An interesting post on The Trouble with Jim Watson. Watson and biology are victims of a successful paradigm — you could still argue that that paradigm is partly Watson’s fault! — and you can’t really kick Watson unless you also take a few swings at how molecular genetics has produced a skewed, simplistic, and deterministic view of how life operates.
The trouble with Watson, then, is not how aberrant he is, but how conventional. He is no more—but no less—than an embodiment of late twentieth-century biomedicine. He exemplifies how a near-exclusive focus on the genetic basis of human behavior and social problems tends to sclerose them into a biologically determinist status quo. How that process occurs seems to me eminently worth observing and thinking about. Watson is an enigmatic character. He has managed his image carefully, if not always shrewdly. It is impossible to know what he “really thinks” on most issues, but I do believe this much: he believes that his main sin has been excessive honesty. He thinks he is simply saying what most people are afraid to say.
Unfortunately, he may be right.
I think I disagree that he has “managed his image carefully” — I don’t think he’s had to do much managing at all, but trusts that he can blunder about gracelessly and his respectful peers and a hero-worshipping media will do the work of covering for him.
But otherwise, yes. The press loves a good “gene for X” story, and there are plenty of scientists willing to serve that right up for them…and of course, you can also get funded by proposing to search for causal genes (although I think most scientists are a little more skeptical than the media). The science establishment will let the ENCODE project sail through, powered with shovelfuls of money, and not question it because it serves the gene-centric perspective so well, even if it is fundamentally flawed.
The scary thing is that while Watson’s career will be neatly wrapped up as he sinks into retirement, I don’t see any sign that the genetic reductionist view is going to retire with him.
that is what I find so disturbing. He sounds so conventional just like the average man in the street except in this one very narrow area were he made a discovery. I sense no deep thinking no great mind. I guess I expect more.
uncle frogy
The media does not like the idea of many different people’s views coming together and being used in a successful way. It is too hard to cover. The media likes one person they can focus on and put on a pedestal. Many of Watson’s views are not intellectual, they probably are honest in that he does feel that way regardless of whether he has evidence to back it up.
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The media also does not like an intellectual, they like brevity, that is also easy to cover. The problem is, brevity does not always mean concision. Sometimes extra words that were omitted ARE necessary. Too often I think we filter out the pasta and feed people hot water. Watson has been feeding the media a lot of hot water and many are too uninformed to know the difference. I can’t blame them, at times I have been uninformed about topics.
I’m curious as to what PZ or any of the commenters here see as the fundamental flaw to a gene-centric perspective, particularly as it relates to medicine.
Sadly enough, you could replace “Watson” with “Dawkin” without having to change much of the post … or the comments.
I do not think the science establishment has allowed the ENCODE ‘debacle’ (as I like to call it) to sail without getting its sails shredded. Many in biology have bought it, but many others certainly have not. I do not know what the ratio between the camps might be, but the nay-sayers have certainly made themselves heard.
@barbaz # 4
I find Dawkins to be more intellectual myself, but I definitely see your point and agree to an extent. Dawkins has in many ways been put on a pedestal by the media. I have read some of his works and I do try to take the ideas on an idea by idea basis, to let the ideas stand for themselves. Unfortunately the tendency to single out a single individual as an authority and focus all of the ideas on that person is commonplace. The argument from authority is a fallacy committed on many different levels.
Biology, and genetics specifically, doesn’t offer closure, in the way the exact physical laws of nature do (whatever those are, ideally speaking, since physicists are still working on it). There are things other than genes and selection and assorted biological processes. That is the most fundamental problem with it, although there are plenty of other more technical reasons for why we already know it’s a bad idea which doesn’t work.
It’s not just pure speculation that physics could conceivably (in principle) tell you what “causes” someone to be a Democrat, for instance, because it’s supposed to be a fundamental theory about everything in nature — Democrats are all made entirely of physical stuff interacting with other physical stuff, after all. There could logically be supernatural entities causing things besides physics, but no such things have ever been observed nor is it even remotely likely that anyone will ever observe them. However, to say genes do it, that nothing else is involved, is assuming you can leave out all manner of other causes which are in fact real. Why do that? This is a coarse-grained description of some subset of the entire world, which neglects numerous other things (that we definitely know are real), in order to make this kind of utterly speculative claim. It’s just brazenly coming up with a premature answer to the question. If you get that you’re deliberately leaving out real stuff in the analysis that you know could have an effect, then what is point of the claim in the first place? Just to put forward a wild hypothesis that you have every reason to believe will be shot down almost instantly, then ignore that it’s been shot down over and over and over again?
I think it’s foolish to think that there is any specific ‘genetic reductionism’ at play here. As somebody who works essentially exclusively with proteins and drug responses it is reductionism in itself that is the problem. Hardly any reviewer likes to hear that any problem is multifactorial even in the age of complex models. And certainly no press officer can grasp this sufficiently well in order to write up such stories into compelling press releases. Until this changes biology will remain trapped– genetics centric or not.
This is of course a completely separate problem from the irrational truckloads of money that get thrown at sequencing efforts.
