We know that countries can change (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-as-a-berserker), and change rapidly even within a generation. So the notion that genetics is absolutely dominant is clearly wrong. My feeling is that while perhaps genetics is a major (or even the main) factor in intelligence and personality, this only leads to a predisposition towards behaviours. Raise someone in 9th century Sweden and they'll become a marauding Viking, raise them in 21st century Sweden and they wouldn't even dream of stealing from Ikea. The external environment dominates what they actually do, even if genetics enables what they're capable of doing.
Although Plomin frequently uses more civil, progressive language than did his predecessors, the book’s message is vintage genetic determinism: “DNA isn’t all that matters but it matters more than everything else put together”. “Nice parents have nice children because they are all nice genetically.” And it’s not just any nucleic acid that matters; it is human chromosomal DNA. Sorry, microbiologists, epigeneticists, RNA experts, developmental biologists: you’re not part of Plomin’s picture.
The scientific advance this time is the genome-wide association study (GWAS). Invented in 1996, GWAS has gained massively in predictive power with the advent of ‘polygenic scores’, a statistical tool that in recent years has lured social scientists to the genome, with the promise of genetic explanations for complex traits, such as voting behaviour or investment strategies. As Plomin notes, it was something they had been trying to do for a long time.
Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so. But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait.
Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”.
Originally shared by Event Horizon
Clippetty cloppetty clippetty cloppetty clippetty clop...
Genetic Determinism rides again.
See also:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nature-not-nurture-after-all-genetics-robert-plomin-polygenic-testing
#psychology
#genetics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5
Professor Sapolsky would disagree. And prove it...
ReplyDeleteDisagree with which part ?
ReplyDeleteAnyone who actually knows what genes do laughs at such determinism.
ReplyDeleteGenes code for RNA.
It is a chemical process, and as such necessarily imprecise. It's like cooking. The results are somewhat predictable because the scale is really big.
The genes do not "know" what they code for, nor do they "know" the outcomes, and apart from blind selection, there is no process that ever connects the outcomes to genes in any way.
To equate that with minuscule control of outcomes requires ignorance or ideological preconceptions.
Yes, I think environment plays a huge role.
ReplyDelete