We're all fundamentalists now

If you're a foodie at all, you've heard of Yotam Ottolenghi, chef, restauranteur, and food writer.  Perhaps you've used some of his recipes, or even have one or more of his cookbooks. And, if you're a fan you'll be happy to know that the Jan 11 episode of the Food Programme on BBC Radio 4 has an interview with him (starting at minute 7:15), and a brief overview of how he got to such a place of prominence in the food world.  

Ottolenghi and his business partner, Sami Tamimi both come from Jerusalem, but Ottolenghi from the Jewish west side and Tamimi from the Arab west.  They both now live in London where they have collaborated since the late 1990's on restaurants and delis and cookbooks, much of it with the aim of highlighting the food of their childhood.  Not only is their food amazing, but it's also worth noting that two men from two sides of the same strife-ridden Middle Eastern city have worked closely together for many years. This isn't something that everyone could do.   

One of the cookbooks Ottolenghi and Tamimi wrote together is called Jerusalem, written to accompany a BBC television program of the same name. For the show, they returned to their birthplace and described and prepared some of their favorite foods, but it wasn't just about the food.  Tamimi said it was difficult to return. He believes that people were much more naive when he was a child, having faith that the conflict between Israel and Palestine could be solved. Now, he says, people are much more entrenched in their belief in the rightness of their side, and it's much more difficult to imagine the differing sides agreeing on a solution.

To us in the West, the Middle East epitomizes fundamentalism, strict adherence to the literal interpretation of a religious text or dogma.  And, fundamentalism goes hand in hand with terrorism. Fundamentalism is our enemy.

But, it's not just in the Middle East that people are more entrenched in their beliefs about right and wrong. Here in the US we've got the Tea Party dictating what real conservatism is, we've got militiamen in Oregon, and homegrown 'terrorists' demanding whatever they're demanding. We've got a Congress that agrees only to disagree. Dare I say it, even the 'new atheists' are fundamentalists. Indeed, compromise has become a dirty word, immoral even. In so many ways, moderation, the ability to see more than one side of an issue, has lost its way.

Ken's view is that in a world in which fundamentalists are now our enemy, we've all become fundamentalists; we know what we believe, we hold to those beliefs without question, and we have no respect for the other side.  If there is a strongly ideological force that you disagree with or that threatens you, it pushes you toward an equal and opposite ideology. You listen only to Fox News or MSNBC, you turn off the radio when Trump comes on, or when Clinton comes on, depending on your predilection -- or you're waiting for the Libertarian candidate to be selected, and there's no way you'll listen to anyone else.

If you're here reading this it's likely that you've also picked a side in the nature/nurture 'debate'; 'genetic determinism' either nicely describes your view of biology, or you're very uncomfortable with the term. Genes will or will not be found 'for' most traits, including behaviors, and diseases will or won't be predictable once we've all got our genomes on a CD.

We've said this before but it's worth repeating.  In 1926, one of the great early geneticists, Thomas Hunt Morgan, wrote this about stature:

A man may be tall because he has long legs, or because he has a long body, or both. Some of the genes may affect all parts, but other genes may affect one region more than another. The result is that the genetic situation is complex and, as yet, not unraveled. Added to this is the probability that the environment may also to some extent affect the end-product.
                                  (TH Morgan, The Theory of the Gene, p 294, 1926):

Morgan would be totally comfortable with the recent GWAS results showing that there are hundreds if not thousands of genes that contribute to stature, as well as environmental factors.  He'd agree that complex traits, like stature, or many diseases (including schizophrenia, which Ken will talk about tomorrow) are polygenic, with some environmental effect.  This has been known for almost a century. So why are people still looking for genes (meaning single genes, or a few genes with individually strong effects) 'for' type 2 diabetes, or heart disease, or stature, or schizophrenia?  Why don't we still know what Morgan knew so long ago?

