NIH blocks access to genetics database if research enters “forbidden” territory
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
We made friends with the various program managers, did all the necessary due diligence, applied, got approved, downloading hundreds of terabytes of data, and then received a stern note from the leadership at NIH that we had to delete everything. Apparently, some Very Important People at NCBI didn't like Google and really didn't like the idea that we'd have a copy of all this data, even though the intent (I can say authoritatively since I was the founder of the project) was to accelerate scientific research.
It's now hosted on AWS as a public/private dataset.
I try to avoid human genomics or really any controlled-access dataset now. The total value in the data is much smaller than generally claimed, and entrenched interests go out of their way to gatekeep and sort of maintain an "artisanal, bespoke" approach to data processing.
Now, if you want to use this data to make strong conclusions about the relationship between genotypes and human intelligence: best of luck to you, as you'll be grabbing the electrified third rail of American politics and science. Nearly every foray into this area generates controversy, and even intelligent, good-faith researchers end up in a trap of "appearing to be racist, or sexist". With career ending consequences.
I study tardigrades instead now.
Edit: Although, in the context of medicine, it would be pretty cool if you can find trends in medicinal health that tend to be common with individuals like yourself, and give you warnings should conditions are more likely to arise. I imagine that would involve adding in a different dataset to compliment understanding characteristics of your DNA
Not only could platforms use that research to optimize engagement/conversions/etc of those with genetic likelihoods of experiencing such symptoms, but unscrupulous platforms can use those genetic predispositions to algorithmically target and induce symptoms of mental illness in the vulnerable. If a platform knows that a user has a predisposition for overeating or depression, they can then try to lead that user into patterns that will make them sick, with the intention of getting them to engage in the desired behavior of clicking, buying, etc.
Do I basically have your position right?
I am not a Google board member, I have no say in what they do. The government does, though, in a limited fashion.
Please don't mistake my desire for Google not to have data with the implicit approval of such datasets existing in the first place.
Also, please remember the millions of people that were starved, enslaved and murdered by the East India Company.
Offhand, I can't think of any corporations who have done that. There's no profit in it... at least, not unless a government is footing the bill.
If you want to conduct expensive research projects for the exclusive benefit of your own politically-correct cabal, don't ask me to pay for it.
But that wasn't the point. The point was to have copies of the data preloaded into Google Cloud, preformatted for high performance data processing by a wide range of researchers. One of the highlights of my career was working directly with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat on mapreduces that turned FASTQ and BAM files into sstables.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/illumina-...
You've just improved my faith in government institutions.
Wonder if the NIH can ask to delete the data. Shouldnt it be public property since it s tax-funded and open source and all
For what it's worth I've mentioned elsewhere I no longer work directly with human genomics data because it's such a political hot potato you can't really do any good research.
Tenure, despite it's elitism and problems of fostering a gerontocracy, is one of the few mechanisms that helps people explore controversial topics. But even then, finding can be cut and labs shut down even if the tenured professor is not fired.
For those who don't click the link. This is getting to really dangerous territory. Political correctness wants to remove genetics altogether from the study of the human condition. Blank-slate cultists are scared of what research will find.
>Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
Given that SO many women and minorities actively support and vote for these groups and candidates, and this is a democratic system, is this really such a bad thing in this case?
In short, if groups of people actively and happily vote against their own best interests, and to keep themselves oppressed, is it wrong for them to be oppressed? Or, in this case, is democracy even a system we should be upholding? And if not, what is the alternative? A system where a group of unelected, unaccountable elites run society because they know what's best? I honestly don't have the answer here.
What do you mean by this?
FWIW as far as I can tell, the OP is correct in that 55% of white women, 36% of hispanic men, and 30% of hispanic women voted for trump. It was also telling that in the 2020 election support for the republican party from all minority groups increased by a few percentage points. I think that counts as "SO many". It's not a majority, but I don't think the OP claimed that.
>Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?
Just wanted some elaboration. It's a bold claim given with no data.
"SO many," if defined as less than 50%, is irrelivant given a democratic sysyem with only two parties. Therefore "SO many" must refer to more than 50%.
Hitler was elected by a minority of the population, but American liberals seem to have forgotten that. It's becoming easy to see how leaders like Hitler come into power. If Trump had been much more competent and destructive than he really was, the US would be really screwed right now, while American liberals would still be sitting around whining about how "gerrymandering" got him elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. (Yes, I know gerrymandering only affects elections for the House members. American liberals don't: they routinely blame gerrymandering for governor's elections and Senatorial elections.)
Seems like a bit of a jump to assume they're distributed the same way and start making conclusions based on that.
The answer is yes. And in fact that's how fascism typically rises to power.
I feel like this is a paradox.
If we're voting on dinner, and I say I'm not going to eat at any restaurant with an F health inspector rating, we can still vote.
Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice. I can't vote for a foreign national to be our president. But honestly, I'm not that broken up about that limit. Just like I wouldn't be that broken up about limiting the ability to elect fascists.
Ok, and who sets those limits? If an unelected group sets the limits, then what you have is not a democratic system at all; it's more like a 1-party state where you can vote who whomever you want, as long as The Party has approved them.
That doesn't replicate the conditions of national elections which are monopolistic and repeated. You can't opt to participate in a different group and you have to play all your games with the same rules - if you refuse to eat at F-grade restaurants you may end up starving.
In "real" elections you end up without the ability to set those convenient limits consistently or usefully.
It's not as if the research caused these people to have the views they have; they use it as a post-hoc justification. And more importantly it's not as if they can't do their own research, even if it's bad quality (or even fake). By remaining intentionally ignorant yourself you won't have a strong answer, and let the "MAGA and similar organisations" take the initiative and control the debate.
