Why doesn’t the left care about minimizing genetic inequality?

Try this thought experiment. You are sitting between two people at dinner. Person A, one one side of you, says this:

‘Life-outcomes are determined by your social class’.

Person B, on the other side, says this:

‘Life-outcomes are determined by your genes’.

Make a guess as to the politics of Persons A and B.

In an experiment, most people decided that Person A is left-wing and believes in social equality, while Person B is right-wing and believes in inequality.

We tend to associate any arguments that genes determine life-outcomes with the political right. And that’s because, historically, people who have argued for ‘hereditarianism’ (ie the idea that many traits are inherited) have used it to argue for ‘inegalitarianism’, which the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson defined thus:

Inegalitarianism asserted the justice or necessity of basing social order on a hierarchy of human beings, ranked according to intrinsic worth. Inequality referred not so much to distributions of goods as to relations between superior and inferior persons. . . Such unequal social relations generate, and were thought to justify, inequalities in the distribution of freedoms, resources, and welfare. This is the core of inegalitarian ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, caste, class, and eugenics.

Inegalitarians argue that nature is unequal in her gifts and there is nothing that humans can do about it. We should accept it and promote a caste system of the biological elite — that caste system may fall along class, national or racial lines. Most of the thinkers I examine in my ‘spiritual eugenics’ project are ‘inegalitarian’ — they believe that they are part of a spiritual elite, who are naturally superior to the masses and thus deserve to rule the world.

Because of the close historical link between hereditarianism and inegalitarianism, genetic explanations of human life-outcomes have a very bad rap with the left, and with the social sciences. Kathryn Paige Harden, a left-wing psychologist who researches genetics, writes:

To insist that genetics is, in any way, relevant to understanding education and social inequality is to court disaster. The idea seems dangerous. The idea seems — let’s be frank — eugenic…One historian compared scientists who linked genetics with outcomes such as college completion to Germans who were complicit in the Holocaust…Another colleague once emailed me to say that conducting research on genetics and education made me “no better than being a Holocaust denier.”

Right-wing thinkers and politicians wield genetic data to dismiss egalitarian social reforms — witness Dominic Cummings’ fondness for the research of geneticist Robert Plomin, who argued in his book Blueprint that the biggest determinant of educational outcomes is your genes. You can’t change the inequality of nature, Cummings seems to believe, all you can do is find the geniuses and put them in a special school.

Or right-wingers use genetic data to argue for dystopian eugenic solutions like state interventions to boost IQ in foetuses. That’s been promoted by Toby Young, a right-wing commentator, and by Cummings’ favourite scientist, Steve Hsu.

Genetic and hereditarian-inegalitarian arguments are most popular with the far right, who use them to argue for irreconcilable differences between races. Jared Taylor, for example, is a white supremacist American who thinks that Black Americans are incapable of ‘any sort of civilization’. He thinks that the genetic research of Plomin and others will ‘destroy the basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years’.

So you can see why the Left is wary of genetic hereditarianism.

In her new book, The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden is thus attempting a difficult maneuver. She wants to persuade us that our genes have a significant impact on things like intelligence and educational outcomes. And she wants to persuade us that you can believe this and still be committed to egalitarianism. Indeed, if are truly committed to fighting inequality, you should be aware of the ‘genetic lottery’ and work to mitigate its impact just as hard as you work to mitigate the impact of class, gender or race.

She calls this project ‘anti-eugenics’. Eugenics is when you recognize or assert genetic inequalities and try to entrench them in social policies. Gene-blindness is when you deny any genetic inequalities (which is what the Left largely does today). Anti-eugenics is when you recognize genetic inequalities and actively work to mitigate them.

In the first part of her book, Harden explains where the science of genetics is now, and the different sorts of studies scientists use to explore the influence of our genes — twin studies (studying different life-outcomes of identical and non-identical twins, including when they have been reared apart); adoption studies; sibling studies; Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), which look for genetic variants associated with particular illnesses; and polygenic risk scores, which are derived from GWAS.

While some illnesses are ‘monogenic’ (ie associated with a single gene), many illnesses like depression and complex traits like IQ are polygenic, ie there are many different genes associated with them. Inheriting those genes mean you are more likely, on average, to suffer from depression, say, or have a certain IQ — but it doesn’t rigidly determine that. Genes interact with environment in complex and not entirely understood ways.

Harden is really good at exploring the difficulties of saying genes ‘cause’ a life-outcome. She shows how it depends on the environment in which the seeds are planted. For example, say we lived in a society where redheads were forbidden to go to school. A clumsy geneticist could then argue that redheads’ illiteracy proved that the gene for red hair ‘caused’ illiteracy. Correlation does not prove causation.

Or take Autism Spectrum Disorder. This is a condition which may be partly inherited. But its impact on life-outcomes is also determined by environmental factors. In certain environments (like, say, Silicon Valley), some degree of ASD could actually be a genetic advantage.

Just because a trait is inherited, that doesn’t mean its impact is not changeable with social interventions. Bad eyesight is inherited, but spectacles still work.

Genes, Harden says, are like recipes in a recipe book. We might all have the Ottolenghi recipe book, but the resulting meals will be very different, dependent on how we cook them, serve them and enjoy them. Environmental factors could be compared to the different restaurants in which recipes are served. And life is all the varieties of experience we can have from the interaction of recipes and restaurants and people and weather and traffic and everything else on any given night.

Genetic determinism is like trying to review a restaurant based purely on its recipes. Nonetheless, recipes do make some difference to a restaurant experience. And likewise, genes do have some impact on things like mental health or educational outcomes, Harden says. She says that the conclusion from various forms of genetic studies is that educational outcome is something like 10–15% affected by genes.

