Not at all, knowing how genes influence behavior or a person’s physical propensity for something close off some routes for changing behavior, but may suggest others.

To go back to the obese example, knowing that genetics has a significant impact on that person’s ability to lose weight may mean that just eating less and exercising won’t help, but might suggest dietary changes in the event they have trouble metabolizing a particular food type. You have fewer options, but are far more likely to find one that works.

Part of what I’m saying is that any remotely satisfying or useful “biological explanation” has to include the environment, but this is too hard to do so far.

Agreed, unfortunately I think some things are fairly intractable without a holistic approach. Gene/environment interaction is incredibly complicated and I’m not sure you can meaningfully separate them.

A lot of people seem to believe genetics makes it impossible to change; I’m not one of them. I want to understand it so that we can find methods that are effective.

I didn’t say there weren’t deterministic genetic traits, like Huntington’s, just that “genetic” does not mean “deterministic,” but I know you know that.

“They don’t need to, just knowing that they have a substantial effect is significant.”

OK, for lots of people that makes sense–you’re huffed that some people dismiss heritability. For me, it’s a given that our traits are the results of complex GxE interactions. The point is the reaction norms and interactions are not understood and are definitely not linear. When we are at the stage where we can say “someone with your profile of alleles 1, 2, and 3 has a tendency toward liver disease in combination with environmental factors a, b, and c, so modify your life in way x,y,z,” the utility will begin to become apparent. Where we are now is something like: allele X explains 3% of the variance in liver disease incidence across Californians who had insurance through K-P in the 90s and had the wherewithal to fill out an IC and show up for regular bloodlettings. Meanwhile, you can barely convince people to modify behavior (or the government to regulate, say, the food industry) in response to real, known environmental risk factors of major effect.

Part of what I’m saying is that any remotely satisfying or useful “biological explanation” has to include the environment, but this is too hard to do so far. So I don’t see how you’re going to convince me that “biological explanations,” are in some way superior, do more conceptual or practical work, or are any less “phantoms” than environmental ones.

So, my question is: what do you want people to do with the information that many traits have strong genetic components? It seems like your interpretation is that trying to address negative consequences of these traits is therefore a waste of time and effort–correct me if I’m wrong. If that’s not what you meant, what is “significant” about recognizing heritability? Besides apathy, what course of action does it suggest today?

You can figure out which approaches to changing a behavior are more likely to work and yes, some things can’t be changed (ie: homosexuality). By determining how genes and environment interact you can determine what the actual likely causes are rather than blindly groping at phantoms which has been the current method.

eg: If propensity for weight gain is significantly genetic, telling an obese person that they’re a fat, lazy, slob that should exercise is both harmful and highly unlikely to work.

It’s funny that you criticize one sentence with practically the exact same statement I made one sentence later.

They don’t tell us that genes have been selected to produce those traits, and they are difficult to extract from epistatic effects and gene x environment correlations.

They don’t need to, just knowing that they have a substantial effect is significant. It suggests courses of action and expectations that are different than if it was entirely environmental. Instead of being completely blind, we’ve lit a candle.

This is my beef with calling this a biological “explanation.”

I never made the argument that one could only explain behavior in terms of biology in the absence of environment. I was criticizing the opposite – the belief that behavior can be entirely explained by environmental factors and the belief which still influences social science (although not nearly as strongly) that there is a mind/body duality.

Do you mean in the sense that we have a social obligation to those who are less physically or mentally capable? I agree with this… a caricature of liberals popular with stupid conservatives (and a reality among some very stupid liberals) is that “everyone is equal” means “everyone is equivalent.” That equality is somehow a statement about measurable traits than about social, moral, and legal standing.

Obviously, a trait having a “biological” basis (this is poor semantics, all traits are at some level biological) or strong genetic component has nothing to do with whether or not it can be changed, enhanced, or ameliorated by non-biological factors.

Twin studies and heritability estimates tell us that genomes have a lot of influence on individuals’ behavioral traits. They don’t tell us that genes have been selected to produce those traits, and they are difficult to extract from epistatic effects and gene x environment correlations. This is my beef with calling this a biological “explanation.”

You don’t really need direct biological evidence; there have been a number of methods that have been developed to get around the lack of a known physical mechanism (ie: twin studies). However, this digresses from my point – social scientists have been hostile to even the consideration that genetics (and therefore evolution) might be involved. This has made for very incomplete research since they are heavily intertwined.

Somehow, a plausible genetics-based argument just sounds better than a plausible (or demonstrably relevant) social/cultural argument to a lot of people.

Conversely, the social/cultural one sounds better to a lot of people too, especially on the left.

To be frank, a lot of processes studied in social science must have at least some genetic mediation or we could not have come about as a species. There are firm theoretical grounds to expect them.

Political scientists, economists, psychologists, and sociologists have perhaps not done great jobs with prescriptions for social problems, but to think biologists are going to trot in with them any time soon is just stupid.

That was not an argument made on this blog. The argument was that human behavior cannot be completely divorced from its biological basis. There is no ghost in the machine.

Without a sound theory, practical prescriptions are very difficult to come by. Failing to consider biology is going to result in ideas that have very limited success.

In the end, even where biological explanation exist, my suspicion is that they will remain forever irrelevant.

Really? Knowing what you can and can’t change is irrelevant? Knowing how the biological system known as a human is likely to react to a particular stimulus (technically all human behavior is biological in origin) and why is irrelevant?

but do know that i know hereditarian rawlsians. in fact, i’d probably say i’m far less libertarian than when i was younger because i accept substantial biologically heritable (and frankly, non-biological too) endowments.

gave me an idea for GSS post btw. has some ?’s regarding genes vs. enviro for various classes.

