Questions for Pure Environmentalists

or whatever you'd call it

Over a long enough timeframe, conditions on social media ensure that pretty much all subcultures devolve into sneering comedy clubs. Over the span of several decades online I’ve watched as community after community was drained of whatever intellectual vitality it once had as more and more of the attention was sucked up by blank sarcasm and shitty jokes. (NBA Twitter, the YIMBY movement, and post-Bernie socialism spring directly to mind.) Decades of pop culture convinced people that being an adult means competing in a never-ending game of trading “ironic one-liners” at each other, while ego convinced them that they’re actually good at it. Everyone thinks that they’re funny and everyone wants to be a Bill Murray figure, the guy sitting at the back of the class impressing everyone with his zingers.

This is mostly just annoying; what they seem not to grasp is that this archetype was the product of teams of writers and actors working over long periods of time, and that no one is actually that smart or funny. (Every other month I’ll be urged to listen to a new “socialist” podcast and they are universally unfunny, untalented, poorly-read dudes laughing at each other’s terrible jokes and splashing in some political commentary they lifted off of someone else’s Twitter feed.) But the urge to joke - driven, no doubt, by getting more “engagement” for doing so than by actually being constructive - has driven out substance from almost every online space I can imagine. It’s a nightmare, like a shitty open mic night you can’t escape.

Critics of behavioral genetics, the academic subfield devoted to the exploration of how genes influence cognition and behavior, are a good example. Although I believe it’s overwhelmingly likely such influence exists, that position is perfectly subject to criticism, and since historically people have gone very wrong in interpreting that relationship good criticism is important. But online, even very well-informed critics of behavioral genetics spend almost all of their time ridiculing and loling rather than arguing. This problem is particularly acute in this domain because so many want to dismiss any consideration of how genes influence how human beings act by saying that anyone who asks elementary questions in that regard is a Nazi. Kevin Bird, a plant geneticist who has been an acid critic of linking genes and behavior, is capable of being thoughtful in that regard, but most of his expression of this attitude online is confined to sneering for the entertainment of the already convinced. I think that’s a shame.

(You also have Eric Turkheimer, a behavioral geneticist who coined the Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics and yet who has in recent years spent much of his energy sniping at every attempt to quantify the very phenomena he posited. I don’t understand the scientific utility of this effort, although I certainly do understand it from a personal and professional standpoint.)

This is all particularly frustrating for me because my concern with genes and cognition has always been very practical. My first book lays out the case that the assumption that all students are perfectly equal in potential, integrated into educational ideology in large part by John Dewey, has profound negative consequences for our education system - and hurts no one more than students who struggle in school. I have already detailed how blank-slate thinking brought us No Child Left Behind, the most disastrous educational policy in the history of our country. The entire charter school ideology, which empowers plutocrats to defund public schools and attack teachers and their unions, depends entirely on the idea that students all have exactly equal inherent ability and that any suggestion otherwise is a way to dodge accountability. This discussion is not theoretical; it has teeth, and our public schools are in the crosshairs. It’s beyond frustrating that asking elementary questions about genetics and behavior is greeted with jokes and not with arguments.

Here are questions that I think are serious and important, that I don’t think can just be laughed off, offered by a layman in good faith and driven by curiosity.

• The nervous system and brain are produced by the same basic process of genetic transmission from parents to child as any other part of the body. We’re developing greater knowledge over time of how genetic variants influence the development of brain structures. How could it be possible that differences in the genome would result in no differences at all in the functioning of the brain and greater nervous system, which produce our cognition and behavior? Wouldn’t this amount to some sort of Cartesian dualism where the mind and the body are entirely separate, the kind of thinking that was left behind hundreds of years ago?

• Do you believe that animal cognition and behavior are influenced by the individual animal’s genome? Does a given dog’s particular genome influence its cognition and behavior? If not, how is it that some dogs can be selectively bred to be more or less aggressive, more or less friendly? If genes can influence the cognition and behavior of animals how could it be that genes don’t influence the cognition and behavior of humans, who are after all just another species of animal?

• Is there no such thing as an intrinsic trait of personality, cognition, or behavior? Is there no such thing as a naturally curious, intrinsically anxious, or inherently shy person? Do we have any inherent predispositions in thinking and behavior?

• Even ardent environmentalists will generally concede that some people are predisposed toward athletic success or are born beautiful. What is fundamentally different between a genetic predisposition towards athletic talent or physical attractiveness and a genetic predisposition to being good at math or bad at chess?

• Often, fraternal siblings have significantly different performance on academic and cognitive metrics, even if born less than a year apart and despite sharing the same parents, home, family environment, family income, access to resources, and privileges. How does a purely environmentalist perspective account for this difference? How is it that children who are very closely matched on a great many environmental and familial variables often differ profoundly in various attributes of academic ability and personality?

• How does a purely environmentalist perspective account for child prodigies like Terry Tao, who was doing differential equations at 8 years old, or Awonder Liang, who defeated a grandmaster in chess at 9 years old? Are their parents just that much better than the average parent? If so, why do prodigies almost never have fraternal siblings who are also prodigies? Did the parents forget how to raise children to be geniuses? Why has no one been able to replicate the parenting that produces prodigies and geniuses?

• Are long-observed familial tendencies in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric conditions real? If yes, then that would mean that we can identify some genetic influences on behavior and cognition. Similarly, there are proposed genetic influences for developmental and cognitive disorders that impact behavior and thinking.

• What it means that identical twins resemble each other in cognitive and personality outcomes whether raised together or apart, or that adoptive children resemble their adoptive siblings in such outcomes no more than they do a random person, is a matter of serious and sustained controversy. But that those dynamics exist is not a matter of controversy; a tremendous amount of data demonstrates that these tendencies exist summatively, whatever their origins. What are purely environmentalist explanations for this tendency? Why are adoptive siblings so often profoundly dissimilar to each other and similar to their genetic siblings despite being raised in very different environments?

• How is it that massive changes in environment and schooling have been found, over and over again, to prompt no changes in academic outcomes? What is the purely environmentalist explanation for this?

None of those questions seems worthless to me. None of them seem out of the bounds of scientific inquiry. None of them seem offensive or bigoted. They are indeed live questions, and as such I’m open to answers that cut against the conventional narrative in behavioral genetics. I’m happy to have a debate and be proven wrong. But I’m afraid all I’m going to get is lol lol lol lmao lol.