So in Part 8 we talked about the flimsiness of twin studies, which are considered by many to be the basis of behavioral genetics. Jay Joseph, who has studied them for decades believes that without twin studies, behavioral genetics would barely exist.
So what happened to Adam Ruthford to make him start promoting behavioral genetics with all the power of his celebrity intellectual status?
SURPRISE! Nothing happened, he's been promoting behavioral genetics for a long time, and I just failed to notice. Perhaps I was thrown off by his personal charisma and that plummy British-accented voice. I could listen to him read the phone book, if we still had phone books.
And he's opposed to racism, so how could I possibly criticize him for his support for behavioral genetics?
Well as we've discussed in this series there are many problems with behavioral genetics including:
- It takes the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology quite seriously;
- It is based on very flimsy twin studies;
- It routinely misuses or confuses the concept of "heritability";
- It promotes the idea that we live in a meritocracy and therefore environmental factors no longer impact socio-economic status so genes must;
- It has proven nothing about actual genetic causation of socio-economic status but its proponents keep making big claims anyway, based on subjectively-organized "associations";
- And its entire history - from eugenics to sociobiology to the present is informed by - perhaps even dominated by - racists, who work with and ally with promoters of behavioral genetics including the authors of the Rutherford paper "Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences."
The genetics of IQ
(Ewan) Birney is the leading expert not just in genetics, but also in fighting racism. In October 2019, Birney published a blog post, which he coauthored with his geneticist colleagues Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford and Aylwyn Scally: Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer.
While strongly denouncing racism and race theories, the authors move to the topic of intelligence, as measured by the IQ, and its heredity. They write:
“Although an IQ score is far from a perfect measure, it does an excellent job of correlating with, and predicting, many educational, occupational, and health-related outcomes.”
The authors protest the notion of IQ differences among different human population, which classic racists (including some of their own scientific peers) keep asserting. But they warn that IQ is inherited genetically, which is unfortunately also a central dogma to scientific racism:
“The Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) is a powerful tool for finding genetic variants associated with all sorts of human traits. GWAS researchers take a group of people with differing values or levels of a trait of interest, and scan their whole genomes to look for specific sections of DNA where their genetic variation correlates with their variation in the trait. […]When it comes to a trait as complex as cognitive abilities, there is nothing genetically unusual or special about measures of intelligence such as IQ. Just like other complex traits discussed above (such as height or disease susceptibility) measures of cognitive ability are related to thousands of different genetic variants, each of which may play small but significant roles in brain development and function, or any number of other biological processes that are involved in a person’s cognitive abilities.IQ scores are heritable: that is, within populations, genetic variation is related to variation in the trait.“
How to argue with eugenist
Which brings me to that recent Hill et al Nature Communications 2019 paper by Ian Deary and colleagues, which Birney is such a staunch defender of. I wrote about that paper before, and have found more interesting information which I will present later below. The authors around the Edinburgh psychology professor Ian Deary analysed human genetic data from UK Biobank (which holds information on half a million of volunteer participants) to determine that economical attainment, i.e., wealth or, if you prefer, poverty, is encoded in your genes.How so? IQ is heritable, and IQ is directly causal for educational attainment (i.e. Oxbridge degrees) and wealth. The fact that so few wealthy elite university graduates in UK and USA are non-white can be explained by… Obviously these populations have low IQ genes, what else, right? I mean, it’s just science.A key coauthor of the Hill et al Nature Communications 2019 paper is Stuart Ritchie, an Edinburgh University graduate. Ritchie used to be a mentee of Robert Plomin, the US psychologist who has been finding genes for IQ for decades already while having much tolerance for outright racist peers like Arthur Jensen. Ritchie seems also to be a personal friend or maybe just a protege of Birney’s, and is now lecturer at King’s College London, with best academic career prospects. More recently, Ritchie wrote a book about scientific bias, which is about to come out now. Basically, someone who peddles pretend-scientific crypto-eugenics is now the highest research ethics authority in psychology and human genetics.
Stuart Ritchie is known for being politically anti-trans and is firmly a part of the race pseudoscience gang, promoting his work via racist Razib Khan and known for teaming up (including just this week) with infamous anti-trans ghoul Jesse Singal who is a long-time ally of Razib Khan.
And of course - of course! - Ritchie has published in ultra-racist Quillette.
Deary, Plomin and Ritchie have all participated in racist-stuffed annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research, six for Ritchie, seventeen for Deary and eighteen for Plomin.
Both Plomin and Deary were cited by the Buffalo mass-murderer in his manifesto. For some reason they were ignored in the New York Times article about Michael A. Woodley's work being cited in the manifesto, which got Woodley called a racist by the New York Times.
There's a great article about Plomin, Softly, softly by researcher David Gillborn, in which Plomin admits the stealthy fashion in which believers in race pseudoscience promote their work:
Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:
‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]
Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods.
Obviously Murray, Gottfredson, Jensen, Lynn and Rushton have all participated in annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research.
