The ‘hereditarian left’ is having a moment. I first wrote about this - still largely hypothetical - political tendency two-and-a-half years ago in the aftermath of the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein affair. That blog remains to this day one of the most viewed items on my page, largely I think because so few writers employ the terminology. That appears set to change, somewhat, with the publication of - and largely positive critical reaction to - “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality” by Dr Paige Harden. Harden was on the side of the angels during the Sam Harris affair but as a fascinating profile in the New Yorker makes clear, she wants her new book to persuade those on the left ‘who insist that genes don’t matter’ of the error of their ways. As the New Yorker accurately notes,
“Harden is not alone . . . Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammeled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” [Emphasis added]
Indeed, both DeBoer and Pinker have separately been crowing at the positive reception Harden’s latest has received. From the outset, I want to be clear that I’ve not yet read The Genetic Lottery, or DeBoer’s Cult of Smart for that matter. So this is not a book review. But I am familiar with both their work - I’ve cited Harden in the past - and despite his talents as a writer I’ve criticised DeBoer over his insistence that genetic variability in humans provides “the strongest possible argument for socialism”. I have no particular axe to grind with Harden and I trust, on the basis of other reviews I’ve read, that her new book is fair-minded summary of the science written by a world-renowned expert in the field and leavened with some standard social democratic politics. What I do take issue with is with the framing of the New Yorker piece - and Harden’s and DeBoer’s general thesis - that progressives need to be convinced that ‘genes matter’ and alter their political programs accordingly. But as we shall see, the real question is: what does it mean for something to ‘matter’?
Put simply, the argument of the handful of writers who make up the ‘hereditarian left’ is not dissimilar from that of the sex essentialists and evopsych gurus who argue for misogyny or against trans rights, or the ‘race realists’ of the like of Charles Murray and his many acolytes, or much of the heterodox thinking of the IDW [I’m not claiming they’re morally equivalent, just similarly fallacious]. All of these social movements and groups - containing an overrepresentation of aggrieved or wannabe scientists - argue passionately and at length that some observable trait (‘x’) in humans exists (or ‘is real’, or ‘matters’), which therefore [waves hands] justifies their [often reactionary] politics. When the left says we don’t care whether trait x is real, or that trait x ‘doesn’t matter’ to our politics, our lack of interest is caricatured with some snarl word like ‘blank slatists’ (Pinker’s idiotic term), science denialists or ‘cognitive creationists’. Whereas what’s actually happening is that the supposed heterodox thinkers are committing the most basic of errors - that of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ - of trying to justify and legitimise their preferred policy positions on the basis of supposed natural facts.
Genes influence behaviour, obviously, but whether that ‘matters’ depends on your frame of reference
The intransitive verb ‘to matter’ is one of those English words that sounds significant but whose meaning is vague and imprecise. Dictionaries tell us its a synonym for ‘important’, or something we care about. If x is some trait or observation, then x ‘matters’ or is relevant only if there is some relationship or function f(x) that produces a desirable goal or output. However, the essence of political disagreement is that humans rarely agree on what goals are ‘good’ or desirable, and whether the methods used to get there are legitimate. In other words, two people can only agree to normative (‘should’) statements when they implicitly or explicitly share the same objectives. For example, we can agree you should exercise but if and only if we first agree that fitness or health is our common goal.
I’ve written before that perhaps the single largest philosophical challenge of contemporary liberalism is the ‘problem of inequality’. To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born equal, but is everywhere unequal. Once liberal societies granted formal, legal equality to all citizens, the question became what degree of social, cultural and economic inequality could be tolerated before the narrative fiction that all human beings are alike in dignity could no longer be defended. The various liberal theodicies which have sprung up in response to this question give structure and context to the vast majority of contemporary political movements. On the progressive side - which includes both the anti-capitalist left and various types of left-liberals - our view is that when people are unequal we should change society somewhat to improve their conditions. Conservatives - including mainstream centre-right liberals and reactionaries - think that inequality is cool and normal, actually, and that we shouldn’t take any steps that would alter the status quo.
So yes, genes influence behaviour to some degree. Obviously. How we measure that influence, it’s mechanisms of action, and how it interacts with other sources of variability including socialisation, environment and pure dumb luck, are questions we can debate. But the influence is ‘real’, in the sense that it is observable, measurable, and falsifiable. In much the same way, sex traits and sexed differences are ‘real’ and group differences in behaviour are ‘real’ - but there is a difference between a fact being real (or provable) and a fact ‘mattering’. Your chromosomes and genitals simply don’t matter to the social performance of gender, for example. Your skin colour shouldn’t matter for your access to civil and political rights. Many observable human traits are simply irrelevant to both politics and political philosophy. A fact is only relevant if it changes how you pursue your goals – and progressives and conservatives have fundamentally different political goals. Which suggests that the same things may not matter in the same way to different people.
