Eugenics, such an old-fashioned idea

It's the age of genetics.  Billions of dollars have been spent on identifying genes for important traits like diseases, fun traits like ear wax type and hair color, politically-charged traits like who we vote for and whether we're criminals, and much more.  "Precision Medicine," the idea that with bigger and better genetic data we'll be able to predict future diseases and then, presumably, prevent them, is au courant, and well-funded.

The assumption that genes determine not only our disease futures but our personalities, our preferences, and our behavior, appeals to a lot of people; some of us are naturally good and some of us are naturally bad.  And this has lead many of us to worry about the return of eugenics, the darwinian idea that populations can be improved by controlled reproduction.  That is, that we control their reproduction.  Those of us who are naturally bad just shouldn't be allowed to reproduce.  This was an idea that early 20th century America translated into the forced sterilization of the intellectually or socially inferior other, and that the Nazis translated (in many ways copying our lead) into mass murder of anyone they didn't like.

It turns out, though, that the worry about eugenics is now out-of-date.  It's too finely-honed a tool. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, with the enthusiastic support of our 45th president, has just passed a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama's signature program to expand affordable access to medical care to 45 million people who had no health insurance, and to those for whom it was prohibitively expensive.

One of the most humane, important, and best-liked provisions of the ACA was that it did not allow insurers to discriminate against people who had "pre-existing conditions", illnesses that preceded their insurance coverage.  Insurance companies don't like to have to cover sick people because they cost money.  Fair enough, I suppose, given that insurers are businesses, not philanthropies, and have to make a profit (unlike a civilized country's national healthcare system, which is by and for the people rather than the plutocrats).  But, this is how all insurance works, car, home, flood and otherwise -- we all pay in, some of us cost more than we pay in, and some of us cost less.  If it's only sick people, or bad drivers, or people in hurricane zones who buy insurance, insurance companies would all quickly be out of business, which of course is why we all are required to buy car and home insurance.

But it turns out that there are good moral reasons to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions -- according to a member of the Republican, white, male "Freedom Caucus", the extreme, and let's be honest, extremely ill-informed right-wingers in the House, pre-existing conditions don't happen to people who live good lives.  (Funny how their new list of pre-existing conditions includes pregnancy, rape, sexual harassment, breast cancer, among many other things, but not erectile dysfunction or prostate cancer. Nice discussion of this topic here.)

To ensure that covering actual sick people was going to be affordable, the ACA mandated that everyone have health insurance.  The political right never liked this provision of the law -- depending on your reading, this was due to the libertarian view that governments shouldn't be able to require that we do anything, or because they didn't want their money covering them, or perhaps a toxic mix of both -- and they've been fighting it ever since.  It's long been clear that that have no idea why a mandate was essential.  Because, who knew that health care was so complicated?

As is well known, the Republicans voted at least a zillion times to repeal the ACA while Obama was president.  Finally, yesterday, under the caring leadership of our current president, the Republican-led House passed a repeal-and-replace bill that would essentially eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions, as well as the requirement that healthy people purchase insurance.  And, in an ugly and cynical move that makes abundantly clear the racist and other lies behind this bill, they voted to exempt themselves from its new constraints (of course, because they're the good guys!).

This bill is bad medicine.  But that's irrelevant to Republicans and their supporters.  It's not meant to be much more than a tax cut for the rich (protecting wealth being the only core tenet of that party). And a thumb in the eye of anyone who benefitted from the ACA; the poor, the sick, and the Democrats.  It will definitely be a money saver, when 24 million people lose coverage, and then die of things that those with money don't have to die of.  As Jimmy Kimmel said in his emotional defense of insurance for all.

And this is what brings us back to eugenics.  Who needs the kind of very expensive, targeted precision promised by knowledge of genes to cherrypick those who should live and those who should die?  Let's just take away access to medical care from all of Them.  And make our country great for the oligarchs again.

Higher resolution discrimination: The GOP wants to allow employers to require genetic testing

This morning, Ed Yong published an article that takes on issues that we at the The Mermaid's Tale care very deeply about.

Link to article

The consequences for important medical research are not going to be pretty.

And I can't help but be angry about this for threatening to take away the fun of genetics too. If we can't have some control over our genetic testing, we can't do it for fun, for education, for finding out more about ourselves, for the awe of it, for innerspace exploration in the technology age. They're taking that away from us by eroding GINA.

I have lots of other thoughts... like about how this fits in so nicely with (not all of) the right's racist/eugenics inclinations.

And juxtapose this view from the political right where there is full-on acceptance of actually-more-than-genetics-can-even-deliver against their anti-science politics and policy...

It's like science is totally fine for Republicans as long as Mother Nature is a dictator.

If it's more complicated than that, then deny it, defund it, bulldoze it. The reality is, genetics is largely probabilistic; it is not a dictatorship. It's just so hard to convince people that it isn't. The ideological drive to justify behavioral differences and socioeconomic inequality with Nature above all is just too strong. If it's Nature, then we don't have to do the hard work of addressing the problems because Nature is Nature is Nature. This is really old thinking that really new knowledge (both through lots of science and lots of lived experience and lots of humanities and lots of art) has overturned but has not managed to catch on all that well. Along with new knowledge we get increasing understanding of genetics so these ancient beliefs can just be spouted by politicians using new-fangled science jargon.

This is really hard to write about today as all the stories about the proposed (and highly probable) budget cuts to science and the arts are blasting through my newsfeeds. It's overwhelming me today. I'm feeling hopeless and angry on behalf of science, art, knowledge, medicine, humanity, humans, children, teenagers, grown-ups, geezers. It's too much today.

But, back to Ed's article, I do need to put this here because it mentions that I have taught with 23andMe and longtime readers of the MT might know about that:

I don't teach with 23andMe anymore. I was doing it for as long as my university would pay for the kits. It was totally voluntary and students had to read Misha Angrist's book and endure long discussions and pass a quiz before deciding whether to go through with the testing. It was so powerful for teaching evolution, genetics, anthropology, etc... and we critiqued the hell out of it. My university said I needed to pay for the kits through course fees from now on. Before any of these threats to GINA, I decided not to do that and to stop using 23andMe. Now, even if my university reconsidered and funded the kits, I still wouldn't take it up again as a teaching tool.

Are we still doing 'beanbag' eu(genetics)? Part III. Culpably ignored nuances?

Part I of this series was about the particulate view of genes and their role in evolution and the determination of traits that are here because they were screened by evolution.  Many view all traits as being in this category, and genetic determinism of those traits to be very strong and specific.  But the data are less clear by far than the commitment to that idea.

Ernst Mayr criticized the one-gene-at-a-time focus of much of population genetics as 'beanbag' genetics.  Mayr said that this was wrong for reasons we mentioned in Part I.  As we discussed there, JBS Haldane, one of the grand ol' men who developed population genetics, wrote in defense of the field, in response to Mayr's criticism.

Haldane was a highly educated, thoughtful, perceptive British biologist whose life was nuanced in many ways that make telling a clear-cut story difficult.  He was brilliant and exceedingly skilled.  But he was also a product of his times, as are we all.  In the early 20th century he became a Marxist, as did many other British aristocrats, accepting all that implies about what determines the structure of human society.  Marxism was materialist but it was about improvability of individuals--an egalitarian view that claimed that position in a class-based society was due to class, not inherent inferiority of the lower classes, and thus that social inequity could--indeed would be erased by the processes of history.  At the time, the Soviet Union seemed a Great Hope to many in heavily unfair empirical Britain.  That essential malleability was one reason that the Russian plant geneticist Lysenko rejected Mendelian/Darwinian models of genetics in favor of a more Lamarckian mode of inheritance by which plants could be conditioned to have desired properties, and those would then be inherited. That proved in many ways to be a disaster for the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Haldane, who was a leading popularizer of science in his day, published a collection of reprinted essays in 1932 entitled The Inequality of Man.  Ironic for a Marxist, but he was not simplistic.  He dealt with, and accepted, the idea of eugenics in those essays, and that was largely what the title referred to.  He acknowledged the major role of environment in making people what they turned out to be. But he stressed that genetics was part of human makeup, too. Rather than a more balanced treatment, at points he lapsed into the aristocratic view about intelligence and in that sense, inherent societal worth.  The upper classes were what they are because of their abilities, and were under-reproducing compared to the lower classes.  He even wrote of society not having the guts to kill its lesser citizens: despite warning about too much stress on inherency, in one article he wrote:

"The danger to democracy to-day lies not in the recognition of a plain biological fact [of inherent inequality] but in a lack of will in certain countries to kill persons who obstruct the declared wishes of the majority of the people."  Further, "The only clear task of eugenics is to prevent the inevitably inefficient one per cent of the population from being born, and to encourage the breeding of persons of exceptional ability where that ability is known to be hereditary."  There should not be a democracy except of a better minority.