Besides, it's not as if reality is going to change just because we don't research it, and if we understand reality better we can maybe do better by everyone.
All "heritability" research is just an analysis of correlations between genes and expressed behaviour. On these grounds a scottish accent is highly heritable, since the accent correlates extremely highly with some genes.
We do not have the means to create new human beings with different genetic profiles and observe them accross many environments, as they develop, to determine if "somehow" a gene causes anything so macroscopic like "intelligence".
So, quite literally: we cannot do science. We cannot create experiments to test hypotheses.
Genes have no plausible mechanism to "cause" intelligence. If they play a significant role, it is a very large number of genes building tissues which are completely opaque (brains, etc.) whose interactions with the environment are completely opaque.
Heritability research, and "psych-genetic research" of this kind is, necessarily, pseudoscience. It's adhearents are the poorest statistians and have the least understanding of the scientific method you could hope for.
We have no scientific theory of intelligence which provides causal variables that we can experiment with; we have no theory of biological mechanism, likewise; we have no theory of genetic mechanism --- all we have are some aging loons with stats software content to put iq-test-scores (ie., people competing patterns of shapes...) and Genes into it.
Whatever can be found by these loons isn't worth a scientist finding. "Data" isnt innocent, it is collected and used for a reason; and pseudoscience isnt innocent.
Correlating genes with ESP ability is likewise nonesense, and that has as much scientific merit.
To give a simple example, one of the best tools is comparing identical twins to non-identical ones. If the correlation between the fraternal twins is substantially less than the correlation between the identical twins then we can know a genetic factor us in play.
Your argument is also too general in that it labels all observational science as pseudoscience. Is astronomy pseudoscience? You don't need to be able to manipulate the environment to do science, just have a hypothesis and a way I'd getting new observations that would probe/disprove the hypothesis.
Twin studies assume a model of environmental variation which cannot be evidenced, because the relevant target of study (a human being in its environment) cannot be experimented on to evidence anything. Twin studies are not RCTs (which are themselves the minimum an experiment needs to be to count as science).
Indeed, the assumed model of the interaction between genes and the environment is *plainly false* (namely, that "equality" between environments exists and that it has linear non-feedback, non-cyclical effects).
Twin studies on star signs would likewise produce as compelling evidence that star signs cause personality. (Can you see why that would be?)
Science requires such experiments take place. No amount of post-hoc analysis of correlation can produce a causal explanation. One must control causes to do so.
Hence, much of this abuse of statistics is unreporducible pseudoscience; it is well known to be outside these fields by anyone with any credible understanding of statistics.
Every chemist will defend physics; and every chemist, biology. And every biologist neuroscience.
Can you cite me anythihg other than the abject horror of real scientists outside these fields on reading their reports?
I'm sorry to break the news: this is peudoscience in the tradiiton of pseudoscience which was invented by psychology's repurposing of statistics for post-hoc analysis of correlation on human data (ie., the most complex systems known to exist) which fails even basic tests of scientific credibility.
Complex systems resist study by the use of the scientific method, and require the best minds in modelling and statistics to even produce "rule of thumb" models (eg., consider the climate).
What we have in heritability, psychometric, etc. research is loons studying the climate (ie., analogously, humans) by putting thermometer readings into GUI stats software and publishing the results.
They're fools. Neo-homeopaths, whose lab coat is "statistics"/.
You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...
I am presently researching a PhD in the philosophy of science and causal analysis; I have two degrees in physics, and I have spend the last nearly 10 years with major lead researchers and data scientists across many industries.
My opinions here are a summary of a talk I recently delivered at a conference on issues applying "ordinary statistical methods" to complex systems, esp. those with profound hysteresis, such as people. But likewise, my opinions arent rare amongst people with similar experience to me: psychmetrics, psychology, heritability research, and so on -- are widely regarded amongst my peers as pseudoscience.
It's unlikely I've made a basic mistake.
His argument as I understand it, is that the MZ twins have a different environment in ways such as being treated as more similar by their parents. This means that high similarity in one respect (such as appearance or temperament) can contaminate the natural experiment by making people assume they are more similar in another respect (such as intelligence or learning style) and treating them the same where that second trait is relevant, thus making the second trait more highly correlated than they would be by genes alone (e.g. you assume they're equally intelligent and thus give them the same education).
This has some merit but is quite far from a knock-down argument.
My previous talks with a professor studying genetics in Oxford has given me the impression that heritability is settled science and theres a huge volume of papers in the area, so I'm not going to change my mind based on an anonymous comment and a paper by a non-academic with an axe to grind without first going back and consulting with her.
Given your statements here I am quite confused as to how you can have a degree in physics while dismissing science where you can't make interventions... did you study astronomy at all in your degree?
I'm also confused as to how you state that genes do not cause intelligence, do you think a mouse is less intelligent than a human due to its lack of soul or something?
[1] https://geneillusions.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/twin_2002_...
My issue with something like a human being is that the state space is going to be non-linear, in the sense that suppose we have an explanatory model of the human in their environment, state = h(x_env, x_body, t, ...)
This makes controlling, really in any sense, those variables is going to be nearly impossible. So close values in `x` space, eg., two environments that look nearly-identical, are going to have radically different values in state space.
Psychologists, using linear "mereological intuitions" based on classical physics, will deny this. A physicist however, would not make this mistake. In cases of hysteresis and complexity, we're well-aware tiny variations in an environment can produce radically different paths thru' state space.
(And I think people are more complex than magnets!).
The fundamental issue with the field of studying human behaviour with scientific methods, is that (imv), we dont have scientific methods. We shouldn't expect science to provide us a method which works in every env.
