{"id":5816,"date":"2019-01-30T18:42:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T23:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=5816"},"modified":"2019-01-30T18:42:42","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T23:42:42","slug":"robert-plomins-blueprint-the-reply-of-the-walking-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2019\/01\/30\/human-nature\/robert-plomins-blueprint-the-reply-of-the-walking-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Plomin\u2019s \u201cBlueprint\u201d: The Reply of the Walking Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

The significance of Robert Plomin\u2019s<\/a> Blueprint<\/em><\/a> is not that every word therein is infallible. Some reviewers have questioned his assertions about the relative insignificance of the role that parents, schools, culture, and other environmental factors play in the outcome of our lives, and it seems to me the jury is still out on many of these issues. See, for example, the thoughtful review of Razib Khan<\/a> in the National Review<\/a>. What is significant about it is Plomin\u2019s description of new and genuinely revolutionary experimental tools of rapidly increasing power and scope that have enabled us to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that our DNA has a very significant influence on human behavior. In other words, there is such a thing as \u201chuman nature,\u201d and it is important. This truth might see obvious today. It is also a fact, however, that this truth was successfully suppressed and denied for over half a century by the vast majority of the \u201cscientists\u201d who claimed to be experts on human behavior.<\/p>\n

There is no guarantee that such scientific debacles are a thing of the past. Ideologues devoted to the quasi-religious faith that the truth must take a back seat to their equalist ideals are just as prevalent now as they were during the heyday of the Blank Slate. Indeed, they are at least as powerful now as they were then, and they would like nothing better than to breathe new life into the flat earth dogmas they once foisted on the behavioral sciences. Consider, for example, a review of Blueprint<\/em> by Nathaniel Comfort entitled \u201cGenetic determinism rides again<\/a>,\u201d that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature<\/em>. The first paragraph reads as follows:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never a good time for another bout of genetic determinism, but it\u2019s hard to imagine a worse one than this. Social inequality gapes, exacerbated by climate change, driving hostility towards immigrants and flares of militant racism. At such a juncture, yet another expression of the discredited, simplistic idea that genes alone control human nature seems particularly insidious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can anyone with an ounce of common sense, not to mention the editors of a journal that purports to speak for \u201cscience,\u201d read such a passage and conclude that the author will continue with a dispassionate review of the merits of the factual claims made in a popular science book? One wonders what on earth they were thinking. Apparently Gleichschaltung<\/em> is sufficiently advanced at Nature<\/em> that the editors have lost all sense of shame. Consider, for example, the hoary \u201cgenetic determinism\u201d canard. A \u201cgenetic determinist\u201d is a strawman invented more than 50 years ago by the Blank Slaters of old. These imaginary beings were supposed to believe that our behavior is rigidly programmed by \u201cinstincts.\u201d I\u2019ve searched diligently during the ensuing years, but have never turned up a genuine example of one of these unicorns. They are as mythical as witches, but the Blank Slaters never tire of repeating their hackneyed propaganda lines. It would be hard to \u201cdiscredit\u201d the \u201csimplistic idea that genes alone control human nature\u201d by virtue of the fact that no one ever made such a preposterous claim to begin with, and Plomin certainly wasn\u2019t the first. Beyond that, what could possibly be the point of dragging in all the familiar dogmas of the \u201cprogressive\u201d tribe? Apparently Nature<\/em> would have us believe that scientific \u201ctruth\u201d is to be determined by ideological litmus tests.<\/p>\n

In the next paragraph Comfort supplies Plomin, a professor of behavior genetics, with the title \u201ceducational psychologist,\u201d and sulks that his emphasis on chromosomal DNA leaves microbiologists, epigeneticists, RNA experts, and developmental biologists out in the cold. Seriously? Since when did these fields manage to hermetically seal themselves off from DNA and become \u201cnon-overlapping magisteria?\u201d Do any microbiologists, epigeneticists, RNA experts or developmental biologists actually exist who consider DNA irrelevant to their field?<\/p>\n

Comfort next makes the logically questionable claim that, because \u201cDarwinism begat eugenics\u201d, \u201cMendelism begat worse eugenics,\u201d and medical genetics begat the claim that men with an XYY genotype were violent, therefore behavioral genetics must also \u201cbegat\u201d progeny that are just as bad. QED<\/p>\n