There is a mix of views in Haldane's chapters, ranging from the autocratic extreme to something more humane and nuanced.  He discusses social class, race, and intelligence as related to achievement, and even within Europe he makes distinctions about intelligence between (guess who!) northern and southern Europeans.  But he also promotes improved opportunities and acknowledges that we don't know the nature or extent of hereditary control of traits like intelligence.  In these popularized articles on many sociocultural issues, he is a softened genetic determinist. Perhaps this could be a Marxist 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' view; but that was always paternalistic when pronounced from on high.  Haldane, like many scientists who are given a public forum, strays far and wide beyond what he knows best, and nearly a hundred years on we can see his only too human opinions.  Life is complicated!

In any case, though the rhetoric is generally changed, we see roughly the same spectrum of views today, but that is in many ways implicitly a bean-bag model of inheritance.  In his day, the idea of identifying the genes that cause the traits of interest was technically not possible.  Now, in the excitement of 'omic technologies, the beanbagger approach is more explicit, noting this or that genetic variant that causes some socially relevant behavioral trait.  This viewpoint is widespread, despite some occasional caveats about complexity and even if there are many labs working on more integrative approaches to that complexity.

The difficulties
These are not simple issues.  People are different in physical, metabolic, and behavioral ways and clearly genetic variation is involved.  Depending on one's social politics, that can be a central or an uncomfortable fact.  But let us assume, for the moment and for argument's sake, that all the genetic determinism that has been proposed were perfectly true.  Then what?

The idea in the writings of various authors, from the past and today, is essentially about what 'we' should do to mold society this way or that.  But who are that 'we'?  They're the professors, politicians, and so on, who in positions of influence make the judgments about what 'we' as a society 'need' to do. 'We' want more intelligence and less addiction and crime (as defined by 'us', of course; usually 'we' aren't talking about white-collar crime).  'We' decide what would be 'good' for society and what should be discouraged.  And there is always the temptation to attribute inherent causation to these differences.

So, for example, we decide what do to with (or to?) those of higher and lesser inborn intelligence. This is rather indisputably arrogant and presumptuous, isn't it?  Or, perhaps, one can ask whether it is any different from what has gone on heretofore.

If the minority of the privileged have the power to decide on societal action, it is rather moot whether the criteria used to justify that action are presumed genotypic ones or just the arbitrary wielding of power.  Does it matter whether Divine Right or 'good genes' is credited with the power of the elite, and the subservience of the rest?  The powers-that-be define the value judgments.

Genotypes may have more, or less, determinative roles than is widely being claimed these days. Eugenics was a particular kind of social control, that had regularly dreadful, indeed lethal, consequences for many people for various reasons. But whether that was any worse than religious or other political dominance is an open question.

Does it matter if it's an ISIS member who chops your head off because of your religion, or a Nazi who gasses you because of your ethnicity, or a physician who decides what genotypes need to be screened prenatally and eliminated, or who gets educational resources?

We have our own personal view, which is that the data generally do not support the making of such decisions based on genotypes and their presumed predictive value--and decisions related to those genetic variants that really do have such value should only be made privately, rather than by public policy.  But the public pays for the treatment of genetic disease, so at what point is coercion within the scope of such an idea?

It is not clear whether these issues really ever get 'solved', or whether rational, measured discussion is even possible.  But it does seem clear that questions about how genes control, or don't control, the traits in organisms are worth understanding, rather than action being taken on vague assumptions about inherent causality before the questions are even answered.

Are we still doing 'beanbag' eu(genetics)? Part II. History's unlearned lessons?

Yesterday we discussed some of the ways in which particularized views of genomic control and evolution were controversial and that, despite much more knowledge now than when the issues first surfaced nearly a century ago, they are still with us in largely unchanged form--even if with massive amounts of data and lots of chest-thumping about how modern our current view is.

One consequence of a genomic causation as highly deterministic and specific is that one comes to believe that once a person is conceived, his or her genome essentially predicts his/her life so that, in particular, we can (a) work preventive miracles in regard to disease, and (b) think of designing the traits we would like to engineer in our offspring.  But the issues of genomic determinism are not at all new.

A new paper by Donald Fosdyke, a Peer J pre-print ("The relative roles of politics and science: William Bateson, black slavery, eugenics and speciation"), shows how controversies about genomic causation began in the late 1800s, not that long after Darwin's Origin of Species was published. Insufficiently circumspect appropriation of Darwinian ideas that occurred, contained within it the horrors of human abuse that would occur, under the rubric of eugenics, in genetics' and evolution's name.  And those issues, like the ones we discussed yesterday, are very much still with us.  Now, in principle at least, we have a chance to learn from history rather than repeat it.  But the signs that such a benign outcome is likely are not very favorable.

Wm Bateson.  From nndb.com, on Google images

William Bateson (1861-1926) was a leading biologist in the formative decades after Darwin's ideas of evolution and Mendel's of genetic inheritance were swirling in scientific circles.  Mendel showed how stable, discrete traits were heritable, and essentially determined--to wit, the presence or absence of traits in his peas.  Mendelian inheritance was 'rediscovered' in 1900 and seemed to provide a sound idea of inheritance.  However, discrete Mendelian traits seemed at the time to be inherited without change.  Such stability and discreteness were inconsistent with the apparent nature of adaptive evolution that Darwin had suggested.  His idea was that traits vary infinitesimally among individuals and selection very gradually moves the resulting traits in a population to adapt to environmental change.

What was 'eugenics'?
The idea that society is composed of the ordinary and their betters is not new.  It has long been part of the rhetorical, religious, and material ways in which the minority justify their position and dominance over the masses.  That the role of the upper classes in pursuits like gluttony, debauchery, and warfare might be a danger to them, and hence to society as a whole if it must suffer without those lost in such endeavors, was a concern even to the classical Greek philosophers (well, they mainly worried about the warfare part).

In the years after Darwin's ideas were published, these concerns about what was good in bad in human nature, or who were the good or bad individuals in society, took on the panache of science, replaying, one might say, similar judgments made by invoking the will of God--the Divine Right of the upper classes, the inherent inferiority of non-Europeans that justified slavery, and so on.  If evolution generated the truly-better, and that means genetically better, then the loss of the social elite to disease or warfare deprived society and its future patrimony of the best genes in the gene pool.  And in any case, it is problematic that the masses outnumber the elites, yet have inferior genes.  Or, to be a bit more charitable, it was thought that it was possible to distinguish between individuals who really were lesser--inherently criminal, drug-abusers, amoral, slovenly and the like--vs those who were better.  The latter were the intellectual, scientific, military and other such leaders.

Now that Darwin had showed us how evolution worked, and that its workings were all about Nature making mortal value judgments (survival of the fittest), modern science could be used to further Nature's plan, speed it up, and ensure that bad luck didn't thwart that plan.  The effort to use science for human and evolution's betterment was called eugenics. The key factor, of course, was reproductive success.  Thus, if differences in individual character could be discerned, we could impose incentives to enhance the reproductive efforts of the better and lead the lessers to voluntarily restrain their own proliferation; that was called positive eugenics.  If this didn't work, we could screen the population for those with better and lesser inherent qualities, and use social mechanisms to impose restricted reproduction on the latter.  This was called negative eugenics.