I’m just spitting science, bro
Harden was a graduate student and protégé of Eric Turkheimer, a behavioural geneticist whose views on this subject I respect immensely. In 1997, Turkheimer wrote an essay in which he argued that:
“A psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic influences on human ability are all real but profoundly complex, too complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata. It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability, or useful if easily misapplied tools like factor analysis. Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual victory of the psychometric right is assured.”
So he, too, I think would agree that progressive engagement with the science is important in order to rebut right-wing attempts to naturalise inequality - but the science cannot then form the basis of a just ‘political schemata’. So, a brief overview of the science of behavioural genetics - at least as I understand it from Turkheimer’s work - seems warranted. The origins of the field lie in so-called twin studies (DeBoer, I think fairly, calls these kinship studies as their basic unit of analysis is family relationships). If two siblings with a known degree of genetic relatedness (r) are raised, by circumstance, apart - and then their life outcomes are subsequently measured - it is in theory possible to calculate the effective contribution of genes vis-a-vis other facts such as upbringing, environment and random chance. Heritability, then, is an estimate of the contribution of biology to outcomes - in other words, if you had a large number of clones of an individual, to what degree their behaviour would vary as a result of non-genetic causes.
Twin studies are notoriously difficult to design - human lives are complex, and the potential confounding factors are many. More importantly, however, because of their limited number of available subjects twin studies tell you very little about the genetic variation within the broader population and next-to-nothing about genetic variation between populations. A twin study cannot tell you which genes are influencing outcomes or by what mechanism they are acting - only that biological similarity plays some role. The second stage of behavioural genetics - which took place largely in the 1990s and early 2000s - was premised on the idea that advances in scientific knowledge, in particular the completion of the Human Genome Project, would allow the identification of the ‘genes for’ particular traits. This turned out to be a disappointment. DNA is rarely so simple, and with the exception of some single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with particular diseases, it turned out most genetic influence was pleiotropic - many genes influence many traits, through complex interactions and subtle influences that are often poorly understood. The challenge increases exponentially when we try to measure genetic influence over complex behaviours such as learning, sociability and sexuality.
Which brings us to the third and contemporary moment - that of the genome-wide association study (or ‘GWAS’). Readers may be vaguely familiar with the concept of factor analysis - which among other things is used in the psychological literature to generate measurement constructs such as g (for general intelligence). By combining the results of multiple tests (e.g. for language, spatial awareness, mathematical ability and problem solving), one can mathematically construct a single variable which best explains performance across multiple domains. A polygenic score is similar to this, but more complex by several orders of magnitude. Very sophisticated computer programs construct thousands or even millions of models combining the tiny influences of hundreds or even thousands of SNPs on an observed trait, settling on a model that offers the best statistical fit to the data. A polygenic score then sums up in a single variable the effect of all those genes - even if the specific identity of those genes or their mechanism of action remains unknown. Once again, these scores can produce quite good evidence of a genetic influence in diseases - the evidence, so far, for behavioural influence remains much weaker.
Turkheimer remains a vocal critic of the GWAS approach. Apart from the significant problem that a polygenic score is a statistical construct divorced from any investigation of the physical mechanism of action, the use of large data sets and machine learning to construct models means the field is doing something akin to ‘p-hacking’ - combing through data until an algorithm finds a result of statistical significance. The GWAS methodology is similar to the data mining approach used by many tech firms - the sort of analysis that predicts that consumers who wear red shoes on Thursdays are x% more likely to buy your product - and shares a similar problem in terms of model selection and validity. The most serious problem with polygenic scores, according to Turkheimer, is that the confidence intervals are rarely reported. A polygenic score may give you an estimate of the influence of your genes on, say, academic performance, but within a fairly wide band. So the predictive validity of a polygenic score for any given individual may be low - these are first and foremost population statistics. Large groups of people with particular scores may on average display the predicted traits, but the likelihood that any one individual will develop it is low. They are - like racial stereotypes or gender norms - poor predictors of individual behaviour and unsuitable for use in public policy formation.
As the New Yorker piece makes clear, Harden has moved away from her mentor’s scepticism in recent years - by all accounts, The Genetic Lottery is optimistic about the potential of the GWAS approach. There are hints in the piece at Harden’s evolving views - as a southerner with an evangelical background, a political ‘pragmatist’, and a successful white woman unaccustomed to receiving pushback from her left Harden is trying to identify the middle ground of these arguments. She highlights the importance of the genetic influence on behaviour while disavowing the dark policy prescriptions of the likes of Charles Murray and the race science crowd. But I - and most others on the left - would be sceptical that this is a line that can be walked, and definitely reject DeBoer’s thesis that it must be walked in order for the left to achieve its goals.
