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attainment who go on to graduate studies, and plenty of people on the
high end who never secure a high-school diploma.

gwas results can accidentally reveal as much about culture or geography
as they do about genes. A study of chopstick use in San Francisco would
find that proficiency is genetically correlated with East Asian
ancestry, which is a far cry from the discovery of an inborn dexterity
with a particular utensil. One way to sidestep this pitfall is by
comparing gwas results within families, where they have been shown to
reliably account for differences in life outcomes among siblings. But
even this measure does not solve Christopher Jencks’s redhead problem.
“A person might go far in education because they are smart and curious
and hard-working, or because they are conforming and risk-averse and
obsessive, or because they have features (pretty, tall, skinny,
light-colored) that privilege them in an intractably biased society,”
Harden writes. “A study of what is correlated with succeeding in an
education system doesn’t tell you whether that system is good, or fair,
or just.”

At some point, Harden has to set aside her caveats and assert that sheer genetic luck plays a causal role in outcomes that matter: “If people are
born with different genes, if the genetic Powerball lands on a different polygenic combination, then they differ not just in their height but
also in their wealth.” For her, accepting this is the necessary prelude
to any conversation about what to do about it. “If you want to help
people, you have to know what’s most effective, so you need the
science,” she told me. Harden thinks that the conversation about
behavior genetics will continue to go in circles as long as we preserve
the facile distinction between immutable genetic causes and malleable environmental ones. We would be better off if we accepted that
everything is woven of long causal chains from genes through culture to personhood, and that the more we understand about them the more
effective our interventions might be.


The first thing that social-science genomics can do is help researchers
control for confounding genetic variables that are almost universally overlooked. As Harden puts it in her book, “Genetic data gets one source
of human differences out of the way, so that the environment is easier
to see.” For example, beginning in 2002, the federal government spent
almost a billion dollars on something called the Healthy Marriage
Initiative, which sought to reduce marital conflict as a way of
combatting poverty and juvenile crime. Harden was not surprised to hear
that the policy had no discernible effect. Her own research showed that,
when identical-twin sisters have marriages with different levels of
conflict, their children have equal risk for delinquency. The point was
not to estimate the effects of DNA per se, but to provide an additional counterfactual for analysis: would an observed result continue to hold
up if the people involved had different genes? Harden can identify
studies on a vast array of topics—Will coaching underresourced parents
to speak more to their children reduce educational gaps? Does having
dinner earlier improve familial relationships?—whose conclusions she considers dubious because the researchers controlled for everything
except the fact that parents pass along to their children both a home environment and a genome.

She acknowledged that gwas techniques are too new, and the anxieties
about behavior genetics too deeply entrenched, to have produced many immediately instrumental examples so far. But she pointed to a study
from last year as proof of concept. A team of researchers led by Jasmin
Wertz, at Duke, used gwas results to examine four different “aspects of parenting that have previously been shown to predict children’s
educational attainment: cognitive stimulation; warmth and sensitivity; household chaos (reverse-coded to indicate low household chaos); and the
safety and tidiness of the family home.” They found that one of them—cognitive stimulation—was linked to children’s academic achievement and their mothers’ genes, even when the children did not inherit the
relevant variants. Parental choices to read books, do puzzles, and visit museums might be conditioned by their own genes, but they nevertheless
produced significant environmental effects.

Even the discovery that a particular outcome is largely genetic doesn’t
mean that its effects will invariably persist. In 1972, the U.K.
government raised the age at which students could leave school, from
fifteen to sixteen. In 2018, a research group studied the effects of the
extra year on the students as adults, and found that their health
outcomes for measures like body-mass index, for whatever reason,
improved slightly on average. But those with a high genetic propensity
for obesity benefitted dramatically—a differential impact that might
easily have gone unnoticed.

Some of Harden’s most recent research has looked at curricular tracking
for mathematics, an intuitive instance of how gene-environment
interactions can create feedback loops. Poor schools, Harden has found,
tend to let down all their students: those with innate math ability are
rarely encouraged to pursue advanced classes, and those who struggle are allowed to drop the subject entirely—a situation that often forecloses
the possibility of college. The most well-off schools are able to
initiate virtuous cycles in the most gifted math students, and break
vicious cycles in the less gifted, raising the ceiling and the floor for achievement.