That is a weaker claim that Plomin’s strong genetic determinism, where genes account for about 50% of educational outcomes. But it’s still pretty big — on a par with family income, say, or your mother’s level of education.

And yet psychologists, economists, sociologists and anthropologists have focused almost all their attention on the social causes of inequalities, and ignored genetic determinants through a form of ‘tacit collusion’ (sociologist Jeremy Freese’s phrase). Start talking about the impact of genes, and you risk being seen as a eugenicist.

But why? What’s the difference between the lottery of class or race or sex or gender, and the genetic lottery? Why are left-wing academics so outraged by the former, and not even prepared to discuss the latter?

Because, I guess, they think that acknowledging the latter in any way is to somehow admit to entrenched differences and inequalities which can’t be changed.

But we don’t think its eugenic or inegalitarian to recognize differences in physical ability, for example, and to work to reorder our society to make it easier for, say, the deaf to have relatively equal opportunities. So why do we accept and ignore the genetic lottery for educational achievements?

Perhaps we steer clear of the topic because of the toxic history of research on genetics, intelligence and race — for 170 years, racist researchers have argued different races have essentially different intelligences, and therefore some races deserve to rule and others deserve to be oppressed, enslaved or excluded.

Genetic studies have very little to say about this question, because almost all genetic studies have been of white people. And, in fact, genetics research undermines clumsy notions of ‘race’ by showing how mongrel we all are. Geneticists prefer the notion of ‘ancestry’ to ‘race’. And we all share the same ancestry — go back 5000 years, and everyone alive now is a descendant of the same people alive then. Almost all our genes are the same as other humans.

However, there are some differences — the Irish, for example, are more likely to inherit haemochromatosis than other ancestries. Does heredity and ancestry contribute to differences in IQ or educational achievement? Probably, but it is extremely hard to unwind all the polygenic and environmental causes that lead to different ancestral groups’ different educational outcomes. And they are not fixed — IQ scores rose around the world in the 20th century, for all groups.

Here is the important point: arguments for human equality need not and should not depend on genetic equality. As the evolutionary scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, you don’t have to be identical twins to have equality in worth and equality before the law. As John Rawls argued, differences in genes or in physical and mental abilities are natural facts. We then make ethical and political choices about how to respond to those natural facts.

Harden, who was raised a Christian, uses the genetic lottery to argue against conventional notions of meritocracy. If educational outcome is largely an outcome of the family lottery, the class lottery and the genetic lottery, why do we put such an emphasis on intellectual achievement as proof of our ‘merit’ or essential worth as a human being? It’s largely luck.

What, then, are Harden’s policy prescriptions? As I mentioned at the start, she argues for ‘anti-eugenics’. Eugenics accepts the genetic lottery and works to entrench it in caste systems. Gene-blind policies ignore the genetic lottery. Anti-eugenic policies recognize the genetic lottery and actively works to mitigate it.

She admits that she’s arguing for something that has barely been tried yet — using polygenic scores to address inequality in areas like education. There are hardly any tested interventions that use polygenic scores to try and improve social outcomes.

But there are some — one intervention, for example, used polygenic risk scores for alcoholism to target a social intervention. Harden also says that you can use polygenic risk scores to control for variables. One study found that children with high polygenic scores for educational outcome who grew up in low-income families did worse than children with low polygenic EA scores who grew up in high-income families.

I’m persuaded, having read her book, that genetic data could be a useful tool as we try to find social interventions that reduce social inequalities and improve life-outcomes.

I also think genetic studies could be useful for improving mental health. For example, one study found that young people with high polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia were much more likely to have psychotic experiences after the heavy use of cannabis than young people with low polygenic risk scores. Why not do a similar study for psychedelics?

Left-wing academics may still worry that, once you gather genetic data, the same results could be used to argue for very different social policies and some sort of genetic caste system. But isn’t that true of any data? Isn’t that true of exam results?

Of course, it’s one thing to fail an exam, another thing to be handed a score which shows you’re in the lowest quintile of polygenic score for educational attainment. Would that not be seriously dispiriting? I don’t know. Is it more dispiriting than simply failing exams over and over? Might it not help us to work out how to work with that particular recipe to create the best life experience?

Harden’s book has received some angry reviews from the left, so clearly she has her work cut out. But my main takeaway is that genetic explanations of life-outcomes are not essentially inegalitarian or transhumanist. Indeed, I believe far less in the possibility of engineering high-IQ ‘superbabies’ after reading her book. That project ‘isn’t just scientifically unfeasible, it’s scientifically absurd’, she says. For one thing, the genes for high EA apparently overlap with the genes for schizophrenia, so the risks of tampering with intelligence genes seem pretty high.

Those who believe in social equality should not, it seems to me, ignore or deny genetic explanations of life outcomes, or desert the field to the right and far-right. As Harden and her supervisor, Eric Turkheimer, argued:

If people with progressive political values, who reject claims of genetic determinism and pseudoscientific racialist speculation, abdicate their responsibility to engage with the science of human abilities and the genetics of human behavior, the field will come to be dominated by those who do not share those values.

My other main takeaway from the book is the social sciences are really hard. It is really hard to find interventions that improve life outcomes with robust and replicable evidence bases. And yet scientists routinely overclaim for their results, and rush them into public policy, where they are greeted with a lot of hoopla, then a decade later they’re found not to make much difference at all.

This happens over and over again in the social sciences. We need to be much more careful and humble in our claims, and we need to use all possible avenues and sources of data.

You can see Harden debate Plomin in this debate, below: