{"id":387,"date":"2014-01-29T16:05:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T16:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=387"},"modified":"2014-02-02T15:29:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T15:29:49","slug":"genetic-determinism-why-we-never-learn-and-why-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/387\/genetic-determinism-why-we-never-learn-and-why-it-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Genetic determinism: why we never learn\u2014and why it matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here it is, 2014, and we have \u201cIs the will to work out genetically determined?<\/a>,\u201d by Bruce Grierson in\u00a0Pacific Standard<\/i>\u00a0(\u201cThe Science of Society\u201d).<\/p>\n

Spoiler: No.<\/p>\n

The story\u2019s protagonist is a skinny, twitchy mouse named Dean who lives in a cage in a mouse colony at UC Riverside. Dean runs on his exercise wheel incessantly\u2014up to 31 km per night. He is the product of a breeding experiment by the biologist Ted Garland, who selected mice for the tendency to run on a wheel for 70 generations. Garland speculates that Dean is physically addicted to running\u2014that he gets a dopamine surge that he just can\u2019t get enough of.<\/p>\n

\"Running<\/p>\n

Addiction theory long ago embraced the idea that behaviors such as exercise, eating, or gambling may have similar effects on the brain as dependence-forming drugs such as heroin or cocaine. I have no beef with that, beyond irritation at the tenuous link between a running captive mouse to a human junkie. What\u2019s troubling here is the genetic determinism. My argument is about language, but it\u2019s more than a linguistic quibble; there are significant social implications to the ways we talk and write about science. Science has the most cultural authority of any enterprise today\u2014certainly more than the humanities or arts!. How we talk about it shapes society. Reducing a complex behavior to a single gene gives us blinders: it tends to turn social problems into molecular ones. As I\u2019ve said before, molecular problems tend to have molecular solutions. The focus on genes and brain \u201cwiring\u201d tends to suggest pharmaceutical therapies.<\/p>\n

To illustrate, Grierson writes,<\/p>\n

File this question under \u201cWhere there\u2019s a cause, there\u2019s a cure.\u201d If scientists crack the genetic code for intrinsic motivation to exercise, then its biochemical signature can, in theory, be synthesized. Why\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0a pill that would make us want to work out?<\/p>\n

I have bigger genes to fry than to quibble over the misuse of \u201ccracking the genetic code,\u201d although it may be indicative of a naivet\u00e9 about genetics that allows Grierson to swallow Garland\u2019s suggestion about an exercise pill. Grierson continues, quoting Garland,<\/p>\n

\u201cOne always hates to recommend yet another medication for a substantial fraction of the population,\u201d says Garland, \u201cbut Jesus, look at how many people are already on antidepressants. Who\u2019s to say it wouldn\u2019t be a good thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

I am. First, Jesus, look at how many people are already on anti-depressants! The fact that we already over-prescribe anti-depressants, anxiolytics, ADHD drugs, statins, steroids, and antibiotics does not constitute an argument for over-prescribing yet another drug. \u201cBartender, another drink!\u201d \u201cSir, haven\u2019t you already had too much?\u201d \u201cY\u2019know, yer right\u2014better make it two.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, what if it doesn\u2019t work as intended? Anatomizing our constitution into \u201ctraits\u201d such as the desire to work out is bound to have other effects. Let\u2019s assume Dean is just like a human as far as the presumptive workout gene is concerned. Dean is skinny and twitchy and wants to do nothing but run. Is it because he \u201cwants to exercise\u201d or is it because he is a neurotic mess and he takes out his anxiety on his wheel? Lots of mice in little cages run incessantly\u2014Dean just does it more than most. His impulse to run is connected to myriad variables, genes, brain nuclei, and the reported results say nothing about mechanisms. We now know that the physiological environment influences the genes as much as the genes influence physiological environment. The reductionist logic of genetic determinism, though, promotes thinking in terms of a unidirectional flow of causation, from the \u201clowest\u201d levels to the \u201chighest.\u201d The more we learn about gene action, the less valid that seems to become as an a priori assumption. The antiquated \u201cmaster molecule\u201d idea still permeates both science and science writing.<\/p>\n

Further, when you try to dissect temperament into discrete behaviors this way, and design drugs that target those behaviors, side effects are sure to be massive. Jesus, look at all those anti-depressants, which decrease libido. Would this workout pill make us neurotic, anxious, jittery? Would we become depressed if we became injured or otherwise missed our workouts? Would it make us want to work out or would it make us want to take up smoking or snort heroin? In the logic of modern pharmacy, the obvious answer to side effects is…more drugs: anti-depressants, anxiolytics, anti-psychotics, etc. A workout pill, then, would mainly benefit the pharmaceutical industry. When a scientist makes a leap from a running mouse to a workout pill, he is floating a business plan, not a healthcare regimen.<\/p>\n

And finally, what if it\u00a0does<\/i>\u00a0work as intended? It would be a\u00a0detriment<\/i>\u00a0to society, because, having a pill, it would remove yet another dimension of a healthy lifestyle from the realm of self-discipline, autonomy, and social well-being. It becomes another argument against rebuilding walkable neighborhoods and promoting public transportation and commuting by bicycle. A quarter-mile stroll to an exercise addict would be like a quarter-pill of codeine for a heroin junkie\u2014unsatisfying. Not only is this putative workout pill a long, long stretch and rife with pitfalls, it is not even something worth aspiring to.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just one article.\u00a0Scientific American<\/i>\u00a0recently ran a piece about how\u00a0people who lack the \u201cgene for underarm odor\u201d (ABCC11) still buy deodorant<\/a>\u00a0(couldn\u2019t possibly have anything to do with culture, could it?). Then there was their jaw-dropping \u201cJewish gene for intelligence<\/a>,\u201d which\u00a0Sci Am\u00a0<\/i>had already taken down by the time it appeared in my Google Alert. I\u2019d love to have heard the chewing out someone received for that bone-headed headline. Why do these articles keep appearing?<\/p>\n