The idea that genes specify who we are, implicitly meaning that even through the fog of culture, environment, and experience, has great appeal.  It's simple.  It leads to effective prediction.  It can be built into policy.  The eugenics movement was an application of Darwinian thinking that assumed many simplistic and/or unverifiable ideas about what Nature 'wanted' and which genotypes (and, of course, their specified traits) were good and which weren't, led textbook authors and research institutes to declare these things and this in turn reflected and/or led to policy imposed by society onto its citizens.  We know what happened in nearly a century of the imposition of 'science' to manufacture such ends.

The temptation was to think of traits as single-gene, or clearly 'genetic'.  Traits that are complex, such as we know many behavioral and common diseases are, can't be attributed to single genes or even a small list of additive contributors (though they can be modeled that way in statistical studies). Because the many components of complex genotypes recombine and shuffle their components among individuals and across generations.  For that reason, thinking of these traits as due to a bean or two from the beanbag is misleading and, essentially, erroneous relative to the underlying causal principles (themselves not yet very well understood).

Whether or not one holds a eugenic view of this sort, the policies in the name of eugenic 'science'--even if that was just a rationalization for what  politicians would do anyway--led to some of the worst horrors in human history, both to individuals and to whole groups.  The lesson was learned, and led to a prevalent environmentalism after WWII, where explicit eugenics was basically itself 'blacklisted'. But memory is short, and the hubris of scientists powerful.  Eugenics, in various new forms, is back.

Neo-eugenics: modernizing a ghastly idea (oh, no harm of course!)
Many readers may have seen the 19th-century-like OpEd in the recent NYTimes ("The downside of resilience," Jay Belsky), that advocated screening all children for a couple of markers of their personality and response to education.  Of course, it was all couched in terms of salubrious value to society--eugenics started out and was often proclaimed that way.  'We' just have to test 'them' (all school children) to find those who need special help to respond to schooling as well as others (another value judgment that the 'we' make about the 'them'), and then we can devote extra resources to those with sub-par performance.  Sure!  That is about as naive as believing in Santa Claus.  What history shows will likely happen is that the well-off will argue, with demagogues in politics at their side, that this is a waste of resources, which should be devoted instead to those like us, who will deliver for society's betterment.  If you think it will be otherwise, then you should go straight to the Mall and tell Santa what you want for Christmas.

In a sense, from our point of view, it doesn't matter if these sub-par-performance traits are 'genetic' or not.  The point is we have zero serious need to 'diagnose' them by genotyping.  We know that even for the vast majority of diseases, actual phenotypes are better predictors by far than genotypes.  So, if a trait is harmful, as disease or other limitations, we need only observe the trait itself or its prodrome--the signs it is coming.  We can learn to identify these things earlier, but at least we only 'treat' those who actually have the trait.

Since such traits are at most only partly, usually slightly genetic, we have no real need to do the genotyping afterwards, either.  Such traits might need therapy the way any disease needs therapy. There is not much gain in knowledge.  A 'beanbag' approach or conceptualization makes policy decisions seem easy but in fact makes much of the inference at best inaccurate to an unknown (perhaps unknowable) degree.

The reason for restraint is that, as history clearly shows , social engineering to protect those in power and influence is typically detrimental to those with 'undesirable' traits.  The value judgments are sometimes, if not perhaps often, based on irrelevant correlates (such as 'race').  But the consequences are that some group of 'we' decides what to do for (or to) some group of 'them'.

As the Fosdyke paper shows, these issues are not new, and even Bateson himself (who coined the term 'genetics') warned about the lack of knowledge of the complexities of biological trait determination, and the tendency towards unjustified eugenics a century ago. Fosdyke quotes Bateson from a 1905 piece of his in The Speaker:

What ... will happen when ... enlightenment actually comes to pass and the facts of heredity are ... commonly known? One thing is certain: mankind will begin to interfere; perhaps not in England, but in some country more ready to break with the past and eager for ‘national efficiency.’ ... Ignorance of the remoter consequences of interference has never long postponed such experiments. When power is discovered man always turns to it. The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time, not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation, or for humanity at large, is a separate question.

                   W. Bateson, ‘Heredity in the physiology of nations.’ The Speaker, 14th Oct (1905).

Bateson had many different ideas on genetics, but in a sense his approach was rather beanbag in nature, thinking of 'gene' as an independent causal agent (though so far before actual genes or their actual particulate nature were known that 'beanbag genetics' really can't apply to him). He was not convinced that Mendelian factors could even account for evolution.

Things are complex and so were the commenters during the eugenics era. Even JBS Haldane, about whom we wrote yesterday in Part I of this series, was a mix of viewpoints. He was a founder of the genetically based area of population genetics that became and still generally is viewed as 'the' formal theory of evolution. It rests on genetic determinism to a great extent, and the idea that what is here is because the relevant causal agents--the genetic 'beanbags'--were closely scrutinized and favored by natural selection. That idea, which certainly has much truth behind it, makes it complex when it comes to judgments about human traits that affected the eugenicists then (and their descendants today). We'll deal with that in Part III.

Bateson warned us about the issues before the major abuses that led to the disasters of the mid-century--human experimentation, Nazi genocide, forced sterilizations and institutionalization. Of course, in the hubris of the new genetics and evolutionary theories of the time, nobody listened to warnings. Too many listened to pompous, self-assured scientific 'experts' who were, of course, always speaking for the public good. And we all know what happened.

However, it is also fair to say that in the absence of relevant information, many different views were circulating around at that time, as the new ideas and discoveries were being assessed. One must be judicious in giving too much hindsight-based credit to views that seem now to have been prophetic. Nonetheless, when a cycle seems to be repeating, it is proper to note how history unfolded even within living memory.

Are these statements too cautious? Is there no chance of a return of the last century? Maybe. Of course a 'return' will have its own form, its own rhetoric, and its own consequences. Some may be quite good (such as effective genetic prenatal counseling for clearly known devastating genetic disorders). But in science as in politics, religion, or other areas of human affairs, the hubris and excitement of such success historically leads to excesses. There are many things we are not allowed to do, such as falsely shout Fire! in a crowded theater. The restrictions on science an always be revised and where risks may exceed benefit, work should just not be done: there are plenty of less ambiguous ways to invest in science for human betterment.

The time to take care of your horse is before it leaves the barn.

Laughing at our ancestors. When is it legitimate?

We've recently posted on the subject of laughing at the arrogance or self-assurance, and sometimes societally hurtful but false reasoning that can pass as scientific truth when said from the pulpit, and presumed imprimatur of major universities.  We picked on WH Sheldon in one post, pointing out the problems with his photos of naked Ivy League university students with the aim of showing that humans came in discrete body types which were windows into individual personality--that is, into an individual's inbred, causally deterministic characteristics.

Sheldon did his work in the days when mainly white people attended major colleges, and women were widely treated as modified (or, perhaps, degenerate) men (after all, their designation is (wo)men).  'Political correctness' had not yet entered the vocabulary of our culture.  So one did not have to excuse his statements about how things were.  However, cultural context and biases influence even scientific statements, which many recognize (if you're a strict genetic determinist, it's highly likely that you're a right-winger; similarly, those who believe that environment is an important determinant of most traits are more likely to be lefties).  Scientists are not as objective as we might fancy.

But can we ridicule our historical predecessors in science, or is that unfair or cruel beyond reason? They did, after all, reflect their times and were as sincere about what they said (and as convinced of their correctness and even rectitude) as we are today, even if that had a subjective aspect.  As we noted in our earlier post, the beliefs of every age will seem risible to others at some future time.  So perhaps we should just say, in a flat voice, that they were wrong but only because they hadn't the data, technology, or experience that we have--and the same will be true of us in the future.  That fits history, but seems risky to anyone who rails against cultural relativism because it seems to say that neither we, nor anybody, knows the truth.  A debatable point, to say the least.