Harden has perceived, in the wake of studies like these, a new
willingness to consider the role of genetics: “I get e-mails now from
curious social scientists that say, ‘I’ve never thought genetics was
useful or relevant for me, in part because I worried there was no way to
talk about genes and intelligence, or genes and behavior, without
dabbling in Murray-style scientific racism.’ ”

The Murray-Herrnstein gun that hung on the wall of William Darity’s
e-mail went off about a year later. On April 23, 2017, the popular
podcaster Sam Harris released an episode—“Forbidden Knowledge”—designed to trigger a commotion among liberal intellectuals. Harris was
affiliated with the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, a miscellaneous
club (from which he has since distanced himself) bound together by a
shared fixation with what it perceives to be liberal groupthink. In his interviews, Harris adopts a drowsy monotone that seems pitched to signal
his commitment to the dispassionate promotion of disputatious ideas. On
this occasion he invited listeners to “strap in” for a conversation with Charles Murray about “The Bell Curve,” which Harris advertised as “one
of the most controversial books in living memory.”

The book generated such outsized hostility, according to Harris, because
it traffics in unpleasant truths. “People don’t want to hear that intelligence is a real thing, and that some people have more of it than others,” he said. “They don’t want to hear that differences in I.Q. matter because they’re highly predictive of differential success in life—and not just for things like educational attainment and wealth but
for things like out-of-wedlock birth and mortality. People don’t want to
hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her
genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to
increase a person’s intelligence, even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be fifty to eighty per
cent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly
don’t want to hear that average I.Q. differs across races and ethnic groups.”

Harris was drawn to Murray’s defense after an incident at Middlebury
College, the previous month, in which Murray was shouted down by student protesters and his faculty chaperone was injured in a melee. Harris
considered the deplatforming “part of an anti-free-speech hysteria that
is spreading on college campuses,” and concluded, “I find the dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice of Murray’s critics shocking. And the
fact that I was taken in by this defamation of him, and effectively
became part of a silent mob that was just watching what amounted to a
modern witch-burning—that was intolerable to me.” The two men discussed Murray’s contention that observed racial differences are at least partly genetic in origin, and that meliorist interventions like welfare and affirmative-action programs are unlikely to prove successful.

Harris seemed less interested in Murray as a scholar or pundit than as a culture-war trope. Soon after the events at Middlebury, the Web magazine
Vox had published a piece that rejected even Murray’s basic points about intelligence tout court. Harris’s podcast seemed designed to reveal that
the left’s repudiation of Murray was motivated by politics rather than
by science. After it was released, Vox asked Turkheimer to contribute a rebuttal, and he proposed that Harden collaborate. Harden felt a
responsibility to accept the assignment. “People are very tempted by Murray’s ideas, and there’s a certain kind of person who almost
certainly hasn’t read ‘The Bell Curve’ but listens to Sam Harris, who
has a huge audience,” she told me.

She believed that the left’s standard-issue response was unhelpful.
“This is a very Christian thing I’m about to say, but it reminds me of
the episode where Jesus is tempted by Satan in the desert,” she told me,
in Bozeman. “There’s just enough truth in Murray that if you say, ‘This is all wrong,’ you paint yourself into a corner where you say
intellectually dishonest things. Jesus has to say, ‘This part is true,
and this part is false.’ ” She stopped herself. “Don’t write that I’m comparing Murray to Satan,” she said, and then continued, “I know we all want to say it’s not true that ‘intelligence tests predict things,’ but that’s not the lie.” To say that sort of thing ran the risk of
furthering the martyrology of Murray, and of lending lustre to the
notion that his ideas were indeed “forbidden knowledge.” The scholar and critic Fredrik deBoer, who has drawn heavily on Harden’s work, has been
even more pointed in his criticism. In a 2017 essay, he wrote, “Liberals
have flattered themselves, since the election, as the party of facts,
truth tellers who are laboring against those who have rejected reason
itself. And, on certain issues, I suspect they are right. But let’s be
clear: the denial of the impact of genetics on human academic outcomes
is fake news.”

The Vox piece, which Harden and Turkheimer wrote with the social
psychologist Richard Nisbett, was headlined “Charles Murray is once
again peddling junk science about race and IQ.” There is a lot of good evidence, they wrote, to support the ideas that “intelligence, as
measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct” and that “individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.” They even
conceded, with many qualifications, that “racial groups differ in their
mean scores on IQ tests.” But there was simply no good scientific reason
to conclude that observed racial gaps were anything but the fallout from
the effects of racism. They pointed out that in the one instance when
Harris used James Flynn’s work to push back against Murray’s ideas,
Murray responded with some hand-waving about a research paper that he
admitted was too complicated for him to understand.

