Thread by @HennLab

An anthropologist, a geneticist, a philosopher and a historian of science walk into a bar ... OK, bad joke. We review a “The Genetic Lottery” by @kph3k in @lareviewofbooks. 1/10
lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-dn…

TLDR: At best, the book is willfully naive. At worst, it elides the role of power in social inequality and misrepresents the current science of polygenic risk scores.

Harden tries to thread a narrow political needle. On one hand, she wants to convince political liberals that genetic differences between individuals cause socioeconomic inequality and policies aimed at social justice must take genetics into account.

On the other, she aims to convince political conservatives that the genes that predispose us to success or failure are allocated randomly at conception, and it is unfair to distribute resources on the basis of this genetic luck.

Her arguments lack scientific and practical rigor. Geneticists are only just now beginning to implement genetic prediction in clinical settings for complex traits such as cardiovascular disease or schizophrenia. nature.com/articles/s4159…

Much of this research is only relevant to specific genetic ancestries.
nature.com/articles/s4158…

To suggest social policy include individual-level genetic data is a radical jump in application to all populations and for traits as amorphous as education.

Harden faces a major dilemma: advocating for policy based on current GWAS findings exacerbates racial inequities, but expanding genetic research to include non-European ancestry populations is not urgently needed for addressing the existing inequities

E.g. wealthy kids with the lowest educational polygenic indices complete college at a higher rate than do poor kids with the highest educational polygenic indices. Effective interventions (that are not genetic) clearly exist, but are only available to children of well-off parents

While we admire Harden’s social justice aims, we remain unconvinced by her biological explanation for socioeconomic inequality. 10/10

A whole thread without mentioning heritability ;)