Wrote this piece for "Ordinary Times" related to my quixotic battles with genetic studies and the overgeneticization of our society (at least that's where it took me). I was writing for a presumed non-scientist audience, so maybe it will be a little more understandable and less dry for someone who is interested in the basic debate I'm trying to put out there. Or not...
Eyecolor isn't Mendelian. It turns out that the genes that create eyecolor are a bit more complex than that, and it's almost as if you get a flat random roll from your genetic background (Some genetic backgrounds don't have blue eyes, for example).
ReplyDeleteTo the meat of your article:
For ADHD, in particular, we see different responses to stimulants, than the general population. I may not know the specific genes that have made these changes to the malleable growing brain, but they're there.
It's not cultural, what makes one person sleep -better- after consuming caffeinated coffee, and the next person not. That's not cultural at all!
I can measure that, with three simple electrodes. At that point, screw genes, we have a detectable phenotype! It may take a thousand genes to show what that phenotype is, but it's detectably different.
And the personality is different because of this.
I don't care if you want to say ADHD isn't a problem, and that we as a culture have problems with "Insert EvoPsych Explanation Here." But it's a physical phenomenon. Measurable, even if we don't have the genes yet.
Murray's Bell Curve book has selection bias issues out the wazoo, by the way. Americans are not a randomized sample of genetic populations (and the African Americans have significant admixtures of other genetic populations).
THAT said, "Don't Sleep In the Road!"
No IQ study can be properly done, of course, without taking into account the critical temperatures for optimal development of the human brain. Those studies were done thirty years ago. Naturally, they're corporate, so I doubt you've read them.
Still, is it really implausible to think that genetic backwaters might have statistically significant deviations in IQ? Or, if you'd rather, abilities that were selected for based on environment? Poodles, the world's second smartest dog, have a very different type of intelligence than the border collie. Why would humans be different?
I can think of a thousand different things that are plausible, none of which are actually true. The point is that no genes have been definitively identified as causing or even contributing to really any mental illness. It's an inconvenient fact. I have been pointing this out for many years. The point of my piece was to convey this fact to those without a significant science background, since it is often incorrectly stated or suggested that we have made such discoveries. Dog IQ is a funny idea. My border collie was a great dog, but not particularly bright by any standards. All of my dogs were very different, even within breeds. That said, there have also been no genes definitively linked to any specific "psychological" trait in dogs, either. I know people want it to be so, and assume it will be so, but it hasn't really borne out from the studies of dogs or humans.
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