Despite its inflammatory headline, the article represented an unusually
subtle culture-war intervention. Nevertheless, Harris and his legion of supporters took it as the instigation of a “smear campaign.” In
Quillette, the researcher Richard Haier compared Harden and Turkheimer’s repudiation of Murray to climate-change denial—the second time in a year
that Harden had been thus indicted, this time from the right. The recriminations of what Harden now describes as “the Vox fiasco” dragged
on over the next year, with parades of arguments and counterarguments,
leaked personal e-mails, and levels of sustained podcasting that were,
by anyone’s standards, extreme. Harden told me, “The popular reaction
was so divorced from that of the scientific community that men on the
Internet were sending me papers to read without realizing they were
citing work by my ex-husband, and that the work itself was a
meta-analysis of my own papers.”

Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to Harris and Harden
that they address their unresolved issues. Harden appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s speculation was
dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment, technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent effects of an
unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct an experiment
to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused to grant that
his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you about
insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as ‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it very
important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood or my
group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this piece.) As
she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a virulent on-line
community populated by racists with swastikas in their Twitter bios.’ ”

Harden is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a “psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult
of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views
associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by
the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter
Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that
I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that
contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added, “There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks
that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its explanation of the science.”

The nomenclature has given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,” which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of “left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the
least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic
economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to
me, “Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in
part because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume
each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists. But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t
agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”

TITLE The family that stares into the abyss together gets through
whatever insanity the year has in store together
Cartoon by Zoe Si

Harden’s outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left.
On Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois
dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This
March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she
argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help
increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account
appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes,
genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for
higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We
Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives
Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”

In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives
should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy.
Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies at
the University of Pennsylvania, strongly disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a
just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what
happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and
it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to
have socially devalued traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden can insist that differences within groups are
genetic but that differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”

There is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,”
Robert Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as
“fortune tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60
or so years.” He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor
wrote, “This is a devastating finding for the armies of academics and
uplift artists who think every difference in outcome is society’s
fault.” He continued, “And, although Blueprint includes nothing about
race, the implications for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.”
Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the
only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle
path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting
people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on
cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the
“human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that
a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do
not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much
of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous
and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left
from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in
his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and
Darity on the other.”

The day after Harden’s brother returned to Memphis, she and I went for a
walk around the campus of Montana State University. We wandered into the
Museum of the Rockies, which has a world-class collection of dinosaur
fossils, and she remarked that the experience would have been more fun
with her children. I asked if her work had given her any special
insights into the challenges of parenting, and she laughed and threw up
her hands, joking that the only established public roles for psychology professors were either as center-right pundits or as dispensers of child-rearing advice. She told me, “As a parent, I try to keep in mind
that differences between people are examples of runaway feedback loops
of gene-by-environment interaction. People have some initial genetic predisposition to something, and that leads them to choose certain
friends over other friends, and these initial exposures have a certain
effect, and you like that effect and you choose it again, and then these feedback loops become self-reinforcing.”

Behavior geneticists frequently quote an old disciplinary chestnut about
how first-time parents are naïve behaviorists and that a second child
turns them into convinced geneticists. In one chapter of her book,
Harden mentions that her son struggles with a speech impairment.
“Looking at how my children differ in their ability to articulate words,
I can easily see the capricious hand of nature,” she writes. “When it
comes to inheriting whatever combination of genetic variants allows one
to pronounce a word like ‘squirrel’ by the age of three, my daughter was lucky. My son was not.” She emphasizes that parents are already well
aware of how we might talk about genetics without making normative
judgments. “I certainly am not implying that one of my children is ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to the other one,” she writes. “Verbal ability
is valued, but having strong verbal ability doesn’t make one of my
children more valuable to me. The genetic differences between them are meaningful for their lives, but those differences do not create a
hierarchy of intrinsic worth.”

The ultimate claim of “The Genetic Lottery” is an extraordinarily
ambitious act of moral entrepreneurialism. Harden argues that an
appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined
to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity
and comfort. She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false
distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in
biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity
are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.

