic “causation” silly. In 1972, Christopher Jencks, a sociologist at
    Harvard, proposed the thought experiment of a country in which
    red-haired children were prevented from going to school. One might
    anticipate that such children would demonstrate a weaker reading
    ability, which, because red hair is genetic in origin, would be
    conspicuously linked to their genes—and would, in some bizarre sense, be “caused” by them.

    Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and a staunch egalitarian, developed a
    different analogy. Imagine a bag of seed corn. If you plant one handful
    in nutrient-poor soil, and another in rich loam, there will be a stark difference in their average stalk height, irrespective of any genetic predisposition. (There will also be greater “inequality” among the well-provisioned plants; perhaps counterintuitively, the more uniformly beneficial the climate, the more pronounced the effects of genetic
    difference.) Jensen’s racial comparison was thus unwarranted and
    invidious: it was absurd to think, in the America of 1969, that
    different races enjoyed equally bountiful circumstances.

    TITLE Great CrowdSurf Misjudgments
    Cartoon by Paul Noth
    Behavior geneticists emphasized that their own studies showed that
    poorer children adopted by wealthy families saw substantial gains in
    average I.Q. This finding, it later emerged, obtained on a societal
    basis as well. The scholar James Flynn found that, for reasons that are
    not entirely understood, the average I.Q. of a population increases significantly over time: most people living a hundred years ago, were
    they given contemporary I.Q. tests, would easily have qualified as what
    early psychometricians called, with putative technical precision,
    “morons” or “imbeciles.” Such tests might be measuring something real, but whatever it is cannot be considered “purely” biological or inflexible.

    Our ability to remediate genetic differences was thus a separate moral question. In 1979, the economist Arthur Goldberger published a mordant rejoinder to social conservatives who argued that genetic differences
    rendered the welfare apparatus supererogatory. “In the same vein, if it
    were shown that a large proportion of the variance in eyesight were due
    to genetic causes, then the Royal Commission on the Distribution of
    Eyeglasses might well pack up,” he wrote. Just because outcomes might be partly genetic didn’t mean that they were inevitable.

    As twin studies proliferated throughout the nineteen-eighties, their
    results contributed to substantial changes in our moral intuitions. When schizophrenia and autism, for example, turned out to be largely
    heritable, we no longer blamed these disorders on cold or inept mothers.
    But, for such freighted traits as intelligence, liberals remained understandably anxious and continued to insist that differences—not just
    on a group level but on an individual one—were merely artifacts of an
    unequal environment. Conservatives pointed out that an à-la-carte
    approach to scientific findings was intellectually incoherent.

    In 1997, Turkheimer, perhaps the preëminent behavior geneticist of his generation, published a short political meditation called “The Search
    for a Psychometric Left,” in which he called upon his fellow-liberals to accept that they had nothing to fear from genes. He proposed that “a psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual
    differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic
    influences on human ability are all real but profoundly complex, too
    complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata. It would
    assert that the most important difference between the races is racism,
    with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in
    their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability.” He
    concluded, “Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual
    victory of the psychometric right is assured.”

    Having endured the summer of 2020 trapped indoors in the oppressive
    Austin heat, Harden was grateful for an invitation to spend this past
    June at Montana State University, in Bozeman. A recent influx of
    out-of-town wealth had accelerated during the pandemic, and the town’s industrial fixtures had been ruthlessly spruced up to suit the needs of
    remote knowledge workers. Harden, who has moss-colored eyes, a wry
    smile, and an earnest nonchalance, met me at a coffee shop that looked
    as though it had been airlifted that morning from San Francisco. She
    wore a soft flannel shirt, faded stone-washed jeans, and dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. The air was hot and dry, but Harden is the sort of person
    who seems accompanied by a perpetual breeze. “ ‘The Bell Curve’ came out when I was twelve years old, and somehow that’s still what people are
    talking about,” she said. “There’s a new white dude in every generation who gets famous talking about this.” 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.”

    Harden was raised in a conservative environment, and though she later
    rejected much of her upbringing, she has maintained a convert’s distrust
    of orthodoxy. Her father’s family were farmers and pipeline workers in
    Texas, and her grandparents—Pentecostalists who embraced faith healing
    and speaking in tongues—were lifted out of extreme poverty by the
    military. “It was the classic tale of the government’s deliberate
    creation of a white middle class,” she said. Her father served as a Navy pilot, then took a job flying for FedEx, and Harden and her brother grew
    up in an exurb of Memphis. Harden scandalized her Christian high school
    when, at fifteen, she wrote a term paper about “The Bell Jar.” She has
    not recapitulated the arc of her parents’ lives. “They’re still very religious—very suspicious of the mainstream media, secular universities, secular anything, which has accelerated in the Trump years.”

