The significance of (looking for) genes for educational achievement
A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate. Estimated effects sizes are small (coefficient of determination R2 ≈ 0.02%), approximately 1 month of schooling per allele. A linear polygenic score from all measured SNPs accounts for ≈2% of the variance in both educational attainment and cognitive function.Dan Graur (of Encode critique fame) sums up the import of this paper very nicely, in 12 languages even, here. Here's the gist of his argument:
The German-born American Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously proclaimed that “God is in the details.” So, let us look carefully at the findings. All the 2,515,021 autosomal SNPs explain 2% of the variation. The largest estimated SNP effect size was 0.02%. Thus, the best genetic variant in the population explains 0.02% of the variation, and the addition of 2.5 million SNPs only adds 1.98%. By extrapolation, using the entire genome, would optimistically explain 3% of the variation in educational attainment.
I was positively floored with excitement.His multi-lingual critique?
In the following, I shall attempt to summarize the findings of this study in all the languages of all the authors of this article: niets, nothing, mitte midagi, nix, ei mitään, ingenting (Norwegian), ingenting (Swedish), rien, ekkert, niente, τίποτα, and لا شيء.Graur being Graur here, but he does have a point. The amount of variation explained is on the low end--even for GWAS!--so it's pretty clear that Science didn't publish this thing for its scientific impact. They published it, surely, for its splash factor. Evolutionary psychologists, behavioral geneticists and so forth will gush they're finally making headway: Now we're beginning to see the real truth about human intelligence! Finger-pointing at generations of IQ-testing naysayers. And think of the billions of dollars they'll demand to follow up these strikingly powerful results.
We have often criticized the spending of public money on genetic studies of traits or diseases for which environmental influences are much more significant -- heart disease, asthma, some psychiatric diseases, stroke, and so on, and educational attainment is surely another such trait. Even just from a genetic point of view, the contributions of specific genes are generally environment and context dependent, and individually trivially uninformative. Taken to an extreme, imagine someone with no opportunity to attend school at all, or to go to college -- no matter his or her genetic make-up, and let's even suppose it's completely determinative, this person will not reach his or her genetically determined potential.
Other factors
At the same time that this study appeared, a paper was published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, reporting on a factor with a large effect on social mobility. Analysis of data from the 1950s and 70s in Britain suggests that infants who were breast fed were 24% more likely to have moved up the social ladder (their job in adulthood compared with their father's job when the subjects were age 10 or 11), and 20% less likely to have moved down.
The authors suggest that breast feeding is associated with improvements in neurological development, cognitive improvement and emotional stability. They controlled for selection bias influencing who chooses to breast feed, so presumably it's not confounding variables that explain their results.
Maybe. But whatever it is that increases social mobility, whether it's breast feeding itself, or something associated with it, or even something unmeasured, something does, and it's unlikely to be genes for social mobility (or educational attainment, which is highly correlated with social mobility). For whatever reason, breast fed kids are 24% more likely to move up the social ladder -- that swamps the effect of whatever alleles reported by the educational attainment GWAS. Reinforcing the idea that whatever genetic component there is to winning the social race, it's miniscule compared with social and environmental factors. But will such papers, not heralded and published in Science, have any tempering effect? Unlikely.
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| Elementary school classroom, USA; Wikimedia |
The morality of such studies
There are a number of issues that acceptance of such a study, much less acting on it or hyping it as important, raises. Such studies have societal impact of all sorts. They can affect how funds are spent and how people are viewed in terms of their inherent worth. Many scientists, especially those benefiting from the grant largesse (and this is not too harsh a way to put it) take the standard amoral position and say that these are issues for society to decide, and of course we must do more and bigger studies of this subject. Science is about finding the facts. You can't outlaw what you don't like about the real world, and the facts are what they are. Science's job is to find the facts. Leave us alone and go make your own social judgments in the political arena.
We'd like to suggest that studies of the genetics of intelligence are not just convenient abstract amorality. They are dangerously immoral. Just as GWAS of diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, that take the focus off lifestyle which clearly has a large effect on risk of disease, emphasis on the genetics of intelligence takes the responsibility from society to ensure that each child meets his or her intellectual potential.
