Education and Genes Grab Bag

A reader points me in the direction of new research (study, writeup) that shows the largest associations yet between polygenic scores and educational outcomes. Many skeptical of the role of genes in academic ability have done a lot of crowing, in recent years, as GWAS and related analyses have been seen as underpredicting the amount of variance in educational outcomes attributable to genes. (Relative to twin studies, anyway.) For my part, I’ve reminded people of that old saw: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That is to say, the fact that a given association study may not find a large association between a trait and known gene variants is likely because we simply have not yet identified enough variants. Traits like intelligence are massively polygenic, meaning that they are influenced by a very large number of genes of small effect. In the long run, it may be the case that such polygenicity prevents us from ever mapping complex traits sufficiently. I wouldn’t be shocked. But certainly you can look at an effort like this latest study and see what many population geneticists have long predicted - increasingly strong statistical associations between educational metrics and known variants as techniques grow more sophisticated.

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A common complaint among critics of a genetics-academics link is to ask, why does this matter? What can you do with this, other than provide the worst people with more justification for eugenics and oppression? The most consistent criticisms of Kathryn Paige Harden’s book expressed this concern, questioning whether knowledge of genetic propensity for better or worse academic performance could ever help achieve Harden’s stated progressive ends. Personally, I think that this conversation tends to be too fixated on the usefulness of genetic testing of individuals and not sufficiently focused on the big picture - the fact that, if every student does not actually have equal potential, the entire foundation of modern educational philosophy has been utterly destabilized. As I put it exactly three years ago, you can define the problem with blank slate thinking in four words: No Child Left Behind. The most radical and destructive piece of educational policy in our country’s history, passed with remarkably broad bipartisan report, could only have been conceived of by those who believed that students have no intrinsic tendency towards a given performance level. And the result was disastrous - there was an immense waste of resources associated with NCLB, students and teachers and schools were suddenly forced to undertake inefficient and unnecessary census testing, and teacher tenure and unions were attacked. All because of a cheery and casually destructive insistence that every child was in possession of the same educational potential.

Yes, the existence of pseudoscientific racism claims of inherent genetic superiority/inferiority of different races invites particular scrutiny in this regard. But as I will not stop insisting, it is not only possible but in fact intuitive and evidence-based to believe that individual differences in academic ability are genetically influenced while group differences like racial or gender differences are environmental in origin. And I will go to my grave pointing out that blank slate thinking is the enemy of a better, more humane education system. Once you stop insisting that the only noble outcome for any and all children is to go to a top twenty university and join the ranks of our Brahmin class, we can dramatically broaden the purpose of school and our definitions of success. If you don’t do that, though, our neoliberal system is going to continue to try to use the meritocratic process as the only tool for achieving “social justice,” with the bonus outcome that those who struggle within that system are made to believe that they deserve their sad fate.

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Last month the LA Review of Books ran a piece on eugenics (defined, as always, quite broadly) by a UC Davis professor named Emily R. Klancher Merchant. The piece is framed by a discussion of those truly whackadoo “pro-natalists” that did a media cycle awhile back, which I find unhelpful. Her broader discussion is useful though and I find some of it insightful, even though I disagree with its overall thrust. I just want to pull out a couple pieces.

In 1923, the psychologist Edwin G. Boring, with no sense of irony, defined intelligence as “what intelligence tests test.” Intelligence testing became a big business after World War I, with universities and employers adopting intelligence tests as gatekeeping mechanisms for entering the middle class, making the correlation among IQ, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today’s psychologists defend the validity of IQ tests by pointing to their ability to predict education and income, but none of these factors is independent of the others.

As someone who routinely spends his time doing the thankless job of defending the social value of certain applications of educational testing¹, I often hear this argument - educational assessments are inherently circular. If you’re validating one with the other and the other with the one, well, you’re not establishing their value! This would be true if we validated educational assessments only through establishing criterion validity by comparing the results of one test to another, but of course we don’t do that. There are dozens of types of validity and reliability in assessment theory, and test developers pull from any number of them. In particular, high-quality assessments are built by subject-matter experts who understand the various constructs being evaluated and contribute to how they’re operationalized in a given test. You build a test with content and you let experts determine what defines the content.

And, as I keep saying, we’re good at doing so. You take a modern well-validated reading assessment. You give it to a bunch of kids. Then you send in some subject matter experts, literacy specialists, and you have them evaluate the kids. They’ll have the kids read, and they’ll take notes and assess fluency, speed, comprehension…. Then you have them rank or score the students. What you’ll find is that those expert observations and those test scores will strongly and consistently agree with each other. We build assessments in relation to expert definitions of constructs! Because we know how to assess reading and many other things. Constructs like IQ, which are by design broader and less tied to specific tasks, will inevitably have lower practical validity, but are still broadly and usefully predictive of a whole number of socially-relevant outcomes. Because we’re good at psychometric testing and educational assessment.

As for the fact that IQ and income and education are not entirely independent of each other, well, yes. That’s true. But so what? What does that tell us about the validity or reliability of our measurements of any of them? Height and weight are not independent of each other, and yet no one doubts our ability to accurately measure height or weight. The observation that various constructs are correlated is not in general an argument that we can’t measure them. Instead, the concern here seems to be that if income level correlates to some degree with intellectual ability then the construct or its measurement must be faulty; typically this stance is based on the thinking that this dynamic must arise from rich people having unfair advantages. But, first, it’s not the job of IQ tests or similar instruments to address the entire American socioeconomic system and figure out why some people perform better on cognitive tasks, only to measure the appropriate construct. Second, Merchant repeatedly refers to the inequality and injustice that plague our system. But because of that inequality and injustice, depressed performance among the poor is exactly what Merchant should expect! American inequality hurts the lower classes, resulting in (modest) negative effects on tested constructs. In other words, the tests are confirming Merchant’s own worldview! Third, as I have spent an awful lot of time demonstrating, it’s likely true that quantitative tests like the SAT are the least income-influenced element in college admissions, in comparison to things like college essays and, yes, grades.