But is past science, though pronounced from on high (that is, the Ivy League, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Berkeley--or Oxbridge), ever more culpable than that?  Should it be subject to ridicule?  How about this example, from a contemporary of Sheldon, Carleton Coon?  He was at Penn and Harvard-trained, and thus considered a world expert on human evolution and human races.  Though his books were generally written as if they were sober, unemotional, objective science, he was a white supremacist in at least two senses.  It was found after the fact that behind the scenes Coon had lobbied against school integration, on the grounds that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and, well, you can guess the rest.

Secondly, he was known for looking at human prehistory, fossils, and current racial variation and arguing that whites crossed the 'human' threshold before those of other geographic areas (Asia and, naturally last, Africa).  This differed from, for example, today's out-of-Africa hypothesis by which modern humans evolved first in Africa and then expanded both in Africa and out into Eurasia.

Now, in Coon's book The Living Races of Man (Knopf, 1965) which we all had as anthropology students and was widely consulted and used as a text, he makes several statements about personality. Among them are that

No one can express anguish more convincingly by his facial expression than an Italian.  A Negro's facial expression, on the other hand, consists largely of exposing his eyeballs and his teeth.  There is a good reason for this difference: the Italian's mobile and moving communication would be lost, under most lighting conditions, on a black face. . . .In sum, light-skinned Caucasoids and Mongoloids independently developed the same capacity for nonverbal communication through a change in the expression of their faces.

Need we restrain our smiles?  Well, here is Coon's illustration of the superior version of the facial muscles, offered as supporting evidence, which I remember very well because I saw it as a graduate student and remarked about it even then:

Coon's version of the 'sophisticated' facial muscles (European left, Asian right)

Note those finely crafted muscles!  Even as students--at the time--we found this worthy of derision. Yes, the eugenics era would be proud of such categorical statements, and we see an emergence of the same kind of stuff, now couched in (this time definitive, trust us) genomic causal terms, today.

Now it so happened that I had got my PhD at the University of Michigan, and was there as a post-doc in the Human Genetics department at their Medical School, where I was and taking gross anatomy. We used one of the leading texts of the time, written by a distinguished anatomist and the course's instructor, Russell Woodburne (Essentials of Human Anatomy, 1970, Oxford).  When we got to human facial musculature, here is the book's illustration (page 199; I added the coloration to help study for the exam):

Woodburne's choice of cadaver to illustrate the human facial muscles

The irony in this illustration should be obvious!

Now there are times when we have every right to ridicule what was said by past scientists, even if they were working within the cultural landscape at the time, but which reveals how clearly one's biases can cloud even what is purported to be objective scientific judgment. This is but one example. Stepin Fetchit may have been acceptable for the movies at that time (to the (white) people who could afford to go), but not for text-books, not then, not ever.  Coon must have seen all those old movies, but not realized the characters in movies are acting.

Let's make the point in another way.  In Coon's time, the typical white's stereotype of blacks was that they were naturally, that is inherently, subservient.  One reason given was that they evolved in steamy tropical Africa where being intellectually energetic would have been selected against.  Now, within one adult lifetime, the white's stereotype of African Americans would not be of subservience, but, if anything, it would be one of inherent violent or criminal tendencies.  Or, as many would have us believe, of inherent low intelligence. Why?  Because they evolved in steamy tropical Africa where being intellectually energetic would have been selected against.

And remember when the eugenicists were convinced of the inferiority of Jews or--what was it in the US?--that they were innate champion boxers?  These changeable 'essences' reflect the mistake of comfortably equating what a whole group seem to be, today, with what they must have been selected for.  In the tempting search for inherency, that mode of thinking is still widespread.

Anyone still clinging to the idea that scientists are really objective needs to read some history
No matter how sincerely most of us do, truly, try to be detached and objective, and open about our assumptions and biases, and no matter how some aspects of our methods and technology can be seen as objective, and disregarding politically motivated criticism of science by those who just don't like what scientists say (e.g., 'postModern' critiques), we are human and our work, including even the questions we choose to ask, has subjective elements.  When those elements color what is said in material ways, especially ways that can not only mislead science but also society (as, for example, undermining integration because of the purported primitiveness of some racial groups treated as discrete categories), in our opinion it deserves all the scorn and ridicule it can get.

Freak of Nature

DNA, Nature

Erika Check Hayden has a thoughtful piece on ethics in this week's issue of Nature, in which she discusses the idea that there might be subjects that some consider taboo for geneticists to study.  Her list includes intelligence ("Taboo level: High"), race ("Taboo level: Very High"), sexuality ("Taboo level: Mild") and  violence ("Taboo level: Mild").

But it's not clear how the taboo levels were assigned because readers are given the opportunity to vote on whether they think each of these subjects should be studied, and as of Thursday morning, Oct 3, the votes were running over 90% in favor of studying at least 3 of them.  Though it's true that there's a touch more caution with regard to studying race; a mere 88% of respondents believe it's fair game.

Yes, all due caveats to online surveys; self-selected respondents, biased readers of Nature in the first place, but are we wrong to conclude that it's apparently not scientists who think there are ethical issues involved in studying these issues?  No, this exercise looks an awful lot like scientists circling their wagons, defending their tribe and their belief system so they can plow ahead, no questions asked.  Their usual arguments are to promise near miracles in social improvement, and that watch-dogging is society's job; meanwhile, science should be given free rein.

We do have to come clean here.  Hayden writes that there are some who aren't happy with studies of the genetics of intelligence.

But not everyone buys that potential misuses of the information can be divorced from gathering it. Anthropologist Anne Buchanan at Pennsylvania State University in University Park wrote on the blog The Mermaid's Tale that rather than being purely academic and detached, such studies are “dangerously immoral”.

We did say this, but really, it's better in context, here in the original post last July about a heavily hyped GWAS reporting 3 genes that the authors claimed are associated with staying in school for an extra month.  Are we really the outliers we seem to be, cautioning that there's a thin line between studying a subject simply for scientific interest and the excesses of eugenics?  Do most scientists believe that every subject is fair game, consequences be damned?  Or is it that they believe we've learned our lesson and the same consequences of earlier eugenics eras just can't happen again?

We prefer to err on the side of caution.  Genetic determinism is all around us (we made this point, yet again, in an essay for Aeon in April).  Despite the evidence, people are primed to accept that there are genes for any trait you can think of, including race, whatever that is, and intelligence, whatever that is.  In our view, scientists should be the first to be cautious about stirring up the racist, classist, hornet's nest that is the genetics of such laden traits.  Instead, apparently, they're among the last.

Yes, we know that there are some things that are off-base: we can't actually torture people to answer research questions (so we have to use mice instead).  But prohibition of torture is a trivial example.  Or is it? Is it torture to put people in freezing water to see how much their body can stand?  Or give disease to people (or deny treatment) to see how the disease works?  These things have been done, and by leading lights of the research and medical communities, all piously stated to be for the good of society.

We've been here before, and more than once.  The major iconic example was the eugenics era.  We note that eugenics was not just due to the awful despotism of the Nazis, but much of it was conceived of and done right here before that, and indeed the Nazis learned some tricks from us.  But it's not just eugenics, of course, but other kinds of unethical research --  think about Tuskegee, and AIDs and syphilis experiments. and drug studies and so forth that we, naturally, do overseas.

Taxpayers of all types pay for research, and they have every right to put constraints on it.  Each person draws the line for him or herself -- our taboo list includes not just prohibiting torture, but topics whose impact is foreseeably likely to be used to favor one group in our society over another.  Studies of race traits, as an obvious example, which can be used to justify racism; studies of inherent intelligence, that can be used to justify preferential distribution of resources among groups.  Of course, we won't exactly repeat the eugenics era, and some good may ensue from 'taboo' research, as we can always proclaim in retrospect.  But the potential for harm should temper what we allow in the first place.