I have, perhaps, high standards on what counts as science; it's esteem imv comes from disciplines that can meet those standards. Everyone else is rent-seeking.
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Edit:
> genes do not cause intelligence
If there's an infinite number of possible people P, our genes make a subset of those impossible because they're not "biologically possible".
There is a narrow sense of "cause" which therefore says that genes play a causal role.
I was taking a more robust sense, in which (one plausible view), is that the set of effects we call "intelligence" are gounded in the body, but a cause of the environment.
Splitting these issues out is very subtle however.
One simple way of making this clear: most possible bodies arent intelligent; they dont speak; they dont think; etc. And all those are biologically possible.
Just as genes dont cause English speaking, they dont "obviously" cause intelligence. Most biologically possible people are basically unable to think, never having been developed in a social environment.
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Not only they tell us genetics doesn't exist, but we can't say it's shitty science because they're the ones telling us what's shitty science and what's not! Brilliant!
The folks who have objections to this sort of research aren't actually existentialists when you push them even a tiny bit on their beliefs. The tabula rasa is just used as a rhetorical tool to deflect from criticism with regards to certain uncomfortable genetic questions.
It's a philosophy of convenience, easily discarded when one needs to argue in favor of, for instance, certain forms of equity.
The reason they "doubt" their dataset is appropriate is they don't like the conclusion.
https://www.hhs.gov/foia/exemptions-and-exclusions/index.htm...
By providing blocks on certain types of research which are known to be flawed because they try to make the garbage metadata meaningful…some of the worst of the bad science performed over the last 200 years gets eliminated. Really, some of the ideas that exist that form the basis of IQ &c. aren’t much better than phrenology.
What if you wanted to search populations with a high concentration of strongly retarded children to look for epidemics of birth defects, and then compare areas by race to see if it looked like there is any unexpected bias?
A research block would stop this and other useful question from being answered. The data would easily suffice, whatever its defects, because you wouldn't need high-resolution IQ measurements, only enough to detect severe defects and you wouldn't need genetically-accurate racial identification, only a rough guess because that's what visible minority means.
But because a bunch of pearl-clutchers are afraid of MAGAites the researcher trying to find and fix other cities like Flint Michigan would instead of demonized, denied tenure, and hounded out of academia.
I know many many people dosing on custom peptides to keep up with the grind in game development these days.
If I had to guess,I think the cats out of the bag already, and we are behind.
We are not truly intelligent beings yet, just a clever neocortex grafted clumsily onto an animal. That animal happens to have a lot of instincts around tribal in-group/out-group behavior that immediately kick in when differences are discussed.
My personal opinion is that things like genetic differences in ability or gender developmental stuff should be studied but it should be discussed in the most obtuse and utterly alien academic jargon possible for an effect bordering on encryption. It should be impossible to quote such research in any way that would be comprehensible to someone outside the field, making it impossible to cite it directly in support of popular political arguments.
Or maybe gate it off entirely. Maybe we should not publish openly about human genetic or gender differences for the same reason we do not publish precise schematics for atomic weapons or detailed how-to documents on how to create a doomsday plague with a mail order CRISPR kit. That reason being: some of us will use such knowledge to kill each other.
What I really hate is that humanity can't handle understanding itself.
Might as well not do the research, and I don't mean that cynically. It might genuinely be for the best.
It's a fallacious argument, but one that will probably work on a lot of people.
That is to say, centuries of systemic oppression and suppression, in addition to things like redlining and ensuring that waste dumps &c. are closest to minority communities tends to result in environmental effects being confused with genetic effects.
Will growing up near a supermax site with less money because the industries have moved away reduce one’s chances for improvement and one’s measurable IQ? Yup. Do people of color live close to such sites at much greater rates than whites? Yup.
I will also state outright that genomic studies will not solve the nature vs nurture debate, because of epigenetic factors (itself a newer concept). Children whose mothers are stressed in the first two years of their life get different genetic expressions during maturation because of the exposure to more stress hormones than others. Children who do not receive a "normal" amount of attention do not themselves learn to pay attention to others as much. (This last is a fairly plausible hypothesis for the development of ADHD proffered by Gabor Maté.)
I would say observation rather than understanding. In my opionion if you can't say what genes are then you can't say you understand it. That's a very recent development.
>genomic studies will not solve the nature vs nurture debate, because of epigenetic factors
That needs to be studied too. But much "epigenetic" factors still require understanding the genome anyway, such as non coding RNA and histone modification. The first case is just a different use of DNA (ei. not for creating protiens) and the second is itself defined by protiens indirectly. The only exception I know is DNA methylation which is "truly" epigenetic in that it is not (or is only weakly) directed by the genome. (There can be more such genome-independant factors, I'm not sure.) So yes, understanding the genome does (mostly) settle the nature vs nurture debate.
>Children whose mothers are stressed in the first two years of their life get different genetic expressions during maturation because of the exposure to more stress hormones than others. Children who do not receive a "normal" amount of attention do not themselves learn to pay attention to others as much. (This last is a fairly plausible hypothesis for the development of ADHD proffered by Gabor Maté.)
These are examples of nurture. I'm not really sure what point you are making here. Gene expression is dependant on enviromental factors? That's been known for a while. Seems irrelivant to the discussion. With regard to my "inherent ability" comment, that (obviously) doesn't take the enviroment into account. For a simple example, if one's inherent ability for strength building is high, but he becomes paralyzed, he will not do well in sports.
(epigenetic factors are by definition heritable, in case that's what you meant?)
I'm not an accredited scientist, and neither are 99% of people in this forum. You think it's best if certain truths about the world are intentionally kept from us by people who chose different career paths?
Information will always be distorted and abused but it's much easier to do that when only certain people are allowed to have access to that information.
