According to a new study reported in Science magazine fully 98% of all variation in educational attainment is accounted for by factors other than a person’s simple genetic makeup. This implies that most of student success is a consequence of potentially alterable social or environmental factors. However, their interest focused almost entirely on a different aspect of their findings: that three gene variants each contribute just 0.02% (one part in 5,000) to variation in educational attainment. Thus the final sentence of the summary concluded not with a plea to find effective ways to help all young people to reach their full potential but instead proposed that these three gene variants “provide promising candidate SNPs (DNA markers) for follow-up work”. Why concentrate on the unimpressive 0.02% and ignore the 98% effect?
An obvious reason is that the researchers were geneticists and therefore blinkered in their understanding of society a a whole.
An article on the Truth-Out website explored a deeper reason.
The research was part of a genetic epidemiology project called the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) that obtains its money almost entirely from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation, i.e. the US government.
The self-described funding premise of SSGAC is that:
“for most outcomes in life, over half the resemblance of two biological siblings reared in the same family stems from their genetic similarity”
In other words, SSGAC believed even before the research was published that inherited genetic predispositions make the dominant contribution to ones’ lifetime achievements, in education and apparently “most” spheres of human behavior. Consequently, the aim of all its projects is to physically locate these specific genetic factors on human DNA. But the actual result implies that such genetic predispositions are pretty much irrelevant, at least as far as educational attainment is concerned. SSGAC had previously searched for gene variants associated with “general intelligence”, and “economic and political preferences” (such as risk-aversion and trust). For all these traits the search was again unsuccessful; in only one instance did project members find a genetic variant that reached the threshold of statistical significance (which is itself far below what might be considered important as a predisposing factor.)
Why is the US government funding excessively genetic determinist projects such as this in the first place? Precise figures are not available, but over the last fifteen years close to half the budget of the NIH has gone to genetic analysis of human populations. That is likely in excess of $100 billion dollars in the US alone.
The probable answer is that the US has many problem. There is a danger that blame for these problems might be laid at the door of the nature of the society that creates these problems. This possibility can be neatly sidestepped, however, if they are proved to be genetically fated. In 2004 science writer John Horgan noted that unsuccessful searches have been made for “genes for”
"attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic depression, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, high IQ, male homosexuality, sadness, extroversion, introversion, novelty seeking, impulsivity, violent aggression, anxiety, anorexia, seasonal affective disorder, and pathological gambling." Since he compiled that list the field of “behavioral economics” has been added to the list of genetic searches. Thus there is operating within the disciplines of medicine, public health, social science, and now economics, a research framework that, if successful, would locate the causes of negative human outcomes internally. At fault will be genes and not circumstances. It is an officially sanctioned and scientific version of “blame the victim”.
Harvard Geneticist Richard Lewontin summed it up his 1992 book ‘The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology’:
“The notion that the lower classes are biologically inferior to the upper classes……..is meant to legitimate the structures of inequality in our society by putting a biological gloss on them”
Ascribing fault to genetic predispositions began in the 1960s with the tobacco industry at a time when smoking was first implicated in lung cancer. the tobacco industry by 1994 had awarded around 1,000 researchers £225 million ($370 million) to nurture research in human genetics. This tobacco research money was directed in particular to searches for genetic associations with lung cancer. The strategy was to sow uncertainty about the causes of lung cancer and create a credible alternative hypothesis to the fact that cigarette smoking caused cancers. They also pioneered ‘behavioral genetics’an idea that even addiction to cigarettes was a genetic phenomenon and little to do with the ingredients of a cigarette. The chemical industry, the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the gambling industry, now follow the same blame-shifting, culpability-avoiding PR exercise.
Scientific magazines and their editors and reviewers are clearly complicit in publishing misleading conclusions. Funding agencies are complicit in awarding public funds to speculative gene hunting projects at the expense of pressing public social questions. Science is essentially now a top-down project. There persists a romantic notion that science is a process of free enquiry. In reality, only a tiny proportion of research in biology gets done outside of straight-jackets imposed by funding agencies. Researchers design their projects around funding programs; universities organize their hiring around them. Individual scientists have negligible power within the system. Powerful political or commercial forces can set and direct the science agenda from above. In the case of medical genetics that power has been used to deform our understanding of what it mean to be human. Money has bought not only scientific ‘progress’ but the domination of intellectual enquiry to ensure political paralysis and the consolidation of economic power.
