The Right Gets It Wrong On Genetics #2

There are two domains of debate where conservatives tend to get it wrong more often than not: genetics and economics. Today we'll be discussing genetics. The common fallacy made is the same one that nearly everyone makes: to conflate inheritance with genetics. It's part of a larger tendency of conservatives to adopt the liberal framework and then struggle to comprehensively argue against the excesses of liberalism they disagree with. It's why there was pushback recently from the hard right against DDR3 (Dems Are the Real Racists) arguments because they are roughly the same as claiming "conservatives are the real liberals." Similarly, when race realists attempt to substantiate their claims through argument of pure genetics, they are saying, "we are the real biological materialists."

We can sympathize with them, of course, because they are attempting to fight against lies. In this case, the lie is blank slate theory - the belief that all people are inherently equal, thus any disparities between groups must be caused by privilege/oppression dynamics. They have good evidence that many traits correlated to outcomes are biologically inherited - which is true - but get tripped up by their own form of scientism by trying to validate their arguments through mainstream science. Unfortunately, the mainstream conviction that all inheritance comes from genetics is not just wrong, but so easily shown to be wrong, so consistently shown to be wrong by their own study results, that it amounts to little more than a lie. Attempts to use one lie to counteract another lie will always end in frustration.

The Zman recently fell into the trap in his post The Gay Debate. He begins,

For the longest time, it was assumed by science that there was not a single gene that caused homosexuality. The reason is a gay gene would make the person less sexually fit and therefore less likely to reproduce and pass on the gene. It does not take much of a disadvantage for a trait to disappear from the pool over enough time. If such a gene did exist, so it was thought, it would have disappeared from the human gene pool a long time ago and homosexuality with it. Therefore, something else must be at work.

This is obviously true. This is a nice little logical argument that effectively disproves the existence of a gay gene - there is no gene that destroys the chance of reproduction because it gives an enormous disadvantage to reproduction. Such a strong argument is not even necessary in this debate; it is not actually our responsibility to disprove their theories. You would think that it would follow that if there is not possibly a single gene that causes homosexuality, then similarly there is not a group of genes that cause it either.

The source of this divide is the philosophical argument that there are facts that can be tested and values that are purely opinion. A scientific theory is one that can be tested, while an ethical proposition cannot. If something cannot be tested and possibly falsified, it is not science. In the case of something like human traits, it means there is either a biological mechanism to explain it completely or it is purely a social construct with no biological root. Traits fell on either side of the fact-value divide.

Exactly. A scientific theory is one that can be tested; an ethical proposition cannot be. What the left does on this issue is to take the ethical proposition that homosexuality is natural and attempt to convert it into the scientific theory that homosexuality is biologically determined. Because they also believe that all biological determination is genetic, they have a clear bias to find evidence of gay genes. Thus, we can predict that there will be scientific publications where the claims made of genetic influence on sexuality in the titles and abstracts will be stronger than the supporting evidence, and the results themselves will tend to be skewed towards supporting that outcome. (That is, they will not be reproducible.)

In the case of homosexuality, it is starting to look like it may be the result of both a combination of genetics and environmental factors. A recent study has found two SNPs that influenced both male and female homosexuality. These are not the “gay genes” some thought existed, but two “switches” that have a strong association with homosexuality in men and women. That means homosexuals tend to have these two markers, but it does not mean all people with them are gay.

The link he provides (which is to a blog post about the study) does not say that the two SNPs have a "strong association" with homosexuality. It says "small but statistically significant." The paper claims to have found a higher correlation of genetics overall to homosexuality - between 8% and 25% - but were  unable to find specific genes with any large any influence. So at most, genetics play a third the role that social conditioning does, and perhaps less than a tenth. In itself, these results refute the liberal claim that gays are "just born that way" and support "pray the gay away" Christian camps and general attempts to direct men's sexual energy away from deviance and towards building families. Even then, those correlations don't prove anything at all. The fundamental fallacy that all Psych 101 students are warned about is correlation does not equal causation. Just because there is a small - even statistically significant - correlation doesn't mean genes cause sexual behavior. It could be a coincidence. For instance, Israeli Jews are the gayest people on Earth with lots of pride parades and all that. However, in Palestine homosexuality is suppressed. Because there are specific genetics between those two ethnicities, a genetic survey of Israel would certainly find a correlation between genes and sexuality, but it wouldn't mean anything.