Sure, we're all dumb apes, but putting on a lab coat doesn't change that fact.
I've sometimes wondered if the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that the knowledge to destroy the entire population became available to too many individuals in those societies.
For instance, suppose some new physics were discovered and technology developed so that it was possible for an average-intelligence person to build a true earth-destroying doomsday bomb in his basement. It would only take one crazy person to eliminate humanity. Even more likely is the ability to genetically engineer a doomsday virus; just look how bad COVID-19 was. If some angry teenager could make something far worse, we're doomed as a species, or at least as a civilization.
I will try to argue against them from a pragmatic point of view.
The US sure is the top dog in scientific research, but far from the only dog. New competition has arisen, mostly Asian countries that do not care too much about historical Western traumas and sensibilities. The US is no more capable of blocking certain research worldwide that the Pope was, back in the Early Modern Era.
By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.
(At this point, too many smart readers will wave the suggestion away with a bland "Intelligence is too complicated to be ever really understood." Sorry, I don't believe that. Intelligence is surely complicated, but so was atom splitting. It would be strange if there were never any results in the field, regardless of work spent.)
Which means that a generation or two down the road, strategic adversaries may have tech to alter intelligence and other mental traits, because they will know what to edit and how. Perhaps not that much, but who knows how genetic and epigenetic manipulation in human beings is going to look like in 2070.
Such an ability may prove even more world-changing than the atomic bomb, and the US is shooting itself in the foot by making sure that it won't be able to compete on the field early.
Which is exactly why it should be studied, especially in a society where we still ostensibly have some semblance of respect for the individual.
Who benefits from those “advances” in technology in that case?
To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place. Sure, nuclear weapons would likely have been theoretically discovered anyways, but did they need to be actually built? Did we need to execute on actually building and using nuclear weapons to understand practical use cases for nuclear energy?
Because I am certain that powers today in an arms race with each other could and would, by this logic, discover and unleash entirely new man-made horrors upon this world that make nuclear weapons look elementary, if this is the path we’re going to go down.
Just because some people choose to study eugenics does not mean we all have to (or should).
Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.
The benefits from ethical eugenic research would be to the whole society. You'd get less genetic illnesses, improved metabolisms, better eyesight etc. In theory it's basically just improving the odds of rolling good genetics for everyone.
It's certainly not going to be easy however, and to be frank: I doubt any of us will be alive by the time the research would bear fruits.
IMO it really depends on how you're doing the extermination. Killing adults/children with the relevant genes is of course hilariously unethical. Killing fetuses with the same genes is very debatably unethical - as in, a lot of people will very strongly say it's unethical, but other societies will do so at >90% rates (see Down's in Iceland as an example).
I find it hard to think of a way in which editing an individual embryo to change the relevant genes is unethical besides the "changing anything is evil eugenics" objection.
I think the Cold War stayed cold because the potential downside of using weapons outweighed the potential benefits—-the use of a single nuke could only bring marginal benefits, but at the risk of Armageddon.
> To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place.
What was the alternative? To bury our heads in the sand and hope that the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were too scrupulous to pursue a strategic advantage? C’mon.
Unilateral disarmament isn’t moral. It’s naive and dangerous.
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I'm so grateful for our individualistic society.
eugenics =/= unethical eugenics.
If you screen your embryos for downs syndrome, you are practicing eugenics.
If you screen your fetus for any genetic defects, you are practicing eugenics.
If you want smart kids and want a smart spouse, you are practicing eugenics.
eugenics =/= unethical eugenics
E.g. giving all parents free genetic screening and genome correction for their fetuses if they wish it would be eugenics.
Some forms of eugenics are routinely practised in the West already. For example, pretty much every IVF clinic out there will recommend patients to scrap embryos that are proven to be aneuploid. (So either not viable, or, in some cases, viable but with Down syndrome.) This is accepted everywhere I know and is considered a part of your reproductive rights.
How is this not "good eugenics"? How would you frame it as unethical?
You can (for example) ban research on things might lead to the development of novel poisons. But that ban is almost sure to prevent the development of some new cancer treatments.
I mean one that would generally benefit mankind as a whole?
Research is not laboring to progressively color in a pre-defined picture, where you can just tell research scientists "don't color in the naughty bits".
The genes that impact those things aren't being restricted?
We don't know what unrelated items or generally applicable patterns we might find when we go looking into basic research.
If so, you're practicing eugenics!
It's tantamount to claiming we shouldn't do brain surgery because someone once practiced it by drilling holes in people's heads to remove demons.
Eugenics at scale seems inherently unethical to me because its purpose and effects are contradictory under any moral justifications I can think of, except that which basically say "I deserve this power because I have it."
If we can't distribute a vaccine universally and equitably, we definitely can't eugenics. It will always boil down to who has the most proximity to the resources.
On the individual level the purpose of eugenics is to make your life better. But if it's done on a societal scale, then that reason becomes increasingly meaningless. It's all too often co-opted into nationalistic, corporate, or blind structures which you might not even notice as an individual.
I hope this sort of thing will be treated like high-tech weaponry, even if not weaponized. On the individual level I want the most protection possible, but I'm not allowed to get a Sherman tank, at least not very easily.
We take it for absolutely granted that people's weaknesses and handicaps get compensated with inventions all the time. Organ transplants, artificial limbs, immunotherapy for cancer.
If it turned out that intelligence tends to correlate with depression, but the depressive part could be tuned out, would it be ethical to let the individuals suffer from depression and deny them a potential cure?
As far as eugenics goes, it is already to a large degree performed by proxy: the elites intermarry. But we are not really talking eugenics here; I am almost positive that in the second half of the century, genetic and epigenetic alterations in living adult humans will be commonplace.
