PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL 17But splashed around the world’s media just before Christmas 2015 was
the declaration that Imperial College researchers have identifi ed two “in-
telligence gene networks.” Lead author of the paper (published online in
Nature Neuroscience on December 21, 2015) Michael Johnson is quoted as
saying, “Th is research highlights some of genes involved in human intel-
ligence, and how they interact with each other.” He goes on, “What’s ex-
citing about this is that... potentially we can manipulate a whole set of
genes whose activity is linked to human intelligence,” and “our research
suggests that it might be pos si ble to work with these genes to modify
intelligence, but that is only a theoretical possibility at the moment.”^17
Numerous other gene- hunting proj ects have been springing up in
vari ous parts of the world. Many are extending this logic to education. In
chapter 11, I have much more to say about the ideology of schooling as a
“test” of potential. But one example is the large group of researchers form-
ing the Social Science Ge ne tic Association Consortium. Th eir remit has
been to fi nd associations between ge ne tic SNPs and educational achieve-
ment. Th ey are funded by a number of prestigious bodies and have been
published in the leading journal Science in 2013. Across the billions of
SNPs scanned, they claimed to fi nd a small number statistically associ-
ated with school test scores.^18
What wasn’t emphasized in the press releases or excited media reports
was that associations were found with only 2 percent of the variance in
educational per for mance. Th at is, even if the associations are real (and
there are doubts), 98 percent of individual diff erences in school achieve-
ment were not associated with ge ne tic variation. Ironically, the group’s
press release declared this to be a ge ne tic “advance,” claiming that the
“fi ndings will eventually be useful for understanding biological pro cesses
under lying learning, memory, reading disabilities and cognitive decline
in the el derly.”
In a circumspect scientifi c environment, such a minuscule correlation
(and a correlation is not a cause) would ordinarily have been dismissed
as a chance or, at best, indirect eff ect. Jonathan Latham, in the In de pen-
dent Science News (August 3, 2013) described this publicity to be “as spec-
tacular a mis- description of a scientifi c fi nding as is to be found any where
in the scientifi c lit er a ture.” He wrote that the claims to fi nd genes, even
when we haven’t, have more to do with the ideological and po liti cal gains
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