Because sometimes it's not true.  Sometimes there are single genes whose variants are by themselves responsible for traits, including disease.  Starting in the early 1980's, the role of single genes in various traits began to be discovered; oncogenes, Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and a whole host of single-gene pediatric diseases, and normal traits as well, like blood types, eye color and so on.  There are now about 6000 rare diseases for which genetic causation appears to be known, or at least claimed.   This history of successes mislead, we would say, geneticists, and others, into assuming they could always expect to find 'the' gene for this and 'the' gene for that.  In essence it is still the informal working model, in the back of geneticists' heads, that everything segregates like Mendel's pea traits.

We can and do have both -- single-gene traits and complex traits due to many genes, or many genes and environmental factors too.  Indeed, there are also traits that are completely environmental -- look at the havoc Zika virus seems to be wreaking, with apparently no help from genes, even if close examination might find some people to be slightly more immune than others. Most viruses are like that.

So, it's curious that even the field of genetics has its fundamentalists.  Every time Ken and I write about complexity, or insufficient understanding of disease causation, or question how we know what we think we know, someone will send us a link to a paper that shows we're wrong because autism, or schizophrenia, or intelligence, or whatever their favorite trait, has been shown to be clearly genetic. Genes, with names, have been found to explain it. Sometimes the comments are so emotionally unrestrained that you'll never see them because we don't publish them.

And, we'll often or even typically look at the paper and realize that we've been reprimanded by a fundamentalist yet again. Autism, schizophrenia, heart disease, stature, intelligence, and so on are just not yet predictable from genes, and, we believe, are unlikely ever to be for reasons we write about all the time.  Ken will discuss the new Nature paper on schizophrenia tomorrow, a paper that got huge amounts of press for finally beginning to explain the disease.  Yes, a paper someone offered to send us when they disapproved of a post Ken had written about the difficulties of predicting disease, proving he was wrong. Which, good as that paper may be, is not the case.

I think if Morgan were to come back to the modern field of genetics, he'd feel as Sami Tamimi did returning to Jerusalem.  I think he'd be nostalgic for his era, when fundamentalists didn't rule the field, geneticists weren't prisoners of Mendel, ideologues who know what they'd find before they even looked. Where, even if things seem rosier in retrospect, and certainly people had preferred views and were not always nice to each other, there was more agreement that things were not yet clearly understood, and complexity was not a dirty word.  I think Morgan would appreciate that some traits are explained more simply than others, but that even those aren't 'simple' -- there are more than 2000 alleles in the CFTR gene that seem to be associated with cystic fibrosis, and this kind of complexity is true of most 'simple' traits.

So, why did the field lose this understanding, and take a turn to fundamentalism?  The answer isn't just that we're in a fundamentalist age, of course.  That it's a lot easier to sell the search for a causal gene than a search for.....we're not really sure what, is a large part of the problem.  But, as a friend says, we should be looking for the molasses that explains biological complexity, that connects causal pathways and processes, which ain't just gonna be a gene, or an environmental risk factor.  It's going to be something we don't yet understand, and continuing to look for 'the' gene for your favorite complex trait is only going to slow down the search.  Acknowledging that what we've learned, and confirmed over and over again since Mendel was rediscovered in 1900, is that most traits are complex -- and unpredictable -- is a crucial step.

Evolution's got a P.R. problem

People aren't just anti-evolution, evolution-averse, or pro-"teaching the controversy" because they're clinging to supernatural explanations that help them identify with a tribe. Culture is mighty powerful but it's a lot more complex than stubborn beliefs in the supernatural as deciphered from, and reinforced by, an ancient text.

Evolution's got a public relations problem that spans beyond fundamental Creationism. It's not exactly looked upon favorably by many non-fundamental yet kind, open-minded, and educated folks either! Here I've jotted down a few thoughts about why...