We just love debating tactics, don’t we?
The default progressive position is that we should remedy all social and economic inequalities regardless of cause. It’s not that genes don’t matter, is that no source of inequality matters. If your standard of living is below the poverty line we should fix that immediately without making moral or scientific inquiries as to why that circumstance has arisen. The real debate, if there is to be one, between the hereditarian left and other progressives is ultimately one of tactics (and oh boy, does the left love debating tactics!). To quote Harden from the New Yorker: “If you want to help people, you have to know what’s most effective, so you need the science.” In other words, is the left making our job of social reform harder by ignoring the science, as Peter Singer believes? Harden’s - and particular DeBoer’s - central contention is that in a realistic political environment, with limited space for progressives to pursue their priorities and the need to persuade others, the genetic influence on behaviour is a relevant source of inequality that should be factored into policy-making. Most socialists, for their part, argue that the dominant source of inequality is social structures and that until those social structures are changed, other interventions are likely to fail.
So DeBoer argues that education reforms have historically failed because they failed to take the genetic influence on cognition seriously. But perhaps a more parsimonious socialist critique would be that centrist plans that heavily focused on punishing teachers as part of an ideological project to undermine public schools were poorly conceived from the start. Until we begin to make serious structural changes to the allocation of resources in society, we simply cannot say that the material environment is not a significant factor shaping life outcomes for individuals. DeBoer and Harden would likely respond that kind of political and social revolution is impossible, and that the better political tactic would be to argue on the basis of luck-egalitarianism that the genetically disadvantaged are not to blame for their poor life outcomes, and that the state has a role to play in compensating for such undeserved inequality. Maybe, in the short term, they’re right. Luck egalitarianism is a respectable liberal philosophical position. But as the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written, any liberalism that is predicated on the unlucky demonstrating their inferiority in order to receive aid from their social superiors undermines the promise of equal dignity at the heart of the liberal system. And given the innate human concern for relative social status, we’ve repeatedly seen that subaltern groups know and despise when elites treat them with pity - which in turn gives succour to reactionary forces.
Not just tactics - strategy
One of the most important political lessons I’ve learned - from the comms specialist Anat Shenkar Osorio - is that tactically sound decisions can be counterproductive in the long-term if they cede the framing of an issue to the right. Even if the hereditarian left was offering tactically sound advice - that interventions based on genetic influence on behaviour were more effective and more persuasive in moving people to support them - it would be strategically unsound. Because conservatives simply do not care about remedying social and economic inequalities. So when the hereditarian left argues that genes matter, they inevitably provide significant succour and support to the right, who can say “Yes, we agree, genes do matter, because they mean that some degree of hierarchy and inequality is natural and inevitable.” Which tends to put an end to movements for social reform.
I strongly suspect that the reason so much of the literature on genes and behaviour is focused on intelligence and academic performance is to, in some sense, legitimise and justify the liberal meritocratic ideal. Academic and journalistic elites - such as Harden, Pinker and DeBoer - are products of an education system that has granted them access to outsized social standing and influence. As the French economist Thomas Piketty has described, the Brahmin left values educational competition because they see their own achievements in that field as legitimising their social position. But if universities are just printing degrees for middle- and upper-class children whose parents paid their way through adolescence, then the Brahmin left’s social position - and the liberal meritocracy they promote - is in some sense illegitimate. For Pinker and the classical [right] liberal IDW crowd in particular, if academic achievement is sorting on the basis of something ‘real’ and unchangeable (i.e. genes), then the meritocratic hierarchy - Jordan Peterson’s hierarchy of talent - is legitimate and defensible.
Conservatives are simply uninterested in changing the status quo to remedy inequality. Whatever Harden and DeBoer may think, the right are not looking to be persuaded on this point, or to persuade others to implement egalitarian social policies. What they are looking for is evidence that legitimises and naturalises inequality and hierarchy, which in turn makes their job of resisting change and persuading others to resist change easier. So when the ‘hereditarian left’ argue that seeking change to social structures won’t be effective in eliminating inequality, or that certain inequalities are fixed and unalterable, they are doing the right’s work for them. So politically speaking, the genetic influence on behaviour doesn’t matter for the left because, in the first instance, we probably can’t make use of it, and in the second, doing so would actively aid our ideological opponents. Plenty of leftists can be and are interested in the science - myself included - and relish the intellectual opportunity to debate its merits. But it simply has no bearing on our politics other than being able to argue against the genetic essentialists and race realists. And that’s where Harden, Singer, DeBoer and their fellow travelers are gravely wrong. The hereditarian left is a dangerous, dead end.