An obvious reason is that the researchers were geneticists and therefore blinkered in their understanding of society a a whole.
An article on the Truth-Out website explored a deeper reason.
The research was part of a genetic epidemiology project called the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) that obtains its money almost entirely from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation, i.e. the US government.
The self-described funding premise of SSGAC is that:
“for most outcomes in life, over half the resemblance of two biological siblings reared in the same family stems from their genetic similarity”
In other words, SSGAC believed even before the research was published that inherited genetic predispositions make the dominant contribution to ones’ lifetime achievements, in education and apparently “most” spheres of human behavior. Consequently, the aim of all its projects is to physically locate these specific genetic factors on human DNA. But the actual result implies that such genetic predispositions are pretty much irrelevant, at least as far as educational attainment is concerned. SSGAC had previously searched for gene variants associated with “general intelligence”, and “economic and political preferences” (such as risk-aversion and trust). For all these traits the search was again unsuccessful; in only one instance did project members find a genetic variant that reached the threshold of statistical significance (which is itself far below what might be considered important as a predisposing factor.)
Why is the US government funding excessively genetic determinist projects such as this in the first place? Precise figures are not available, but over the last fifteen years close to half the budget of the NIH has gone to genetic analysis of human populations. That is likely in excess of $100 billion dollars in the US alone.
The probable answer is that the US has many problem. There is a danger that blame for these problems might be laid at the door of the nature of the society that creates these problems. This possibility can be neatly sidestepped, however, if they are proved to be genetically fated. In 2004 science writer John Horgan noted that unsuccessful searches have been made for “genes for”
"attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic depression, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, high IQ, male homosexuality, sadness, extroversion, introversion, novelty seeking, impulsivity, violent aggression, anxiety, anorexia, seasonal affective disorder, and pathological gambling." Since he compiled that list the field of “behavioral economics” has been added to the list of genetic searches. Thus there is operating within the disciplines of medicine, public health, social science, and now economics, a research framework that, if successful, would locate the causes of negative human outcomes internally. At fault will be genes and not circumstances. It is an officially sanctioned and scientific version of “blame the victim”.
Harvard Geneticist Richard Lewontin summed it up his 1992 book ‘The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology’:
“The notion that the lower classes are biologically inferior to the upper classes……..is meant to legitimate the structures of inequality in our society by putting a biological gloss on them”
Ascribing fault to genetic predispositions began in the 1960s with the tobacco industry at a time when smoking was first implicated in lung cancer. the tobacco industry by 1994 had awarded around 1,000 researchers £225 million ($370 million) to nurture research in human genetics. This tobacco research money was directed in particular to searches for genetic associations with lung cancer. The strategy was to sow uncertainty about the causes of lung cancer and create a credible alternative hypothesis to the fact that cigarette smoking caused cancers. They also pioneered ‘behavioral genetics’an idea that even addiction to cigarettes was a genetic phenomenon and little to do with the ingredients of a cigarette. The chemical industry, the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the gambling industry, now follow the same blame-shifting, culpability-avoiding PR exercise.
Scientific magazines and their editors and reviewers are clearly complicit in publishing misleading conclusions. Funding agencies are complicit in awarding public funds to speculative gene hunting projects at the expense of pressing public social questions. Science is essentially now a top-down project. There persists a romantic notion that science is a process of free enquiry. In reality, only a tiny proportion of research in biology gets done outside of straight-jackets imposed by funding agencies. Researchers design their projects around funding programs; universities organize their hiring around them. Individual scientists have negligible power within the system. Powerful political or commercial forces can set and direct the science agenda from above. In the case of medical genetics that power has been used to deform our understanding of what it mean to be human. Money has bought not only scientific ‘progress’ but the domination of intellectual enquiry to ensure political paralysis and the consolidation of economic power.
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