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“This paper explores the evolution of hereditarianism in its various forms, examining its connections to racism and anti-egalitarian politics. A consistent theme is the belief in the potential for genetic explanations of social inequalities both within and between groups”

Hereditarianism: a century of the science of inequality - History and Philosophy of the Life SciencesHereditarianism, the belief that genetic factors significantly influence differences in behavioral traits and social outcomes, remains relevant in the age of polygenic embryo screening and social scie...link.springer.com

"Genetic Studies of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior: The Verdict Is In." My new Substack post on problematic genetic studies and theories of "criminal and antisocial behavior" in the social and political context. jayjoseph22.substack.com/p/genetic-st...

Genetic Studies of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior: The Verdict Is InThe Gene Illusion is a reader-supported publication.jayjoseph22.substack.com

Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin review 'The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture' by Dalton Conley. www.nybooks.com/articles/202... (it's a scathing critique)

Not in Your Genome | M.W. Feldman, Jessica RiskinGenerations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.www.nybooks.com

Brutal review, wow... "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy."

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of BooksKathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.lareviewofbooks.org

I always liked this one from Oscar Kempthorne www.jstor.org/stable/2529584

Well-motivated scientists will say it. Badly motivated determinists will say it. But it still won't work, because ultimately the explanation of human behavior is not a problem in genomic technology. /end

The reckoning will come at some point in the future when a new technology-- deep sequencing of most of the world's population or whatever-- becomes available. Ah, people will say, PGS didn't work, but now new technology is going to explain differences in human intelligence! /8

This column by @edsall about genetics and political science leaves me feeling like no one has been listening for the last 25 years. Despite being "heritable", mostly in the twin study sense, political attitudes are not genetic or innate. /1...

In the spirit of the question asked by @jgschraiber a couple days ago, why, in your heart of hearts, are SNP heritabilities so much lower than twin and family heritabilities?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/this-time-i-mean-it-the-naturenurture-debate-is-over/C7821543145B470D6AE8B77948AD51A5

And this one about the development of behavioral variability in inbred mice: https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.1235294?casa_token=Ai8ACj-0pJwAAAAA:pWWwJ5_u2vSLmMayyHjCbFnF3sLvsUQqecDjs_WXL-8o9n3zUwzByD7t4eebgWu093HEMUKJ0_J9fmU

Interesting paper showing development of behavioral variability in clonal fish. If this much diversity can develop in (a) identical (b) fish raised in (c) identical conditions, makes one think about tracing gene-behavior pathways in free-ranging humans. http://shorturl.at/hlzVY

Just Interviewed @ent3c.bsky.social on The Nature-Nurture debate here -- Check it out! www.youtube.com/live/xWeG2dh...

The Nature / Nurture Debate - Eric TurkheimerYouTube video by Digital Gnosiswww.youtube.com

Those hereditarian dreams-- ultimately dystopian-- are sinking under the surface of the gloomy prospect, just as happened with twin studies. What will remain afloat is good old-fashioned descriptive social science. We should appreciate it for the limited pleasures it offers. /end

https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/eric-turkheimer/files/genome_wide_association_8.pdf /end

Are all the post hoc analyses interesting? Maybe, I guess. But it confirms what I predicted a long time ago: the genomics of human behavior has not turned psychology and sociology into natural science; it has turned genomics into social science....

But that fundamental finding gets buried in a mountain of growth curves, mediation analyses, genetic correlations, and all of the other bells and whistles that behavioral GWAS has concocted to distract readers from the fundamentally null results. /10

All in all, this study showed that a polygenic score can account for about 1% of the within-family variance in occupational status. That is basically a way of saying that once confounds are properly accounted for, genetics makes no difference. /9

The problem reminds me a bit of my occasional disagreements with radical heritability skeptics. I don't think the best approach is to argue that rMZ isn't really higher than rDZ. That dog won't hunt. The important question is the meaning of the empirical observation. /4