When things are going well, it may truly be that research is just benign or even salubrious curiosity.  Or that the prurient and nosy side of science, poking into everything scientists decide would be fun to look at, will do no harm.  But put society under stress and  people turn on each other in all the ways they can think of, and use whatever technology and rationales they can think of.  Even when not under stress, the privileged use every trick and tactic they can to get ahead, and certainly many are looking to genetics to provide some relevant therapy so Suzie can get into Stanford or Johnnie can play for the Yankees.

There are certainly difficult issues in circumscribing studies of subjects, even proven sensitive ones like the genetics of intelligence.  These issues include understanding and remediating pathological conditions that affect mental function. They even include agreeing on the definition of intelligence in the first place. There's no easy answer.  But we don't apologize for saying that there are plenty of real, unarguable serious problems in this world, limited funds, legitimate ethical issues, and a long, long history of abuse that suggest we should be circumspect about where research investment can be made.

Here's one on the top of the Disgusting charts

If this story is true, it is to us as disgusting, inexcusable a story one can imagine.  As reported in the LA Times, the minister of health in Israel, has just revised guidelines for the use of the birth control drug, Depo-Vera, now requiring better informed consent when it is prescribed.

The ministry's new policy comes in response to a controversy exposed last month by local investigative journalist Gal Gabbay, who reported that Jewish Ethiopian women awaiting emigration to Israel in transit camps in Ethiopia were coaxed into the treatment with little medical explanation and led to understand this was a condition for moving to Israel.

Many women continued to receive the drug after moving to Israel, although they were often not informed of its effects. 

Whether or not this was officially sanctioned by the Israeli government is not yet known, but the high number of women given Depo-Vera, and the fact that, again according to the LA Times, 60% of the women given the treatment were Ethiopian, and most of the rest women in detention, suggests that it was at least someone's official policy.  The reason being suggested is that if Israel didn't control births among this immigrant group, Ethiopians would pollute the true Jewish gene pool.  After the story hit the news, or, as the LA Times put it, "rocked by scandal," the government revised its guidelines.  Which suggests that there are at least some decent people in the Israeli government. And raises the question how anyone in that population could possibly think to do this sort of thing without crystal clear agreement on the part of the recipients (victims?)--much less justify it in his/her own mind.

This is so completely a replay, in reverse, of what Hitler visited on the Jews to preserve the pure Aryan race, as to be totally jaw-dropping.  If even Israel's European Jews can't escape the trap of vicious racism, and justify a recurrence of eugenics, then what hope is there for anybody!

We have written about our concerns, and have often been asked what we think, about the potential for genomic data to be used in a way that might revisit the eugenics era, in which privileged scientists and health professionals used a Darwin-rationalized belief in peoples' inherited worth to decide who deserves to have life.  Judgments by the elite on who's worthy and who isn't are a commonplace in human history, and genetic and evolutionary justifications are just some of the more recent excuses for exploitation and elitism. This shows the need for vigilance, and we shouldn't overlook the possibility that real good may come of genomics if there are strong laws to prevent abuse. But many just conveniently dismiss the idea that abuse will be commonplace, arguing that we should just be allowed to whatever of this kind of research we want to, because we would never repeat the sins of our recent forebears.....

The Israeli story isn't the only recent one.  A few years ago the Brits were suggesting the use of genetics to determine who should be allowed to immigrate (based on detection of some countries of origin).  Even if it was stopped before being implemented, the fact that it was seriously considered was concerning.  But to hear that the Israelis, of all people, would reinvent the involuntary sterilization of the unworthy, shows that raising the issue of a new era of eugenics is not just being Chicken Little and making up issues where they really don't exist.

To us it is important to have real, strict, enforced laws on what science is allowed to investigate.  Yes, it's censorship!  But we already do prohibit all sorts of research on humans, and even to a lesser extent on animals.  We are not allowed to cry Fire! in a theater unless there is a fire. Slander is a kind of speech that isn't free.  We couldn't for example, put study subjects in a tank of ice water to see how long they survived, the kind of thing that was done by the Nazis.  Millions of people who died in the Holocaust--many of them the Jewish ancestors or relatives of today's Israelis--would have had a chance at life had there been such restriction in the first half of the 20th century.

Is there any place for sympathy?
We've been unapologetically critical of this decision to protect the Chosen race (should we call them, say, neo-Aryans?).  There is consistent historical precedent for people to develop tribal solidarity, and hence to be suspicious and wary of incoming people who are not members of the tribe.  That may be  only natural: tribal identity is a way of building cooperation and trust, order and solidarity.  Outsiders can pose various levels of unknown threat.  That's why immigrants are so widely distrusted and opposed today and in the past, and why ethnic warfare is not a new invention.  Nor is elitism based on  inherent worth--it's in Plato and other Greek classical authors, and the earliest formal writing on such topics.

From this point of view, it is wholly understandable that, now that it's their turn in power, the European-derived Israeli power structure would feel threatened not just by Palestinian Muslims but even by those 'other' kinds of Jews that may not look or act like proper (i.e., clean-cut, educated European) Jews, that is, the ones in power.  It is also quite understandable--which is not the same as excusable--that those in power would want to pretend to welcome all members of their religious tribe, but not really want to be overwhelmed (i.e., out-reproduced) by them.

The lesson is perhaps an anthropological one: that no group, even those who were the victims within living memory of as  evil a genocide as was ever perpetrated, can be trusted to behave differently when they are in power.  The bottom line is that we have to be strong and vigilant in opposing this kind of action.

Unfortunately, this has implications for immigration policies, worldwide.  The reality must be addressed that people do tend to oppose immigration.  Policy to incorporate or limit foreigners has to be based on how the locals feel at any given time.  Every population is capable of acting in a seriously discriminatory way.  There are no easy answers, but the lesson of the eugenics era, and its reported echo even where it should be most eschewed with horror, should be one all of us should  learn.  And we should be careful about using Darwin or genetics to base our decisions on.

The empty organism: If not reductionism, what then?

There are some interesting recent parallels in what one may call the philosophy of science, that have to do with the issues related to determinism, reductionism, and our struggle to understand complex trait causation in terms resembling 'laws' of Nature.  We discussed a lead-in to this the other day.

If life is just a kind of fancy molecular biochemistry, and molecules obey fundamental, universal physical laws, then mustn't life also follow the same laws?  If not, what does that mean and what could be the evidence?  How could the laws be suspended?  And at what level would purely material, molecular/energy stop applying?

Answering these kinds of questions is problematic (because we have no actual answers), but nonethless shows an important way in which even asking the questions is not entirely about science but is also profoundly affected by sociocultural and historical circumstances.  These circumstances are complex, but have to do not just with the technology and methods that are available at any given time, but also with what is acceptable to think in the first place.

Gotcha! moments
Darwin and the excitement that his attempt at a universal physics-like theory of life (evolution by natural selection, implying rather strong genetic determinism) was an exciting event in science.  It threatened established scriptural religion, and its proponents felt highly empowered to rip religion based on faith in one kind of scripture for what in many ways amounted to faith in another accepted word--that of Darwin.

Since adaptive evolution of a natural kind (not that done in labs, or in agricultural breeding, or via pesticides and antibiotics, etc.) took place imperceptibly slowly and in the past, we must rely on indirect explanations and interpretations of the evidence.  Ever since Darwin, there have been widespread and rather hubristic declarations of selective stories about this trait or that--or, by some, the belief (and that's the right word for it) that basically everything in life is the result of specific adaptive selection.

More than that, along with striking research success in identifying genes, the historical belief developed that reductionism--ultimately, molecular explanations of everything.  Molecules are the sexy total truth of the world according to that view.  But such a view is not just objective science; instead, it also reflects society at large, as is very clear from the history of the life sciences since Darwin's time.

