All posts tagged: Genetics

Genes, Environment, and Luck: What We Can and Cannot Control

Published by Michael Shermer

Social justice activists have issued a challenge to “check your white privilege.” Inasmuch as I oppose the inherent racism ingrained in such expressions of Identity Politics, my initial replies were of a snarky nature, such as “It’s doing just fine, thank you.” But as I engaged the task more seriously it wasn’t my “white privilege” that I discovered so much as it was my good fortune. This led to my November 2017 column in Scientific American, in which I enumerated a few of the ways that luck has favored many people (myself included) that led to their success, much of which was not “earned” in the purist sense that conservatives conceive of it, in which the successful merited it and the unsuccessful deserved it. The deeper I looked into the matter of how lives turn out, in fact, the more I realized how much is out of our control. Let’s begin with a question: Why do some people succeed in life while others fail? Is it because they are naturally smarter and harder working, or …

Should We Use Genetic Technology to Boost Human Intelligence?

Published by Julien Delhez

Chinese researcher He Jiankui is now world-famous for having announced the creation of genetically-modified twins that would be resistant to HIV. He said that he edited the genomes of these twins with CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that makes it possible to target specific genes within a living organism. Everywhere, scientists and non-scientists alike reacted with astonishment. Most comments were negative, but not all were critical of gene editing per se. Julian Savulescu, the Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford who favors gene editing and embryo selection, released a press statement denouncing Jiankui’s decision to perform the experiment on healthy babies instead of on embryos that had fatal genetic diseases and would be certain to die in the absence of the intervention. He also pointed out that gene editing is still experimental and “capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer.” By contrast, Marcy Darnovsky, the Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society and a long standing critic of genetic editing, wrote: “In a time of resurgent …

What Does Genetic Research Tell Us About Equal Opportunity and Meritocracy?

Published by Robert Plomin

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from Robert Plomin’s new book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. For a review of Blueprint by Gregory Cochran, see here. For a piece by Toby Young on the book, and a wider discussion of social genomics and why it attracts the hostility of some academics, see here. If schools, parenting and our life experiences do not change who we are, what does this mean for society, especially for equality of opportunity and meritocracy? In particular, does it mean that the genetically rich will get richer and the poor poorer? Are genetic castes inevitable? What does this say about inequality? These questions have been bound up in the topic of meritocracy, which is not the same thing as equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means that people are treated similarly, for example, everyone is given equal access to educational resources. Meritocracy only comes in when there is selection, for example, for education and employment. Meritocracy means that selection is based on capability and competence rather than unfair criteria such …

Is Sociogenomics Racist?

Published by Toby Young

The publication of Blueprint (2018) by the behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin has revived the old debate about whether there’s something inherently racist or right-wing about looking for biological causes of human behavior. The subtitle of Plomin’s book—How DNA Makes Us Who We Are—makes it sound as if he’s a full-blooded hereditarian and that has led to a predictable outcry from long-standing opponents of this “dangerous” intersection where the natural sciences and the behavioral sciences meet. (To read an extract from Blueprint, click here.) To its opponents, sociogenomics—or social genomics—of which Plomin is a leading practitioner, sounds suspiciously like sociobiology. When the Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson published a book of that name in 1975, it was greeted with passionate opposition by a group of left-wing scientists who had assembled under the banner of ‘Science for the People,’ originally an anti-Vietnam War protest group. The biologists in that organization, several of whom Wilson had counted as friends up until this point, formed the ‘Sociobology Study Group’ and started firing off venomous letters to newspapers. For instance, a …