I think it's clear that behavioral genetics is attractive to racists as a means of smuggling their beliefs into the mainstream. And it's clear that many allegedly non-racists have no qualms about working with, promoting or befriending hardcore racists like Razib Khan, as discussed in Part 7 of "What happened to Adam Rutherford."
The Rutherford paper does discuss this problem, but only in the past tense:
Scientific research exploring connections between genetics and socio-economic success has a turbulent and controversial history.
During the sixteenth century, early ideas about biological heredity were influenced by legal concepts of cross-generational inheritance of property and wealth. The concept of heritability began to be formalized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the light of the work of Mendel and Darwin, which revealed the laws of inheritance and mechanisms of evolution. Charles Darwin's half-cousin, Francis Galton, explored the heritability of traits linked to merit and socio-economic success in his book, Hereditary Genius (1869). In this period, a prelude to the emergence of the field of genetics, Galton and his followers put more emphasis on 'nature' than on nurture. In his book, Galton applied statistics to show that offspring of'eminent' figures had a higher chance of succeeding in what were perceived to be high-profile professions 1 Inspired by these findings, Galton became a proponent of improving what became known as the 'genetic quality' of a population through selective parenthood, thus initiating and spearheading the emerging eugenics movement. This movement became widely supported in many countries across the world and across the political spectrum by established intellectuals and medical authorities'°. Eugenics proponents intended to explore and enact policies that would increase the overall well-being of majority populations or dominant social groups, but inevitably at the expense of others who were deemed economically costly or socially undesirable and who suffered stigmatization and persecution as a result. In many cases, eugenic ideas resulted in state-sponsored violence against marginalized groups, primarily via enforced or coerced sterilization. [33-35] The destructive power of the eugenics movement reached genocidal levels in the Second World War, after which its public support declined. The legacy of involuntary sterilization is still detectable, with population register data revealing that individuals categorized with severe mental and physical disabilities (up to 1970 in Finland and 1976 in Sweden) often remained childless36 Enforced or coercive sterilization continues in several countries to this day, including China and India, the two most populous countries on Earth, often targeting lower socio-economic groups as a means of population control. In the second half of the twentieth century, the scientific field of heredity became largely decoupled from social applications in most countries and made progress through decades of twin and family studies. [37]
In addition to the paper using past tense as if "connections between genetics and socio-economic success" is no longer controversial, it also fails to mention that the eugenics movement was not just morally reprehensible but scientifically bogus, as Jay Joseph noted on Bluesky.
Reference 37 goes to a paper, Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies that was co-authored by Visscher, one of the co-authors of the Rutherford paper.
Not only Visscher but two other co-authors of the paper, Danielle Posthuma and Christiaan A de Leeuw, have participated in annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research, which, as all its annual meetings do, featured a number of committed racists. For example Posthuma participated in the 2007 annual meeting in Amsterdam which also included as participants Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson and many other hardcore racist hereditarians. Jean-Phillipe Rushton presented a co-authored paper "International Differences in Intelligence Symposium: Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Group Differences on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Estimated from Twins Reared Together and Apart."
So let's talk about twin studies.
Clinical psychologist Jay Joseph has been analyzing twin studies for over twenty years and ten years ago he published a book: "The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences" which is where I got the title of this blog post from. He had determined that twin studies provide no valid evidence in favor of genetic influences on human behavioral differences, which Turkheimer called "science denial." In his response Joseph said:
Criticism of behavioral genetic research strengthens science, since good science is greatly served by rejecting and casting out bad science such as the classical twin method and all TRA [twins reared apart] studies published to date - from its ranks. On the other hand, leading behavioral geneticists and psychiatric geneticists refuse to recognize that decades of failed behavioral gene discovery attempts constitute a scientific finding that such genes are unlikely to exist. This, one could argue, is real science denial (Joseph, 2015b, emphasis in original).
The refusal of the field of behavioral genetics to admit to failures was something I had noticed before, but I hadn't studied the issue for as long or as thoroughly as Joseph. It's good to see he confirms my impression.
More recently in his Behavioral Genetics on the Brink: A Review of Eric Turkheimer’s Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate, Joseph writes:
Twin studies and accompanying heritability estimates supply the foundations of behavioral and psychiatric genetic theories and supposed "big findings" (see Kendler & Prescott, 2006; Plomin et al., 2016). Without twin studies, these fields would barely exist. Neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell and a colleague wrote in 2009, "Familiality and twin concordance data are the bedrock on which all psychiatric genetics, including GWAS [genome-wide association study], is based and justified" (Mitchell & Porteous, 2009, p. 740). However, the bedrock is cracking.