It is hard to imagine that this study isn't going to be just one of many more. While we don't think they will ever find much of significance, others believe otherwise, and one can't dismiss the likelihood that they will, or are eager to, interpret them differently. Indeed, GWAS believers have declared victory with studies of many other traits where we see pretty trivial results. But studies of the genetics of intelligence are almost certainly to be used to evaluate people's inherent intellectual worth -- the most fundamental worth, criteria that have widespread formal and informal use in our society
We aren't the only people to worry about a new era of intolerance. Voting rights are being challenged in the US. How long will it be before we see a new era of using such data for group characterizations whether formally or not--that is, racial judgment based on 'scientific' documentation of different average inherent mental abilities? And similar conclusions are always waiting in the wings to be used between as well as within nations. Have we not learned the disastrous lessons of the eugenic era in the last century? If you think this time it's different, then you haven't read enough of what was written a century ago.
This kind of non-sensical study should not have been funded, and should not be published in a major journal as if it were more than a non-result gussied up to seem profound. We may not be able to censor research formally, but we don't, as a society, have to pay for it.
One might say that this is a heavy duty over-reaction on our part, to a rather bland (if hyped) study that found hardly anything at all. Why get all heated up and panicky about a return to biological rationales for segregation (and worse)? Our response is that, as the Germans learned in the 1930s and later wrote widely about, the time to keep the horse in the barn is before it has inched its way out, one un-noticed step at a time. But lessons have been forgotten, and distant amorality is again offered, often with pious expressions of benign intent (again, as they were a century ago).
There are a number of issues that acceptance of such a study, much less acting on it or hyping it as important, raises. Such studies have societal impact of all sorts. They can affect how funds are spent and how people are viewed in terms of their inherent worth. Many scientists, especially those benefiting from the grant largesse (and this is not too harsh a way to put it) take the standard amoral position and say that these are issues for society to decide, and of course we must do more and bigger studies of this subject. Science is about finding the facts. You can't outlaw what you don't like about the real world, and the facts are what they are. Science's job is to find the facts. Leave us alone and go make your own social judgments in the political arena.
We'd like to suggest that studies of the genetics of intelligence are not just convenient abstract amorality. They are dangerously immoral. Just as GWAS of diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, that take the focus off lifestyle which clearly has a large effect on risk of disease, emphasis on the genetics of intelligence takes the responsibility from society to ensure that each child meets his or her intellectual potential.
It is hard to imagine that this study isn't going to be just one of many more. While we don't think they will ever find much of significance, others believe otherwise, and one can't dismiss the likelihood that they will, or are eager to, interpret them differently. Indeed, GWAS believers have declared victory with studies of many other traits where we see pretty trivial results. But studies of the genetics of intelligence are almost certainly to be used to evaluate people's inherent intellectual worth -- the most fundamental worth, criteria that have widespread formal and informal use in our society
We aren't the only people to worry about a new era of intolerance. Voting rights are being challenged in the US. How long will it be before we see a new era of using such data for group characterizations whether formally or not--that is, racial judgment based on 'scientific' documentation of different average inherent mental abilities? And similar conclusions are always waiting in the wings to be used between as well as within nations. Have we not learned the disastrous lessons of the eugenic era in the last century? If you think this time it's different, then you haven't read enough of what was written a century ago.
This kind of non-sensical study should not have been funded, and should not be published in a major journal as if it were more than a non-result gussied up to seem profound. We may not be able to censor research formally, but we don't, as a society, have to pay for it.
One might say that this is a heavy duty over-reaction on our part, to a rather bland (if hyped) study that found hardly anything at all. Why get all heated up and panicky about a return to biological rationales for segregation (and worse)? Our response is that, as the Germans learned in the 1930s and later wrote widely about, the time to keep the horse in the barn is before it has inched its way out, one un-noticed step at a time. But lessons have been forgotten, and distant amorality is again offered, often with pious expressions of benign intent (again, as they were a century ago).
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