As she put it to me in an e-mail, “Even if we eliminated all
inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by
family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools
(which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we’ve
only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in
educational outcomes.” She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank
data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic
groups rather than between them. “Common intuitions about the scale of inequality in our society, and our imaginations about how much progress
we would make if we eliminated the visible inequalities by race and
class, are profoundly wrong,” she wrote. “The science confronts us with
a form of inequality that would otherwise be easy to ignore.”


The perspective of “gene blindness,” she believes, “perpetuates the myth that those of us who have ‘succeeded’ in twenty-first century capitalism have done so primarily because of our own hard work and effort, and not
because we happened to be the beneficiaries of accidents of birth—both environmental and genetic.” She invokes the writing of the philosophers
John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson to argue that we need to reject “the
idea that America is or could ever be the sort of ‘meritocracy’ where social goods are divided up according to what people deserve.” Her
rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she
discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century
social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If
genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we
ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

In my conversations with her colleagues, Harden’s overarching idea was
almost universally described as both beautiful and hopelessly quixotic.
As one philosopher put it, “What I love about Paige, and also what I
find so incredibly moving and courageous and reckless about her, is that
she thinks she can change the whole apparatus—this large-scale framework
for moral responsibility—on the basis of our understanding of our genes. I’m not sure genetics has the capacity to shift our intuitions, at least
on the left—because of course the right already cares about genes. In principle, the left could try to take genes as a starting point, too,
but in practice it’s probably a different story. It’s really awful to
think about, but I think the fact that she’s an attractive and
charismatic Southern woman seems not irrelevant to her desirability as a culture-war ally for the right.” James Tabery, a philosopher at the University of Utah, believes that underscoring genetic difference is
just as likely to increase inequality as to reduce it. “It’s truly noble for Paige to make the case for why we might think of biological
differences as similar to socially constructed differences, but you’re bumping into a great deal of historical, economic, political, and
philosophical momentum—and it’s dangerous, no matter how noble her intentions are, because once the ideas are out there they’re going to
get digested the way they’re going to get digested,” he said. “The playing board has been set for some time.”

In Bozeman, Harden seemed anxious that she had not heard from Turkheimer
about her book. It took him a long time to get around to reading it, he
told me, in part because of the ways their ideas have diverged in recent
years, but when he finally did he wrote her an e-mail that said, “I
really do think the book is great—in fact I think it will be instantly recognized as the most important book about behavior genetics that has
ever been written. You should get ready to be very famous.” He told me, “I’m really proud of Paige. She’s amazing. And it’s, well, an interesting experience to have a student that gets this successful based
in part on disagreeing with you.” He still looked askance at gwas. “I
think that Paige’s dilemma—and I don’t mean this in a bad way, because she takes the problem very seriously—is in that balance that everyone
has to seek. If you’re me, who thinks that it’s all just correlation,
then you’re the ‘gloomy prospect’ guy and everybody thinks you’re a wet blanket. And if you think, ‘Wow, the whole world turned out to be
genetic,’ then you’re Charles Murray, and in between you have to walk
this very careful path. You have to believe in a certain amount of
genetic causation or you don’t have a science, and you can’t believe in
too much genetic causation or you believe that poor people are poor
because they have poor genes—and that’s a very, very delicate walk.”

Harden’s political optimism is tempered by a serene personal realism. At
the end of our walk, she admitted that it wasn’t always easy to
reconcile herself with whatever it was that behavior geneticists’
results were telling us. “Take the heritability of an outcome like divorce—it’s totally wild, because there’s a whole other person there!” Plenty of twin research suggests a meaningful, if puzzling, genetic
correlation with divorce. Harden’s parents are divorced, as is she.

“I use this example of my sunglasses,” she said. She removed her
Ray-Bans and took out her phone to show me a photograph of two previous
pairs, both of which had lost the same lens. “I think of the
heritability of life events as the repeatability of things that seem serendipitous. I’m clumsy in ways that persist over time, I have certain tastes that persist over time, and I guess I think of the heritability
of divorce in the same way. My subjective experience of my sunglasses
being broken is that you have good intentions and life goes awry—it’s
easy to interpret these things as events that happen to you. But, on the
other hand, I bring all sorts of things that make these experiences
repeatable in ways that are extremely difficult to describe. It’s
obviously difficult to do exact science on the ways I repeatedly break
my Ray-Bans, just like it’s difficult or impossible to explain marital
status on a molecular level.” She picked her sunglasses up off the table
and put them back on. “But I do think that in the end you end up
becoming yourself.” ♦

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