    Harden’s parents insisted that she stay in the South for college, and
    Furman University, a formerly Baptist college in South Carolina, gave
    her a full scholarship based on her near-perfect SAT scores. She
    received paid summer fellowships in rodent genetics, and found that she preferred the grunt work of the lab bench to the difficult multitasking required by the jobs in waitressing and retail to which she was
    accustomed. She only later realized that the point of the program was to
    draw students from underrepresented backgrounds into science. At twenty,
    she applied to graduate school in clinical psychology. Her father’s only comment was “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She was rejected almost everywhere, but Turkheimer, noting her lab experience and her exceptionally high quantitative G.R.E. scores, invited her for an
    interview. She wore a new Ann Taylor suit and he wore Tevas.
    Turkheimer’s e-mail avatar is the Greek letter psi, for “psychology,”
    set against the Grateful Dead logo; he offered her admission on the
    condition that she stop calling him “sir.”

    Her experiences as an apprentice scientist were only part of the reason
    that she grew disillusioned with evangelicalism: “There was this
    incredible post-9/11 nationalism—flags on the altar next to crosses—that infected my church to a point that felt immoral and gross. Sometimes I
    feel like I sat through eleven years of Christian school and absorbed
    all the things they didn’t intend for me to absorb. I thought we were following a social-justice ethos in which the meek shall inherit the
    earth, and I must’ve missed the track that was the run-up to the Iraq
    War.” Turkheimer recommended a local psychoanalyst, who, Harden said,
    took her on as a “charity case.”

    It might have seemed peculiar that a behavior geneticist was
    recommending analytic treatment, but Turkheimer had long been known for
    his belief that biological explanations for behavior were unlikely ever
    to supplant cultural and psychological ones. Turkheimer’s longtime
    rival, the prolific researcher Robert Plomin, believed otherwise,
    predicting that we would one day achieve molecular-level purchase on
    what makes people who they are. Turkheimer associated himself with what
    Plomin lamented as “the gloomy prospect”—the notion that the relevant processes were too messy and idiosyncratic to be fixed under glass. The prospect was gloomy, Turkheimer said, only from the perspective of a
    social scientist. As a person, he had a more sanguine view: “In the long
    run, the gloomy prospect always wins, and no one would want to live in a
    world where it did not.”

    Woman bakes unappreciative man a birthday cake.
    “I’m not undermining your diet. I’m baking you a birthday cake.” Cartoon by William Haefeli
    This did not mean that behavior genetics was useless, only that it
    required a modest perspective on what could be achieved: twin studies
    might never explain how a given genotype made someone more likely to be depressed, but they could help avoid the kind of mistaken inference that
    blamed bad parenting. Harden’s work in Turkheimer’s lab remained
    squarely within this tradition. For example, the state of Texas spent a
    lot of money on school programs to promote sexual abstinence, on the
    basis of research that showed a correlation between adolescent sexuality
    and subsequent antisocial behavior. Harden used a twin study to
    demonstrate that a twin who began having sex early showed no greater
    likelihood of engaging in risky behavior than her twin who had
    abstained. In other words, both behaviors might be the expression of
    some underlying predisposition, but no causal arrow could be drawn. She
    did similar work to show that 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.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Harden’s years in graduate school coincided with the arrival of actual geneticists in a field long dominated by psychologists. In 2003,
    scientists completed the first full map of the human genome, and it
    seemed as though Plomin’s vision would be borne out. Some illnesses—Huntington’s, for example—turned out to be the result of a mutation in a single gene, and there was a widespread assumption that
    complex personality traits might be as cleanly derived. A gene was
    purportedly identified for aggression, and one for depression, and one
    for homosexuality. But these studies couldn’t be replicated, and the “candidate gene” era had to be written off as a gross misstep. It became clear that complex traits were governed by multiple genes, and that
    individual genes could pertain to a variety of attributes.

    Around the time that Harden was finishing her dissertation, however, researchers began to wonder if it might be possible to identify hundreds
    or even thousands of places in the genome where differences in our DNA sequences could be correlated with a trait or an outcome. This research
    design was called a “genome-wide association study,” or gwas (pronounced ji-wass). Turkheimer was characteristically unimpressed with the initial results, which were weak. At the annual conference of the Behavior
    Genetics Association in 2013, he delivered a withering keynote address:
    trying to understand human behavior with a gwas was like putting a CD
    under a microscope to figure out if a song was good. Harden, too, was
    sure that they would not learn anything from these contrived statistical exercises. “But we were wrong,” she said.