The best science writers understand and even write about how to avoid determinist language. In 2010, Ed Yong wrote an\u00a0excellent analysis<\/a>\u00a0of how, in the 1990s, the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene became mis- and oversold as \u201cthe warrior gene.\u201d What\u2019s wrong with a little harmless sensationalism? Plenty, says Yong. First, catchy names like \u201cwarrior gene\u201d are bound to be misleading. They are ways of grabbing the audience, not describing the science, so they oversimplify and distort in a lazy effort to connect with a scientifically unsophisticated audience. Second, there is no such thing as a \u201cgene for\u201d anything interesting. Nature and nurture are inextricable. Third, slangy, catchy phrases like \u201cwarrior gene\u201d reinforce stereotypes. The warrior gene was quickly linked to the Maori population of New Zealand. Made sense: \u201ceveryone knows\u201d the Maoris are \u201cwar-like.\u201d Problem was, the preliminary data didn\u2019t hold up. In\u00a0The Unnatural Nature of Science<\/i>, the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert observed that the essence of science is its ability to show how misleading \u201ccommon sense\u201d can be. Yet that is an ideal; scientists can be just as pedestrian and banal as the rest of us. Finally, Yong points out that genes do not dictate behavior. They are not mechanical switches that turn complex traits on and off. As sophisticated as modern genomics is, too many of us haven\u2019t moved beyond the simplistic Mendelism that enabled the distinguished psychiatrist Henry H. Goddard to postulate\u2014based on reams of data collected over many years \u2014a single recessive gene for \u201cfeeblemindedness.\u201d The best method in the world can\u2019t overcome deeply entrenched preconception. As another fine science writer, David Dobbs, pithily put it in 2010, \u201cEnough with the \u2018slut gene\u2019 already<\/a>…genes ain\u2019t traits.\u201d<\/p>\n

As knowledge wends from the lab bench to the public eyeball, genetic determinism seeps in at every stage. In my experience, most scientists working today have at least a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the relationship between genes and behavior. But all too often, sensationalism and increasingly greed induce them to oversell their work, boiling complex behaviors down to single genes and waving their arms about potential therapies. Then, public relations people at universities and research labs are in the business of promoting science, so when writing press releases they strive for hooks that will catch the notice of journalists. The two best hooks in biomedicine, of course, are health and wealth. The journalists, in turn, seek the largest viewership they can, which leads the less scrupulous or less talented to reach for cheap and easy metaphors. And even though many deterministic headlines cap articles that do portray the complexity of gene action, the lay reader is going to take away the message, \u201cIt\u2019s all in my genes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genetic determinism, then, is not monocausal. It has many sources, including sensationalism, ambition, poor practice, and the eternal wish for simple solutions to complex problems. Science and journalism are united by a drive toward making the complex simple. That impulse is what makes skillful practioners in either field so impressive. But in clumsier hands, the simple becomes simplistic, and I would argue that this risk is multiplied in journalism about science. Science writing is the delicate art of simplifying the complexity of efforts to simplify nature. This is where the tools of history become complementary to those of science and science journalism. Scientists and science writers strive to take the complex and make it simple. Historians take the deceptively simple and make it complicated. If science and science journalism make maps of the territory, historians are there to move back to the territory, in all its richness\u2014to set the map back in its context.<\/p>\n

Studying genetics and popularization over the last century or so has led me to the surprising conclusion that genetic oversell is independent of genetic knowledge. We see the same sorts of articles in 2014 as we saw in 1914. Neither gene mapping nor cloning nor high-throughput sequencing; neither cytogenetics nor pleiotropy nor DNA modification; neither the eugenics movement nor the XYY controversy nor the debacles of early gene therapy\u2014in short, neither methods, nor concepts, nor social lessons\u2014seem to make much of a dent in our preference for simplistic explanations and easy solutions.<\/p>\n

Maybe we\u2019re just wired for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here it is, 2014, and we have \u201cIs the will to work out genetically determined?,\u201d by Bruce Grierson in\u00a0Pacific Standard\u00a0(\u201cThe Science of Society\u201d). Spoiler: No. The story\u2019s protagonist is a skinny, twitchy mouse named Dean who lives in a cage in a mouse colony at UC Riverside. Dean runs on his exercise wheel incessantly\u2014up to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[229,365,38,45,232,197],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-armpits","tag-exercise","tag-genetic-determinism","tag-genomics","tag-hype","tag-intelligence"],"yoast_head":"\nGenetic determinism: why we never learn\u2014and why it matters - Genotopia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/387\/genetic-determinism-why-we-never-learn-and-why-it-matters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Genetic determinism: why we never learn\u2014and why it matters\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here it is, 2014, and we have \u201cIs the will to work out genetically determined?,\u201d by Bruce Grierson in\u00a0Pacific Standard\u00a0(\u201cThe Science of Society\u201d). 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. 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Spoiler: No. The story\u2019s protagonist is a skinny, twitchy mouse named Dean who lives in a cage in a mouse colony at UC Riverside. Dean runs on his exercise wheel incessantly\u2014up to ... 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.","sameAs":["http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com"],"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/author\/genotopia\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgtNP1-6f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}