1. Who cares about evolution? Sheesh, what's the big deal?
Evolution doesn't appear to matter to so many people. And getting frothy over evolution can certainly spark interest but it can also, in gut reaction, intensify the apathy. We love to go on and on about how "human" it is to wonder where we came from or to wonder how the world works. Well, it's not exactly a species-wide phenomenon, at least acting on that wonder isn't. With these folks, we can just keep doing what it is that we do and hope that they will come around to see why evolution matters and hope that until then they don't influence others to be as tuned out or turned off.   People are less likely to voice apathy about knowledge that they're accustomed to like biology, history, chemistry, geology, physics, literature, English, composition, mathematics. I think this attitude about evolution will go away once biology becomes a synonym for evolution in K-12 classrooms and beyond. 

2. Mystery is mystical by default. 
It's still acceptable to fill-in ignorance about biology with the supernatural. This is not as much the m.o. with chemistry or physics, but we tend to do it there too (like with quantum mechanics). I couldn't explain how the Internet works but I assume it's not magic and I don't know anyone who thinks it is either. Yet, missing pieces of understanding in biology are not, as default, just missing pieces of understanding. We jump automatically to magical thinking rather than assume that we just don't know and that maybe someone already does! Unfortunately, gaps in our biological knowledge don't always spark us to take more classes, to read, or to watch videos to see that many of those mysteries aren't mysteries to anyone who's studied them. Gaps in our knowledge don't always spark us to undertake controlled observation or to devise experiments at home. For some reason, instead... and I think it's the Bible and other powerful cultural influences, and also the way that the history of science unfolded ... biology's mysteries are comfortably cloaked in magic. If biological mystery is mystical, then it's easier to uphold allegiance to Creationism, or to maintain intellectual empathy with fundamentalists who ask that we simply "teach the controversy." 

3. It takes quite a bit of study, observation and life experience to understand evolution. 

Evolution is a complex, multi-disciplinary matter that few people can master in one semester of study. You need anatomy, physiology, genetics, behavior, comparative anatomy, zoology, ecology, geology, history, math, philosophy, etc. But you need only dabble a few toes in those areas to begin to form the picture. Because the e-word is so often left out of K-12 classrooms, students don't realize that they're learning it all along, in all its bits and pieces as they advance year to year. When they finally do get to a classroom that uses the e-word, they think it's a whole new subject matter and that's actually quite an obstacle. Plus, that evolution takes a while to understand in any sort of useful way means we have an under-informed population full of people who, at best, had one year of solid evolutionary exposure in high school...one year of learning our one natural explanation for all of biology. That's evidently not enough to bring everyone far enough along to overcome #1 and #2. 

4. Evolution's not even well-understood by those who claim to. 
It's not. There's a lot we don't know about evolutionary history, about how it unfolded, and that means there's a lot that we are earnestly trying to figure out. And it's clear that public patience for science is lacking and that's rooted in a lack of appreciation for how science is done, how knowledge is formed, and how the truth changes. On the one hand there are those who know full well that feeble, foibly humans are devising this knowledge and on the other hand are those who've got far too much respect for "KNOWLEDGE." (The latter is revealed on the petrified faces of my students when I announce they're "creating knowledge" by doing a laboratory assignment.) Both perspectives are working against science every time something pops up in the press as being "debated" or "overturned." Every piece ends with "more research is needed." No wonder patience is running thin. The skeptics think science is fraught with fraud because it's done by people. The others flirt with thinking (or do literally think) that knowledge comes from on high, or from Revealed Natural Truths, and not possibly from mere humans. And then there are those who study evolution who are not earnestly trying to  understand it better. They're using a half-baked tool that they call "evolution" to do their work or to advocate for evolution education. And often when their views get in the popular press they're parroted or presented uncritically by writers with an equally non-nuanced understanding of evolution, who are equally oblivious to it. 

5. Evolution is being pushed by so many unhuggable atheist intellectuals. 
This has to do with what many public intellectuals like to call "tribalism" and in-group, out-group identity. Aligning yourself with professors or intellectuals is social and political suicide for many. Aligning yourself with the godless can be even worse. Of course there are lots of folks who retain their beliefs and accept evolution, but there are fewer of them (at least in the limelight) than us who eschew or reject the supernatural.  We need more huggable atheists. We need more huggable intellectuals. We need fewer anti-intellectuals. We need fewer anti-atheists. Lack of belief in the supernatural needs to be seen as a legitimate way to be a friend, a parent, a child, a relative, a neighbor, a community member, a leader, a teacher, a human.  

