Category: eugenics

The ignorant and misguided demonization of a behavior geneticist

August 17, 2022 • 11:30 am

I don’t usually look at Twitter unless a reader sends me a tweet, and I never engage in Twitter battles. But I’ve heard enough about these squabbles—particularly when connected with someone’s “cancellation”—that I know that they’re rancorous, full of ignorance and hatred, and the participants are often anonymous, which is cowardly.

Today we’re going to look at one attempt at cancellation that particularly galled me, for the charges against the accused—genetic researcher and paleoartist Emily Willoughby—are not only unfair, but bespeak the profound ignorance of her critics.

This piling on is what happens when someone studies the genetics of IQ, but doesn’t even mention race.  It’s enough that one studies the genetics of this trait to bring out a pack of howling morons denying that there is IQ, that it has a genetic component, and then you claim that the student is a horrible person who must be a eugenicist or Nazi.

That kind of tirade, of course, derives from the empirical demonstration that ethnic groups differ in IQ, which has become taboo to mention. You don’t even have to mention race: all you have to say is the undeniable scientific fact that IQ (whatever it may be) is highly heritable within a group—that is, about 60% of the variation in IQ among, say, Europeans, is due to variation in their genes—and the Blank Slate Police come knocking. The implication is that if you deny this simple empirical fact, you must also think that variation among groups has a big genetic component (this is a faulty conclusion), and therefore must be a eugenicist hoping to sterilize or kill members of groups with lower IQs.

I wouldn’t have believed this kind of stupid extrapolation had I not seen it for myself.

As I said, Willoughby is a geneticist: a postdoctoral researcher in personality, individual differences, and behavior genetics at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is also a paleoartist, known for depicting extinct creatures. I gave a positive review in 2018 to one of the books she illustrated, a pro-evolution book called God’s Word or Human Reason?: An Inside Perspective on Creationism.

Here’s Emily’s bio from her research webpage (there’s another on her art webpage).

 

Emily is also engaged in the new genome-wide association mapping (GWAS) of various human traits, a technique I described in my review of a book by Kathryn Harden on the method. It’s a new way to find small regions of the genome that contribute to variation among people in behavioral and physical traits. One of the most well-known papers describing its results is the paper below published in Nature Genetics. As you see, Emily is an author (click to read).

Using a huge sample (1.1 million people), and one “race” (Americans of European ancestry), the authors found fully 1271 variable regions of the genome (“single-nucleotide polymorphisms”, or SNPs) associated with differences in educational attainment (how far you go in school) and cognitive performance (how you perform on tests). These SNPs accounted for about 10-13% of variation among “Europeans” (i.e., U.S. whites). Because the “heritability” of the trait measured by standard methods (parent-offspring correlation, twin studies, and adoption studies) is substantially higher than this (around 0.6), the GWAS results imply that there are a ton of variable regions in our genome that affect academic and cognitive performance within an ethnic group, but have effects to small to measure. Other studies give similar results.

Now this isn’t IQ per se, but these traits are highly correlated with IQ. Whatever IQ measures, there’s no doubt that it’s strongly correlated with various measures of “conventional” success in life, including academic achievement, financial success, income, socioeconomic status, educational attainment (one of the traits measured in the paper below) and occupational level attained. There is no controversy about this, or about whether IQ itself has substantial heritability within a population.

Now, what does someone bent on stirring up trouble and besmirching a genetic researcher’s reputation do with the fact that Emily works on stuff like the above? Here’s what—they issue a defamatory tweet, full of misrepresentations.

Where does one start hacking through this thicket of nonsense? First, how can a measurement be a “pseudoscientific myth”? It is an estimate, and one that is not only highly heritable, but highly correlated with conventional measures of success in life. (Note: I am not saying that people with higher IQ’s are “better”: many of them are jerks, and there are lots of valuable human qualities, like empathy, not measured by IQ. All I’m saying is that IQ measures something that correlates with academic, occupational, and financial achievement.)

“Prehistorica”‘s deliberately misleading slurs go on.  Emily’s research, as you can see by reading her c.v., is NOT “directly tied to eugenics, racism, and classism.” Yes, in the past bigoted researchers have made those ties, but to imply that Emily is doing that is simply a lie. She works on genetic analysis and heritability of behavioral traits within populations.

And saying that Emily is “indifferent to the myth that intelligence is a racial component” is a way of implying that she knows this is true, but doesn’t pay attention to it. In fact, we don’t know whether it’s a myth, because we have very few data. But at any rate, Emily does not deal with the issue of racial differences in cognitive abilities. This is just a smear.

Below is some approbation for one of her papers, which measures the heritability of IQ using correlations between parent and offspring in both adoptive and biological families. (This is one of the better ways to measure heritability, since family environment is presumably similar among the groups but genetic relatedness differ drastically.)

In the graphs below, notice the difference in the heritability using IQs of parents correlated with biological offspring (0.42, or 42%), versus that between parents with their adoptive offspring. (Parents and biological offspring were almost all whites of European ancestry, while adoptive children were 21% white but with 66% Asian and 13% adoptees of other groups. Heritabilities are the slopes of these regression lines.) In contrast to biological parents and their offspring, the heritability of IQ using parents and adopted offspring was much lower: either 10% or 6%, depending on how it was measured. This shows a small “common environment” effect, but a much larger effect of genes—a finding in line with that of previous studies.

These are respectable studies in peer-reviewed journals, conducted using standard protocols, and giving results that are in line with previous work or, in the case of GWAS studies, with contemporanous work.

But that doesn’t matter. Watch the yahoos go to town on Twitter! We start again with Prehistorica, as all the another tweets are responses to his tweets.

The tweet above is hilarious. The correlation (as instantiated through the regression line) is evident to anybody who has studied statistics, yet “magpie” can’t believe that this is a correlation. Magpie is an idiot.

All these people are shocked by the misguided tweet of Prehistorica, though they clearly know nothing about Willoughby’s research. This is how someone’s reputation is taken down by ignoramuses. Note the people who completely write Willoughby off because of what Prehistorica says, yet what he says is ignorant gibberish. Still, all the Twitterites, ignorant of modern behavioral genetics, fall in line like lemmings. (Willoughby does have a few defenders.)

“Vile, spiteful person.”  How did they divine that from Willoughby’s work?

The one below is even funnier in its stupidity than the one about correlations.  My response is “YES, THIS IS HOW PHENOTYPES WORK.” A phenotype is any measurable trait of an organism, and it can be morphological, physiological, and yes, behavioral. For any measurable trait (“phenotype”) you can calculate a heritability, assuming you do the work right and control for common environment, nongenetic inheritance (wealth) and the like.  So, “Lost Ovis”, take a course in biology for crying out loud!. The fact is that every “behavior” in “Lost Ovis”‘s table is a phenotype that one can use to figure out how much variation among individuals in the behavior is due to variation in their genes.

Here’s a graph from one of Emma’s papers showing estimates of heritability in many “phenotypes”, including behavioral ones.  The scientific estimates are on the Y axis, but do correlate pretty well with laypeople’s off-the-cuff estimates. Note that “intelligence” is estimated by both groups to have a heritability (or, for laypeople, “estimate of genetic influence”) of about 0.6.

Now one attacker above mentions a picture commissioned by Willoughby and her boyfriend in 2009. Here’s the “Nazi” picture that was commissioned, used above to further denigrate Emily. I wrote her and asked her what that was about, and she replied (with permission to quote):

The explanation for the drawing of dinosaurs in Nazi uniforms is just that my boyfriend and I were feathered dinosaur artists and chess fans, and thought it was funny to be offensive 13 years ago. We would never think of asking someone to draw something like that nowadays, nor expressing humor about it in public.

Emily has grown up since she drew it, and, truth be told, I don’t find it so offensive myself. Raptors dressed as Nazis is a trope of comparison, and it doesn’t make fun of any group except raptors. But Emily thought it was necessary to explain it.  I, for one, am satisfied with her explanation and regret, but the trolls will never be.

Emily, distressed that she was being taken apart on Twitter for no good reason save ignorance, decided to write a series of tweets in response. I’ve put the ten of them below.

Although it’s clear from Emily’s final tweet that she certainly does not condone eugenics, she decided to email me further to give a clearer statement about her beliefs. Here it is, unsolicited by me.

I unequivocally denounce eugenics and those who advocate for it. I cannot control those who follow me and argue in favor of ideologies I abhor. I did not invite them. The checkered history of my field is part of why I care about improving it by doing good research and methodology commensurate with our modern notions of human rights. But if people start believing behavioral genetics is a racist field of research, only racists will conduct it. Please don’t let that happen.

Good enough for you trolls? Can you see Emily as a good researcher and a human being again?

I didn’t think so.

This has been an object lesson to me on Twitter, and has further confirmed my unwillingness to read comments on my own Twitter posts (they go directly to the site from my WordPress account) as well as my refusal to engage in Twitter fights.

Yes, Twitter can be useful in scientific communication by publicizing new papers or results quickly. But it can also be used by scientific know-nothings to smear researchers. And that was what was done to Dr. Willoughby here. Both Prehistorica and his/her vicious acolytes should be ashamed of themselves. They won’t be, of course, because, being Woke, they think they’re doing God’s work. Ignore them.

“Jeopardy” shows that the Woke have won

December 16, 2021 • 1:15 pm

I received an email from reader Paul Topping, and I thought it was both amusing and sad. I have his permission to post it, so I’ll give it to you just as I got it:

My wife and I watch “Jeopardy!” regularly. This last Tuesday, they had an answer and question that might amuse you. This week and last they are doing their “Professors Tournament” which, obviously, features college professors. This question/answer was the “Daily double” in the first (single) Jeopardy part of the show.

Answer:

     Biologist T.H. Huxley was a renowned defender of this theory & in 1893 famously lectured on it ‘& Ethics’

Contestant (English Prof from Penn State U, Hester Blum):

     What is eugenics?

Host:

    Sorry, the question is “What is evolution?”

I don’t think this contestant was well-informed on science. She laughed out loud when the subject for Final Jeopardy was introduced: Physics.

When I wrote Paul that this was both sad and funny, he responded:

t’s interesting but not surprising that someone would know just enough science to name scientists to cancel but not much beyond that. If it’s any consolation, she lost the contest.

It would be an English professor, wouldn’t it? (Or a sociologist or cultural anthropologist!)

I’ve written about T. H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) several times, and about how his reputation has been unfairly besmirched. Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, for instance, has been renamed because the University deemed Huxley a racist. Now T. H. seems to be more associated with eugenics than with biology, abolitionism, or science education. And he was NEVER a proponent of eugenics!

Assessing Ronald Fisher: should we take his name off everything because he espoused eugenics?

January 18, 2021 • 11:00 am

Many consider Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) one of the greatest biologists—and probably the greatest geneticist—of the 20th century, for he was a polymath who made hugely important contributions in many areas. He’s considered the father of modern statistics, developing methods like analysis of variance and chi-square tests still used widely in science and social science. His pathbreaking work on theoretical population genetics, embodied in the influential book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, included establishing that Mendelian genetics could explain the patterns of correlation among relatives for various traits, and helped bring about the reconciliation of genetics and natural history that constituted the “modern synthesis” of evolution. His theoretical work presaged the famous “neutral theory” of molecular evolution and established the efficacy of natural selection—the one part of Darwin’s theory that wasn’t widely accepted in the early 20th century.

Fisher also made advances important to medicine, like working out the genetics of Rh incompatibility, once an important cause of infant death. His statistical analyses are regularly used in modern medical studies, especially partitioning out the contributors to maladies and in analyzing control versus experimental groups (they were surely used in testing the efficacy of Covid vaccines).  As the authors of a new paper on Fisher say, “The widespread applications of Fisher’s statistical developments have undoubtedly contributed to the saving of many millions of lives and to improvements in the quality of life. Anyone who has done even a most elementary course in statistics will have come across many of the concepts and tests that Fisher pioneered.”

That is indeed the case, for statistical methods don’t go out of fashion very easily, especially when they’re correct!

Unfortunately, Fisher was also an exponent of eugenics, and for this he’s recently starting to get canceled. Various organizations, like the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Statistical Association, have taken his name off awards, and Fisher’s old University of Cambridge college, Gonville and  Caius, removed their “Fisher window” (a stained glass window honoring Fisher’s statistical achievements) from their Hall last year.  Further disapprobation is in store as well.

This article in Heredity by a panoply of accomplished British statisticians and geneticists (Bodmer was one of Fisher’s last Ph.D. students) attempts an overall evaluation of Fisher’s work, balancing the positive benefits against his work and views on eugenics. If you are a biologist, or know something about Fisher, you’ll want to read it (click on the screenshot below, get the pdf here, and see the reference at the bottom.)

The authors make no attempt to gloss over Fisher’s distasteful and odious eugenics views, but do clarify what he favored. These included a form of positive eugenics, promoting the intermarriage of accomplished (high IQ) people, as well as negative eugenics: sterilization of the “feeble minded.” The latter was, however, always seen by Fisher as a voluntary measure, never forced. While one may ask how someone who is mentally deficient can give informed consent, Fisher favored “consent” of a parent or guardian (and concurrence of two physicians) before sterilization—if the patients themselves weren’t competent. But is that really “consent”? Negative eugenics on the population kind (not the selective abortion of fetuses carrying fatal disease, which people do every day) is something that’s seen today as immoral.

Further, Fisher’s views were based on his calculations that the lower classes outbred the higher ones, which, he thought, would lead to an inevitable evolutionary degeneration of society. But he was wrong: oddly, he didn’t do his sums right, as was pointed out much later by Carl Bajema. When you do them right, there’s no difference between the reproductive output of “higher” and “lower” classes.

Contrary to the statements of those who have canceled Fisher, though, he wasn’t a racist eugenist, although he did think that there were behavioral and intelligence differences between human groups, which is likely to be true on average but is a taboo topic—and irrelevant for reforming society. Fisher’s eugenics was largely based on intelligence and class, not race. Fisher was also clueless about the Nazis, though there is no evidence that he or his work contributed to the Nazi eugenics program.

In fact, none of Fisher’s recommendations or views were ever adopted by his own government, which repeatedly rejected his recommendations for positive and negative eugenics. Nor were they taken up in America, where they did practice negative eugenics, sterilizing people without their consent. But American eugenics was largely promoted by American scientists.

My go-to procedure for assessing whether someone should be “canceled”—having their statues removed or buildings renamed and so on—involves two criteria. First, was the honorific meant to honor admirable aspects of the person—the good he or she did? Statues of Confederate soldiers don’t pass even this first test. Second, did the good that a person accomplish outweigh the bad? If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then I don’t see the usefulness of trying to erase someone’s contributions.

On both counts, then, I don’t think it’s fair for scientific societies or Cambridge University to demote Fisher, cancel prizes named after him, and so on. He held views that were common in his time (and were adhered to by liberal geneticists like A. H. Sturtevant and H. J. Muller), and his views, now seen properly as bigoted and odious, were never translated into action.

Of course the spread of wokeness means that balanced assessments like this one are rare; usually just the idea that someone espoused eugenics is enough to get them canceled and their honors removed.  It saddens me, having already known about Fisher and his views, that what I considered my “own” professional society—the Society for the Study of Evolution—and a society of which I was President, is now marinated in wokeness, cancelling Fisher, hiring “diversity” experts to police the annual meeting at great cost, and making the ludicrous assertion—especially ludicrous for an evolution society—that sex in humans is not binary (read my post on this at the link). The SSE’s motivations are good; their execution is embarrassing. I am ashamed of my own intellectual home, and of the imminent name change for the Fisher Prize, for which the Society even apologized. Much of the following “explanation” is cant, especially the part about students being put off applying for the prize:

This award was originally named to highlight Fisher’s foundational contributions to evolutionary biology. However, we realize that we cannot, in recognizing and honoring these contributions, isolate them from his racist views and promotion of eugenics–which were relentless, harmful, and unsupported by scientific evidence. We further recognize and deeply regret that graduate students, who could have been recipients of this award, may have hesitated to apply given the connotations. For this, we are truly sorry.

His promotion of genetics was not relentless, wasn’t harmful (at least in being translated into eugenics, as opposed to being simply “offensive”), and of course scientific evidence shows that you could change almost every characteristic of humans by selective breeding (eugenics). But we don’t think that’s a moral thing to do. And yes, you can separate the good someone does from their reprehensible ideas. Martin Luther King was a serial adulterer and philanderer. Yet today we are celebrating his good legacy, which far outweighs his missteps.

But I digress. I’ll leave you with the assessment of a bunch of liberals who nevertheless use Fisher’s work every day: the authors of the new paper.

The Fisher Memorial Trust, of which the authors are trustees, exists because of Fisher’s foundational contributions to genetical and statistical research. It honours these and the man who made them. Recent criticism of R. A. Fisher concentrates, as we have extensively discussed, on very limited aspects of his work and focusses attention on some of his views, both in terms of science and advocacy. This is entirely appropriate, but in re-assessing his many contributions to society, it is important to consider all aspects, and to respond in a responsible way—we should not forget any negative aspects, but equally not allow the negatives to completely overshadow the substantial benefits to modern scientific research. To deny honour to an individual because they were not perfect, and more importantly were not perfect as assessed from the perspective of hindsight, must be problematic. As Bryan Stevenson (Stevenson 2014) said “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

In one of Fisher’s last papers celebrating the centenary of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and commenting on the early Mendelian geneticists’ refusal to accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection he said, “More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning track or stopped short of the right” (Fisher 1959). Here, then, there is a lesson for us. Rather than dishonouring Fisher for his eugenic ideas, which we believe do not outweigh his enormous contributions to science and through that to humanity, however much we might not now agree with them, it is surely more important to learn from the history of the development of ideas on race and eugenics, including Fisher’s own scientific work in this area, how we might be more effective in attacking the still widely prevalent racial biases in our society.

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Below: Ronald Alymer Fisher, in India in 1937 (as the authors note, Fisher was feted by a colleague for his “incalculable contribution to the research of literally hundreds of individuals, in the ideas, guidance, ans assistance he so generously gave, irrespective of nationality, colour, class, or creed.” Unless that’s an arrant lie, that should also go toward assessing what the man actually did rather than what he thought.

Fisher in the company of Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Mrs. Nirmalkumari Mahalanobis in India in 1940. Courtesy of the P.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Museum and Archives, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, and Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Adelaide Library.

h/t: Matthew Cobb for making me aware of the paper.

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Bodmer, W., R. A. Bailey, B. Charlesworth, A. Eyre-Walker, V. Farewell, A. Mead, and S. Senn. 2021. The outstanding scientist, R.A. Fisher: his views on eugenics and race. Heredity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-020-00394-6