Gotcha! regains acceptability
History affects what is accepted or followed or believed.  Darwin stole explanations of life away from religion.  Among other things was the idea that what we are is inherited and is here only because it was adaptively successful in the past. This was a view of biological inherency.  As is well known, this immediately spawned the eugenics era.  The idea was that now that we (that is, elite scientists, mainly males) know the real truth of the nature of organisms, we can control rather than be controlled by Nature.  We can guide our evolution with this knowledge.  In a kind of extension or rebirth of the Utopianism of the 18th century, we could purge society of its ills and replace them with only that which is good.  Of course, now we were talking about people, not just social and governmental structures.  This means determining who reproduces and who does not, which is the ultimate value judgement that needed to be made if we were to imitate and speed-up the beneficent goals of Nature.  It might be harsh, if only some reproduce and others don't (or are prevented from it), but Nature itself is harsh, and so on.

This led beyond the rather piously benign idea that someone in authority would decide who could mate, to the less benign idea that someone in authority would decide who could survive.  Over several decades, this idea terminated (so to speak) in the Nazi death camps.  By the end of WWII, the eugenic view that who and what you were was dictated by your genes became so discredtied and distasteful that scientists developed a very different view.

This was the behaviorist or environmentalist view.  In psychology it was lead by BF Skinner in that period, especially in the US.  The idea was that what you are was based on your experience, not your inborn tools.  This was not a new idea, but genetic inherency had taken over as the prevailing view for nearly a century, and the view, whether informal or formal in regard to rejecting eugenics, was the environmentalist view.

In this view, reduction to genetics was not really thought to be of any use.  Whatever the mechanism or how brought about by genes, that (the brain, neurons, etc) internal stuff was just not relevant to understanding the traits--behavior, mainly--of the person.  Reductionism was not going to gain any insights, even if certainly the mechanisms must involve genes and nerves and so on.  It was even said that you could (or should) just assume that an organism was entirely empty inside!  We just need to look at the outside not the inside of our subjects.  We did not need to know anything about the insides to understand behavior, and trying to work out the way the complex wiring worked was a waste of time.  A recognition of the complexity of traits like behavior.  Indeed, for his time, Darwin had little alternative, but this--considering the trait, not the internal generative mechanism--was essentially what he studied in so much detail.

Cachet and cash, eh?
The evidence didn't change, but behavioral approaches and environmental determinism took over.  Indeed, the evidence isn't changing very much even now.  We know a bit about neuroscience that is relevant to behavior, but we're still not really explaining behavior in any serious sense by invoking this gene or that one.  But what is pursued, what people 'believe in' and get dogmatically excited about, and what is allowed or considered acceptable (whether for explicitly understood reasons or not) is changing.  As memory fades, and new practitioners replace the WWII generation, genetic determinism and inborn inherency are rapidly regaining respectability. There is simply too much cachet--and too much cash!--in 'modern' technical science, and too little revulsion at what we know has been done in the name of imposing value judgements by one group against another (using religion, science, or whatever else) as expedient justifications, for this reversal of what is acceptable to swing back the other way.

What we accept is not just based on hard-core science decisions, but to a huge extent depends on historical context as well.  Will it turn sour again?  The probability may be low but is certainly not zero, because elitist expert-based decisions on how society should be run (by them) for its betterment (as they see it) are just hard to keep down.

Of course, we are no more genetically determined, or not, than during Hitler and the prior eugenics times.  So there is no serious scientific reason for this swing back to earlier once-discredited ideas.  But it is now savory to believe in it, as higher-level analysis fails to answer questions (as it did before eugenics) we return to reductionistic inherency.  It just seems technological, real science, and it's lost its odor of abuse.  A new generation reinvents its beneficence for society.  The sexy tools (genome sequencers, fMRI scanners, and much more) are available and so are the grant funds and the journals hungering for The New Discovery (after all, should journalists remember the past any better than scientists do?).

If behavioral  and evolutionary psychology can't keep their hands off this potential societal dynamite, they're not alone by any means.  Genomics and other omics are beating on the same drum, assuming that traits like obesity must be understood not on their own terms but by looking 'inside' the organism to understand them.  Of course, there is and always has been reason for trying to understand how things work.  But there isn't enough understanding, not yet at least, for this to come nearly to what is being promised.

Still, at present, we haven't got good law-like alternatives.  Are there laws of how underlying mechanisms must work, how the determine complex traits, or whether in fact inherently probabilistic things may mean that reductionism simply cannot work very well for the kinds of explanations being sought.

At the very least, more circumspection is what is in order.

The true meaning of "candidate" genes revealed

The biology of behavior
I take a deep breath.  If you were here with me you'd have noticed that it was breath signifying annoyance, annoyance over something I've just read.  The annoyance triggered my brain to trigger my diaphragm to contract and elevate my lower ribs and expand my thoracic cavity vertically, while at the same time my external intercostal muscles and interchondral muscles have elevated my upper rib cage to expand the width of my thoracic cavity to allow the intake of air.  The process is reversed as I breathe out. It's a biological thing.  My annoyance also surely triggered hormonal releases of some sort as well, and other downstream reactions that may or may not catch up with me someday in the form of "stress-related illness."

But ok, that deep breath out of the way now, I start to type.  My brain has begun to formulate sentences in response to what I've just read, and now transferring those sentences to the screen requires a complex interplay between the parts of my brain that think (clearly or not) and the muscles that govern my fingers on the keyboard.

More biology.  Genes are firing all over the place, creating and controlling the complex interactions that make all this, and more, happen simultaneously without me making it happen or even being aware of what's going on.  That's because in many senses I'm nothing but an automaton controlled by my genetic makeup to respond to my environment with biological impulses. 

But I'm also eating a pear as I type.  My hunger is a biological drive -- a genetic predisposition, even -- to which I'm responding.  I have to eat or I can't fulfill my darwinian destiny to survive and reproduce.

But why am I eating a pear and not a durian fruit?  Or a betel nut?  Or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder Bread?  Because durians and betel nuts aren't sold at my local grocery stores, or even my local farmers' markets, and I don't like Wonder Bread.  (Have you tried peanut butter and pickle sandwiches though?  My mother's favorite lunch, a taste passed down to me.)  So my clearly biological drive has to be satisfied in culturally specific ways, and based on my own personal taste.  In part taught to me by my mother. 

Let's go back to the source of my annoyance.  It's a commentary in this week's Nature: "Biology and ideology: the anatomy of politics," about how biology shapes our politics.

An increasing number of studies suggest that biology can exert a significant influence on political beliefs and behaviours. Biological factors including genes, hormone levels and neurotransmitter systems may partly shape people's attitudes on political issues such as welfare, immigration, same-sex marriage and war. And shrewd politicians might be able to take advantage of those biological levers through clever advertisements aimed at voters' primal emotions.

Many of the studies linking biology to politics remain controversial and unreplicated. But the overall body of evidence is growing and might alter how people think about their own and others' political attitudes.

Of course biology affects our beliefs and behaviors, in much the same ways that it affects what we choose to eat or our responses to things that annoy us, which in turn have been affected by our culture and upbringing.  The work described in this commentary annoys me but it might strike you as perfectly fine.  We are biological beings, and everything we do and are is affected by genes and hormones and neurotransmitters.  But that is not the same as saying that everything we do is determined by our biology.  I eat a pear but not a durian fruit, if I'm a southerner I voted Democratic in my youth and Republican now.

Genes 'for' 
Genetics is now becoming deeply entrenched in the social sciences; economists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists are being seduced by the appeal of genetics and Darwin as they try to explain why humans do what they do.  Hell, evolutionary theory is even used to explain why characters in classic novels behave the way they do.

But this shows how little social scientists understand what genetics can actually tell us about complex traits like, well, like all the traits of interest to these disciplines.  We can't even find genes 'for' truly biological traits like type 1 diabetes or clinical depression, even if the commentary assumes we have:

The past few decades have seen a wave of research connecting genes to disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and alcoholism, and to complex outcomes such as sexual orientation and how far people progress in education.

Well, but we have made very little progress in geneticizing such things, and where we've found genetic variants that affect such traits, they usually have very little, and inconsistent, effect.  Indeed, when we throw in the effects of culture and learning, not to mention neuroplasticity of the brain, almost all bets are off in terms of identifying biological forces that shape what we believe or how we behave.

