Eugenics is back. Or, rather: Never left.

[Project Willow]

This is OT, but I came across it recently and I wondered where these ideas might intersect with, or serve as launching point for some in a contemporary eugenics movement.

http://vhemt.org/

[Mummy]

the current issue of wiredmag 21 yr old soon to be bio tinkerer, as soon as he cracks "the code"

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/ ... ics-of-iq/

ex."But he is far from average. After being identified early as a science prodigy, Zhao raced through China’s special programs for gifted students and won a spot in Renmin, one of the country’s most elite high schools. Then, to the shock of his friends and family, he decided to drop out when he was 17. Now, at 21, he oversees his own research project at BGI Shenzhen—the country’s top biotech institute and home to the world’s most powerful cluster of DNA-sequencing machines—where he commands a multimillion-dollar research budget.

Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.

Zhao doesn’t talk about work tonight. He dives in and out of the crowd. He makes small talk with a girl, bums a cigarette off her. Tonight Zhao is a normal young adult. Tomorrow he will return to his multimillion-dollar experiment—one whose success could complicate the whole idea of what it means to be normal."

[JackRiddler]

Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.

If this works, and you can grow alphas (in a jar or by IVF), everyone would want to have alpha children. Would this result in college spaces and highly qualified professional jobs for everyone? (Also kind of the implication behind the theory that the cure for unemployment is in training.) Who would do the shit work? They'd run into the same problem as the elites did in Brave New World. They'd have to make betas and gammas and maybe deltas and epsilons too, or assign that role to the inferior nations. (What we already have in practice in many ways, I know.)

[JackRiddler]

Willow, that video: At least it's clear viewing it that it's not the stork, it's the sprawl. The amount each one consumes. Or rather, the stork times the sprawl.

As for Eugenics as Orthodoxy, aye: we could do a thread about this that mirrors the recent discussion of "Fascism" and how to properly define it. But it's the heterodoxy that's probably more interesting & useful as an Early Warning System -- because the idea itself is bound to come up in many contexts. I know I've had many talks about it with friends (who I learned things about!) in my short sweet life already.

How would Eugenics be formulated into a common goal at PRC HQ? That's an interesting question, so is this: how would Eugenics be formulated over the past 50 years of oligarchy-building success at Silicon Valley? What gets agreed upon, in principle, at Bohemian Grove? How is Eugenics discussed at the VIP bar at Aspen Ideas? What are the key arguments about Eugenics in Johns Hopkins or UPenn frat houses?

Much like Fascism, they're all mutants and they're all dangerous. The history is mostly useful for the operational details, not the ideologies.

Yes.

[JackRiddler]

Meanwhile, here's the far more consequential experiment the PRC is conducting universally on children - one that may render all efforts to produce superior human stock by way of eugenic selection irrelevant. Exposes the insanity of present thinking one not only finds in China: an obsession with genetics and its supposed determining influence over all things and supposed susceptibility to manipulation and tailoring; outright contempt for considering all the environmental factors that are known to be highly determinate and that are clearly susceptible to change.


Li Wen/Xinhua, via Corbis A baby being given nebulizer therapy at Beijing Children’s Hospital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/sunda ... nted=print


The New York Times

August 3, 2013
Life in a Toxic Country
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — I RECENTLY found myself hauling a bag filled with 12 boxes of milk powder and a cardboard container with two sets of air filters through San Francisco International Airport. I was heading to my home in Beijing at the end of a work trip, bringing back what have become two of the most sought-after items among parents here, and which were desperately needed in my own household.

China is the world’s second largest economy, but the enormous costs of its growth are becoming apparent. Residents of its boom cities and a growing number of rural regions question the safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. It is as if they were living in the Chinese equivalent of the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disaster areas.

Before this assignment, I spent three and a half years reporting in Iraq, where foreign correspondents talked endlessly of the variety of ways in which one could die — car bombs, firefights, being abducted and then beheaded. I survived those threats, only now to find myself wondering: Is China doing irreparable harm to me and my family?

The environmental hazards here are legion, and the consequences might not manifest themselves for years or even decades. The risks are magnified for young children. Expatriate workers confronted with the decision of whether to live in Beijing weigh these factors, perhaps more than at any time in recent decades. But for now, a correspondent’s job in China is still rewarding, and so I am toughing it out a while longer. So is my wife, Tini, who has worked for more than a dozen years as a journalist in Asia and has studied Chinese. That means we are subjecting our 9-month-old daughter to the same risks that are striking fear into residents of cities across northern China, and grappling with the guilt of doing so.