This article The myth of mirrored twins, published in Aeon by Gavin Evans discusses the very weak basis for the bold claims made by hereditarians about twins (my highlight):
The main method of twins-based research is to compare dizygotic (DZ), or two-egg ‘fraternal’ twins, with monozygotic (MZ), or one egg ‘identical’ twins... The basis of this approach is the assumption that both groups share their environments to the same extent, but that, because fraternal twins share only half their sibling’s genes, if they show greater variation, the cause must be genetic, so it becomes possible to attach a heritability figure to it.An example of this kind of study, involving a national sample of 11,117 twins, prompted The Guardian headline in 2013: ‘Genetics Accounts For More Than Half Of Variation In Exam Results’. Towards the end of their paper, the study’s authors noted a potential methodological drawback: to wit, ‘the equal-environments assumption – that environmentally caused similarity is equal for MZ and DZ twins’. Acknowledging the problem didn’t stop them making bold claims about the genetic contribution to exam performance. But the problem is profound, undermining hereditary claims when it comes to social studies.
Evans explains why racist hereditarians love twin studies so much (my link and highlights):
The next big wave of studies of separated twins came from the stable of Bouchard, the hereditarian behind the ‘Jim Twins’ revelations. Bouchard was attracted to race science and, in 1994, he publicly endorsed a document drawn up by the race science promoter Linda Gottfredson: ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’. Its purpose was to back Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve (1994), which argued that poverty was caused by low IQ and that this was the reason why there were more poor Black people. Bouchard also wrote an enthusiastic endorsement for an overtly racist book called Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) by the Canadian psychologist J Philippe Rushton. Bouchard received financial backing for his twin studies from the Pioneer Fund, set up in 1937 by Nazi supporters. The Fund maintained its policy of promoting research in eugenics and ‘race betterment’.Race science promoters were drawn to twin studies because they thought that, if it could be shown that IQ was highly heritable, then different IQ averages between population groups could be portrayed as innate. But this assumption misunderstands heritability, which speaks to the degree of variation in a trait directly caused by genes within a population, never between populations. This can be illustrated using something far more heritable than IQ: height. Two populations with the same gene profile might have different height averages for environmental reasons. For instance, South Koreans are up to 8 cm taller than North Koreans because of better nutrition over several generations. In the same way, two populations might have different IQ averages owing entirely to environmental factors – something that Bouchard’s backers failed to appreciate.Using Pioneer Fund money, Bouchard’s Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research built up its larder of twins raised apart, inviting them in for a battery of interviews and tests. His research team ended up grilling 81 pairs of identical twins and 56 pairs of fraternals. Bouchard’s results must have delighted his sponsors because he said adult IQ was 70 per cent heritable (later he opted for an overall figure of 50 per cent). But his methods and conclusions did not impress other researchers. One problem was self-selection. His identical twins had known each other for an average of nearly two years before contacting him; some had known each other as young children; and it seems likely that those who were most alike were most likely to contact him. Kamin, the professor who rumbled Burt’s fraudulent studies, and his colleague said there was pressure on the twins to come up with cute stories, and that Bouchard’s studies had ‘a number of serious problems in the design, reporting, and analyses’.
The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) gave Bouchard its lifetime achievement award in 2010. ISIR loves Gottfredson's document "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" so much they include it in the resources section of their website, referring to it as a "classic."
Since its glory days of funding twin studies, the Pioneer Fund's money has been dispersed to neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation.
In his review of Kathryn Paige Harden's book "The Genetic Lottery" psychiatrist Steven Pittelli notes the weakness of twin studies and addresses another issue that occurred to me, which is why I noted Adam Rutherford's class background in part 5. Pittelli writes: (my highlights and bold):
The problem here is that you add nothing to the argument by pedantically looking at the genetic variants that are found in different social classes. Of course you will find genetic variants that are more or less frequent due to long-standing population stratification, but are you really doing anything more than correlating Italians to pizza and Koreans to chopsticks? I contend that you are not and Harden and others in the field, all highly educated, and mostly from privileged backgrounds, should be wary of doing such self-affirming research on educational attainment. Believing that people within these privileged classes have actual genetic variants that allow them to be “... smart and curious and hard-working,” in some way that confers educational attainment is blind to both common sense and the obvious realities of the society we (and the UK, where many of these studies arise) live in. Although Harden does acknowledge some of the factors leading to this kind of confounding in genetic studies, she tries to make the case that these factors can be weeded out, leaving us with only the good stuff.There are a number of problems with this claim. The first is that the claimed high heritability of a trait like “educational attainment,” like other behavioral traits, was divined by twin studies, which Harden defends, but these studies are simply not confirmed by actual genetic studies, which find miniscule heritability by comparison. This leaves behavioral geneticists to flailingly suggest that there is “missing heritability” still to be found. Harden attempts to explain this as being due to “...particularly rare genetic variants which might have especially large effects.” In other words, the genetic variants that aren’t common enough to be picked up in a GWAS genetic study just happen to have all the missing heritability. There is no evidence to support this and, frankly, it smacks of desperation.Thus, we have the circular argument that keeps the field of behavioral genetics alive: The heritability of a trait seen in twin studies proves there is a genetic basis for that trait, and the fact that we are not able to confirm twin studies via genetic studies shows only that we haven’t found the genes we expected yet, but we know must exist because of twin studies. Such circular assumptions are then presented as established science. For example, Harden claims as fact that behavioral traits are “polygenic”:
“Schizophrenia and autism and depression and obesity and educational attainment are not associated with one gene. They are not associated with even a dozen different SNPs. They are polygenic - associated with thousands upon thousands of SNP’s [genetic variants] scattered all throughout a person’s genome.”
