Eugenics 2.0: How Dialectical Materialism can end the Nature vs. Nurture debate

Race “science” has not disappeared, and with the rise of xenophobic nationalist politics, it is making a comeback in the form of vulgar genetic determinism. The classic nature vs. nurture debate is returning, with right-wing ideologues firmly on the side of “nature”. Nafis Hasan argues that through dialectical logic we can overcome the nature vs. nurture debate and understand the human species in a way that doesn’t bow before genetic reductionism. 

2018 seems to be the year when fetishism around genetic determinism has returned to vogue. From the bitter fights over the CRISPR gene editing technology patent and its alleged use in editing human embryos that were carried to term signaling changes in the ethics of reproduction and a potential wave of “CRISPR babies” in the future, to US politicians embracing direct-to-consumer genetic testing kits to uphold identity politics, and white supremacists embracing genetics as another avenue to display their superiority and the idea of intellectual superiority of whites over Blacks in the US becoming more acceptable in the US white population, it appears that this has really been the year when the Nature vs Nurture debate, always simmering in the background, has jumped out in the foray of politics and society. In some cases, scientists have clearly tried to separate themselves from the use of genetic data for political use, e.g. when the American Society of Human Genetics “denounced attempts to link genetics and racial purity”, although it did not recognize that in the public mind, race and genetics are intertwined. But in other cases, scientists called for more research into the link between genetics and racial differences in sociological and behavioral parameters, going the full spectrum between cautious interpretation of genetic association studies advocated by David Reich, to the ultimate victory of Nature over Nurture as concluded by Robert Plomin in his new book “Blueprint.”

The debate on race, genetics, and intelligence is not a new one — after eugenics was supposedly put to rest, it appeared that this ideology had taken refuge in the shadows of evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics. It is not surprising that the latter field, built on the Nature vs. Nurture duality, is a hotbed of debate and sensationalism, given the sociopolitical implications and our collective obsession with genetic determinism. Over the years, the question of whether differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors or genetic factors has been repeatedly raised. In 1994, Charles Murray co-wrote the notorious book, The Bell Curve, in which he argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites because of genetic differences. While the book was criticized by the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould in his summary analysis & rebuttal The Mismeasure of Man (revised ed., 1996), the idea that there are inherent genetic differences in intelligence across races stuck around in other forms. Once the human genome was sequenced, and genetic determinism again became fashionable in its technological reincarnation, billions of dollars of public money was funneled into studying the genetic basis of complex traits, including behavioral and psychological ones, and their differences across racial and ethnic boundaries. The belief that the answer lay in the genes nurtured the idea of eugenics along with it.

Current day eugenics, Eugenics 2.0, takes the form of hyper-rationalism, scientific racism, race realism, and the misleading idea of “human biodiversity.” It is not surprising, then, that the alt-right and white supremacists have taken up Eugenics 2.0 behind the shield of “Science”, just as they espouse their bigoted views from behind the mask of Free Speech. For example, earlier this year, a secret conference on eugenics and intelligence was hosted at University College, London, featuring white supremacist speakers like Toby Young. Sam Harris recently hosted Charles Murray on his podcast under the title “Forbidden Knowledge”. This was after Murray was protested against at a lecture at Middlebury College, the underlying premise being that Murray’s ideas were being restricted due to the “college PC culture” (Murray was recently awarded a hefty prize from the Bradley Foundation and is regularly invited to give talks on conservative platforms). The cautious approach advocated by Reich is naive at best, since as geneticist Razib Khan’s case shows, white supremacists can use such studies as evidence for racial superiority, and they are increasingly leaning towards genetic testing for validation.

This is not to say that Eugenics 2.0 hasn’t faced its own share of resistance in academia — much has been written against the idea that inherent genetic differences explain the variable performances in IQ tests along racial lines. The scientists that championed the environmental causes of such differences in IQ test outcomes have put forth socioeconomic status (SES) as the primary cause. A seminal study by Turkheimer et al in 2003 showed that genetic differences could only explain differences in intelligence among kids from high SES background. For the kids from lower SES, environmental factors were the primary cause for variation observed in IQ. A more recent critique of the paper showed that the differences observed between the two SES groups were not significant along racial lines. A paper by Figlio et al, published in 2017, was the largest study to test the idea that “genetic influences on cognitive abilities are larger for children raised in more advantaged environments”, found no evidence to support their hypothesis. However, they do admit that “articulating gene-environment interactions for cognition is more complex and elusive than previously supposed.” A host of scientists across disciplines have accused Reich of conflating the implications of modern behavior genetics research, and one scientist even questioned Reich’s expertise in understanding evolutionary biology and whether he is a racist. Academia is not without rebuttals, as evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen took to Twitter to criticize the above-mentioned rebuttal op-ed to Reich, asking whether social scientists understand genetics themselves. Beyond the discussion of study design and other scientific details of contradictory results, the question has attracted other meta-analyses. Some of these include a sociological perspective on whether race is a biological or social construct, the limitations of IQ tests, whether the term “Race” should be used in the context of genetic differences between population groups, and whether this debate belongs in the realm of Free Speech.

