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.
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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.
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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
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