The promise and peril of the new science of social genomics
nature.com
nature.com
If your dataset it sufficiently large and the phenomena is sufficiently complex you can find myriads of tiny, valid yet uninteresting and ultimately irrelevant effects. It is simply about accuracy - take any genomic data and any visible observable phenotype of the population for the genomic data, if you don't find anything relevant it simply means your method is not yet accurate enough.
Will people that like to play pokemon have a genetic marker compared to those that do not? If you average it over hundred of millions of instances you might see a difference. Does it mean anything with respect to one single individual playing pokemon? No, many other factors will down out that contribution.
etc.
the same is with this study as well, of course every population will eventually develop its own markers unless are being constantly mixing randomly. Does it mean anything at all, beyond what we already know - that a population develops its own markers ...
The scary and lazy eugenics argument of course is that some people have an inherent “inferiority” due to their genetic inheritance.
But evolutionary pressure at each step applies to local advantage only so the causal chain more likely runs the other way: that 200 years of increasingly centralized industrialization encouraged expression of genes that would favor certain behavior. Plus the reduced cost of transportation would encourage offspring for whom that was not an advantage to move away.
Super fascinating. But if seized upon by the modern day phrenologists it could be super dangerous.
Edit: a couple of typos
I don't see how their findings are surprising. There seems to be a lot of mixing of cause and effect.
I am 100% certain that lots of the things that determine our lives are heritable, but that doesn't mean I think this kind of research is beneficial.
Research should be aimed at improving the general state of humanity. We have already seen what this does. Why would anyone even give this stuff a chance?
Scientists should avoid trying to "scientifically" ascertain peoples' place in the world based on inborn traits. Instead, the focus should be on helping people achieve what they want to achieve.
If things are heritable we should certainly catalog in a rigorous manner how they are heritable.
It does have applicability if you want to know things like what causes crime and how much, how much can we fix generational poverty with moar education, and will legalizing crack cause 50% of the population to get wiped out by addiction.
This issue of outcome measures in social genomics seems insurmountable to me.
And no, obviously laymen are not more likely to understand the implication, as evidenced by the "eugenics is good, actually" crowd in this thread.
>it would require having access to the genome of every single person you want to manage
Only in this dystopian hellscape you're imagining. This isn't about micromanaging individuals. Its about better understanding the origins of behavior in society. Here's one immediate potential application: how can you be sure that quotas in hiring aren't unrealistic and counterproductive if you refuse to research the effect size of genetics in human interests?
My overall point is that we don't know the answer to these questions and there is an emergent social pressure which presumes a worst case application of such research and does not allow for it to be conducted. This leads to assumptions pervasive in social, medical, and academic practices which we don't know to be true. What if effectiveness of psychological interventions hinges on genetics? Should such research be forbidden because of totalitarian fantasies?
Genetic screening has many great potential benefits, but the Iceland Down's example is not their best showcase.
I don't understand this position. Should we just ignore entire branches of science just because their results are inconvenient for some people/narratives? Meanwhile we allow sloppy, one sided science from the socially acceptable camp to influence social policy in a potentially totally broken way.
Agenda driven science is bad science. You cannot solve social issues if you refuse to consider where the problems may actually come from. If there's any validity to social genomics, then perhaps our approach of blanket solutions to all groups in society will be shown to be ineffective, and this is a critical avenue to explore because it would indicate that our current allocation of resources is suboptimal.
The problem is that genomics (and anything to do with heredity before it) has been and still is abused in the opposite way: people pretending it to be an inevitable predictor like the law of gravity is, while claiming to not have any social agenda until they have had a glass of wine or two and you start hearing absolutely disturbing things.
I've worked for molecular neurobiologists working on brains - the vast majority of them are fine. They research schizophrenia and such that do have genes associated with them, but also get that a lot of the genetics are about incrasing risk factors, not determinism. But once you hit the sub-group that researches the heritability of IQ... well, let's just say that there is a very suspicious aspect to the self-selection bias in the people who decide to research that topic.
The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction.
This is something often said by white people who never had to deal with the many issues around migrating to Western countries, even though we have the entire history of eugenics and "scientific" racism proving the opposite.
> The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction.
That would assume that there are two equally valid opposing views here, and yet there is nothing here to back that up. Science doesn't run on "both sides"-isms.
So why does the opening of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ say "Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80% and 86%."?
Is the mountain of research on the heritability of psychological traits so obviously 'nothing', you don't even have to bother giving a source for your claim?
And heritability doesn't mean what you think it does
I'm choosing to believe you're arguing in good faith, so prepare to ingest a decent amount of material if you want to understand why: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
As strange as it may sound, the entire scientific community is not in fact conspiring to hide inconvenient right-wing truths from the common people, and if they do happen to overwhelmingly lean left that does not entail the existence of such a shadowy cabal.
Gains of several standard deviations in mental traits, including intelligence, are looking very plausible with minimal technological progress. We are well past the speculative phase.
As we live in a competitive technological landscape and China, Korea and India do not share our taboos against genetic enhancement, we will be forced to embrace this, too.