In his defense, Plomin (author of Blueprint) argues that he’s focusing on the differences between individuals rather than groups and that genetic data provides a probability on where an individual’s cognitive ability lies on a normalized distribution of the population. He concludes that 50% of the differences between individuals, in personality, mental health and illness, and cognitive abilities can be explained by inherited DNA differences. These differences can come in the form of single nucleotide changes in the DNA, otherwise known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and it is using this parameter that variability among individuals is determined. Of course, in the 3 billion bases that constitute human DNA, it is very possible to have a wide array of SNPs and therefore, modern-day behavioral genetics uses an outcome known as polygenic score, a statistical tool that incorporates variations at particular genomic locations that carry different weights in terms of phenotypes; the polygenic score, therefore, provides a risk estimate, a probabilistic score. However, as James Freese writes in his well-balanced review on the use of genomics in social sciences, “polygenic scores are purely predictive scores,” and they only explain only a portion of complex human behavior such as cognitive outcomes, which are still influenced by environmental effects.

This endless debate, however, is spurred on by a major epistemic flaw in understanding the Nature and Nurture equation. In his detailed analysis of the behavior genetics field in the post-genome sequencing era, sociologist Aaron Panofsky writes, “Behavior geneticists’ focus on environmental factors and interactionism has involved looking at different parts of the nature versus nurture equation, not a rethinking of the presumptions of that equation or the notion of the analytic separability of genes and environment.”¹ Something perceived to be a change in the paradigm ended up being just a shift towards one variable or the other. The individual focus on genes or environment as separate entities have resulted in much contradictory evidence so far, allowing the white supremacists to weaponize scientific evidence to their favor and change public perception (for years, Nicholas Wade misrepresented scientific data to make racist claims as a science writer for the New York Times). However, Panofsky doesn’t provide an avenue to escape the quagmire that behavior geneticists find themselves in.

The promised paradigm shift can be achieved through a shift in how we view the relationship between us and our environment. And turns out, Marxist ideas can help us do exactly that. Engels first proposed the idea of using Marx’s dialectical materialism to examine this relationship is his unfinished book Dialectics of Nature (1883). Marx, in his revision of Hegel’s dialectics, asserted that dialectics should deal with the “material world” of human history and activity rather than the metaphysical world or the world of ideas. As Ernest Mandel describes in his introduction to Capital (Penguin edition, 1976), “when the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality.” Dialectical materialism allows for studying the interactions between phenomena in an empirical manner. Engels’ intention in his unfinished book was to employ this philosophy to understand the ever-changing relationship between Man and Nature.

Biologists such as J.B.S. Haldane and others had tried to keep this tradition alive through their writings over the years. But the pseudoscience practiced by Trofim Lysenko and the misuse of dialectical materialism by Stalinists resulted in a shunning of this approach in Western philosophy and scientific understanding. However, in its unadulterated form, dialectical materialism can provide a solution to the nature vs nurture debate, as Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin outlined in their book The Dialectical Biologist (1985). Levins & Lewontin write:

“an organism does not compute itself from its DNA. The organism is the consequence of a historical process that goes on from the moment of conception until the moment of death; at every moment gene, environment, chance, and the organism as a whole are all participating….Natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organism actively codetermine each other.”

The central premise of Levins & Lewontin’s argument is that because the relationship between an organism and an environment is reciprocal (and hence dialectical) it is this relationship that should be the subject of empirical study rather than either the environment or the individual organism. Additionally, they argue that this relationship cannot be studied outside the context of evolution, echoing both Marx and the famous biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky who proclaimed “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Lewontin went on to further solidify the necessity of using a dialectical approach to studying evolution and development of an organism. In his book The Triple Helix (2002), he writes “the ontogeny [development] of an organism is the consequence of a unique interaction between the genes it carries, the temporal sequence of external environments through which it passes during its life, and random events of molecular interactions within individual cells. It is these interactions that must be incorporated into any proper account of how an organism is formed”, establishing the organism as a site of interaction between the environment and genes. Therefore, under dialectical materialism, the Nature vs. Nurture debate is replaced by how Nature AND Nurture contribute to the development of an organism.