Genome-wide association (GWA) methods, the increasingly powerful tool described in Blueprint<\/em> that has now put the finishing touches on the debunking of the Blank Slate, are dismissed as something that \u201clures scientists\u201d because of its \u201cpromise of genetic explanations for complex traits, such as voting behavior or investment strategies.\u201d How Comfort distills this \u201cpromise\u201d out of anything that actually appears in the book is beyond me. One wonders if he ever actually read it. That suspicion is greatly strengthened when one reads the following paragraph:<\/p>\n

A polygenic score is a correlation coefficient. A GWAS identifies single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the DNA that correlate with the trait of interest. The SNPs are markers only. Although they might, in some cases, suggest genomic neighborhoods in which to search for genes that directly affect the trait, the polygenic score itself is in no sense causal. Plomin understands this and says so repeatedly in the book \u2013 yet contradicts himself several times by arguing that the scores are in fact, causal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You have to hand it to Comfort, he can stuff a huge amount of disinformation into a small package. In the first place, the second and third sentences contradict each other. If SNPs are variations in the rungs of DNA that occur between individuals, they are not just markers, and they don\u2019t just \u201csuggest genomic neighborhoods in which to search for genes that directly affect the trait.\u201d If they are reliable and replicable GWA hits, they are one of the actual points at which the trait is affected. Plomin most definitely does not \u201cunderstand\u201d that polygenic scores are in no sense causal, and nowhere does he say anything of the sort, far less \u201crepeatedly.\u201d What he does say is:<\/p>\n

In contrast, correlations between a polygenic score and a trait can only be interpreted causally in one direction \u2013 from the polygenic score to the trait. For example, we have shown that the educational attainment polygenic score correlates with children\u2019s reading ability. The correlation means that the inherited DNA differences captured by the polygenic score cause differences between children in their school achievement, in the sense that nothing in our brains, behavior, or environment can change inherited differences in DNA sequence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would be very interested to hear what Comfort finds \u201cillogical\u201d about that passage, and by virtue of what magical mental prestidigitations he proposes to demonstrate that the score is a \u201cmere correlation.\u201d Elsewhere we read,<\/p>\n

Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein\u2019s The Bell Curve<\/em> (1994) and Nicholas Wade\u2019s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance<\/em> (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306\u2013307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could be just as grave.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, neither The Bell Curve<\/em> nor A Troublesome Inheritance<\/em> have ever been discredited, if by that term is meant being proved factually wrong. If books are \u201cdiscredited\u201d by how many ideological zealots begin foaming at the mouth on reading them, of course, it\u2019s a different matter. Beyond that, if something is true, it does not become false by virtue of Comfort deeming it \u201cundemocratic.\u201d I could go on, but what\u2019s the point? Suffice it to say that Comfort\u2019s favorite \u201cscientific authority\u201d is Richard Lewontin, an obscurantist high priest of the Blank Slate if ever there was one, and author of Not in Our Genes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I can understand the editors of Nature\u2019s desire to virtue signal their loyalty to the prevailing politically correct fashions, but this \u201creview\u201d is truly abject. It isn\u2019t that hard to find authors on the left of the political spectrum who can write a book review that is at least a notch above the level of tendentious ideological propaganda. See, for example, Kathryn Paige Harden\u2019s review of Blueprint<\/em> in the Spectator<\/em><\/a>. Somehow she managed to write it without implying that Plomin is a Nazi in every second sentence.\u00a0 I suggest that next time they look a little harder.<\/p>\n

My initial post about Blueprint<\/em> tended to emphasize the historical ramifications of the book in the context of the Blank Slate disaster. As a result, my description of the scientific substance of the book was very broad brush. However, there are many good reviews out there that cover that ground, expressing some of my own reservations about Plomin\u2019s conclusions about the importance of environment in the process. See, for example, the excellent review by Razib Khan in the National Review linked above. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the book itself is only 188 pages long, so, by all means, read it.<\/p>\n

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The significance of Robert Plomin\u2019s Blueprint is not that every word therein is infallible. Some reviewers have questioned his assertions about the relative insignificance of the role that parents, schools, culture, and other environmental factors play in the outcome of our lives, and it seems to me the jury is still out on many of … Continue reading “Robert Plomin\u2019s \u201cBlueprint\u201d: The Reply of the Walking Dead”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,303,411,105,247,232,166,28,66,108],"tags":[418,326],"class_list":["post-5816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-bioethics","category-darwin","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-genetic-determinism-2","category-genetics","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-psychology","category-secular-religions","tag-blueprint","tag-genetics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1vO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5818,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5816\/revisions\/5818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}