    In the last five years, gwas results have rapidly evolved. Polygenic
    scores can now account for a good deal of a population’s variance in
    height and weight, and have been shown to predict cardiovascular disease
    and diabetes. “This is really a cause for celebration,” Plomin told me. “Imagine the advent of predictive medicine—to be able to identify
    medical issues before they occur.” Researchers have also found links
    with complex behavioral traits. “Significant hits have been reported for traits such as coffee and tea consumption, chronic sleep disturbances (insomnia), tiredness, and even whether an individual is a morning
    person or a night person,” Plomin notes, in his 2018 book, “Blueprint:
    How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.” The new research, he writes, “signals the start of the DNA revolution in psychology.”

    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. Nobody
    knows quite what to do with these results, but, as one population
    geneticist put it to me, “the train has left the station—even if researchers don’t fully understand what they’re learning, this is how
    the genome is used now.”

    Harden and her collaborators currently conduct their own gwas efforts;
    most recently, they have investigated behaviors including adolescent
    aggression and risktaking, which are strongly predictive of life span
    and labor-market outcomes. She knows that she may never convince
    Turkheimer, who continues to argue that the light these studies generate
    is too faint to dispel his gloom. But she thinks that they represent an incremental step forward: “Eric says it’s dangerous to talk about genes
    if you don’t know exactly how they’re associated with the outcome, but
    we don’t even really know how, exactly, poverty changes things—why is it good to be adopted into a rich family?” She added, “It’s impossible for me not to care about how what people start with shapes their lives.”

    Harden was joined in Bozeman by her younger brother, Micah, who was
    visiting from Memphis. We sat together on the covered patio of the airy
    house Harden had rented with her boyfriend, an architectural designer
    named Travis Avery. It was the longest spell she had ever spent away
    from her children, who were on a road trip with Tucker-Drob. (The couple
    got divorced in 2018.) Micah had not yet read his sister’s book but had grudgingly agreed to be genotyped for it. “We have the same brown hair,
    same green eyes, same tendency to do what our stepmother refers to as
    the ‘Harden slow-blink,’ closing our eyes for a few seconds when we are annoyed at someone,” she writes. “Despite these similarities, our lives have turned out differently.” Micah still lives near their childhood
    home, has not left the church, and can run up and down a soccer field “without gasping for oxygen.” Her broader point, she told me, was that siblings, who share only about half their DNA, are as unalike as they
    are similar. She said, “On our thirteenth chromosome we’re basically two strangers.”

    Micah had come with his wife, Steffi, and their ten-month-old, Hadley, a bright, sly child with an endearingly defiant stare. As the adults sat
    around talking, Hadley plotted to make off with the ramekins of almonds
    and glasses of wine. Each time she evaded adult supervision and vaulted
    onto the coffee table, Micah took the opportunity to troll his sister,
    saying delightedly, “Looks like Hadley won the genetic lottery!” Harden rolled her eyes and reminded him that this was the opposite of what
    she’d meant. Micah, as it turned out, knew precisely what she meant; he
    had already described the book to Steffi as “telling the right that they didn’t bootstrap and telling the left that interventions are more
    complicated than they want to believe,” which Harden conceded was not a terrible précis. Micah and Steffi had met playing soccer, and Harden
    teased them that Hadley might forsake the pitch for musical theatre. 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.”

    The episode at Russell Sage had prompted Harden to think about what her research really meant: “The experience was a pivot point for me, away
    from a career that was almost entirely about the production of empirical research and toward doing more metascience.” “The Genetic Lottery” reflects her years spent wandering in the desert. The book does not shy
    away from technical details, but it wears its learning lightly;
    alongside Harden’s frequent Biblical allusions are references to the
    movies “Clueless” and “Sliding Doors.”

    Two roofers and a horse on the roof of a small building.
    “Now that I see him up here, I think we might not have needed the horse
    at all.”
    Cartoon by Zachary Kanin
    Harden described her book to me as “fundamentally defensive in a lot of ways,” and before she makes any claims for what we can learn from gwas results she goes into great detail about their limitations. gwas simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental
    health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular
    society at a particular time: it wouldn’t make sense to compare findings
    for educational attainment for women in America today with women who
    came of age before sex-based discrimination was outlawed in higher
    education. And gwas results are not “portable”: a study conducted on
    white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria.
    Polygenic scores remain poor predictors of individual outcomes—there are plenty of people on the low end of the spectrum for educational

    [continued in next message]

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)