Do I think we're behind as a country because NASA isn't sending people to the sun now? No.
I'm universally fine with waiting until there's a theoretically viable approach before throwing random innocent lives at things which have no evidence of working even in theory.
Or, as others in this thread have argued: how should the person feel that doesn't get a high score, and shouldn't we outlaw research in that area to make sure they don't feel bad?
This didn't prevent the field into developing into what it is today, acquiring more knowledge along the way.
As of today, we measure intelligence using tests on paper. In the future, it might be done using something like MR or CT, only more sophisticated. We can certainly map some cognitive processes in ways like that already, so it does not seem as absurd as walking in 6000 Kelvin on a gassy surface.
More seriously, it suggests that we ought to pursue any unethical domain so long as our perceived competitors will. Should the US have sunk billions into Lysenkoism[1] because the Soviets did, or phlogiston[2] research because there’s an off chance we’ve actually been wrong for the last 200 years?
In other words: this requires us to add a perverted normative glance to science, the kind you seem keen to avoid in the first place. Is it ideal that Americans get squeamish whenever intelligence is brought up? No. But doing something that’s largely failed to meet scientific standards just because another big country might do it doesn’t pass the smell test either.
I don’t see why this situation would be unsustainable for the USG. It’s not a particularly unusual one.
But if the West collectively and unilaterally decided to reject firearms as such back then, it would likely have been gone by the 17th century.
I think the Lesenkoism analogy is more appropriate here: our best science demonstrates, at the most, that our strongest attempts to genetically influence general intelligence have weak effects, if any. So it’s not so much latent danger (the way rejecting firearms would have stopped much of Western history) as it is poor science that produces limited value relative to its financial and civic costs.
I am sure that complexity of genome and epigenome is huge and that we are just at the beginning of the journey. But unlike Lysenkoism, I believe that the underlying principles are sound.
But I disagree with the idea that you can easily measure value of science by its costs, especially short term.
Look no further than Katalin Kariko, one of the most important people in mRNA. They demoted her at UPenn in 1997 because they considered her research not valuable... and yes, it actually took 20 years for it to bear fruit.
Is this an expert opinion, or a lay opinion? Eugenics is one of those fields where there’s a split distribution: experts are generally less confident in the scientific value of eugenics research than the public is.
No domain is infallible, and science is by its nature unsettleable. But the fact that a particular academic department was unfair to a particular academic is not especially strong evidence that the scientific community is wrong, as a whole, about eugenics.
You have a lot of results that are used in practice already today. Embryos in IVF are genetically screened to weed out serious issues, and so are often developing foetuses in natural pregnancies. Certain countries have genetic counseling to reduce frequency of locally important diseases such as Tay-Sachs.
Aren't these methods of preventing human suffering valuable?
E.g. let's say we discover that there's a common defect in a particular gene makes aurul learning harder, then we can raise awareness and get schools to check if struggling students might do better with pictorial learning.
Knowing both that this mutation exists and how prevalent it is (and where!) is important for knowing if its worth expending limited school resources on alternative approaches.
That’s discrete from eugenics as popularly understood, which involves large-scale engineering of the gene pool across generations. There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work, and near universal consensus that it’s unethical.
This is completely false to such an extent that I've read it several times to see if I've misunderstood.
Humans have been breeding new varieties of plants and animals for millenia. Compare modern bananas to their ancient ancestors[1] or the modern chihuahua to its wolf ancestors. Heck, you can have substantial changes in just a dozen generations if your selective pressure is strong (or even one, if you sterilize every single light skinned person the next generation will be much darker skinned).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type#/media/File%3AInsi...
Edit: and, to be clear: the reason we can successfully breed bananas (or dogs) with desirable traits is because we aggressively cull the undesirable traits. I assume you understand what this would imply in human beings, and why this is unacceptable.
We can select for anything we can measure. E.g. if we did sperm harvesting from everyone who scored top marks in memory tests and sterilised the rest we'd get a population that's very good at memory tests (and probably also has better memory than today's average).
In theory we could attempt to measure general intelligence using a battery of tests for everything we can think of and this would probably improve general intelligence. It would probably also give us all Tay-Sachs.
Genetic counseling such as "when two people have the same recessive gene coding for a serious disease, they shouldn't have kids together" works very well and is used in many countries to suppress prevalence of various diseases.
The first country to introduce a program to suppress Tay-Sachs this way was actually Israel, the home country of Holocaust survivors. If they can tolerate it, so can the rest of the world.
Again: there is no major controversy over things like the former, and that’s not what’s popularly understood as eugenics. So it’s not clear how it rebuts the objection to what we’re actually talking about, which is the West matching the (potential) reactionary eugenics of China.
Or perhaps you are addressing the categories. Well, "health" is, to some degree, socially defined. As is "disease".
There were times when homosexuality was classified as a disease. Not that distant times. Alan Turing (in)famously committed suicide because of that. As of now, scientists working in the longevity field are pushing for aging itself to be redefined as a disease.
Parents of heavily intellectually disabled kids would probably agree to any reasonably safe treatment that would help their kids, if such treatment existed. Not having enough general intelligence is a big obstacle in everyday life. HN gets an audience of mostly smart people; most of them cannot even begin to understand how cognitivelly loaded is contemporary world.
Because it isn’t good science, it isn’t clear what the Chinese have to benefit from it. That’s their mistake to make, not unlike the Soviets with Lysenkoism. But that doesn’t suggest that we should blindly copy their mistake.
While I don't know what you're talking about when you use the word "eugenics", I don't really need to because your argument has the same flaw regardless. Whatever "eugenic" hypotheses you're worried about, if they really are "bad science", the data will bear that out and the best solution is to disseminate that data as freely as possible rather than withholding it. Conversely, the only way bad science can be protected is by prohibiting inquiry and establishing dogma by fiat, which is exactly what happened in the case of Lysenkoism.