And then there's the question of just what phenotype is being measured anyway.  This is hard enough for biological traits -- what constitutes 'high' blood pressure, obesity, or autism?  Very large studies to find genes for obesity find essentially entirely different candidates depending on the measure being used (e.g., body mass index, waist-hip ratio), or the obesity-related traits like diabetes, hypertension, or Alzheimer's disease.  So how on Earth do you measure political belief in such a way that it is a proxy for some protein coded for by some gene?  

Eugenics
What about this sentence, that you might have just glided over above:

...shrewd politicians might be able to take advantage of those biological levers through clever advertisements aimed at voters' primal emotions.

We've been down this road before.

Once Darwin gave people, especially the noble science class, the idea that Nature not God made people what they were, and that through their insight they the scientists rather than clergy, could divine what was good and bad, they (like clergy) are the ones who should evaluate who was naughty and who was nice, and indeed could help Nature out by doing something about the offenders.  Of course it was all for the good.  Just like clergy helping to save souls, scientists would help save society.  And since Darwin showed that our essence was not our soul, but our biology, which within decades became  genes, their term for their wise engineering was not absolution, but eugenics.

The temptation was of course to believe that they, through their science, could find out people's true essence, and recommend what to do about it.  All for the protection of society.  Does it sound a lot like the inquisition, where clergy decided how to test, and judge, and engineer (get rid of) those who polluted the true and faithful?

Eugenics in its early form, which crept in on little cat's feet, led by the biomedical research establishment, was all for human good, of course.  But of course power corrupts and demagogues are always ready to use it, and scientists as we know very well from the past -- and today -- are easily co-opted by the hands that feed them.  And of course that kind of thinking, in its various guises, led to the Nazi exterminations (and, here and elsewhere, incarcerations, involuntary sterilizations, and the like).  It also led to the abuses of the Stalinist era called Lysenkoism, which was the inverse of Darwinism out of control.

Well, you might say, that was then and this is now.  Yes, the early eugenicists were the well-respected scientists and physicians, but they were misguided.  Now, we know better, and our scientists have only everybody (else's) good at heart, don't they?  Intrusive abuses couldn't happen any more, could they?

Direct-to-consumer racism?

Ken and I have often cautioned here on MT and elsewhere that society may be flirting with a new era of eugenics with our new genetic technologies that claim to be able to assess our ancestry and our risk of disease or other traits.  More ominous are these new technologies coupled with current attitudes about genetic determinism.  History shows the horrors that the misuse of science in this way have been visited on millions of people.  This could be a legitimate concern even if scientists, today, unlike the past, would  cringe at the thought of such uses of their work.  But are we wiser, kinder, and gentler than our benighted forebears, or is vigilance just as needed now as ever?

A story in this week's Nature, "Genome test slammed for assessing 'racial purity', is a case in point, suggesting that this isn't just hysteria on our part. A genetic diagnosis company in Hungary, licensed to do genetic testing for health purposes, has certified a far right member of the Hungarian parliament to be free of Roma or Jewish heritage.  The company scanned 18 loci for variants that they say are at higher frequency in Roma and Jewish populations.  They produced certification of the candidate's pure Hungarian ancestry in time for the election, which this candidate went on to win.  How much the certification had to do with the win, who knows, but that's not the point. 

Nature reports that the company argues on its website that it “rejects all forms of discrimination, so it has no right to judge the purpose for which an individual will use his or her test result, and so for ethical reasons it could not have refused to carry out the test."  Even so, many in Hungary have reacted negatively -- the government has condemned this misuse of genetic testing, Hungary's Medical Research Council secretary says it's "professionally wrong, ethically unacceptable -- and illegal," a Jewish member of the company's board resigned. 

“The council’s stand is important,” says Lydia Gall, an Eastern Europe and Balkans researcher at civil-rights group Human Rights Watch, who is based in Amsterdam. In Hungary, “there have been many violent crimes against Roma and acts of anti-Semitism in the past few years”, she says. Politicians who try to use genetic tests to prove they are ‘pure’ Hungarian fan the flames of racial hatred, she adds.

It's important to note that the testing did not precede the racial hatred, but it does serve to feed the frenzy.  This is why we have so often cautioned that scientists need to be very careful about the kinds of uses for which they use or advocate genetic testing.  Not long ago similar ancestry testing was proposed for screening immigrants to the UK--for national 'security' purposes.  Sound familiar?  It's just what the British eugenicists were up to 85 years ago. 

The problem is that when the horse is out of the barn, it's too late.  So, indeed, it's a very delicate and difficult issue, but there are arenas into which scientists should not tread -- or not without some clear and controlling societal agreement on what can and cannot be investigated.  

Who needs DNA when we've got fMRI?

Neuroscience is the new genetics, the explanation for everything that ails you, and for why you are who you are.  Where your brain 'lights up', as caught on fMRI scans, when you're doing some task -- lying, serial killing -- apparently tells the researcher a lot about you. "It wasn't my fault, my brain made me do it," may be a defense soon coming to a criminal court near you.

fMRI, amygdala in red

The story of the perfectly normal man who slowly and stealthily became a pedophile, finally caught by his wife when he began to molest his 11 year old stepdaughter, is only one of many that are causing people to rethink the idea of responsibility for our behavior, and indeed, free will.  This man came to the attention of a sympathetic physician, who decided he needed an MRI, which showed that he had a large tumor on his frontal lobes.  When the tumor was removed, the man's pedophilia disappeared entirely.  When he began to be interested in children again, it was found that the tumor had recurred.  The tumor was again removed; the legal charges were ultimately dropped against this man, deemed to not be responsible for his behavior.

This story was repeated on a BBC Radio 4 program about understanding the criminal brain, and it gave us occasion to muse once again about causation.  Neuroscientists are doing a lot of work on what is malfunctioning in the brains of sociopaths.  And how can you doubt their word?  You can see it on scans.

Serial killers have less activity in their amygdyla, which leads to less empathy, which leads to antisocial behavior.  And, according to the show, this aberrant brain activity can be identified in severely misbehaving children, kids, they claim, who are likely to grow up to be criminals.  (Will this lead to preventive measures taken by the state to lock up or dope up those whose 'brain will make you do it'?)

A school in England is now addressing this problem head-on (so to speak).  Armed with fMRI scans of kids with serious behavior problems, the malfunctioning part of the brain identified, the school has developed a method to work with these kids to activate the caring parts of their brains.  So, for example, they show them pictures of fearful kids and teach them how to tell how the kid is feeling, both from the face and from body language, clues that the students aren't good at picking up.  The hope is that these brains are rewireable, so that the kids will grow up to be contributing members of society.

But there's a kink in this analysis.  It is both reductive, and of course reminiscent of claims of behavioral geneticists -- my brain structure, or my genes, made me do it -- and expansive at once.  If the criminal (or future criminal) brain is plastic enough to respond to environmental pressures in the form of teaching, and it can in fact remold itself, then that suggests that something malformed it in the first place.  And here we're back to the age-old questions of social causation, and then of course ultimate responsibility -- does poor parenting make criminals?  Poverty?  Bad luck?  So, the reductive explanation is not a complete one after all.

The problem is simple, even if the solution, if there is one, isn't.  After the 'bad' behavior has occurred, one seeks any tecchie gear that will show why, in a reductionistic way (bad gene, tumor, --- some built-in molecular 'cause').  And even if it's clear that non-technical experiential factors can fix the problem, it is not so easily recognized that such factors may have caused the problem.  The random population is not screened to see how many non-sociopaths have the same brain activity patterns, for example.

More importantly, if it is assumed that the technical finding (genotype, fMRI signature) is causal, a likely consequence, if history is any guide, will be to use the same findings 'preventively'.  That was the basis of the eugenics movement, and anybody who thinks something of its ilk can't happen again hasn't read any history.   Eugenics -- the very term itself! -- was the purportedly benign attempt to improve society through science.