@chris61 # 3
That is an excellent question. I am not sure but I would love to hear others views on that myself. What are your views on the fundamental flaw?
@7 consciousness razor
What things? Human beings either are or are not a mass of chemical reactions and if they are, those chemical reactions are governed by how our genes are expressed. If we are more than a mass of chemical reactions … to me that sounds like a theological or philosophical argument.
1) genes are not proteins.
2) individual genes only rarely are the causes of diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, …
3) genes only rarely point the way to the appropriate intervention
I realize there are a few counter examples (BCR-ABL, HER2amp, BRAF-V600E, …), but this paradigm is clearly the exception and not the rule.
@hrun0815 # 8
Which is basically what I was getting at in #2. People want brief concise answers and the answers are often not brief and concise. If you try to omit extra words you leave out something critical to the understanding. The brief release might be compelling when it comes out, but it is also inaccurate. I use that analogy of filtering out the pasta and feeding people boiled water a lot (I thought of it when looking at a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster). I have been having a lot of problems with this myself lately.
@ 9 frankgturner
I don’t see a fundamental flaw to a gene centric perspective although I would certainly agree with @8 hrun0815 that reductionist approaches of any sort have serious limitations.
@11 hrun0815
Agree that genes aren’t proteins but protein synthesis and function requires gene expression. Points 2 and 3 argue against one gene=one phenotype but that is not, as far as I can see, a tenet of genetics anyway.
@chris61 # 13
Yeah that is pretty much what I feel with my whole don’t filter out the pasta an feed people hot water analogy. hrun0815 makes a good point on #11 – 2). Stuff like sickle cell disease, which is only one gene that causes that condition, are certainly a LOT less common that stuff like COPD which is this whole mesh of different problems on a multi-factorial scale. I have seen some posters of COPD causality and development and it is like looking at this huge spider web of information. Tons of different genes influence that and its manifestation and all sorts of different lifestyle progressive interactions influence how COPD is going to progress an what is going to be co-morbid with it. Not the kind of thing you want to explain to a simple minded person.
#3 chris61. The gene centric approach is the Newtonian solution in a relativistic world. It might get your to the moon safely but fails miserably in describing the universe.
That’s a matter of reducing them ultimately to physics, as I already said.
No, that doesn’t follow at all. What follows is that genes are reduced to physics as well, like everything else. They don’t play a special role in physics, only in a special science which talks about what genes do. There are industrial pollutants, for example. Those don’t have genes, and maybe they have some effect on whether or not a person is a Democrat. Since a human being is not a closed system, that is a possibility, and your genes wouldn’t “govern” it. It’s pretty easy to see how it’s not a fucking theological claim that “the environment exists.” It’s a philosophical one, maybe, but not in the way you’re using it as a term of abuse, just in the way that any scientific claim is one which has epistemic and ontological and evaluative components.
Maybe at some point we will be able to decipher how the whole genome controls transcription, translation, post-translational modification, and degradation. I think we are still far off. Investing some money into measuring the activation state of proteins. We are essentially trying to predict the activity of the cell by measuring something that is four levels removed.
@17 consciousness razor
If human thought is governed by gene expression, then it seems to me that your genes would govern it (acknowledging of course that gene expression may be altered by environmental interactions).
@18 hrun0815
There are studies into large scale identification of proteins and their post translational modifications. I thought that was basically what proteomics was all about.
The human brain is very plastic, and its development depends upon how it is used and trained. Saying genetics locks in place whether or not you are a musician, and you will develop certain brain structures without training in music is a fallacy. Training forms the brain structures. The same is true of other educational factors.
As for the most obvious flaw, the whole reason why we developed a nervous system is that there is a world outside that we need to react to. And those reactions have consequences. And you cannot predict the externals from the genes, thus neither can you predict the consequences. Evolution reacts to the environment, after all.
And as for humans specifically, there is culture. Given the external world, I’m pretty certain you can’t explain culture solely from the genes. From physics, at least in theory though it’s impossible in practice as it’s far too complex, but not from genes alone. Genes know nothing about, for example, when a volcano is going to erupt, but volcanic eruptions can have huge consequences for culture, which then can have strong effects on humans.
Genes are important, but they’re definitely not everything – for human behavior, probably not even most of it.
Excellent statement, and a very interesting one as many individuals who discuss how genes might hypothetically influence our behavior seem to discuss human beings as if we were closed systems.
Actually I would point out that microorganisms that cause some industrial pollutants (certainly not all) do have genes that influence them. And the fact that you go on to point out how the pollutants might influence the genes that hypothetically could determine if a person is a Democrat strengthens the point that we are not in a closed system.
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And furthermore, we are trying to predict its activity in an opened system where we cannot control a multifactorial set of variables. Causation is a bit hard to pin down in that instance.
@10, chris61
We are chemical…but that doesn’t mean we are entirely governed by genes. There are other sorts of chemicals.
Also, you can have the exact same genes but get different behaviour. This is just a fact about how experience shapes our brain. Light entering our eyes also affects our chemical brain. Air vibrations into our ears affects our chemical brain. Those expereinces don’t come pre-packaged in DNA.
It’s not all friggin DNA.
@16 madtom1999
Meaning?
True. But the relationship between money thrown at sequencing versus anything else seems disproportionate in relation to what is the actual effector in the cells.
What if it’s not “governed by gene expression,” but determined* by things that aren’t related to gene expression? That seems much more likely by far, considering the vast numbers of things we encounter every day that don’t have genes, don’t express them and aren’t the end result of any such process.
*I’d prefer that to “governed,” because I figure genes aren’t running for office in a tiny little state/province and enforcing laws in cases when things misbehave.
@brianpansky # 24
Have you ever met identical twins that actually look different as adults (although they are similar in height and mass and body structure) due to different life experiences? I have a friend whose uncle wound up looking a heck of a lot different than her father due to that. So you hit the nail on the head there.
@ chris61 # 25 and madtom1999 #16
He can answer for himself, but I take that to mean that it has practical applications in the short run and can help you in doing some predictions in the immediate sense but does not provide a good model on a larger scale that allows you to make greater discoveries. Is that it madtom?
@21 Nerd
While all of that may be true, none of it is evidence that genetics doesn’t contribute to musical or any other specialized ability. The human brain is very plastic but it isn’t infinitely so.
@27 consciousness razor
Do human thought and action rely on gene expression?
chris61 # 25 and #29 frankgturner
Someone with Downes syndrome could have exactly the same genes as someone without.
Well, yes, but “governed” gives enough wiggle room to pretend to acknowledge environmental effects, while still carrying a connotation that the almighty genes are really in control of the outcome in any environmental interaction. *eyeroll*
That it is too simplistic to adequately explain the whole universe of observed phenotype expression and human behavior and such. Come on, man.
@madtomm1999 # 32
Uhm, no I don’t think that is right.
http://www.ndss.org/Down-Syndrome/What-Is-Down-Syndrome/
http://www.nads.org/pages_new/facts.html
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If you mean to say that a person with Down’s Syndrome with a high IQ and an ability to function in society has the same genes (not perfectly identical but similar) who cannot, I can get behind you on that.
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Or are you getting at the person with Down’s syndrome having the same 46 chromosomes as a person without but having one extra? Help me out here.
“Contributes to?” Whatever happened to “governed by?”
@32 madtom1999
Irrelevant. The expression of those genes (and gene expression is basically what ENCODE is going after) is still going to determine whether or not the phenotype is Downs syndrome.
Did genes determine my taste in music? What are the chemical paths that govern whether you’ll join a cult or not? How did my opinions on politics ended up entirely different from my brother’s, and both from our parents’? How much of my gene expression would be different if I suffered severe head trauma as a kid?
@ 38 vaiyt
The fact that you are conscious of having a taste in music or political opinions clearly depends on gene expression.
@chris61 # 39
Which is good that we can determine that, but which gene determines that consciousness, or is it more than one? Which gene determines which opinion, or is that even genetic?
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I have often heard it said is it “nature” (gene code), or “nurture” (environment). One can get plenty of Scholarly articles by entering “nature vs. nurture” into a search engine like google). The most common answer I hear is, “both.”
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And I would not be surprised if someone else is also typing this.
Sure. But that is also true of protein expression, membranes, metabolites, salts, gravity, electrostatic charges, quantum mechanics, … and countless other things.
So should we say that our taste in music depends on the properties of the potassium ion? Seems pretty meaningless.
You might have become an obsessive reductionist?
Only in a stupidly trivial sense.
They also depend on a whole lot of other factors too. Hence the argument that we shouldn’t make reductionist arguments down to genes for everything to do with how an organism behaves.
Sure, they rely on it. Sometimes. Of course. “Rely on” is pretty vague, a bit like “governance,” but sure why not? And “contributes to” is practically begging for other contributors, that you for no good reason deem to be unimportant — but that too. Genes do that.
Does that mean all of it, in every circumstance, is entirely and exclusively determined by gene expression? No, that’s just ridiculous.
You know, in answering your first question about “gene-centrism,” I was afraid that my “genetic determinist/reductionist” position would be considered a strawman, which nobody takes seriously for the very obvious reasons already cited. That’s in contrast to physical determinism and reductionism, like mine, which continues along those lines until you come to an actual, fundamental, reasonable stopping point. Just keeping going a little farther — it’s not turtles all of the way down. You eventually run out of turtles. With physics. Not genes.
You were the first. Apparently I was the fourth.
Then show me where musical training would be selected for by evolution, and genes that make it so. Science is in the specifics of that evidence, not in vague claims about adaptation and the mental wanking about what is genetic versus cultural. I presume cultural, not genetic adaptations, based on the plastic brains, until the genes are found.
Evolution made a generic bioware computer. The training it receives helps it to adapt to the environment it is in, and in turn, that changes the bioware and how it operates to a degree.
@39 Chris61 — Silly Wabbit, no it doesn’t!! It’s entirely based upon what all my cool older sisters and their cool friends had to say in my presence. Entirely. One hundred percent. Scientifically proven and market-tested. Bona fide. Genuine true fact.
Musical ability has a genetic component as determined by twin studies.
@frankgturner what I’m trying to get at is there are no different chemicals produced by the Down’s syndrome extra (or partial) chromosome – there’s nothing different there, its the way the whole set-up interacts.
I come from the programming world where exactly the same instructions can produce hugely varied results and find it easy to see that just because we’ve isolated one activity a gene that there may be others we have not been able to isolate that rely on other genes and environmental and historic factors coded/recorded elsewhere in the genome. Genes have been experimenting with things for 4billion years – to think we can understand them fully in 50 or a 100 years after first finding them is a touch overconfident which is why I compared us now to being where Newtons Laws were 20 years before relativity came along – looked pretty good but didn’t quite explain Mercury’s precession or the way light bent around the sun in an eclipse. I’m not saying there is a simple relativistic solution – in fact I’m quite confident there will be many different ways genes interact with each other in different situations that rely on different mechanisms that we haven’t even begun to explore. We’re only scratching the surface but some people want to dismiss large sections of society almost on a whim.
@44 consciousness razor
All human thought and action requires gene expression. Not sometimes but always.
I wold have thought that the smoking gun of my gradpa’s COPD (which killed him) was “working in a coal mine for 40 years”. Though it’s true that “”working in a coal mine for 40 years” also ran in the family.
Maybe it was the genes after all
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And the heels of my shoes make a reasonably working hammer. What does it have to do with the price of butter? Do you think that genes make western music sound good to western ears but a lot of non-western music not? Do you think that with just the right genes somebody becomes a world-class musician regardless of where they are born and when and into what family?
@madtom1999 # 49
OK got it. I assume that it is a typo and you mean that it was 200 years before relativity but I get the point.
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To back up chris61 in # 48
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01065903
Mind you that is a soft science study and is basically determining tendencies, correlation as compared to causation (though there are probabilistic factors involved).
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There is another short article here,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/291/5510/1969.short (also a soft study but a good one).
There are suggestions from other articles that what evolution may have been selecting for was pitch recognition which may have assisted hunter gatherers in hunting and evading predators. The side effect of genetic enhancement would be musical ability. Mind you it still suggests plasticity based on what one chooses to develop.
@ Giliell # 51
Well of course working in an environment that irritates certain conditions can lead to certain diseases directly. Heavy tobacco smokers and those who work in kitchens with burning oils often can develop COPD. That was not what I was getting at. A small percent of people may have alph-1 anti-trypsin deficiency and develop COPD even without exposure to heavy pollutants. Neonatal lung damage can lead to COPD in individuals not exposed to heavy pollutants. Sometimes COPD is co-morbid with other obstructive lung conditions like things that cause heavy mucus build up. Sometimes this is due to other genes that contribute to conditions such as emphysema.
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Thats what I was getting at.
frankgturner
I think we’re on the same page. I was getting at the fact that when my grandpa was born in 1921, it was not his genes that destimed him to die of COPD at age 89. Sure, his genes played a role in all of this. Probably played a role in the fact that he lived that long (with lots of modern medicine) even though he worked under bad conditions for many years. It was his socioeconomic status, the time and place of his birth.
It also requires carbon. Always. Wow, that’s deep.
But wait. It also requires oxygen. Whoops. I almost forgot that. There goes that theory. It looks like science isn’t done by making vague assertions.
@Giliell # 54
Ok, yes we are on the same page. Heck one might say that a combination of genes and modern medicine did a lot to keep him alive until 89 if he had worked for 40 years in a coal mine. That is well above average for someone who worked for THAT long under said conditions (many don’t).
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Just something I was getting at a couple of times in the string on how genetics can play a role in tendencies based on information gained from soft science studied. I say “play a role” as these are obviously not strict causal studies where all variables can be controlled for. That is something a lot of people don’t seem to understand that differentiates some types of scientific studies from others.
@chris61 # 50
Well yes human thought requires gene expression as gene expression is part of biology and necessary for life. I think one is looking for something that gives a bit more information like a direct causal determination.
@chris61, have you considered how gene expression has never allowed feral children (aka ‘raised by wolves’) to develop normal human linguistic capacities? Even children identified as having come from families of utterly normal cognitive capability? Missing out on the crucial language development years that are reliant upon interaction with other humans means those feral children not only never learn to speak but also end up with extremely limited cognitive capability in general, because our adult problem-solving skills seem to be built on top of the neural structures that are built during language acquisition.
The human *mind* is a social construct built on the plasticity of our *brain* structures as they react to our environment.
@55 consciousness razor
Unlike carbon or oxygen, gene expression is something that varies between individuals and therefore has at least the potential of explaining differences between individuals.
Huh? Physical conditions vary between individuals, trivially. That includes distributions of elements, but other things at other scales as well. You change the environment, and you get different results. Those different conditions of course can be used to explain the resulting differences in individuals. If your conclusion from that is something like “genes govern everything,” then you’re apparently just confused. But it’s all so vague, I don’t even know what you’re confused about anymore.
Hey PZ, I took a whole class once on criticisms of biomedicine (and science in general), but one thing I did notice is that those who criticize modern biomedicine and molecular genetics seem to have a strange view of what scientists think. You don’t really think that even a sizable minority of serious biologists (of any subfield), anthropologists, or psychologists subscribe to single gene ideology, do you?
@Chris61
Gene expression is a biochemical process. Literally, chemical reactions in the cell control gene expression. These chemical reactions follow all the normal rules of physics an chemistry
Why don’t you describe what you mean by single gene ideology.
Chris61, do you think evo-psych is anything other than “just so tales” bullshit?
@62 Ian Boucher,
No argument with that. But gene expression is something that current technology allows us to analyze on a global scale. Annotating that data at the level of physics/chemistry is as far as I’m aware beyond the capabilities of current technology.
@ 64 Nerd,
Gave myself away did I?
@ chris61 # 59 an consciousness razor # 60
I think I get what he might be confused about but I am not sure. (This relates to my understanding of a different issue as well).
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When studies of things like musical ability are done in twins chris61 it is not like a scientific experiment where one can determine direct causality because when can control all variables. Doing so by raising human twins in an Orwellian type environment to control absolutely every variable of their lives, calorie intake, exposure to allergens, etc., would be highly unethical. There are not really environmentall identical twins among humans. As a result what one is conducting are soft scientific studies in which tendencies are basically being determined. These are correlative and may have mathematical probabilistic influences, but it is hardly causal. FYI, I have seen this myself, a friend of mine has a father (now diseased) who is monozygotic with her uncle who came to look quite different as adults due to different life progressions. They were the same height (her father is now deceased) an build and skin tone and a series of other trivial outer appearance indications.
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Some twin studies have ALSO shown that despite physical similarities between things like identical twins, dramatic variations can ALSO occur due to environmental exposure. Controlled studies of this type can be done with laboratory animals (this is better on the morality scale) and sometimes show that phenotypic expression of monozygotic animals may be great due to certain environmental conditions, and small due to others.
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Here are some articles on the issue.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Link&dbFrom=PubMed&from_uid=15809262
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Is this what we are getting at?
@chris61 # 65
Wait, you are aware that evolutionary psychology studies basically have the potential to be ad-hoc fallacies due to limited ability to control variables and environment. They are not really causative but correlative in their determination. You seem to get that right? Why haven’t you been couching your terminology in posts like post 48?
give it up, Chris.
It’s a valiant effort, but nobody here is going to listen to the idea that a lot of evo psych is actually testable; that there is a long history of neurophysiology to support the causality of correlative analysis. they will forever be smitten by the plethora of bad articles that have been published in its name, just like those who were attacking sociobiology in the 1970s, and to be sure, there HAVE been a lot of bad articles written, in both eras, and mostly making the same mistakes.
and yet, sociobiology is still alive, still has a journal, still routinely publishes good articles as well as bad.
people who read “Spandrels” and thought it spoke to all of sociobiology then, are just as wrong as people who think that these poor evopych articles speak to all of evopsych now.
evopysch is just another discipline, and should be treated as such. not focused on as if it alone is the most egregious of ideas and concepts. It’s like people somehow think we have never learned anything at all about human behavior and how our minds work.
this mob mentality to judge the value of scientific endeavor scares the fuck out of me.
“Requires” is a world different from “is caused by” or “can be reduced to”.
Nope, you’ve trolled before, and having a good memory is required for most scientists, especially organic chemists….
@chris61 #50
Wrong. The primordial reason we have a nervous system is to respond to environmental challenges (e.g., predators or prey) more rapidly than gene expression allows. Gene expression is a slow process, taking at least many seconds to minutes, which lags behind actions and thoughts. In the nervous system, for example, neurons alter the expression pattern of so-called “immediate early genes” in response to neural activity.
Nobody is disputing that genetics and gene expression are critically important for understanding biological systems, but the fundamental flaw in the gene-centric perspective is that it underemphasizes the role of other important phenomena in understanding biological systems. Your comment that musical ability has a genetic component is a great example. Fine, but what percentage of variance is explained? What explains the rest? How much of the heritable component is specific to musical ability per se, as opposed to generally healthy neurobiological development? Musical production is obviously not genetically encoded, so what mechanisms are engaged during the learning of musical ability? The phenotype is so much more vastly complex than the genotype, or even than the pattern of gene expression, that limiting focus to the gene and its influences misses much of the interesting phenomenon available for study.
Saying that understanding genes is the key to understanding human behavior is a bit like saying that understanding the architecture of a computer chip allows you to figure out the best strategies for Halo.
There’s this little thing that humans have called “culture.” Failing to take that into account when looking at behavior is akin to forgetting that computers have a little thing called “software.”
@Ichthyic # 68
Well hey, I see a value of evolutionary psych and sociobiology, but I recognize that the best they can produce in terms of humans beings is correlative analysis. I try to be very clear that this is correlative and I try to couch my terms because I recognize that.
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I don’t mind talking about it, but I recognize the speculative nature of it. As long as people can do that then ok. if it becomes a breeding ground for poor thought processes…..
@69 vaygt
If you are saying that understanding human behavior can’t be reduced to understanding gene expression, I agree with you. But if you’re suggesting that because human behavior can’t be fully explained by gene expression, there is nothing useful to be learned about it by studying gene expression, then we disagree.
Delighted that my Genotopia post has prompted so much discussion of genetic determinism. I’m with Chris61 (#74). The study of nature through science and the study of science through history have much to say to one another. Looking forward to continuing dialogue.
I don’t say that. Just that gene expression is not the parsimonious conclusion without physical evidence. Cultural adaptations are the parsimonious conclusions. Don’t stop looking at the genes, but don’t expect to find real links until you can filter out the cultural noise. from the signal.
…and that would be wrong, and ignorant of the huge body of causative literature that has existed for over 100 years on the subject.
and that was my point.
also why i realized months ago that it was pointless to even discuss it here, as even PZ is so unfamiliar with the literature that it isn’t worth discussing, let alone all the armchair scientists.
hell, I BARELY spend time reading these journals (usually only pop across articles as I search for animal behavior studies), and STILL know there is a ton of research on human behavior out there that is based on direct experimental observation (especially in neuroscience), with the corresponding studies looking at the genetics of it.
NOBODY is saying, nor have they for over 50 years, that genetics is the sole determiner of behavior, but behaviors HAVE been shown to have inherited characteristics in humans, regardless of just how much influence the environment has on it both in development and afterwards.
this is why the theory behind evo psych is sound, just like the theory of evolutionary biology itself is sound, and why, while people are correct, as always, to point out papers that are more speculation than experimentation, there certainly is enough literature out there to encourage further experimentation, just like with ANY subject in evolutionary biology.
behaviors are traits, like any other, and can be affected by selection and drift, like any other.
end of.
Your genes are important in as much as that you are a human and not a goat or a cyanobacterium. But which has more effect on your life and attitudes and experience – that you were born with a certain mix of human traits, or that you were born on this planet at this time in its history? Against that canvas, differences between individuals seem immeasurably insignificant.
@Ichthyc #77, I think it depends on what exactly you mean by “the theory behind evo psych.” The most broad interpretation, that human behavioral and cognitive traits were shaped by their evolutionary history, and their modern forms reflect that history, certainly is sound. But the theory behind evo psych, as practiced, is usually more specific than that, and includes additional ideas that are less sound. For example, evo psych researchers often expound radical adaptationism, a concept which is controverted by modern evolutionary theory, and massive modularity, a concept which is controverted by modern cognitive neuroscience. I understand your frustration in discussing evo psych here, but carefully reasoned criticisms of evo psych abound in the academic literature, e.g., Panksepp & Panksepp 2000, and de Waal 2002. You’ll notice I’m sure that both of those papers are more than ten years old. This is in fact part of what concerns me about evo psych as a discipline; fundamental, valid criticisms of the field have been published in the literature for well over a decade, yet these have had little impact on how the field seems to proceed. In fact, evo psych researchers often seem to defend their work by painting their critics as radical “culturalists” who are opposed to any notion of biological influences on human behavior, rather than addressing the legitimate criticisms that have been raised by biologists who are working within ostensibly the same epistemic framework.
We could also have a whole discussion about the idea that “behaviors are traits, like any other,” (I would argue that there are differences in degree, if not kind, in how environmentally-influenced behavioral traits are compared to other traits) but I’ll leave it there for now.
Having a functioning, metabolically-supported human brain with which to think at all certainly does, but either you’re using bad grammar to try to imply that having thought XYZ instead of though YXZ is dependent to a similar degree on gene expression, or very confused. If you’re seriously trying to assert that a gene expression is involved in each individual cognitive process, you need to cough up some pretty impressive citations. If you’re not, you need to cut the shit.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130701174918/http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm
The first part of the article, about the Demon, is so relevant to this thread.
@Ichythic #77
Thank you for actually listening. The part “but I recognize that the best they can produce in terms of humans beings is correlative analysis” was intended sarcastically. When I posted the link to the pubmed articles in #66, article 4 and several others would have shown direct contradiction to this.
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This is a good one too.
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/5/5/546.short
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Although I disagree that,
@vaiyt # 81
Good article, that actually applies to a lot of different things that I have been learning.
Nonsense. The scientific establishment empowers ENCODE because what it aims to do is useful. Geneticists study genes. Of course it’s gene centric. This hardly indicates that the many researchers involved espouse a gene = trait approach.
The question though is if throwing barrels of cash at ENCODE is an efficient use of the money. And that is directly tied to the question of how tightly genes-individual or in combination-are tied to disease phenotypes.
More accurately, these are questions. These questions can’t be answered until basic questions about functional motifs in the genome are answered. As such, ENCODE has the potential to provide a useful database to other researchers asking these questions about particular diseases. This database is publicly accessible, and so even flaws in evaluating functionality of gene regions are open for review by anyone with sufficient knowledge and computational chops. That is to say, though the analysis might be flawed, data are data, and you or anyone else can have them for free.
Is the $400 million price tag worth the knowledge? That depends I guess on ones outlook. I a narrow sense, I can understand how someone might think not, given the very real limitations of scientific funding. Funding for ENCODE has almost certainly prevented other worthy projects from being funded. However, in the long view, the results of this project have a much higher probability of improving happiness and alleviating suffering than much of the spending of our national budget. For example, a single aircraft carrier carries a price-tag in the billions of dollars.
Well, it depends what your phenotype is. If your phenotype is “cystic fibrosis”, then there is a pretty clear link between two mutant copies of the CFTR chloride channel gene and the disease. Of course, there are other factors – genetic and environmental – that will affect the severity of the phenotype. But the link is clear.
If your phenotype is “autism” or “depression”, then the link is more tenuous and more variable. But that is obviously because the phenotype is much more complex and much more hard to define than, say, cystic fibrosis.
The reductionist program for understanding gene function has been enormously successful. It would be hard to thick of a strategy that could have told us about the function of genes anywhere near as successfully. But it is only a start. Even “simple” diseases like cystic fibrosis are affected by genetic modifiers and environmental influences, but those points get lost when the media report on published papers. That, I think, is the cause of the huge gap in communication that leads to the “Gene for X” fallacy.
No argument here. It is not a matter of scrapping ENCODE to buy 2/5 of an aircraft carrier. It’s a fundamental question of our (over)reliance on genome in lieu of other approaches. And just because it is (freely accessible) data, does not make it necessarily worthwhile.
I agree that the strategy has been enormously successful, but the question is ‘for what’? Without it we would certainly not understand as much as we do now about general cellular mechanism. However, if you want to claim that genome sequencing has been ‘enormously successful’ in the context of identifying, treating, or preventing disease, I would say the jury is still out. I realize that CTGA is not ENCODE, but I think it is a very illustrating example of where a certain approach is taking a huge chunk of money with only marginal or totally uncertain success.
Sorry, that should have been TCGA and not CTGA in 88.
Thanks for that link, PZ. Good stuff.
Except, you know, when it’s not.
Confirmation bias is a very powerful deceiver, and it’s far more prevalent in The Humanities than in science generally.
Oh, that’s just bullshit. Any critique based in The Humanities is, clearly and obviously, far more “subjective” than is good science.
The festival of confirmation bias continues apace around here.
That which is not presumably isn’t included in the category referred to.
Well, if you say “clearly and obviously,” I guess that settles things scientifically.
I have to wonder if people like you, Chas, are proud of your years-long failure to engage openly and honestly with intelligent critique. Sadly, you probably are. In any case, you remain as willfully ignorant and tiresome today as you were in 2009.
As I said earlier this year:
If the cheerleaders could manage to stop reflexively sniping, examine their own biases, and read some intelligent critical work with an open mind, a discussion could be had. But quite often they don’t. What they don’t recognize is how they’re harmed – intellectually, morally, and psychologically – by this reflexive defensiveness, how harmful it is to others, and how pathetic and sad it looks to those who recognize in it the same pattern that’s existed for centuries.
@hrun0815 #88
When I said the reductionist approach has been enormously successful, I was not thinking so much about current Big Science ventures, but more about the formal loss- or gain-of-function approach to understanding what genes do. Find gene X, knock gene X out in mice, see what it does. Or isolate mutant in genetic organism like Drosophila, clone gene X and infer function. Those sorts of approaches will not give you the whole answer about gene X. They won’t tell you about the large number of potential modifiers of X, nor how the gene X’s function will work in different environments. But it’s a start, and nothing better has been proposed as an alternative.
It’s worth bearing in mind that before the advent of what we now call modern molecular biology, biology had a fair amount of woo associated with it. Hans Spemann flirted with vitalism for most of his career, and even Thomas Hunt Morgan expressed some skepticism about the importance of genes in his 1934 Nobel lecture. If reductionism achieved anything, it sounded the death knell for vitalism.
Here’s what I don’t get. Several points:
1. We live in a capitalist society. Our society has also, for centuries, been structured by white, male, human supremacy.
2. This all shapes the way we come to understand the world. Science isn’t magically immune from this – the practice, institutions, and content of science have developed in and are influenced by this social context.
3. Ideas and arguments (those claimed as scientific and others) tend to reflect the biases and assumptions of the system. Those ideas and arguments that appear to support in some way the status quo benefit from this fact. (NOTE: This isn’t to say that any idea or argument is scientifically unsound due to its system-serving capacities, simply that there is a social bias in favor of ideas and arguments that support the system.) This is especially true to the extent that there are powerful people and organizations actively promoting these ideas and arguments (and often seeking to disguise this fact).
4. In contrast, those ideas and arguments that challenge the status quo will tend to have a tougher time of it – less publicity, ridicule, marginalization, ad hominem rejection,… (NOTE: This isn’t to say that these ideas or arguments are scientifically sound due to their system-challenging capacities, simply that there is a social bias against them.)
5. The history of science (as it relates to any of these human political structures) has shown a consistent pattern of system-serving claims and arguments based on bad extrapolation or speculation from solid science, bad science, and pseudoscience being treated as sound science, forming the basis of institutional practices and law, and being taught to students. Even when earlier claims and arguments and branches of science have come to be thoroughly discredited, new, similar ones have appeared in their place, once again claiming the mantle of scientific objectivity.
6. These unsound claims and arguments have served to perpetuate the system, with harmful effects for those in subordinated groups. They’ve also contributed to false understandings of the human condition in general.
All of this, to me, has important implications (including moral implications) for how we should approach science:
A. A central aspect of science is humility and a recognition and addressing of possible bias. We need to recognize this strong driver of bias and how it’s worked historically and continues to operate. Given the powerful social bias towards system justification, we should subject claims and arguments that seem to reflect or justify systemic assumptions or biases to rigorous critical scrutiny.
B. At the same time, we should seek out, remain open to, and resist the urge to mock, reflexively dismiss, or ignore both intelligent criticism and challenging arguments and perspectives. This means acknowledging their existence and engaging with them critically but fairly. It means being willing to acknowledge valid criticisms and to admit when we’ve been wrong.
C. Failing to do the above is immoral. Leaving ourselves open to believing and perpetuating false claims is harmful to people’s well being and growth and to the development of knowledge.
I suppose I’m not understanding whether the argument is with the first set of points or the second (or whether it isn’t an argument so much as ignorance and irrational resistance).
Andy Groves @93
Ok. I think we agree here just fine. I think nobody who has any knowledge of biology can argue that classical genetics (both reverse and forward) hasn’t been enormously important for understanding biology. Without it I think that current biology would be unrecognizable for all of us.
However, in the context of the OP and in some of the ensuing discussion I am pretty sure that the current infatuation with the ‘sequence everything that moves’-approach is being questions. Seeing that ENCODE is specifically part of the post (and there are multiple other genetics-heavy approaches underway) I would think that specifically these current big data ventures are being indicted.
@94 Salty Current
Actually there is a large body of research/psychological/neuropsychological literature that suggests that what it is, is blind-spot bias.
A description of blind spot bias from wiki
The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of recognizing the impact of biases on the judgement of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one’s own judgement.
Wiki goes on to say about the causes of this phenomenon.
The cognitive utilization of bias blind spots may be caused by a variety of other biases and self-deceptions [3]
Self-enhancement biases may play a role, in that people are motivated to view themselves in a positive light. Biases are generally seen as undesirable [4], so people tend to think of their own perceptions and judgments as being rational, accurate, and free of bias. The self-enhancement bias also applies when analyzing our own decisions, in that people are likely to think of themselves as better decision makers than others.[3]
People also tend to believe they are aware of ‘how’ and ‘why’ they make their decisions, and therefore conclude that bias did not play a role. Many of our decisions are formed from biases and cognitive shortcuts, which are unconscious processes. By definition, people are unaware of unconscious processes, and therefore cannot see their influence in the decision making process.[3]
When made aware of various biases acting on our perception, decisions, or judgments, research has shown that we are still unable to control them. This contributes to the bias blind spot in that even if one is told that they are biased, they are unable to alter their biased perception.[3]
SC, responding to Chas:
Heh. If “subjective” meant something like “unlike good science,” then I guess that might settle it, as a matter of logic, if the comparison were accurate and relevant. What’s clear and obvious is that humans are subjects, but equivocating between those clearly and obviously different meanings is nothing new.
It really would be an Earth-shattering discovery of primary importance, if it were found that merely going about the business of describing and understanding subjective experiences, which are at the base of any empirical investigation of anything else whatsoever, carried with it some such problem of not being like “good science” or not as good as the “good science” is.
That would be love-is-just-a-word deep, and presumably there would be a real challenge to try to overcome such an obstacle. Or maybe the person saying it wants there to be such an obstacle in place, because it protects their favorite vision of what is special about humanity or because it protects their interests personally or in society. (Or they simply have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, but something like their expertise in one area leads them to believe that isn’t so.) The alternative, either way, is that “love” is a word, not love the experience, because those sorts of things aren’t words. But that’s just trivial, almost never relevant to anything anyone cares about, and it makes no deep Earth-shattering point about the nature of reality itself. That sort of confusion though, either way, is preventing you from saying or doing anything useful in cases like this. (I’m riffing on an example of Dennett’s about deepities, for reference.)
Now comes the point in the dialogue where you tell me that what you really meant to say had to do with “values” or “evaluations” or “meanings” or “interpretations” or some such thing. You didn’t have some coherent notion of subjectivity which somehow didn’t carry all of that baggage, but you had something in mind which is distinct from that. So I guess the idea is something to the effect that good science shouldn’t be doubted in the way that values should be doubted? That doesn’t sound right. Do we have no choice but to take such evaluations as they are and not scrutinize them as rigorously as possible, while in “good science” we can do that or are allowed to do that or must do that? Why the fuck would that be the case, even if you could sort out how “good science” isn’t presupposing values of its own which also presumably require some level of scrutiny?
This is all about as clear and fucking obvious as mud buried under a pile of horse shit.