These works naturalized socioeconomic inequality, contending that the poor have not been exploited by the capitalist system but rather received an unlucky draw in the “genetic lottery.”

If I ever write that textbook on argumentative writing, I’m using this as an example of false binary. You can receive an unlucky draw in the genetic lottery regardless of the economic system that you find yourself in; Soviet astronautic engineers in the 1950s and 1960s enjoyed many privileges that their farmer counterparts did not. The notion that inequalities in human capital could only result in unequal reward under capitalism is demonstrably untrue.

More to the point, though, what determines whether you are unlucky is dependent on context, and in 21st-century America and its supposed meritocracy, people who lack certain core academic skills are unlucky. Not to bore you with my old saw, but John Henry was a giant of a man until the steam drill rendered his skills redundant; it was only his bad luck to have been born not long before the steam drill’s invention. Human capital is always context-dependent and in flux. In that sense I agree with Merchant.

The trouble is that a) while I bow to no one in my desire to change our system, the fact is that we live in it and will for some time, and b) blank slate thinking harms the worst off in that system because its insistence on everyone’s equal potential supports the “just deserts” thinking that conservatives always employ to defend inequality. Yes, people are hurt by being born into the depravations of neoliberal capitalism. But within neoliberal capitalism, where we find ourselves for now, it’s senseless to act as though blank slatism helps the worst off. If we believe that people shouldn’t suffer because of attributes they can’t control, then we should certainly include the vagaries of our chancy genetic endowments.

As sociologists have long known, educational attainment is not a straightforward reflection of intelligence but rather the result of a long and complex series of social interactions.

Here’s a core point. When we talk about this stuff, there’s a lot of quick insistence that these traits aren’t just genetic, but also environmental, and there’s always gene by environment interactions, and there’s epigenetics…. All true! Just as Merchant is surely right here about the influence of social interactions. But I think it’s important to say that the existence of such complicating factors can’t deny the salience of a particularly important factor. So consider height. Height is highly polygenic, it’s heavily influenced by environment, there are gene by environment interactions, all true. However, none of this means that height is not significantly heritable, and crucially if your genes don’t want you to be 7 feet tall, you’re not going to be 7 feet tall. The existence of the complicating factors doesn’t change the reality that height is probably about 80% heritable. Severe malnourishment in childhood can absolutely stunt someone’s growth, but you can overfeed a kid whose genes want him to be 5’4 and it’s not going to make him a six footer. Similarly, I could never be a chess grandmaster no matter how hard I tried; I lack the raw processing power. Because genes matter.

both sides are buying into and thereby furthering the larger eugenicist project of attributing socioeconomic inequality to genetic variation.

I am again in this position where the basic moral values I’m evaluating simply do not make sense to me. Merchant reveals herself to be a committed progressive and critic of contemporary capitalism in this essay. Good. But what is progressive about denying the role of genetic variation in socioeconomic inequality? Our genetic endowment lies entirely outside of our own control, and the fact that we are born with a given genome is a matter of pure random chance, just like being born into a rich family. The neoliberal capitalist project depends on a widespread societal belief that our system is fair and consistently gives almost everyone a decent shot to succeed. But how can the outcomes be fair if our genes disadvantage us before we can make a single choice, before we attend a single class, before we work a single job?

It’s rude and unscientific to believe that fat people are just gluttons without self-discipline. It’s rude and unscientific to believe that everyone has the same risk of being an alcoholic or drug addict. It’s rude and unscientific to believe that schizophrenia is caused by cold and distant mothers. And it’s rude and unscientific to believe that when one kid excels in the classroom and the other one struggles, that process is equitable and fair.

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Over a long enough timeframe, genetic engineering of embryos to confer valuable traits like being tall, intelligent, or attractive - as opposed to genetic engineering to address serious health challenges, which no one opposes - is an inevitability. The question is the timeframe. My instinct is to say 50 years, but based on the past history of people making such grandiose predictions, it’s probably more like 150. It’s certainly true that the massively polygenic nature of complex human traits makes the task much more complex and difficult, but there’s nothing conceptually impossible about continuing to catalog relevant SNPs that influence a given outcome and, in the future, doing some sort of mass editing. As I said, this appears to be science fiction for now, but then our new cystic fibrosis and sickle cell treatments were science fiction 20 years ago. And it’s very difficult to imagine a regulatory environment that stops the rich from exploiting such technology once it exists; you can prohibit any American firms from openly engaging in such techniques, but rich people will no doubt find some discreet labs in Singapore or Turkey or somewhere. Looking ahead (and again this won’t be happening in my lifetime), my real concern is not so much that designer babies will exist - they will - but that access to the process of creating them will be deeply unequal. If so, gene editing will become just another tool for the rich to perpetuate their advantage.

I won’t live to see the era of routine genetic engineering. But its eventual arrival is vastly more certain than that of superintelligent AI, or of the colonization of distant planets, or of finding a cure for death. And I think it would be a good idea for people to sort out the moral consequences of the effects of genes on our skills and abilities now, so that we’re ready for when that era arrives. Because someday someone’s going to randomly assign genome editing to a collection of embryos, leave another set untouched, wait until the children reach school age, and assess the performance of the test group versus the control. And then we’ll know.

1. I am not a supporter of routine K-12 census testing (that is, where every student is tested every year) because such testing is terribly expensive and unnecessarily disruptive, and because we have the power of inferential statistics.