Even if that risk is not taken seriously, we still have serious problems in dealing with this kind of causation and association data, or of putting non-technical facts in the same perspective as we put technical ones: we're too enamored of the latter, in this Age of Science.

Eugenics and other genetic risks, continued

Again, we return to a topic we said months ago we'd follow up on, but never did.  Holly touched on it here recently in her post about genetics and intelligence -- and, in fact, here's a quick followup on that subject; in particular, scroll down a bit in that link and read the sidebar on what happens to the brains of London cabbies -- and we wrote about it yesterday.  But, as the issues won't go away, and yet another paper is out this week in PNAS by the same characters using the same set of data, we think a topic we began to write about months ago is worth another look.  Especially given our focus this week on randomness and probability, and once again on genetic determinism and eugenics. 

Back in October, we, and many others, blogged about the paper by Fowler et al. that reported that genes largely determine political ideology.  The data set Fowler et al. mined for that paper, have mined before, and mine again for their PNAS paper this week, is the 2,600 subjects included in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a study of 20,000 adolescents in grades 7-12 in 1994, and followed up in 2001-2002 when students were 17-24 years old, and a subset more recently followed up with biomarkers, including DNA.  The study was designed to look at the effects of social context on health behaviors like seat belt use, drug use, sexual activity, nutrition and so on.  

The small subset who donated DNA were genotyped for 7 candidate polymorphisms. 

The initially targeted candidates are the dopamine transporter (DAT1), the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4), the serotonin transporter (5HTT), monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), monoamine oxidase B (MAOB), the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2), and the dopamine D5 receptor (DRD5).

Why these particular genes were   chosen is not something we could easily find but presumably it has to do with previous reports of their association with particular behaviors.

A cursory literature review shows that using these genetic data, researchers have, to date, found 'the warrior gene', that is, an association with DAT1 or DRD2 and gang behavior and serious delinquency, a link with low grades and DAT1, a dopaminergic gene, and that "students with a single, DRD4 variant had significantly lower grades in English and math, but only marginally lower grades in history and science", the genetic basis of victimization, the genetic basis of our place in a social network, that is, popularity, an association with genes and smoking behavior, as well as the links with political behavior and ideology reported by Professor Fowler et al.  And, the new study by Fowler et al. reports that people who share the same DRD2 allele associated with alcoholism tend to be friends.  

Ok, let's just take the DRD4 gene.  This gene that has been associated with numerous behaviors previously, including attention deficit disorder (the association is with a 48 basepair VNTR, or variable number of tandem repeats, in exon 3), novelty-seeking (that exon 3 VNTR again), externalizing behavior in toddlers (exon 3 VNTR), temperament in children with the exon 3 repeat allele if they are given poor quality parenting (or 'differential susceptibility to child rearing'), aggression at age 4 (long repeat), attachment disorganization in infants (48 bp repeat), to cite just a few of the studies reporting an association of behavior with this long repeat in this dopamine receptor gene.  And there are plenty more.

The idea, as proposed by Hamer et al. in 1996 in the precedent-setting Novelty Seeking study, was that the number of repeats in the gene affects the structure of the receptor, thus how dopamine binds to it, and so the efficiency of neurotransmission.

But now there's this, a 2010 genomewide association study by Verweij et al.:

Variation in personality traits is 30–60% attributed to genetic influences. Attempts to unravel these genetic influences at the molecular level have, so far, been inconclusive. We performed the first genome-wide association study of Cloninger's temperament scales in a sample of 5117 individuals, in order to identify common genetic variants underlying variation in personality. Participants’ scores on Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, and Persistence were tested for association with 1,252,387 genetic markers. We also performed gene-based association tests and biological pathway analyses. No genetic variants that significantly contribute to personality variation were identified, while our sample provides over 90% power to detect variants that explain only 1% of the trait variance. This indicates that individual common genetic variants of this size or greater do not contribute to personality trait variation, which has important implications regarding the genetic architecture of personality and the evolutionary mechanisms by which heritable variation is maintained.

No association with DRD4 and Novelty Seeking.  And no association with DRD4 and Novelty Seeking was found in 2 samples in New Zealand, and while some studies in birds have shown an association with a DRD4 variant and exploratory behavior, it isn't consistently reported.  A study of one of these repeat polymorphism has shown that the effect of the variation depends on your socioeconomic status: negative for low SES, positive for high SES.  Context determines what the genotype determines.

Now, all the usual caveats that we mention over and over again apply here -- the definition of the trait may vary enough between studies that they are comparing apples and oranges, and the association may in fact be real in some populations and not in others.  But GWAS should find genes with large effects, and the Verweij et al. study did not.

What if that's because the trait is due not just to a single gene but to gene-and-environment interaction? Would a GWAS still pick it up?  This would depend in part on the size of the study sample and the amount of environmental variation among those sampled.  GWAS detects net results, basically, especially if the environmental factors are not known or measured.  Large effects found in a GWAS may be because there was some tractably invariant environment among the sampled people, that may not be present in another sample, and the same allele may not have its purported effect in those data.

The association of this gene with political ideology could be real.  Or it could be a chance positive result due to multiple testing or other statistical aspects of the sample.  Or it could be real....but only ephemeral, changing rapidly with societal context.  The notion that we can predict these kinds of things very meaningfully is one we should be very circumspect about.  Even after extensive (and expensive), very technically sophisticated studies (unlike many of the behavior one-gene studies mentioned here), we can't make good predictions of very clearly genetically-affected traits like how tall you are or whether you'll have diabetes (and if so, what its particular characteristics, severity, response to treatment, etc. will be).

Every trait you can name probably has at least some heritability; that is, genetic variation contributes to variation in the trait.  Heritability is usually substantial.  But so are chance and the various aspects of lifestyle and environment.  High heritability means that genes are relative important in the population, but does not mean that an individual genotype predicts that person's trait reliably.  GWAS experience, which is now extensive, shows that high penetrating power of single (or even a few) genetic variants is not common.  Often, the trait definition is crude (like 'intelligence' or 'IQ', or 'asthma' or 'autism' or even obesity), but the definitions are changeable and cultural, the measures sometimes arbitrary, and people can have the same value for different reasons.  People with high intelligence measures can have better ability to memorize, or to learn quickly from one exposure to a fact or challenge, or to integrate repetitive exposure, or to do mental work by visualization or by other means, and so on.  

Change the environment or the measuring criterion and you can change the result.  Different approaches to modifying the achieved trait, like therapy for a disease, can apply differently to different people with similar measurement value.  People with similar glucose levels have different ways in which the 'same' trait is manifest during their respective lives.  This should be obvious, since diabetes and IQ have both increased substantially in recent decades, but the underlying genetic variation hasn't.


This is in rough terms why things can be genetically affected in real and substantial ways but, we would say, not genetically determined.  Again, the problem lies in overstating the latter and putting it into policy.  This is where the idea of 'eugenics', that is, of using ideas about inherited worth to make policy to 'improve' the human species and its genome, become heavily sociopolitical rather than scientific.  Historically this has led to discrimination against individuals and against whole groups.  One might be tempted to say that it's 'right wing' to believe in genetic determination of traits like ability or behavior, or the inherent value of one race vs another.  But this would be vague at best and misleading at worst.


To caricature affiliations, we can say that it's not just rapid right-wing behavior genetics that we should be wary of.  The rabid left has left its own trail.  While the Nazis were gassing people who were inherently 'inferior', the Soviets were starving people because, under the influence of one Trofem Lysenko, they believed life was improvable by experience alone rather than by inheritance (a view generally attributed originally to Lamarck in 1813).  In both cases, categorical beliefs about the role of inheritance led to disaster on a major scale.


That is why, despite the fact that of course genetic variation contributes to all biological variation, we should be very careful about making pronouncements that could be used for societal policy.  Today that policy might be favorable to you....but what about tomorrow?  Even if nothing untoward is being done with genetic data these days, prevention is the better part of valor.

Of course, if you want to make strong statements about the genetic determinants and evolution of ostrich knees, feel free, because only a few 'experts' in the world will care one way or the other.