Like them, we take precautions. Here in Beijing, high-tech air purifiers are as coveted as luxury sedans. Soon after I was posted to Beijing, in 2008, I set up a couple of European-made air purifiers used by previous correspondents. In early April, I took out one of the filters for the first time to check it: the layer of dust was as thick as moss on a forest floor. It nauseated me. I ordered two new sets of filters to be picked up in San Francisco; those products are much cheaper in the United States. My colleague Amy told me that during the Lunar New Year in February, a family friend brought over a 35-pound purifier from California for her husband, a Chinese-American who had been posted to the Beijing office of a large American technology company. Before getting the purifier, the husband had considered moving to Suzhou, a smaller city lined with canals, because he could no longer tolerate the pollution in Beijing.

Every morning, when I roll out of bed, I check an app on my cellphone that tells me the air quality index as measured by the United States Embassy, whose monitoring device is near my home. I want to see whether I need to turn on the purifiers and whether my wife and I can take our daughter outside.

Most days, she ends up housebound. Statistics released Wednesday by the Ministry of Environmental Protection revealed that air quality in Beijing was deemed unsafe for more than 60 percent of the days in the first half of 2013. The national average was also dismal: it failed to meet the safety standard in nearly half the days of the same six-month period. The environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, told People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, that “China’s air quality is grim, and the amount of pollution emissions far exceeds the environment’s capacity.”

I want my daughter to grow up appreciating the outdoors — sunsets and birdcalls and the smell of grass or the shape of clouds. That will be impossible if we live for many more years in Beijing. Even with my adult-size lungs, I limit my time outdoors. Though I ran on the banks of the Tigris River while in Baghdad and competed in two marathons before moving to China, I am hesitant about doing long-distance training for that kind of race here.

One thing I refuse to forgo is biking, even if it means greater exposure to hazardous air than commuting by car or subway. Given the horrendous traffic here — itself a major contributor to the pollution — I go to the office and restaurants and my courtyard home in Beijing’s alleys on two wheels. This winter, I bought a British-made face mask after levels of fine particulate matter hit a record high in January in some areas — 40 times the exposure limit recommended by the World Health Organization. Foreigners called it the “airpocalypse,” and a growing number are leaving China because of the smog or demanding hardship pay from their employers.

One American doctor here has procured a mask for his infant son. My mask of sleek black fabric and plastic knobs makes me look like an Asian Darth Vader. Better that, though, than losing years of my life.

THIS spring, new data released from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, first published in The Lancet, revealed that China’s outdoor pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010, or 40 percent of the worldwide total. Another study, published by a prominent American science journal in July, found that northern Chinese lived five fewer years on average than their southern counterparts because of the widespread use of coal in the north.

Cancer rates are surging in China, and even the state news media are examining the relation between that and air pollution. Meanwhile, studies both in and outside of China have shown that children with prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants exhibit signs of slower mental development and of behavior disorders. Research from Los Angeles shows that children in polluted environments are also at risk for permanent lung damage.

In northern China, shades of gray distinguish one day from another. My wife and I sometimes choose our vacation destinations based on how much blue we can expect to see — thus a recent trip to Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. I will never take such skies for granted again. “We still can’t get over how blue the skies are here,” the wife of an American diplomat told me over dinner in Georgetown more than half a year after the couple had moved back to Washington from Beijing.

Food safety is the other issue weighing on us. We have heard the stories of rat meat being passed off as lamb at hotpot restaurants, cooking oil being recycled and crops being grown in soil polluted by heavy metals or wastewater from factories. The food catastrophe that most frightened both Chinese and foreign parents was the milk scandal of 2008, in which six babies died and at least 300,000 children fell ill after drinking milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical. Since then, many parents of newborns have gone to great lengths to bring into China foreign-made infant milk powder when it is needed to supplement breast-feeding.

Months after my trip back from San Francisco, my wife and I realized that our supply of formula was dwindling. We sent e-mails to friends we thought might be traveling soon to China, asking for volunteers to be “mules.” Our friend Alexa flew in from New York this week with two boxes of powder. We have two other friends who promise to bring more this summer.

I recently spoke to a woman in Beijing, Zhao Jun, who pays Chinese students and housewives living in Europe to mail her cans of Cow & Gate, a British brand. “We’re constantly worried, so we want to find a good brand from overseas with a long history,” she said.

So widespread is the phenomenon of Chinese buying milk powder abroad that it has led to shortages in at least a half-dozen countries. Hong Kong has even cracked down on what customs officials call “syndicates” smuggling foreign-made powder to mainland China.

The anxieties do not end with milk. Our daughter has begun eating solids, so that means many more questions for us about how we source our food. Do we continue buying fruits and vegetables from the small shops in the alleys around our home? Do we buy from more expensive stores aimed at foreigners and wealthier Chinese? Do we buy from local organic farms? Last weekend, I went with a friend to visit a village home an hour’s drive northeast of Beijing. He and his wife wanted to lease it as a weekend house, but I was more interested in gauging whether I could use the garden to grow our own vegetables. Some people I know here have done that.

“It’s so difficult to protect yourself on the food issue,” said Li Bo, a proponent of communal gardening and a board member of Friends of Nature, an environmental advocacy group. “I never thought I would become a vegetarian. Then in 2011, I said enough of meat, after so many examples of wrongdoing in animal husbandry.”

Each day that passes in Beijing makes it harder to discern the fine line between paranoia and precaution. Six years ago, when I was back in my hometown Alexandria, Va., to pack for my move to China, my mother handed me several tubes of toothpaste. She had read stories that summer of toxic toothpaste made in China. I felt as if I was going off to college for my freshman year all over again. I put the tubes back in my parents’ bathroom. When I go home these days, my mother still on occasion gives me toothpaste to bring back to Beijing, and I no longer hesitate to pack it in my bag.

Edward Wong is a correspondent in China for The New York Times

[semper occultus]

Okay, tell us what you mean, if it was presumptuous of me.

….OK.....well firstly lets accept we are characterising eugenics as an elitist intellectual movement driving to effect radical demographic restructuring of a population as a means of fulfilling an ideological vision of a new transformed and improved society…

…the urge to imagineer “new people” who are somehow more worthy & deserving of a place in that prospective nirvana and that the same means to that end could be simoultaneoiusly embraced by apparently antagonistic ideological opponents is hardly controversial in itself.. whther it be capitalist-imperialism vs old school socialist or Hitler’s Aryan superman vs Stalin’s New Soviet Man



I therefore find it uncontroversial to posit an analogue between that position and a new project of demographic re-ordering as mandated by neo-liberal monsters like Sutherland – who float around the organs of global control like a cancer-cell : from 2 of the most toxic corporate excrescences on the planet, through the EU Commission to the UN with scarce a pause for a fresh blood transfusion from the drained corpse of the latest Bohemian Grove sacrifical offering….all the while being enthusiastically fellated by an attendant crew of kneeling flunkies amongst a particular self-identififying group of over-whelmingly white prosperous middle-class metropolitan and highly influential “progressives” ( hereafter referred to as the “fellating-flunkies” ) as forensically anatomised by David Goodhart’s recent book



...here reviewed by a perfect exemplar of the breed Jonathan Portes of the NIESR....all of whom with their charts and graphs “proving” how much we all benefit from their policies & perpetuating bull-shit scare-stories about ageing socities accede so effectively in the neo-liberal “great alchemical work” of the transformation of man into a perfectly malleable fungible unit of production / consumption to be allocated at will across the globe like a Swiss bank deposit in search of the greatest return….

The TL:DR version would probably have to go in to the final capitulation of the old left in the 1980’s as many traditional Labour white working class voted for Thatcher, obstinately continued reading The Sun & cheered on the Falklands task-force like a world cup football team , the defeat of Tony Benn, the abandonment of the Marxian/economic corpus for post-modernist navel-gazing ( viz Terry Eagleton ), the sting of rejection & abandonment curdling into the sort of sneering contempt so wonderfully expressed in my quote from Suzanne Moore who, although she could hardly be described as an intellectual is at least a sufficiently empty cranial-space to act as an effective echo-chamber….

…….are we supposed to be oh so charmed and impressed – as this buffoon so obviously is - by her kids cowering in shock and terror at all those horribly “lacking” white people…..great hordes of them….…the same people who just happen to be the ones who have contributed the most to making Britain one of the best places on earth to live….certainly for comfortably off middle-class metropolitan hacks like Moore….xenophobia’s actually meant to be a bad thing right kids…?

Oh and btw please accept this free and complementary “ fuck the fucking fuck off Greek man”….for your earlier insinuations as to my so-called “obsession” & “distortions”….…



…no need to apologise, we’re all shooting from the hip on here… as you may well be aware the most preponderant of new arrivals are all white Christians from Poland - it’s a numbers game, and the making of private profit by the likes of Starbucks who sadly unable to actually off-shore service jobs can instead fill their shops with an endless supply of minimum-wage young kids living out of back-packs out to improve their English, whilst dodging any corporation tax on the profits...handily leaving the public to pick up the tab & feel the effect of the increased demand on under-resourced infrastructure, housing, educational and health services. Infact those most adversely effected are those most dependent on state support whom the fellating-flunkies claim to be most concerned about…. privatising profit and socialising costs is actually meant to be a bad thing right kids….?

Even among foreign-born UK residents responding to the Citizenship Survey, 49% express a preference for reductions and only 15% advocate an increase. Dividing the sample into white and non-white sub-groups yields similar results to the UK-born/foreign-born split, with about half of British minority ethnic respondents favouring reduced migration.

http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-concern

…..wonder how many of “your Greeks” were in favour of letting Turkey into the great Wirtschaftsraum you know back in those far-off halcyon days when it all seemed like such a good idea….?

....here's another paradox for you.....just suppose this policy was one of the key supporting pillars perptuating and maintaining a system that you otherwise characterise as being a planetary disaster...what should your attitude towards it be....?

[Wombaticus Rex]

While I am fascinated by the overall subject of a transition from the Rhodes/Pilgrims Society globalist hegemony of white Xtians vs. white Catholics, and I agree that we could trace a distinct tidal change in the 1960's & 70's -- David & Laurance Rockefeller, Alvin Toffler, Esalen, RAND, and United Colors of Benetton breeding stock provided by multi-cultural elite think tanks like the IMF, World Bank & UNESCO. The revelation is just this: there are truly no inferior races, they all produce exceptional individuals, and what we need is a global management caste distilled from this exceptional stock, and of course: a system to enable this. Ubermensch Meritocracy.

I have listened to co-workers in pubs hold forth on this at some length...it's not my idea, here. (Also, heard a Brit disparaging the "Old Boys Network" of family job placements in DC because it meant that the UK wasn't really contributing their best and brightest.)

That aside, though, my real burning interest is a bit more mundane and properly prole: Is that photo of the Queen Mother letting both barrels blaze actually real? And if so, what / when / where?

[semper occultus]

The revelation is just this: there are truly no inferior races, they all produce exceptional individuals, and what we need is a global management caste distilled from this exceptional stock, and of course: a system to enable this. Ubermensch Meritocracy.

....oh the clever people are already way ahead of you...there's even an easy way to identify them.......

my real burning interest is a bit more mundane and properly prole: Is that photo of the Queen Mother letting both barrels blaze actually real? And if so, what / when / where?

.....completely genuine...occassioned I believe by a recent audience with the Spanish Ambassador.....

....and btw its just "The Queen" .....like "The Fonz"....

.......the Queen Mother was the old, crabby-faced one.......

[JackRiddler]

Queen Mother

Yeah, if you remember the QM, at this point her daughter has reached a point of indistinguishability. It's an easy mistake to make.

[JackRiddler]

Very interesting review by biologist Lewontin of book by Evelyn Fox Keller. Exposes the fallacy of attempting to attribute causality to cleanly separated, static categories of "nature" and "nurture." Makes the reductionist genetic argument as given above by Dawkins, Chagnon et al. look extremely simplistic and inadequate (not to mention mean, which it is).

See link at end.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tpage=true

It’s Even Less in Your Genes
May 26, 2011
Richard C. Lewontin
Font Size: A A A

The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture
by Evelyn Fox Keller
Duke University Press, 107 pp., $64.95; $18.95 (paper)
lewontin_1-052611.jpg

In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.

That tendency, as Evelyn Fox Keller’s new book suggests, is one of the most powerful influences on our scientific understanding. As we change our intent, also we identify anew what is object and what is background. When I glance out the window as I write these lines I notice my neighbor’s car, its size, its shape, its color, and I note that it is parked in a snow bank. My interest then changes to the results of the recent storm and it is the snow that becomes my object of attention with the car relegated to the background of shapes embedded in the snow. What is an object as opposed to background is a mental construct and requires the identification of clear boundaries. As one of my children’s favorite songs reminded them:

You gotta have skin.
All you really need is skin.
Skin’s the thing that if you’ve got it outside,
It helps keep your insides in.

Organisms have skin, but their total environments do not. It is by no means clear how to delineate the effective environment of an organism.

One of the complications is that the effective environment is defined by the life activities of the organism itself. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,” as we are reminded by yet another popular lyric. Thus, as organisms evolve, their environments necessarily evolve with them. Although classic Darwinism is framed by referring to organisms adapting to environments, the actual process of evolution involves the creation of new “ecological niches” as new life forms come into existence. Part of the ecological niche of an earthworm is the tunnel excavated by the worm and part of the ecological niche of a tree is the assemblage of fungi associated with the tree’s root system that provide it with nutrients.

The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the “struggle for existence” as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources. First, despite the standard models created by ecologists in which survivorship decreases with increasing population density, the survival of individuals in a population is often greatest not when their “competitors” are at their lowest density but at an intermediate one. That is because organisms are involved not only in the consumption of resources, but in their creation as well. For example, in fruit flies, which live on yeast, the worm-like immature stages of the fly tunnel into rotting fruit, creating more surface on which the yeast can grow, so that, up to a point, the more larvae, the greater the amount of food available. Fruit flies are not only consumers but also farmers.

Second, the presence in close proximity of individual organisms that are genetically different can increase the growth rate of a given type, presumably since they exude growth-promoting substances into the soil. If a rice plant of a particular type is planted so that it is surrounded by rice plants of a different type, it will give a higher yield than if surrounded by its own type. This phenomenon, known for more than a half-century, is the basis of a common practice of mixed-variety rice cultivation in China, and mixed-crop planting has become a method used by practitioners of organic agriculture.

Despite the evidence that organisms do not simply use resources present in the environment but, through their life activities, produce such resources and manufacture their environments, the distinction between organisms and their environments remains deeply embedded in our consciousness. Partly this is due to the inertia of educational institutions and materials. As a coauthor of a widely used college textbook of genetics,1 I have had to engage in a constant struggle with my coauthors over the course of thirty years in order to introduce students to the notion that the relative reproductive fitness of organisms with different genetic makeups may be sensitive to their frequency in the population.

But the problem is deeper than simply intellectual inertia. It goes back, ultimately, to the unconsidered differentiations we make—at every moment when we distinguish among objects—between those in the foreground of our consciousness and the background places in which the objects happen to be situated. Moreover, this distinction creates a hierarchy of objects. We are conscious not only of the skin that encloses and defines the object, but of bits and pieces of that object, each of which must have its own “skin.” That is the problem of anatomization. A car has a motor and brakes and a transmission and an outer body that, at appropriate moments, become separate objects of our consciousness, objects that at least some knowledgeable person recognizes as coherent entities.

It has been an agony of biology to find boundaries between parts of organisms that are appropriate for an understanding of particular questions. We murder to dissect. The realization of the complex functional interactions and feedbacks that occur between different metabolic pathways has been a slow and difficult process. We do not have simply an “endocrine system” and a “nervous system” and a “circulatory system,” but “neurosecretory” and “neurocirculatory” systems that become the objects of inquiry because of strong forces connecting them. We may indeed stir a flower without troubling a star, but we cannot stir up a hornet’s nest without troubling our hormones. One of the ironies of language is that we use the term “organic” to imply a complex functional feedback and interaction of parts characteristic of living “organisms.” But musical organs, from which the word was adopted, have none of the complex feedback interactions that organisms possess. Indeed the most complex musical organ has multiple keyboards, pedal arrays, and a huge array of stops precisely so that different notes with different timbres can be played simultaneously and independently.

Evelyn Fox Keller sees “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” as a consequence of our false division of the world into living objects without sufficient consideration of the external milieu in which they are embedded, since organisms help create effective environments through their own life activities. Fox Keller is one of the most sophisticated and intelligent analysts of the social and psychological forces that operate in intellectual life and, in particular, of the relation of gender in our society both to the creation and acceptance of scientific ideas. The central point of her analysis has been that gender itself (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and that construction has influenced the development of science:

If there is a single point on which all feminist scholarship…has converged, it is the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender…. All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” has influenced the social construction of science.2

Beginning with her consciousness of the role of gender in influencing the construction of scientific ideas, she has, over the last twenty-five years, considered how language, models, and metaphors have had a determinative role in the construction of scientific explanation in biology.

A major critical concern of Fox Keller’s present book is the widespread attempt to partition in some quantitative way the contribution made to human variation by differences in biological inheritance, that is, differences in genes, as opposed to differences in life experience. She wants to make clear a distinction between analyzing the relative strength of the causes of variation among individuals and groups, an analysis that is coherent in principle, and simply assigning the relative contributions of biological and environmental causes to the value of some character in an individual.

It is, for example, all very well to say that genetic variation is responsible for 76 percent of the observed variation in adult height among American women while the remaining 24 percent is a consequence of differences in nutrition. The implication is that if all variation in nutrition were abolished then 24 percent of the observed height variation among individuals in the population in the next generation would disappear. To say, however, that 76 percent of Evelyn Fox Keller’s height was caused by her genes and 24 percent by her nutrition does not make sense. The nonsensical implication of trying to partition the causes of her individual height would be that if she never ate anything she would still be three quarters as tall as she is.

In fact, Keller is too optimistic about the assignment of causes of variation even when considering variation in a population. As she herself notes parenthetically, the assignment of relative proportions of population variation to different causes in a population depends on there being no specific interaction between the causes. She gives as a simple example the sound of two different drummers playing at a distance from us. If each drummer plays each drum for us, we should be able to tell the effect of different drummers as opposed to differences between drums. But she admits that is only true if the drummers themselves do not change their ways of playing when they change drums.

Keller’s rather casual treatment of the interaction between causal factors in the case of the drummers, despite her very great sophistication in analyzing the meaning of variation, is a symptom of a fault that is deeply embedded in the analytic training and thinking of both natural and social scientists. If there are several variable factors influencing some phenomenon, how are we to assign the relative importance to each in determining total variation? Let us take an extreme example. Suppose that we plant seeds of each of two different varieties of corn in two different locations with the following results measured in bushels of corn produced (see Table 1).
lewontin_chart-052611

There are differences between the varieties in their yield from location to location and there are differences between locations from variety to variety. So, both variety and location matter. But there is no average variation between locations when averaged over varieties or between varieties when averaged over locations. Just by knowing the variation in yield associated with location and variety separately does not tell us which factor is the more important source of variation; nor do the facts of location and variety exhaust the description of that variation.

There is a third source of variation called the “interaction,” the variation that cannot be accounted for simply by the separate average effects of location and variety. There is no difference that appears between the average of different varieties or average of different locations, suggesting that neither location or variety matters to yield. Yet the yields of corn were different when different particular combinations of variety and location are observed. These effects of particular combinations of factors, not accounted for by the average effects of each factor separately, are thrown into an unanalyzed category called “interaction” with no concrete physical model made explicit.

In real life there will be some difference between the varieties when averaged over locations and some variation between locations when averaged over varieties; but there will also be some interaction variation accounting for the failure of the separately identified main effects to add up to the total variation. In an extreme case, as for example our jungle drummers with a common consciousness of what drums should sound like, it may turn out to be all interaction.

The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture appears in an era when biological—and specifically, genetic—causation is taken as the preferred explanation for all human physical differences. Although the early and mid-twentieth century was a period of immense popularity of genetic explanations for class and race differences in mental ability and temperament, especially among social scientists, such theories have now virtually disappeared from public view, largely as a result of a considerable effort of biologists to explain the errors of those claims.

The genes for IQ have never been found. Ironically, at the same time that genetics has ceased to be a popular explanation for human intellectual and temperamental differences, genetic theories for the causation of virtually every physical disorder have become the mode. “DNA” has replaced “IQ” as the abbreviation of social import. The announcement in February 2001 that two groups of investigators had sequenced the entire human genome was taken as the beginning of a new era in medicine, an era in which all diseases would be treated and cured by the replacement of faulty DNA. William Haseltine, the chairman of the board of the private company Human Genome Sciences, which participated in the genome project, assured us that “death is a series of preventable diseases.” Immortality, it appeared, was around the corner. For nearly ten years announcements of yet more genetic differences between diseased and healthy individuals were a regular occurrence in the pages of The New York Times and in leading general scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Then, on April 15, 2009, there appeared in The New York Times an article by the influential science reporter and fan of DNA research Nicholas Wade, under the headline “Study of Genes and Diseases at an Impasse.” In the same week the journal Science reported that DNA studies of disease causation had a “relatively low impact.” Both of these articles were instigated by several articles in The New England Journal of Medicine, which had come to the conclusion that the search for genes underlying common causes of mortality had so far yielded virtually nothing useful. The failure to find such genes continues and it seems likely that the search for the genes causing most common diseases will go the way of the search for the genes for IQ.

A major problem in understanding what geneticists have found out about the relation between genes and manifest characteristics of organisms is an overly flexible use of language that creates ambiguities of meaning. In particular, their use of the terms “heritable” and “heritability” is so confusing that an attempt at its clarification occupies the last two chapters of The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. When a biological characteristic is said to be “heritable,” it means that it is capable of being transmitted from parents to offspring, just as money may be inherited, although neither is inevitable. In contrast, “heritability” is a statistical concept, the proportion of variation of a characteristic in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. The implication of “heritability” is that some proportion of the next generation will possess it.

The move from “heritable” to “heritability” is a switch from a qualitative property at the level of an individual to a statistical characterization of a population. Of course, to have a nonzero heritability in a population, a trait must be heritable at the individual level. But it is important to note that even a trait that is perfectly heritable at the individual level might have essentially zero heritability at the population level. If I possess a unique genetic variant that enables me with no effort at all to perform a task that many other people have learned to do only after great effort, then that ability is heritable in me and may possibly be passed on to my children, but it may also be of zero heritability in the population.

One of the problems of exploring an intellectual discipline from the outside is that the importance of certain basic methodological considerations is not always apparent to the observer, considerations that mold the entire intellectual structure that characterizes the field. So, in her first chapter, “Nature and Nurture as Alternatives,” Fox Keller writes that “my concern is with the tendency to think of nature and nurture as separable and hence as comparable, as forces to which relative strength can be assigned.” That concern is entirely appropriate for an external critic, and especially one who, like Fox Keller, comes from theoretical physics rather than experimental biology. Experimental geneticists, however, find environmental effects a serious distraction from the study of genetic and molecular mechanisms that are at the center of their interest, so they do their best to work with cases in which environmental effects are at a minimum or in which those effects can be manipulated at will. If the machine model of organisms that underlies our entire approach to the study of biology is to work for us, we must restrict our objects of study to those in which we can observe and manipulate all the gears and levers.

For much of the history of experimental genetics the chief organism of study was the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in which very large numbers of different gene mutations with visible effects on the form and behavior of the flies had been discovered. The catalog of these mutations described, in addition to genetic information, a description of the way in which mutant flies differed from normal (“wild type”) and assigned each mutation a “Rank” between 1 and 4. Rank 1 mutations were the most reliable for genetic study because every individual with the mutant genetic type could be easily and reliably recognized by the observer, whereas some proportion of individuals carrying mutations of other ranks could be indistinguishable from normal, depending on the environmental conditions in which they developed. Geneticists, if they could, avoided depending on poorer-rank mutations for their experiments. Only about 20 percent of known mutations were of Rank 1.

With the recent shift from the study of classical genes in controlled breeding experiments to the sequencing of DNA as the standard method of genetic study, the situation has gotten much worse. On the one hand, about 99 percent of the DNA in a cell is of completely unknown functional significance and any two unrelated individuals will differ from each other at large numbers of DNA positions. On the other hand, the attempt to assign the causes of particular diseases and metabolic malfunctions in humans to specific mutations has been a failure, with the exception of a few classical cases like sickle-cell anemia. The study of genes for specific diseases has indeed been of limited value. The reason for that limited value is in the very nature of genetics as a way of studying organisms.

Genetics, from its very beginning, has been a “subtractive” science. That is, it is based on the analysis of the difference between natural or “wild-type” organisms and those with some genetic defect that may interfere in some observable way with regular function. But to carry out such comparison it is necessary that the organisms being studied are, to the extent possible, identical in all other respects, and that the comparison is carried out in an environment that does not, itself, generate atypical responses yet allows the possible effect of the genetic perturbation to be observed. We must face the possibility that such a subtractive approach will never be able to reveal the way in which nature and nurture interact in normal circumstances.

An alternative to the standard subtractive method of genetic perturbations would be a synthetic approach in which living systems would be constructed ab initio from their molecular elements. It is now clear that most of the DNA in an organism is not contained in genes in the usual sense. That is, 98–99 percent of the DNA is not a code for a sequence of amino acids that will be assembled into long chains that will fold up to become the proteins that are essential to the formation of organisms; yet that nongenic DNA is transmitted faithfully from generation to generation just like the genic DNA.

It appears that the sequence of this nongenic DNA, which used to be called “junk-DNA,” is concerned with regulating how often, when, and in which cells the DNA of genes is read in order to produce the long strings of amino acids that will be folded into proteins and which of the many alternative possible foldings will occur. As the understanding and possibility of control of the synthesis of the bits and pieces of living cells become more complete, the temptation to create living systems from elementary bits and pieces will become greater and greater. Molecular biologists, already intoxicated with their ability to manipulate life at its molecular roots, are driven by the ambition to create it. The enterprise of “Synthetic Biology” is already in existence.

In May 2010 the consortium originally created by J. Craig Venter to sequence the human genome gave birth to a new organization, Synthetic Genomics, which announced that it had created an organism by implanting a synthetic genome in a bacterial cell whose own original genome had been removed. The cell then proceeded to carry out the functions of a living organism, including reproduction. One may argue that the hardest work, putting together all the rest of the cell from bits and pieces, is still to be done before it can be said that life has been manufactured, but even Victor Frankenstein started with a dead body. We all know what the consequences of that may be.

Letters

What Genes Can't Tell Us: An Exchange October 13, 2011

1

Anthony J.F. Griffiths, Susan R. Wessler, Sean B. Carroll, and Richard C. Lewontin, Introduction to Genetic Analysis, ninth edition (W.H. Freeman, 2008). ↩
2

The Scientist, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 7, 1991). ↩

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Now if you read all of that up to here, you have either read the following or will 100 percent want to read it:

Lynn Margulis [5.1.96]
http://www.edge.org/conversation/chapte ... bitch-quot

[worldsastage]

Thank you so much for these two articles! I adore Margulis, Lovelock and Keller but Margulis' work especially, will be part of a course I'm teaching this fall.

I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems...

[JackRiddler]

Thank you so much for these two articles! I adore Margulis, Lovelock and Keller but Margulis' work especially, will be part of a course I'm teaching this fall.

I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems...

And thank you for saying so! I'm so grateful for feedback like this, it keeps me posting stuff... welcome to RI (a bit belatedly, perhaps). What are you teaching? May I ask where?

[worldsastage]

Thanks for the welcome! This stuff is inspiring. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll actually have time to do more than a quick comment on these threads when I get a chance to read them. Helping my teen with her geology interests, teaching 4 classes per semester, research and volunteering can be consuming but I tend to be action oriented....


To answer your question I'll be teaching biological psychology as I've done for a few years at a small liberal arts college on the east coast of the US.

[JackRiddler]

This sounds interesting, biological psychology. How would you define the subject? I am curious. (On this thread we're sort of discussing the psychology of biology!)

[worldsastage]

I am enjoying this thread precisely because it is about the psychology of biology. It raises issues I have long had questions about.

Biological psychology is supposed to be the about the biological influences on behavior and thought processes. These days the field is called behavioral neuroscience. Thing is, I also have some issues about the neuron centered doctrine of biological psychology AKA neuroscience(what about the beautiful glial cells?). How neuroscience is practiced and used by the dominant culture leaves me somewhat the odd man out because I see psychology and biology as less deterministic and more a function of ecology in a bi-directional process. There is also much that is unknown. I struggle with how little I know all the time. My degrees are in psychology but my actual training is in molecular biology along with field studies in ecology and animal behavior.

When I first started looking for jobs in academia
(I absolutely abhorred the idea of pharma) I was offered positions in both the psychology (in the school of humanities, arts and social sciences) and the biology
(in the school of sciences) departments where I currently work. I chose the psychology department because I found the behavior of those in the psychology department more suitable to my personality. Strict reductionist determinism just isn't my thing. The psych dept professionals observe behaviors of whole organisms AND groups, as well as -in my case- cells, genes, chemistry, etc.