In general there are a few conclusion that should be drawn from that. One is that researchers tend to focus on research subjects that align with their own cultural biases, so while the data might be unbiased the choice of research subject is not. It is that naturally those researcher will have a harder time considering alternative explanation for a given set of data, even if that data itself is unbiased.
The key is always to consider culture into context of research and understanding how it limits the ability of the researcher, especially when politicians take such conclusions and runs with it.
Eugenics is not science. It is a set of political beliefs and practices.
But they don't get squeamish. They confidently claim there is no basis for intelligence (or personality in general) in genetics [1,2], then use any differences in behavior or outcomes as evidence of racism.
[1] I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. ― Stephen Jay Gould
[2] In fact, you did so in your very post, comparing the link between genes and intelligence to Lysenkoism or Phlogiston.
While it is likely true [0,1] that the mean/median of one group is more genetically intelligent-capable than the mean/median of a different group, the variance is going to make it so that there are extremely intelligent outliers in both groups. And if we're focused on intelligence and its products, the potential of those outliers being wasted due to slavery/poverty/racism/etc is the travesty being pointed out by the quote.
[0] Intelligence capability obviously relies on genetics. In the most obvious way, the genes of ursa americana result in a much less capable brain than the genes of homo sapiens. So, unless maximum "intelligence-capability" is the thing most strongly selected for (doubtful), genes that cause higher intelligence capability are going to be correlated with other genes that developed at the same time. But actually measuring that, in some objective way? I'd say you're better off focusing on the other end of trying to define what "intelligence" even is, at the computational level, and then the organizational level, before you can even think about judging the contributions of the biological substrate level.
[1] The reason this is generally ignored or even rejected is that it's an utter red herring. At most you can say it influences individual outcomes by a tiny bit, while being overwhelmingly swamped by the larger issues of culture, nurture, environment, access to resources, and overarching personality. Meanwhile, less intelligent people love to reference their race as evidence of their own intelligence/virtue/etc, because happenstance attributes of their existence are their primary "accomplishments". So it's best to not add fuel to that fire.
[1] Calling it "determinism" sets up a clever strawman by giving the impression that only genes matter, and environment has no effect. Strengthening the strawman case is how his book on the subject devotes many pages to debunking 19th century science. And doesn't even get that right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Reassess...
A bigger problem in the present day, however, is the wasted potential from polices that come from the denial of difference.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210612203955/https://www.washi...
And yes, lots of Americans correctly identify that racism plays a significant role in perceptions of intelligence. This doesn’t alter the fact that many are squeamish about discussing it directly.
You can actually already edit genome of living things today, using tools such as CRISPR. Granted, they are still rather primitive, but they are getting better.
I am almost positive that by 2070, genetic engineering will be as ubiquitous as semiconductors are today.
Couldn't the same be said about the OG Nazis? All of their medical "experiments" on prisoners of concentration camps [1] were unethical, there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".
There are lines we damn well shouldn't cross, and where it is worth we should sanction violators. We are supposed to have learned from "historical Western traumas and sensibilities", because if not then all the suffering would have been in vain.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/ns-aerzte-experimente-an-k...
Genocides always begin with data.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.
And you would trust China in that, a country that locks up Muslims in concentration camps and surveillances its citizens to a degree the Soviet KGB and German Stasi wouldn't have dreamt of?
China needs to be reined in and that soon.
All the more reason why not leave the entire field of human genetics exclusively to them - imagine a future in which rich and influential people can get treatments for certain deadly diseases only in Shanghai and Beijing and China demands not only money, but allegiance for keeping them alive.
As for your last sentence: this ship has sailed some twenty years ago. At the current stage, China can only seriously damage/destroy itself from within. Totalitarian states are weaker than they appear, though. It may very well happen.
Just like paperclip and mkultra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
As far as I know pretty much all we know about the effects of exposure to cold temperatures from frostbite to eventual death was found in Japanese and German prison camps in WW2. Quite reasonably so, I imagine it to be hard to find volunteering participants for a study where the proposal is "we'll freeze you to death".
You are being too generous. They argue for ignorance now, only because they are forced to by the starkness of the "do or do not" research question. Otherwise they would confidently claim every notion they dislike has been widely debunked (and give examples of 19th century studies getting debunked, while avoiding mention of any post-1950s research). When pressed, they would retreat to "it's complicated", and finally to "so what/you shouldn't care anyway" [1].
And when the discussion is over, they will immediately forget it, and revert to using an absolutist blank slatist assumption (with zero basis in research) to legitimize their politics, and deconstruct [2] their opponent's.
[1] "I don't have a dog. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. And if I had a dog and it did bite, it didn't bite you. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."
[2] Not just delegitimize, but deconstruct, i.e. "not only should you not care about those things, those things don't even exist, they are mere social constructs with no biological basis"
The name of this fallacy is "kettle logic".
Just in the 20th century USSR similarity banned Genetics and Cybernetics. While keeping ideological purity it had to sacrifice agriculture developments and, later, computers. The Genetics alternative, funnily enough, had been Lysenkoism, which is also something we can observe in the US nowadays.
We know that we'd improve the intelligence of children across the board if we had free school lunches and classes started at 11am. That's pretty low hanging fruit for a country with our resources, so why haven't we accomplished this?
The Chinese don't really care about those kinds of sensibilities, and if they find it useful to research something, they will.
America falls behind Europe and others?
On average you would expect to pay the same of what you are paying today. But it would give discount to people with longevity genes and makes the bills more expensive to disease-prone individuals.
