American Scientist

THE GENETIC LOTTERY: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. Kathryn Paige Harden. Princeton University Press, 2021. 300 pp. $29.95.

“If everybody were to agree on the improvement of the race of man being a matter of the very utmost importance, and if the theory of the hereditary transmission of qualities in men was as thoroughly understood as it is in the case of our domestic animals,” wrote Francis Galton in 1865, “I see no absurdity in supposing that, in some way or other, [human] improvement would be carried into effect.” Galton, a pioneer of statistics, believed that applying the science of heredity to society would lead to a happier, healthier, handsomer, and especially smarter world. A rigorous program of controlled breeding, he thought—carried out “under the existing conditions of law and sentiment”—could improve the collective germplasm. Eighteen years later, he would call such a program eugenics, from the Greek, meaning “wellborn.” Imagining a “utopia” in which humans reproduced by scientific methods, he burbled, “What a galaxy of genius might we not create!”

Kathryn Paige Harden, a psychologist and behavior geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, also wants to use our knowledge of heredity to improve society. But instead of proposing a breeding program, she suggests that we use new methods in genomics to shape social policy—under existing conditions of law and sentiment. She and Galton are linked by a long line of psychologists, geneticists, anthropologists, economists, and others convinced that social norms should be more strongly shaped along genetic lines. Not all of these individuals have been eugenicists. They have come from across the political spectrum, from communists to members of the alt-right (whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack). Harden takes pains to distance herself from eugenics, even advocating “anti-eugenics,” in an echo of Ibram X. Kendi’s notion of antiracism. What everyone in that queue shares is hereditarianism, the belief that nature is more important than nurture.

In her new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, Harden argues that “the science of human individual differences is entirely compatible with a full-throated egalitarianism.” Following philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice, Harden believes that if we accept one another as (genetically) different, understanding that each person receives their (genetic) endowment by “nature’s Powerball” and not because they are inherently worthy, then we ought to treat one another as equals.

Agreed: We should treat one another as equals. But how does genetics get us there? Harden’s approach is to cast innateness as “genetic luck.” You have no control over the DNA you inherit: Your genome is a more or less random selection of the genes of your parents. Undeniably, people differ in ability. Irrefutably, our differences are partly genetic. Understanding natural differences in ability as luck, Harden argues, allows us to reject the idea that ability equals social or moral worth. We avoid eugenics by thinking of difference not as “innate superiority,” but rather as simply a better roll of the genetic dice. However, the two are not mutually exclusive. Harden’s “genetic luck” and good old-fashioned breeding are coextensive.

Since Galton’s time, hereditarians have been interested in human social behavior, especially behaviors related to sex, violence, money, and above all, intellect. The technologies of heredity have improved dramatically since the 1860s; yet with every advance, scientists and the public ask new versions of the same questions. Is homosexuality a choice? Can predicting criminal behavior stop crime before it starts? Is genius born or made? Attempts to use hereditary knowledge to better society have come from across the political spectrum, and at the outset, at least, they are usually well-intentioned. But they have always ended in failure—sometimes with a bang, sometimes a whimper.

The advent of personal genomics in the 21st century has created large databases of whole genomes. Any trait recorded on a donor’s information form can now be scanned across the entire database for DNA variants—as small as a single A, C, G, or T—that correlate with the trait of interest. So-called genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have revealed clusters of genetic variants that correlate with intelligence, obesity, wealth, crime, homosexual behavior—the usual. A weighted sum of those effects, compared against a reference sequence, yields a polygenic risk score (or polygenic index)—a prediction of the likelihood of expressing the behavior, given a particular genetic constitution. Although genetic effects account for only a small portion of the variance for complex traits, polygenic scores provide a surprisingly robust forecast of IQ, or wealth at retirement, or being gay. By itself, the polygenic risk score says nothing about the underlying biology, or—crucially—whether any specific individual with a given polygenic index will show the trait. There can be an 80 percent chance of rain, and yet on 2 days out of 10 with the same weather conditions, the streets will stay dry.