Tar and feathering human enhancement as “eugenics” worked when human enhancement was not possible. We no longer live in that world. The signal is no longer cheap. Whatever nations fail to embrace embryo selection, iterated embryo selection, and eventually genetic engineering for intelligence will find themselves as children, competing in a technological landscape they are too dull to understand.
Like Lysenkoism of old, our modern mental Lysenkoism will become unsustainable. We would be wise to discard it now.
As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this).
I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.
A one sided, self reinforcing status quo does not require a conspiracy. All it takes is a majority of well meaning researchers to create a self-reinforcing situation wherin research along certain perfectly legitimate avenues is strongly discouraged through emergent social pressure. After spending a decade pursuing a PHD, it's hard to justify sticking your neck out when the consequences are potentially career ending, and the result is that in Western society we effectively shun any discussion of the influence of nature in favor exclusively of nurture.
>When evoluyionary biologists express skepticism towards claims made by behavioral "geneticists" or "evolutionary" psychologists, they are in fact pointing out the shoddy assumptions and flawed methodology, independently of whether the conclusions are morally abhorrent or not (they often are, but it's orthogonal to the point).
You don't think it strange to have an unquestionable default position where any study showing innate differences among populations is immediately dismissed as having poor methodology when the results are inconvenient? Is this not indicative of a strong institutional bias? Particularly when all of these same puzzle pieces are taken as legitimate when viewed individually in "safe" contexts? For example, no one argues against the existence of the warrior gene, that cat is out of the bag; but any whispers of different effects on genetic subpopulations and people bend over backwards trying to minimize the influence of such a factor on individual behavior [1] while totally ignoring the measurable consequences for distribution statistics.
Here's a legitimate potential consequence of ignoring such questions: if it turns out, hypothetically, that a particular subpopulation is more or less likely to be aggressive in tense situations, wouldn't that necessitate an adjustment in policing practices to ensure fairness in the justice system? What about optimization of treatment for psychological conditions like depression?
The assumption that human behavior is purely a product of nurture is not supported by a multitude of individual scientific facts, but institutional social bias is such that no reputable institution is willing to unify these factors, even when doing so is likely to produce more optimal outcomes for all of society. While well meaning, this is ultimately bad science potentially underpinning bad social policy.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3?_re...
This is not the ideologically tainted race research of the 1920s. And this has consequences far beyond the somewhat arbitrary black/white divide. We have 100 years of scientific progress in evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, and more to consider now. Dismissing any attempt to evaluate genetic influence on behavior as having racist motivations is dangerously myopic.
You don't think it strange that there has been a dearth of research in this direction for some 3 decades now? Where is the definitive proof that humans are 100% products of their environment? The issue is far from settled and it is dishonest to pretend that it is.
The potential for misuse of such data by racists is one very small part of the positive and negative consequences of inquiry into this area. And, again, the puzzle pieces are all around us and not controversial in part, they beg an investigation which objectively considers them in sum.
The people promoting eugenics dressed up with trendier terms also have an agenda.
Shunning these technologies will be seen, in time, as akin to the shunning of inoculations in the Victorian era.
When you find yourself cheering on, however indirectly, Mendelian disease consider perhaps that you are one of the baddies.
As for your predictions - they've been said over and over again ever since I started embarking on the genomics hype 7 years ago. The reality is much more boring and selecting for complex traits that heavily interact with the environment is bound to have disappointing returns.
Even if it is an agenda, it still represents a wealth of evidence of an entire other side to the question of human behavior.
This kind of immediate dismissal, slandering by accusations of "eugenics" or other euphamisms for racism, is exactly how the status quo is maintained without any overt conspiracy or cabal as referenced by other commenters.
This isn't a question of scientifically justified racial supremacy. Some of us are actually interested in truth, which cannot be obtained if one perspective is irrationally forbidden as taboo. Opening up the discourse doesn't automatically push us into some twisted genetic caste dystopia - the nature of population distributions is such that individuals can still be judged by their own merits and we all still deserve the same rights as human beings.
A thousand times this. If the taboo'd claims are false, then the other side should welcome discussion and scientific experimentation, as that will further prove the taboo'd claims false. Suppose a group of people claim the sky is actually brown, not blue. Suppose academics and governments respond harshly, silencing all such people and banning all attempts to determine the color of the sky. This would have the exact opposite of the intended effect, it would make people wonder what's up with the blue-skyers' irrational behavior, and it would make people wonder what the blue skyers are trying to hide. Instead, let the brown-skyers talk and let them perform their experiments, and it will become manifestly clear that they are mistaken!
Two things to say here.
First, truth is in the eye of the beholder, even in science. There is still plenty of research into discredited theories because the proponents don't care, and they can recruit new believers by being selective in their presentation of the evidence, and screaming that the opposition is irrational.
Second, what is irrational about not pursuing lines of research that one considers will inevitably lead to eugenics? Is ethics in scientific research irrational? Science is not some perfectly neutral abstract playing field, it has real impacts on the world.
On your second point, what's wrong with eugenics? Even if it is wrong, who decides what knowledge falls into that category of inevitably leading to bad things? Do we need to ask the pope?
You are rationalizing what amounts to a strong institutional bias. That's bad science and will be bad for anything built on that incomplete picture, including official and unnoficial social policy.