Nature versus nurture: a cursed phrase that has plagued biology for longer than the existence of the field of genetics. It was coined by the father of eugenics, the man who unwittingly pays my salary, Francis Galton, perhaps influenced by Prospero’s lament for Caliban in The Tempest:
“a born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick.”
In modern parlance, nature refers to our genes, biologically inherited from our forebears. Nurture encapsulates the environment in which those genes exist, and that includes everything in the universe that is not genes – from the cells in which DNA is translated into working proteins, to the photons streaming into our skin and eyeballs from the Sun.
The cursed word is versus. Nature and nurture are not in conflict with each other, but act in concert. We are a symphony of what is scored on the page and how that plays out in our lived lives. Untangling those two forces remains one of the great challenges of human genetics in the twenty-first century, because they are so tightly knitted together: we inherit directly from parents, and non-biologically from everyone else, and the society into which we are thrust. Today, we continue to rely on twin studies – invented by Galton – as a means of minimising the genetic influence on individuals and decloaking the environmental, as identical twins have near identical DNA, and so any difference between them should be attributable to nurture, not nature. But we’re now in the era of galactically vast genomic datasets, and can interrogate them with highly sophisticated statistical techniques.
Abdel Abdellaoui led in writing our new paper, which we wrote and rewrote and rewrote, responding to robust peer review (primarily by Sasha Gusev, to whom we are extremely grateful: follow his Substack). In it, we’re looking at a particular and particularly important aspect of our environmental lives, which is the socio-economic status we occupy. We’ve done a deep dive into social hierarchies and mobility, starting in the agricultural revolution, through history, via the formalisation of eugenics, and into the current genomics era. It is not an endorsement of hereditarianism, but over generational time, socio-economic status does influence genetics to craft social stratification.
I’m not going to go over it here: the paper speaks for itself. I think it’s important, because this whole question is central to the relationship between genes and everything else, and this has political ramifications about how society is structured and organised. Therefore iI’d like it to be read by a much broader public than scientists and sociologists.
And because Abdel is a goddamn mensch, he commissioned Lizah van der Aart to draw a comic that explores the ideas within the paper. I include the whole thing below: I think it’s worth your time.
Post script: My involvement, apart from simply because this stuff is important, is also because it relates to my core interests, which include evolution, genetics, the history and unwelcome return of scientific racism and eugenics. Genomic data are often susceptible to misinterpretation, misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Galton was the first hereditarian, and his disciples today are a vocal crop of terminally online commentators, science cosplayers and activists who seek to amplify the role of genes over that of the social environment for many personality traits. Abdel and I have had many run-ins with them, and just this week, some are detailed in an article here.
As with their Führer idol, their focus tends to be in relation to race and intelligence, Galton’s lifelong obsessions. Some of them exist on and draw their salaries from Substacks which I won’t link to, but I will highlight their recently exposed secret plans, in stunning undercover work by Harry Shukman et al. and Hope Not Hate. (I’m in conversation with Harry at the Hay Festival, 28th May).
I’ve secretly witnessed their group meetings, which would be comical if they weren’t so ideologically driven. They often lean heavily on misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data (such as the global IQ datasets, curated by the now dead doyen of scientific racists Richard Lynn). One of the things the Hope Not Hate investigation revealed were their political motivations: they are not truth seekers but aggrieved ideologues. In the new paper, we are striving to advance knowledge because that is what scientists do. As we say in the final paragraphs, we are not calling ‘…for genetic intervention, but rather a call for a deeper understanding and awareness that our social structures are part of an evolving environment that, over time, shapes both social and genetic outcomes.’
Why did you cite flawed twin studies, then? How are you any better than Arthur Jensen?
Brilliant, thank you! Really like the comics.