6. People don't want to be animals.
With education, people come to accept reality. And they accept what they cannot change. Right?

7. Evolution seems to support racism, sexism, (and atheism, intellectualism, evolutionism, vegetarianism,) and every other -ism that's wrong with humanity.  
But it doesn't. There's too much to unpack here in this small space, but this is a huge problem contributing to the aversion to evolution out there. Evolution isn't just subversive because it goes against established religious dogma. It's subversive because it, as completely misunderstood and misapplied, supports racism and sexism and murder and warfare and rape and infanticide, etc etc etc... Understood well, or even just a little bit well, evolution cannot be used in those ways and then, as a result, avoided by those who are afraid to align with such an unsavory worldview. Evolution is just generation to generation change in lineages that have shared ancestors in the past. Evolution describes how everything depends on what came before. That is all. Evolution requires no differential value placed on one species over another (human exceptionalism). Evolution requires no differential value placed on one skin color over another (racism).  Evolution requires no differential value placed on one sex over another (sexism). Those are human inventions. Culture is powerful.  

8. Evolution tells me I'm going to die when I die. 

This is the human condition. Belief in the supernatural or not, acceptance of evolution or not, this is what we're all dealing with. We often lament how, "evolution reduces the meaning of life to survival and reproduction." Well, if it does, is that so bad?

**

Evolution's got a lot more than fundamental religious beliefs working against it.  As an educator, I can't help but think that, first and foremost, a clear understanding of what evolution is (and isn't) is key to addressing all of these issues contributing to evolution's P.R. problem.  Yesterday's post was my attempt to help provide that clear understanding: 

Evolution is the only natural explanation. And it's all we need.

Why does genetic determinism persist, in spite of the evidence?

What's so wrong with genetic determinism anyway? Isn't it just political correctness to claim that who we are isn't determined by our genes? Genes are the basis of every trait, aren't they? And, they follow rules so we can predict who'll have what. Lots of diseases are caused by mutational variants at single genes, so traits like behaviors and intelligence and skin color must also be reducible to single genes. And, indeed, we can even retrodict the reason that a given trait evolved, since, obviously, natural selection has molded all living things into what they are today, yes?

 Well, no, even if conventional wisdom is that we can predict pretty much anything from genes. And, people seem to believe it in droves; thousands are happily paying genotyping companies to have their disease risk determined, and at least 15,000 people have volunteered to have their whole genome sequenced by the 100,000 Genome Project. The predictions are often expressed in terms of probabilities, but vended and perceived as being causal -- if you're a regular here, you know what we think about this.

And genetic explanations for many traits, including behaviors, are being adopted far and wide. Just type "gene for" or "genes for" into Google, and see how many hits you get (hint: you'll find that it's close to 10 million, and Donald Trump has the genes for success). Delve even briefly into those results and you see that we now are being told by political scientists that how we vote is genetically determined, not to mention whether or not we vote, economists and psychologists tell us that 'the warrior gene' makes us aggressive (except when it doesn't) and influences whether or not we belong to a gang (if we happen to be male). The list is long and growing -- just do this same search again next week, and you'll see. (By the way, the selection against 'good genes' via the deaths of warriors while cowards stayed home dining well and having the warriors' women has worried societal thinkers from Plato through Darwin and the Nazis to the present. But if that was truly selective at the genetic level, why has society not become all cowards?)

Given how much we've learned about the complex polygenic, gene-by-environment nature of complex traits (e.g., see our discussion of GWAS vs lifestyle questionnaires as predictors of disease risk, and, indeed, a study of 19,000 women published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week reports that risk of cardiovascular disease can't be predicted from genes identified by GWAS), why is determinism still so appealing? Especially given the potential risk (see our recent posts about eugenics, here and here).Why won't it loose it's grip on contemporary thinking (just as the other side of the pendulum, environmentalism, gripped the post-WWII generation)?