These contradictory assumptions leave us with a “polygenic” model with thousands of genetic variants adding up to a tiny bit of heritability, and unidentified “rare variants,” to be found at a later date, accounting for the remaining huge chunks of missing heritability. This is simply wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking appears to dominate behavioral genetics, as I noted with Charles Murray in part 5.
To my great amusement, while reviewing Pittelli's blog, I noticed he features a quote from Abdel Abdellaoui, calling, I assume Pittelli's blog, "A far left hate blog."
From the side-bar of Pittelli's blog
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More and more I wonder exactly how deep Abdellaoui's connections go into the world of far-right race pseudoscience.
You don't have to go far to find racists using twin studies to support their ethnic essentialist beliefs, as in a paper published in 2014, DEMONSTRATING THE VALIDITY OF TWIN RESEARCH IN CRIMINOLOGY.
I've written about biosocial criminology on Pinkerite and so I recognize most of the author names on the paper. And I know how deeply racist biosocial criminology is, most clearly stated by John Paul Wright in his contribution to Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research published in 2008:
Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially.
Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality.The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.
Another co-author, Brian Boutwell has written articles in racist Quillette with white nationalist Bo Winegard, eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly and racist blogger Razib Khan.
In 2023 Undark magazine noted how important racist Jean-Phillipe Ruston is to biosocial criminologists:
Still, for years, Rushton’s work was cited in the biosocial criminology literature. In the 2015 paper, the researchers drew on Rushton to speculate that this evolutionary path could help explain racial disparities in convictions.Later that year, the lead author of the paper, Brian Boutwell, took to the right-wing magazine Quillette to complain that biosocial criminologists were being shunned by their colleagues. Around that time, Boutwell and one of his co-authors on the paper, Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver, appeared separately on the show of alt-right podcaster Stefan Molyneux to talk about the links between crime, biology, and race. (Wright, one of the Cincinnati professors, appeared on the show too.)Shunned or not, the authors of the paper maintained active careers. Boutwell is now an associate professor at the University of Mississippi. One of his co-authors, J.C. Barnes, was until recently the chair of the Biopsychosocial Criminology division of the American Society of Criminology. Another co-author, Beaver, now directs the Biosocial Criminology Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University, and he maintains an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. (Beaver did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Boutwell co-authored a paper with ISIR board member Emily Willoughby and Tinca JC Polderman.
Polderman along with three ISIR meeting participants are co-authors of Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies, which is reference 37 in the Rutherford paper, mentioned above.
So we've established two things about twin studies:
1. they are flimsy but behavioral geneticists won't stop using them anyway and;
2. racists use them with the ultimate goal of claiming that Black people are innately less intelligent and more criminal than other "races." And not some time in the distant past but right now.
This is why it helps nobody except racists when Adam Rutherford writes an op-ed that claims that "the trajectory of genetics has been one that tends towards progress, and equity for all" while at the same time attacking those who point out the fact that the field of behavioral genetics is a welcoming, comfortable home for professional, politically motivated racists like Guy Madison, Rosalind Arden, Geoffrey Miller, Tobias Wolfram, Razib Khan and the leaders of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) and Quillette, who absolutely will use behavioral genetics claims to support, as Rosalind Arden calls it, "the genetic hypothesis" on race.
There is plenty to criticize about behavioral genetics, from the flimsiness of twin studies to the frequent misuse of the concept of "heritability" to the failure of GWAS studies to prove actual genetic causation of socio-economic status, to the extreme way its proponents downplay or ignore environmental factors, to the indisputable evidence that racists have completely permeated behavioral genetics.
So what happened to Adam Rutherford to make him so hostile to the many people who criticize it? And why does he use the force of his celebrity intellectual career devoted to popularizing science to popularize behavioral genetics?
Finally the last part:
