Thread: It is *not* “Nature (genetics) vs Nurture (environment)”. It is both, and they are so entangled it’s nuts to talk about one without the other.
Both these statements are true : “genetic variants explain the majority of the variation in height in the U.K.” and “good nutrition and childhood environment are important for growth and ultimate height”.
Both these statements are true “genetic variants provide a substantial explanation of educational attainment in the U.K.” and “good schooling and family environment are critical to achieve good educational attainment in the U.K.”
There is no “fight” or “conflict” in studying intellectual + educational processes using both biological (including genetics) or environmental (including family setting). Indeed they are so entangled that you really have to look at both together
(A great example of the entangling is family environment which itself is partly set up by parent’s genetics, some of which is shared with their children)
However, bringing in genetics / biology into this discussion has its policy and communication issues - and geneticists need to be aware and counter act them at all times
This first is the idea of genetic determinism implying to some lay people (and sometimes policy makers) that improvement of the educational systems is futile - this is *rubbish*
This is equivalent to saying in the human height analogy that our understanding of vitamins, mandated folic acid in bread, was pointless. Clearly not.
Another analogy from @StuartJRitchie : myopia has very strong genetics but we don’t as a society “reject wearing glasses because of the genetic determinism of myopia”.
To move this to a more educational setting ; spell checking software is useful to everyone, and in particular people with dyslexia. Indeed the presence of robust biological conditions influencing sunsets of education should (and do) ask questions of how we should assess people
The other massive communication issue is around ethnicity : for most people the words “genetics and heritability” and “ethnicity or race” are closely linked often to be proxies of each other.
People can easily take “genetics has a substantial role in education” to mistakenly think this also means “biological factors have a substantial role in why we observe different distributions of ethnicities in educational attainment- university- and thus society”
This is *not* true. We can be confident of this via in fact the presence of so many very mixed populations (Brazilians, African Americans, Afro Caribbeans) all of which have substantial European genetic ancestry
(There are other reason to be confident; ideally we’d have some big cohort studies in sub Saharan Africa to nail this all down; such cohort studies are partly underway via H3 Africa)
On the flip side, the presence of strong biological factors to educational attainment means a policy goal of equal outcomes of education can’t be crude “equality” - people are individuals and some differences are pretty deep rooted in development/ genetics etc
I don’t live the educational science world too much (a little via my wife!); my distant view is that the people working with children / data in real world settings understand this, but there can be a philosophical “tabula rasa” starting point in some academic areas
A plea to all academics and journalists - let’s really move on from the “conflict” framing of nature vs nurture in intellectual abilities and educational attainment ; it might provide good copy and connect to old debates, but the reality is this complete entanglement of both
(Thread ends)