This research will come from China, which has taboos about certain political topics, but not race.
But what if research does find out meaningful differences? It's all a matter of how we look at it. We all agree that they are differences between different families. In one family people tend to be tall, in another they have musical talent, and so on. Its undeniable that there is some influence from genetics in our lives; it mostly becomes problematic if we think of it in terms of races, gender, instead of "my genetics, my parents, my ancestors". When it becomes essentialized, and puts people into boxes where it becomes a destiny (X people are like Y).
I think in a saner world, we would want to know as much about our genetics and out biological potential as we could - alas, we are not in a sane world yet.
Can you explain this point?
But if you are convinced that there are no meaningful differences between groups, or that the differences are innocuous, then there is no reason to oppose such research.
Sooner or later, the data will be available. Where will it end? Will "stupid" people stop having children or will they choose intelligent donors until genetic engineering is possible?
Researchers come to your community and tell everybody they're studying genetic diseases. Their research will provide comfort to those who suffer. Sounds great, so you all hand over your DNA/ec to these researchers. Then a few years later, using that same data, researchers publish studies saying that your people are genetically stupid. That you're a bunch of subhumans generally unqualified for anything but menial labor. How does that make you feel the next time researchers come around asking for more data?
You'll tell them to fuck off, that's what you'd do. Why would you consent to research that demeans and degrades you and your people? And because your community now has an adversarial relationship with scientific research, that initial promise of research helping people goes out the window too.
If using this sort of data as a weapon against others is permitted, you harm not only the people you collected the data from, but your own ability to collect data from them again in the future.
That seems more like a moral conclusion than a scientific one. Sure, maybe scientific evidence can fuel discrimination, but at least it gives us something over which we can have an intelligent conversation. It bounds a discussion that nowadays encounters no resistance or counterarguments in certain groups. And there will always be a group of people genetically smarter, more athletic, good looking than yours. So it doesn't take much thinking to reach the conclusion that we are all in this together.
That distinction doesn't change anything. Even if you can keep that sort of language out of even the preprints, you'll have politicians citing the studies and making those statements themselves.
It boils down to this: if you tell people you're collecting data to help them, then you can't allow that data to harm them.
Scientists collect data to discover the truth, not to "do good", whatever that may be.
>And despite how much "truth" they could discover by performing unethical experiments
Why have you put the word "truth" in quotation marks here?
(I'm doing it because I'm quoting it as word, rather than using the word itself.)
>ethics boards and the Hippocratic oath subordinate that goal to the broader ideas of medical ethics and what is "good."
The issue would be ths experiment, not the truth that comes out of it. The truth is always good in my view.
Presumably because they think being paid is good. Pure truth-seeking is fairly marginal.
> Why have you put the word "truth" in quotation marks here?
"Truth" and "good" weren't really the best words to use in either of the contexts I used them above ("knowledge" and "right" would have been more correct), but I wanted to specifically use those words because they were the ones you had originally framed the discussion with, so I put them in quotation marks to draw attention to the fact that I was reusing your words. It was kind of cumbersome, looking back on it.
> The truth is always good in my view.
Suppose a physicist in Nazi Germany runs away rather than help the German nuclear program to invent the atom bomb because he knows Nazi leadership would do terrible things with it. This is an example of a scientist choosing not to pursue knowledge because that knowledge would, in that context, be harmful. I don't think any truths are inherently harmful, but some are contextually harmful when known by certain people (e.g. Nazis), and I think it's ethically justifiable for even a scientist to prevent those people from learning those truths.
I suppose it’s ok to consider the trade offs between these concerns. But at times this comes off as pure censorship in support of dogma, and that fails to convince anyone except those who already want to be convinced. Ie it’s not improving our discourse it’s just making science worse.
Somewhere out there is a person with the genes to unlock biological immortality, but sure, lets block access for researchers because their public (scrutinizable) results are biased, or based on biased data.
Btw, there is no unbiased data in the world, should we cancel all science?
Wouldn't I simply demonstate that their claim is invalid?
As for correcting misinformation, I'm sure you've heard that misinformation travels further and faster than the truth. By the time you figure out where their statistical errors were, the study has already been spread around the world by those that wish you harm.
Furthermore, most of the people from whom the data is collected are not scientific researchers. They are members of the general public. How can a firefighter, real estate agent or aerospace engineer refute a jargon-heavy genetic research paper with subtle statistical errors? Go back to university first? You don't have the time or expertise to refute every bad paper written about you.
One research group may do that, while another weaponizes the data instead. One doesn't cancel out the other.
You are literally proposing that we just halt science altogether?
The reality is researching these kinds of things is frowned upon (in the west, at least) because it makes people uncomfortable. And it makes people uncomfortable because we don’t like the idea[1] that certain traits are more common in others, and certain things society values (intelligence, athleticism, beauty) obviously have at least some genetic component.
Consider another hypothetical where this research is de facto banned in the west because everyone feels yucky about it, but it isn’t in e.g. China where novel technologies in the future allow selection or even manipulation of genetics for intelligence/beauty/whatever. Not a position I’d like to be in.
[1] we don’t like this idea because it runs against a lot of philosophy that I’m quite sure you have read for how we want our developed society to treat its members - as equals.
It's the history of anthropology.
One does not need to think that others with less desirable characteristics are less worthy of their own existence just because those characteristics have an identifiable genetic cause. That people are mean to each other - because some are dumber than others, or less pretty than others, or can't run a mile in under 6 minutes - is not a reason to restrict research into what makes those things possible, it's a reason to be more vigilant about virtuous behavior.
We know certain people have genetic dispositions towards sickle cell, skin cancer, Tay Sachs, and so on. If it turns out some group is genetically predisposed to struggle a little more with math, then as a society, we can find a way to help them better overcome that. Burying our heads in the sand won’t benefit anybody.