It is therefore interesting to note that while Plomin admits that “we select, modify and even create our environments in line with our genetic propensities”, he chooses to label environmental effects as “largely unsystematic, unstable and idiosyncratic” even though they account for the rest of the 50% of differences among individuals. He goes as far as to argue that while environmental factors may have temporary effects, these effects are largely erased in the course of reproduction. This argument, in fact, should be discarded in the face of mounting evidence from laboratory studies using rodents and from human studies that show transgenerational heritability of phenotypes. Epigenetics, long heralded as the connection between the environment and the genome, shows that genomic imprinting (the phenomenon by which genes are expressed in a strictly parent-of-origin pattern), has been observed in approximately 75 genes in humans and around 150 genes in rodents. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment that mimic hormones and interfere with their physiological functions have shown to transgenerationally affect multiple disease states in humans and rodents that range from cancer, diabetes and obesity to neurological disorders such as ADHD, despite not being classic mutagens (chemicals that alter the DNA). More recently, it has been shown that male offsprings of male mice exposed to stress exhibit symptoms of social anxiety disorders, and this effect is carried through changes in microRNAs carried by the sperms. The microorganisms that inhabit our bodies are gaining a more central role in our development, and affect our physiological as well as our neurological functioning to the point that the individuality of the organism has been brought under question, leading to the concept of the organism as an ecosystem, a “holobiont”.

With the rise of observations in developmental plasticity, such as the examples mentioned above, it would appear that Lamarckian concepts of transmission of heritability are quickly gaining traction in Western science. While fetishism around the gene as the central identity has been the key ideology of the neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins and has propagated a reductive “DNA as the blueprint of life” ideology, neo-Lamarckian systems of transmission of inheritance as proposed by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb (1995) can be used to argue against such ideas.² Jablonka and Lamb argue that short-term evolution does not depend on new mutations in the DNA, but rather on epigenetic modifications that uncover genetic variants already present in the population. Additionally, genes undergo “shuffling” through recombination during cell division, thus giving rise to further variation within the population. They also argue that the structure of the chromatin (the condensed version of chromosomes in cells) affects changes in the DNA sequence and therefore “highlights the complexity of the role of the environment in evolutionary change, the environment is not the just the agent of selection. Through its effects on genes phenotype, ti also biases the direction, rate, and type of DNA changes at the locus.” Jablonka and Lamb also propose group selection rather than individual selection and counters the neo-Darwinian idea of the gene as the unit of selection by proposing groups of cells as units of selection instead. Cognizant of the fact that inheritance at the social and behavioral level is different compared to genetic and epigenetic level, Jablonka and Lamb (2005) describe four properties of Behavioral Inheritance Systems (BIS) that are founded on a fusion of collective-individual activity devoid of genetic hierarchy. They argue that: 

“with variation transmitted by the symbolic system, there is a quantum leap in social complexity with families, professional groups, communities, states, and other groupings all influencing what is produced in art, commerce, religion and so on. Construction plays an enormous role in the production of variants, yet because symbolic systems are self-referential, the rules of the systems are powerful filters. The ability to use symbols also gives humans the important and unique ability to construct and transmit variants with the future in mind” (Evolution in Four Dimensions, 2005).

In his analysis of evolutionary theory using dialectics, Julio Munõz-Rubio³ further argues that this mechanism of inheritance is essentially a dialectical one since Jablonka and Lamb’s work implies the evolutionary process to be a synthesis between the genetic information and the environmental influences, which Lewontin (1983) had described to be conceived as “two opposed, active, and mutually selective elements”, thus forming “a dialectical Aufhebung of the organism-environment.”⁴ Munõz-Rubio extrapolates his analysis to social interactions and human evolution:

“In this case it is a synthesis resulting from actions of self-aware beings: human beings, the only species that evolves at this level, the only species that does not cease being Homo Sapiens and which, consequently does not shed its biological condition in its evolution. This evolution emerges as what is defined as self-relation, of a negative nature, that is, an internal relation of societies (or of populations within them) that leads to self-negation, to a movement in which humans shed their previous nature, they deny it in their next stage, in which they self-assert themselves.”

Current scientific rationale employs the neoliberal and capitalist ideology of individualism to champion the cause of genetic determinism, and in turn, scientific racism. While scientists (both geneticists and sociologists) have acknowledged that both the environment AND genes play a role in the development of cognitive functions, their study designs are flawed because of this reductionist, individualistic approach. Modern technological advances have done little to end the debate despite promises; scientific evidence generated using a reductionist view will only continue to be co-opted by chauvinists and white supremacists. Scientists cannot afford to ignore the sociopolitical impact of their work. It is time for a more encompassing understanding of our biology and our relationship with the environment, and dialectical materialism, as Marx and Engels had intended, and Levins & Lewontin have applied theoretically, is poised to do so.

1. From Behavior Genetics to Postgenomics, Postgenomics, Duke University Press, 2015, pg. 150
2. Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension, OUP, 1995
3. Dialectics and neo-Lamarckism against the fetishism of genes, The Truth is the Whole. The Pumping Station, 2018
4. The organism as the subject and object of evolution, Scientia 118, 63-82.