Certainly some of it is just momentum -- when the expensive infrastructure for genetic treasure hunting is built, be it in service to political science departments, psychology, epidemiology, anthropology or economics, it's hard to dismantle, even when the evidence against this approach mounts and the payoffs turn out to be slight. 

And too, it's all too easy to construct scenarios to explain positive results, even non-significant ones. Making selective, after-the-fact claims of success is just what homeopathic medicine, phrenology, and other nonsense therapies do. The temptation seems to be too great for many to resist, particularly in a field like anthropology, with its focus on human evolution and how we got to be what we are. It must be genetic, and it must be due to natural selection. And generally these stories can't be tested, so we can make up anything we want! So, we've got genes for long distance running in West Africans because of their history of cattle rustling, genes for opposable thumbs because, well, because of almost any explanation for why they make us human, and even genes for ping pong prowess in China (although the proposed adaptive reason for this escapes us at the moment, but there is one).

But hold on. These kinds of Just-So stories needn't be so rampant, if researchers would just ask themselves a few simple questions. First, when trying to explain the association of a gene with a trait is a researcher should wonder, if the trait of choice is really so adaptive, (meaning that people with the trait consistently had more children than those without, over many generations), why the trait still varies after so many generations of selective pressure. Perhaps selection wasn't all that strong, and the trait not so adaptive after all. Was the trait present in mammals before there ever were humans? If so, no human-specific arguments bear much weight.

Further, and this is just good science, how can the chosen evolutionary explanation be tested? How would we know why a trait evolved? We can't know enough about environmental pressures at the time the variant arose, nor about how it varied through time, to be truly convinced that we know how or why a trait is selected. So, if you've constructed an explanatory framework that involves assumptions about environmental pressures tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years ago, how will you test it?  And, why should a complex trait like thumbs or language or head size be due to a single gene anyway? If not, what is its genetic and evolutionary basis?

As we say in The Mermaid's Tale, natural selection certainly happens, but in general it's weak, usually very very weak, among other things, rather than a steady, simple driving 'force'. And, the idea that complex traits are due to single genes or even a few genes has been shown over and over not to be so, even if there are determined efforts to make them genetically predictable. So, why do these selective genes-for scenarios persist?

We live in a fundamentalist age, and there's more than a hint of simplistic fundamentalism to these selective scenarios: Darwin was right, and it's heresy to question Darwin. Therefore, everything's due to natural selection -- even though Darwin himself cautioned against that kind of thinking. And, the legacy of success at finding single genes for many (rare, usually pediatric) diseases has lulled us into thinking that all traits should be due to a single gene, so why we're human and no longer chimps is probably due to a single gene, or at least a single trait (the use of language, brain size, uprightedness, thumbs, tool use, and so on), for which we'll surely find the gene. People may deny that their explanations are so simplistic, and say they recognize complexity, but look at what they say and how they act.

Fundamentalism is dangerous, no matter its form. And genetic fundamentalism, as the history of eugenics has taught us, is no exception. Throw in traits fraught with societal import, such as intelligence or criminality -- which can't even be defined meaningfully (does anyone ever look for genes for white collar crime?), much less reduced to single genes -- and it can be explosive.

The underlying problem is a hunger for simple answers to satisfy various desires, such as easy prediction, pharmaceutical bonanza, simple explanations of cause and origin. The scientific challenge is to understand the way genetic mechanisms and genetic variation, as part of a mix of causation, work and how traits affected by such a mix evolve.

 A lot hinges on the meaning of 'determinism'. The usual concept is the same as cause, in the sense that we say gravit y determines how fast something will fall, or temperature when something will melt or boil. But in genetics it can be a confusion of probabilistic association and physical cause. The problem is too great for a post, but probable association -- you have a 27% of being diabetic if you have such-and-such genotype --is a very different kind of determination. It usually is misleadingly simple in many ways, especially when many factors, measured and unmeasured, are involved. Rarely does it mean strict causation.