You’re not going to find a race or subgroup that’s all around better at everything, if that’s the worry. Every animal on earth that’s good at something is not good at something else.
And if your threshold is 10+, I strongly doubt a single such group exists. I'm not very worried about the risks of upsetting a sufficiently unlikely group.
I'd probably be worried about people mishandling news of some tiny bias, but that's a different problem entirely.
Although, I have to agree with you in that the people currently leading the charge don't seem to have everyone's best interests in mind.
And why do we care about optimizing the efficient of certain types of brains? At best it's a notional win for business owners. At worst it leads to eugenics, discrimination, etc. Even if we find anything in the data, there's simply no upside.
Not everything needs to be optimized for efficiency.
Examples of things like the Tuskegee Experiments, the North Carolina Eugenics Board, hell, we're less than a decade past when hundreds of women were sterilized because they were thought to be "unfit" because of their prison sentences and race.
Since you asked, search for Ayurveda. Vata, pitta, and kapha describe these brain types that have been a permanent staple of society since we left Africa. Ayurvedic societies were able to be efficacious by ensuring everyone has a role in social life by understanding what makes us different and using it for everyone's benefit.
But it's been popular and studied by people who called themselves scientists many times. You and I would agree they aren't scientists, but the public sure think they are at times.
Reality is, this has been obvious for hundreds of years for anyone with two eyes to see.
Stupid people exist. Very stupid people exist. Intelligence has a genetic component.
We know that exist. Learning why they exist doesn't change this fact.
Our belief that humans should be treated with dignity and respect should not and is not contingent on our ignorance of the reason.
Knowing why Bob and his children are stupid should have no bearing on how Bob and his children should be treated.
Climate science is widely rejected not for its science, rather for its outcomes. Nobody rejects science that improves quality of life though.
You seek truth or you do not. You can't cherry pick the truth or make it go away.
So let's say your scenario plays out. Researchers objectively established that "my people" are cognitively underdeveloped compared to another group.
Well, so what, if that's the truth? If it really is the truth, I'd likely already know that, as I would have experienced it myself. If I were to be a woman (I'm not) I would have experienced that I'm physically weaker than the typical male. The truth is not degrading, just the way you packaged it.
Differences in capabilities are plain to see at every single level. It shouldn't be this controversial. The only controversial part is what you do with it, but if you constantly overcorrect into the utmost cynical scenario, you're blocking all potential progress. Further, it only invites speculation, conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Insights in genetics could drive better health outcomes, investment in education, socio-economic investments, the like.
- Announce that you re moving your research to china
- Claim that the chinese will get an advantage on this
- Claim a priori that your research demonstrates how genetics don't matter , even if it does
unfortunately, research in europe / japan and elsewhere follows american trends to the T, so there is not even the probability of having some competition here
We know these companies have used their data for law enforcement purposes. Do they also allow academic researchers to use it (anonymized, of course)?
One can detect what this debate is about, in the direction its proponents want to take the results. There is no search for a "cure" no search for a way to help, instead its almost always a search for a "anti-social" behaviour justification. I want to cut responsibilties for my fellow men, want to cut taxes and justify atrocities, in war and peace, looking scientific doing it.
One can predict the "research" to be showing up usually in booming and busting places, were good-times spending has to be cut back and crisis looms.
Example is the museums build for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man which currently has a sizeable pseudo science following, explaining any economic superiority with a "race" superiority and definatly do not look like the "Aryan" Uebermensch in old nazi germany museums. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO7dvuDslJk
Want some mental model with some actual explenation power? Human groups cycle through resource crisis since the dawn of time. And we adapted natural instinctive responses to that.
A exponential curve cycling endlessly between TheHornOfPlenty > PreCrisis > War > Reconstitution. And evolution, the blind, mindless industrious process it is, "optimizes" to any constant environment, even a cycling one.
So there you have them, the whole zoo of adaptions and even "non-intelligence" which all have a place. To not party hard and produce labour intensive offspring en mass is "intelligent" if ones instinct consider the optimization for the loop holy. To have no feeling but group loyalty is not intelligent, unless you are in a mass butchering in some trench and try to get your side home safe. Its not intelligent, but is very good adaption.
To be paranoid and direct society tensions to outsiders of the group, is not intelligent, but well adapted to this cycle. All paid the ferry-woman in the end, before science came along and was able to suspend the self destructive vehicle for 70 years.
So what is intelligence? Optimal Adaption to the inevitable? Hacking the circumstances, until the inevitable makes it a sizeable catastrophe?
Lets assume, being on board, you favour Hacking the circumstances, aka research: You can build great structures from the various loop adaptions. The paranoid make for great explorers of stagnant fields, when forced through training and kept from noise over interpolation.
The peacefull ones are great incremental researchers, in newly discovered fields.
The warlike ones, make for great critics, unafflicted by emotions and with a few of the whole.
Intelligence is the usefullness of pieces in societal machines. The individual is irrelevant.
The other thing I think people here are not considering is the issue of informed consent on the part of the patient. When patients agree to give biological samples, they generally do so with the understanding that that they will be used for a particular purpose or within some scope. It is unethical for researchers to use the bio samples or data outside the bounds of patient consent because it is disrespectful and violates their autonomy.
For example, if I tell you that I am going to use your DNA to cure cancer, and then turn around and give it to someone who wants to develop a bio weapon (or targeted ads), that is not cool. You would probably feel duped, and never would have agreed had you known it could be used for such purposes. This is kind of an extreme example, but hopefully it makes the issue clear.
My guess is that this is less about “censorship” and more about legal issues around patient consent.