Note also the syntax of the genes not being gay genes but gay "switches." Biologists refer to this kind of verbiage frequently when they attempt to find the genetic influences for complex traits. They never can find the genetic causation they're looking for, so they assume that the trait is biologically determined elsewhere and that the gene somehow acts as a switch to that mechanism. It's the conclusion you'd expect to see if there is no genetic basis for the traits but scientists are so eager to find one that they'll concoct any excuse possible to elevate coincidental correlations into evidence for solid causal biological pathways.

He continues (emphasis added).

As with intelligence, something as complex as human sexuality probably has many genes that influence the trait. It could also mean other traits come along with the ride, as they are also associated with the set of genes that cause homosexuality. It’s entirely possible that this set of genes is responsible for a range of behaviors that are often associated with homosexuals. In other words, the attraction to the same sex is just one result of many from a set of genes turned on or off in the person.

Not very strong language here, and it makes the same mistake and applies it to IQ. As always, the genetic surveys do not support the theory, so it is theorized that there are complex webs of genetics underneath that we've not been able to tease apart. Sure, perhaps a viable hypothesis if there were millions and billions of genes in the web, but there are only about 190 genes said to be unique to the human genome. There is no genetic space for the alleged webs of complex genetics needed to account for the wide range of heritable complex behavioral and physiological traits observed in humans. The results of the Human Genome Project disprove all this, yet the bitter clingers just can't let go of their genetics.

The last sentence of the actual study's abstract is:

Overall, our findings provide insights into the genetics underlying same-sex sexual behavior and underscore the complexity of sexuality.

Of course, they never will say that the results - which don't support a genetic basis for biological inheritance - don't support a genetic basis for biological inheritance. They'll say it's more complex than they realized, more funding is needed, etc. The same is seen in astrophysics. The more money we spend chasing false assumptions, the more money we are asked to spend chasing increasingly complex false assumptions.

Ultimately, Zman still manages to end up in the right place.

If sexuality is purely natural, then debating the culture issues surrounding it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if culture matters a lot, then debating the morality surrounding sexuality is a primary concern. Do we want more homosexuals or fewer homosexuals becomes a valid topic of debate. Leaving it up to nature is no longer a justifiable response.

Despite all the efforts to find underlying genetic causes, the studies still show that social influences are a much stronger influence on behavior.

A second example of one of our writers making bad genetic arguments comes from Steve Sailer in Race, Genetics and Pseudoscience: An Explainer, which critiques this article by the same title.

If they wanted to be more persuasive, they should give more examples to back up their assertions. For example, they repeatedly claim that old scientific and popular ideas about how best to lump and split human populations have been debunked by modern genomics, but they don’t tell us which of these ideas that have been disproven and what has replaced them. The essay would be far more interesting with more factual examples.

This is true. Most people, including the relevant scientists, believe that modern genomics proves the neo-Darwinian theories of evolution. In fact - and as we saw above - modern genomics always rebuts those theories, but they are interpreted as hinting at previously unknown complexity.

The following paragraph comes from the original article, which Sailer quotes on his own post.

… Moreover, since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation. These very different patterns for these two traits mean that the genes responsible for determining skin pigmentation cannot be meaningfully associated with the genes currently known to be linked to IQ. These observations alone rule out some of the cruder racial narratives about the genetics of intelligence: it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence.

This is correct! Granted, inadvertently so, and it gives way to larger false conclusions. The reason that the same genes that give rise to skin color aren't the ones that give rise to IQ is that genetics don't play that big a role. Yes, race is a real thing and correlated with IQ, skin tone, behavioral inclinations, and all that. However, because race realists have rested all their arguments on genetics, they open themselves to be countered completely by the reality of the human genome.

Sailer responds:

Wow, that’s pretty embarrassing. Folks interested in human biodiversity tend to have vastly more sophisticated views than those attacked here.

His rebuttal would be more interesting with more factual examples. 😉By sophisticated he really means more complex, because the right-wingers who adopt biological materialism are forced down the same rabbit hole as the lefties. Because his opinions were countered by the left using actual evidence - in exactly the way I've said they would be - he is reduced to petty "wow, how embarrassing" commentary. All political arguments rooted in genetics will be rebutted by evidence. However, while the left's shortcomings will be excused with quiet mutterings about hidden complexity, the right's will be widely lambasted as disproven hate speech.