How will such methods lead to a more egalitarian and just society? Like hereditarians going all the way back to Galton, Harden boils it down to intelligence. The proxy she uses for IQ is educational attainment, which is positively correlated with health, wealth, and social success. Polygenic scores show that some children are innately more gifted than others, she tells us, no matter what school they attend. Attending a better school has a positive impact on educational attainment, no matter what your background; conversely, impoverished schools have a depressing effect on it. Didn’t we already know that? All of Harden’s insights or recommendations can be reached without recourse to genetics.

Like IQ, educational attainment is bound up in culture. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional, many Southern school districts simply closed the public schools. They opened “private,” whites-only schools and lifted mandatory schooling laws. Black children were left with no formal education to attain. Genetics does not—cannot—address the most serious obstacles to educational attainment. One might think that a scientist genuinely interested in making an intervention in social problems would take seriously the work of those who have been studying it longer than she has.

For example, in Race after Technology (2019), Princeton sociologist Ruha Benjamin argues that the hunt for ever more data acts as a barrier to a more just educational system. “It is not the facts that elude us,” she writes, “but a fierce commitment to justice that would make us distribute resources so that all students would have access to a good educational environment.” Rawls would surely applaud that statement. Harden, however, disagrees with Benjamin’s assertion that we already know what to do, and cites reports concluding that the large majority of educational interventions are of little benefit.

Because polygenic scores predict student performance rather than measuring it, any use of them would amount to genetic tracking (grouping students for instruction on the basis of presumed, rather than demonstrated, ability). A wealth of evidence shows that tracking reinforces racial and socioeconomic inequalities (see, for instance, Jeannie Oakes’s Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality [2005]). In 1969, the psychologist Arthur Jensen proposed using data from IQ tests to shape school policy. Fifteen stormy years after Brown v. Board of Education, Jensen concluded that compensatory education had “failed.” Drawing upon now-discredited studies that claimed that Black students had a lower average IQ than white students, he advocated tracking Black students into trade-oriented classes, where, he suggested, they would be happier. All of Harden’s data come from whites (a problem in the databases themselves), which lets her skirt issues of race. But her proposals smack of precision education, which seeks to use polygenic scores to “tailor” educational resources to students’ genetic capacities. Rawls argued that any inequalities in society must benefit its least-advantaged members. Harden offers no concrete suggestions for how taking genetics into account would benefit the disadvantaged—and not a word on how to keep it from harming them.

Harden doesn’t address the hard stuff, such as general literacy, school funding, remedial education, charter schools, and curricular reform.

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Ultimately, the book is more a defense of behavior genetics than an introduction to a truly useful tool for education policy. Harden doesn’t address the hard stuff, such as general literacy, school funding, remedial education, charter schools, and curricular reform. Surely genetic counseling would be a vital part of any brave new genetic world, yet it goes unmentioned here. Harden devotes a chapter to why scientific racism is bad, but she avoids serious discussion of how racial inequalities in health and income affect educational attainment—which is perhaps the key problem in American education today, followed by questions surrounding intellectual disability, such as whether to mainstream children who once would have been branded “feebleminded” and shipped off to schools for “mental defectives.” For a book on applied human genetics published in 2021, The Genetic Lottery is astonishingly blinkered when it comes to race and disability. These things should be de rigueur for a book on progressive social policy.

By the end, genetics simply gets in the way. The book closes with a set of “anti-eugenic” policy statements. “Use genetic information to improve opportunity, not classify people.” A laudable sentiment, to be sure. But all polygenic scores have to offer in this realm, apparently, is “spotlighting how academic tracking entrenches inequalities between students.” Again, we already know this—and again, it’s hard to see how a precision education approach based on genetics would not in fact encourage tracking. “Create health care, educational, housing, lending, and insurance systems where everyone is included,” she writes, “regardless of the outcome of the genetic lottery.” Also, “Society should be structured to work to the advantage of people who were least advantaged in the genetic lottery.” Adding “the genetic lottery” to these statements of progressive values does not increase their empirical power or rhetorical force; indeed, remove genetics and the statements become stronger, more universal. My conclusion, then, is that DNA doesn’t matter for social equality.

Parsing nature from nurture has never made good social policy. Although Pollyannas may put genetic differences down to luck, it is all too easy for the less well-intentioned to ascribe them to the natural order of things. Hereditarianism has increased inequality in every era of genetics. Harden offers no reason to believe that the genome age will be any different.