In the same paper, Gilborn demonstrates that Adam Rutherford was promoting behavioral genetics since (at least) 2014:
The difference between little Johnnie’s and little Jimmy’s grades has a significant basis in their DNA. The inheritance of intelligence is such an emotive subject it’s almost impossible to have a rational discussion about it. But surely it’s time for this science to emerge from its cloud of suspicion? The flury of ire is present, of course, and you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
Adam Rutherford (BBC Radio 4, 2014, original emphasis)[17]
The last sentence reminds me of Steven Pinker's remark that to deny race pseudoscience is to deny reality itself.
A favorite tactic of promoters of behavioral genetics is to claim that critics are simply anti-science as Kathryn Paige Harden did in her response to the review of her book The Genetic Lottery:
Finally, Harden asks whether we reject the psychological and behavioral sciences altogether. We don’t: we reject those areas of the psychological and behavioral sciences that claim a spurious reduction of complex social phenomena to genes. Happily, we know that some researchers in the area are pursuing better, less reductionist lines of research. The intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of people in social situations aren’t fixed and distinct but are continually shaping and transforming one another, so that there’s no fact of the matter about which causes what. It’s not that these situations are too complex for us to figure out how much is intrinsic and how much extrinsic, but that the question itself is meaningless. How much is the California coastline due to the Pacific Ocean and how much to the North American continent?
Back to the Gillborn article (my highlight):
The quotation above is how Adam Rutherford, an evolutionary biologist, ended the first of a three-part series that he presented on BBC radio in the spring of 2014 – a further example of the explosion of popular interest in the genetics of education that followed the events outlined in Part I (above). The quotation perfectly captures the dominant trope in public discussions of the issues; the ‘inheritance of intelligence’ is presented as a scientific fact that explains differences in individual achievement; critics of this view are assumed to be non-scientists driven by emotion. In this part of the paper I turn from an analysis of how race and racism feature in current debates, and consider the underlying ‘science’ itself. When the key concepts (such as ‘heritability’) and methods (twin studies) are scrutinized, their claims to scientific rigour and significance begin to crumble.
There are those problems with 'heritability' and twin studies again.
After doing this series on Adam Rutherford for the past month or so, I think that it's reasonable of Steve Pittelli to write: The Question That Must Be Asked: Is Behavioral Genetics a Null Field?
I think behavioral genetics will go the way of string theory. Which gives me another chance to promote the Youtube channel of physicist Angela Collier. She did a video on the public response to string theory.
String theory fell out of fashion because it could not be falsified.
But at least string theory wasn't relentlessly promoted by hardcore, politically-motivated racists.
You can understand the motivation behind Rutherford & friends to wish to obliterate all criticism of behavioral genetics, since they've spent so much time and staked so much professional reputation on it.
So it is with some irony that I accept this honour in a lecture where I am about to describe Voltaire as a hideous racist. A grotesque purveyor of insidious, ill researched opinion dressed up with the authority of celebrity...
Watson has said that he is “not a racist in a conventional way”. But he told the Sunday Times in 2007 that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true." Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds like bog-standard, run-of-the-mill racism to me.And this current whinge bemoans a new poverty born of his pariah status. Apart “from my academic income”, he says, Watson is condemned to a miserly wage that prevents him from buying a David Hockney painting.His comments reveal a pernicious character entirely unrelated to his scientific greatness, but that is longstanding and not new. Watson is rightly venerated for being half of the pair, along with Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, and for leading the Human Genome Project. The story of the unveiling of the double helix is messy and complex, just like all biology. It has been pored over and studied and embellished and mythologised. But simply, the race was won by Crick and Watson, and in April 1953 they revealed to the world the iconic double helix. The key evidence, however, Photo 51, was produced by Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling, at King‟s College London. Franklin‟s skill at the technique known as X-ray crystallography was profound, and was indubitably essential to the discovery. Crick and Watson acquired the photo without her knowledge.With their unique insight and vision, Crick and Watson deserve their Nobel gongs. Contrary to some narratives, Franklin was not overlooked in this accolade. The rules are quite clear: Nobels are not awarded posthumously. Franklin had died from cancer aged just 37, in 1958, four years before the Nobel committee recognised what is undoubtedly one of the most significant scientific advances of the 20th or any century.With Nobels, we put people on pedestals and gift them platforms to say whatever they like. Here, they represent science, but contrary to stereotype, there isn't a typical scientist. We're just people.
...we can't ignore the fact as well that he was sort of overtly sexist. At least in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, which became a bestseller and said, how does that play into is sort of the way we perceive Feynman now 100 years after his birth?
Simply pointing out these parts of Feynman’s life and character is like sending up a bat signal to science bros everywhere —a call to defend one of their heroes. After years of writing feminist critiques of science online, I am well versed in the vitriol that comes along with critiquing favored male scientists, but mentions of Feynman seem to hit a particular nerve. A cult of personality has cropped up around him that allows white male scientists to see themselves in him. In 1984, People magazine called “Surely You’re Joking”—the same book that recounts his adventures as a pick-up artist—“irreverent” and noted that Feynman’s unbuttoned memoir “gives nerds a good name.” Sheldon Cooper in the TV show The Big Bang Theory idolizes Feynman and plays the bongos in his honor, which feeds into the larger “adorkable misogyny” M.O. of the show. The recent Nature piece casts him as a “wild-nonconformist.” This type of representation gives Feynman’s seedier side a pass, or in the case of the People article, even implies that it’s something of a cultural virtue.
