We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought
nautil.us
nautil.us
We can estimate how genetically determined a trait is by comparing identical to non-identical twins, or by comparing full siblings to half siblings and adopted siblings. There is a long history of data in this area which is just as valid today as ever. This article points out that we know very little about how specific genes determine specific traits. True. But we can know that a trait is genetically determined without knowing how a trait is genetically determined.
I don't see how laws and social norms would work without the assumption of free will. I'm not saying it would be absolutely impossible.
The justification of criminal justice is to make an example to society that a behavior is unacceptable. Thus creating an environment where that behavior is discouraged.
In my mind the environment is responsible for a criminal. The way we have chosen to punish their environment is to remove the individual from it. This brings shame to the family or splitting up a family or loss of income due to the person being removed. The person with the hardest punishment(in jail) is least responsible.
In dictatorships they actually punish the family of the criminal, which is a contributing factor to how they can hold power. Everyone is more invested in everyone conforming.
On the positive side, is parents feeling pride if their children succeed. We cannot give the success directly to the parents for raising their child, therefore they enjoy the success of their children by proxy, pride.
This of course extends to every link being a product of their environment and thus, for now, we need the fiction of free will. How would a society that accepts there is no free will function? That would make a mind blowing sci-fi film or novel.
I am very much in favor of genetic agnosticism, the position that we are currently very poor at predicting complex traits from genetic data (and may always be). Failure to predict does not negate genetic determinism per se. However, clonal animals and human twins provide fairly strong evidence of the limits of genetic determinism.
I recommend watching the entire playlist, but I've linked to the punchline at the end of Behavioral Genetics II. I've linked to him discussing the heritability of plant IQ, followed by the heritability of depression example I alluded to earlier.
https://youtu.be/RG5fN6KrDJE?t=3200
Again, I recommend watching the entire lecture if you have an hour and a half, both lectures if you have 3 hours, or all the lectures if you have, like, 40 hours.
Among other issues, this seems like yet another case of someone confusing "environmental" with unpredictable or non-natal. An increasing appreciation of epigenetics is not the same as a dismissal of the role of genes. And a lot of the the other arguments are seriously misleading, like implying incomplete dominance is somehow a blow to our knowledge of genetics, or sleight of hand, like saying genes aren't 'primary' because something has to read them and implying that diminishes their effect.
Mostly, it seems to copy common misconceptions about statistics. The people working with polygenic models understand that the models don't perfectly represent reality, but that doesn't make them useless! They give estimates for various traits (like height) that have been tested to correctly explain some fraction of the variance in a population.
Models aren't reality, hence the name!
I studied genetics quite extensively and none of that is news to me at all. Dogmatic genetic determinism is Dunning-Krueger effect territory, not because it's impossible but because we don't know enough to be certain enough about it to make it useful. Trying to assert otherwise is wishful thinking, usually by people who really wish there were a way to make scientifically credible assertions about the value of human beings based on their genetic lineage (hint hint).
The best way I can describe what seems to be happening with genes and development is that it's something loosely analogous to procedural world generation in games. You have this genetically encoded series of very complex chemical structures that when embodied in a given environment and "executed" via energetic processes generate a phenotype. The phenotype is the product of a set of genes embodied in an environment. Beyond protein structure genes do not contain any kind of "blueprint" for anything any more than e.g. a fractal equation actually contains its complete output. The blueprint analogy is even wishy washy in terms of direct protein structures due to things like RNA transformations, epigenetics, proteins influencing how other proteins form, etc.
I can give you one example that gave me pause and you should know.
At the EAC cafe there were twin kitchen staff. However one was lean and the other was more tubby. Unless there was a transcription issue in the gene for metabolism I think there were identical genes at play. Thus the resulting variance is non biological developmental.
There are tons of other anecdotal observations I have made in my experience with identical twins. I think any variance (assuming perfect cloning) suggests something that is non biologically determined.
Certainly nobody claims that environmental influences are not important and like most things the details are complicated and leave much room for debate over the exact role of each component in determining traits. In some ways it is true that the environmental factors are the most interesting since they are the ones we have most control or at least influence over for ourselves and our children.
This conclusion is incorrect. The variance was perhaps not due to genetics, but it would be really strange if it wasn't biological.
However, if this is the intended message of this article, much of his writing is, at best, slightly off topic. Even though the protein coding regions of the genome are far less important than we first believed, that does not mean that genetic heritability is necessarily unimportant. I would have loved to see a discussion about the heritability caused by non-protein regions of the genome. Maybe another time...
In fact, it cannot be unimportant since evidence showing genetic heritability (in the sense of explaining a part of phenotype variance between ancestor and descendant) is not invalidated by the fact that it does not explain the variance completely.
It's unfortunate that some people will leap into new and unsettled scientific 'discoveries' as if they were gospel. It's as though cultural responses to the old 'supreme authority' were simply transferred onto a new one.
Sadly, in this case, the historical outcome is a prime example of that danger. The tentative - and upgradable - nature of science must be communicated in the teaching of it, including the news and the reference works.
Now and then it's only human to admit 'I don't know'. (As Jacob Bronowski took pains to demonstrate in 'The Ascent of Man'.)
But "in the online journal Biorxiv" is still a sort of ridiculous attempt to drum up credibility. Heck, I'd be more inclined to overlook it, but the mis-capitalized title and nonstandard italics both serve to make it look more like a traditional journal than it really is. (And, of course, it's being cited to prop up a really sloppy article.)