This is because there is a lack of biological evidence for most of the claims of those enamored of biological explanations. Somehow, a plausible genetics-based argument just sounds better than a plausible (or demonstrably relevant) social/cultural argument to a lot of people. I frequently encounter people who fervently believe in biological explanations for this or that (sometimes on this blog) who seemingly haven’t an inkling of what evidence for or against a genetic explanation would look like.

“Or considering only socioeconomic or environmental reasons for a particular characteristic without ever discussing genetics.”

There are very few complex human characteristics for which we have genetic models. Some day we will, my personal taste is to bracket gene x environment for complex human traits until we understand the effects of genes and environments on the traits we’re interested in. Biology is good at the genes part (almost), social scientists are often good at the environments part, but some currently non-existent hybrid of the two will at some point be required to sort it all out. Political scientists, economists, psychologists, and sociologists have perhaps not done great jobs with prescriptions for social problems, but to think biologists are going to trot in with them any time soon is just stupid.

On that note, I find biological “explanations” are usually used to justify or explain away perceived problems rather than address them, and when they are presented as the source of solutions they seem ridiculous. e.g. – allele X makes one susceptible to lifelong mental problems if one is abused as a child, so let’s really work hard on allele X. Which is better, research into fancy molecular strategies for manipulating the activity or effects of allele X, or doing a better job at stopping child abuse? In the end, even where biological explanation exist, my suspicion is that they will remain forever irrelevant.

ie: There is a nasty tendency to declare genetics inadequate as an explanation by saying that controlling for a particular variable makes it negligible without ever considering that a genetic trait might be responsible for both.

Or considering only socioeconomic or environmental reasons for a particular characteristic without ever discussing genetics.

It’s basic missteps like this that tend to make people in the natural sciences skeptical of SS.

In a sense yes, but most of them are already far from being sciences when called social sciences. That is why I said “stating the obvious”. There is a huge difference in terms of scientificity between natural sciences and most social sciences, but we don’t see a similar difference between humanities and most social sciences, so it is often the case that a particular social/human discipline is sometimes called a social science and sometimes a discipline of humanities.

I really object to the whole science pecking order, whether it’s within science or between science and something else. Physicists say that physics is more scientific than biology, but that’s crap. Philip Anderson says that particle physicists say that solid-state physics is less scientific than particle physics, but that’s crap too.

The pecking order, as far as I know, comes from highly ambitious individuals with a mystical devotion to Science and an equal obsession with their own egos and their own careers. It’s really locker room one-upsmanship. And people will do that, but they shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Chris, around 1900 (Boas) anthropologists bracketed out biology and to a degree, psychology from anthropology. They did this mostly because the psychjological, medical and biological explanations of culture were so crappy, and also because they wanted to specialize their study in large group behavior and in learned / transmitted culture and institutions. It’s been fruitful, alberi flawed, though not fruitful in the way you wish it was.

Unfortunately the methodological bracketing out came to be taken as a truism, and that’s been being corrected over the last 40 years or so. But the first two waves of biological anthropology, — sociobiology and ev psych — both had plenty of their own flaws which are now widely recognized, many of which some have been avoided if the authors in question had paid a little attention to sociology, politics, history, etc.

I was not saying that the behavior of large groups is unintelligible. I’m saying that it’s emergent from group interaction, only in some degree a function of psychology. For exampe, if you have two nations, one of them warlike and one of them not, the difference is not because of differences in the psychologies of the two peoples. For example, until at least 1709 the Swedes were military brutes, whereas the Russians and Germans were militarily feeble victims. After 1815 Sweden was militarily of no importance and general neutral, while the other two countries became war machines.

But did any chemist ever think that physics was not involved?

But most of social science is about the aggregate behavior of enormous groups of people organized in multiple overlapping complex non-natural (i.e. culturally coded and learned rather than biologically innate) systems.

Massively complex, but not completely random either. There are limits to even the behavior of large groups. Those limits can be found and understood. Because group behavior is an aggregate of individuals, the characteristics of the individual can be studied to learn more about the behavior and characteristics of the group.

I’m not expecting perfection out of Social Science, but I do expect something coherent that can be built off of.

When you say “demote”, that’s confusion is understood.

As I’ve said a number of times here and elsewhere, though it seldom gets through, what’s at stake here is the scientific imperative and the scientific pecking order. It’s commonly felt at some gut level by people in the sciences that everything should be made scientific, that everything scientific is superior to everything non-scientific, and that non-scientific forms of study are of little intellectual interest (“stamp-collecting and social work”), and so on. When you say “demote”, that’s what comes through.

What I say is that history (and the social sciences) are not scientific in the sense the word is usually used, but that that’s not a defect. It’s just in the nature of the material. One consequence is that attempts to make history scientific should be looked on very skeptically, and in fact a lot of them have turned out to be crap. Another consequence is that even after history absorbs a lot of science it still is not scientific. The logic of the historian’s work as a whole will still be a historian’s logic and not a scientist’s.

In short, the work of a historian (and a social scientist) should be compared to other work studying the same topic, rather than to any ideal of science. And critics of the unscientificity of history should roll up their sleeves and write better, more scientific history, if they can.

As Razib hinted above, this same argument has occurred between physicists and biologists. As far as I’m concerned, biology and history are what they are, and whether or not you call them scientific depends on the definition of science you use. It’s OK with me if the line is drawn between history and biology, but it would be OK with me if it were drawn between physics and biology too. Once you know what’s going on in each study, the labelling is nominalistic.