44 The New York Reviewpolymorphisms to consider, how to
weight and aggregate them. Interpre-
tive decisions are of course essential to
all science, but here there are a great
many opinions dressed up in facts’
clothing. “This polygenic index will be
normally distributed,” Harden contin-
ues, now disguising an assumption—
that there are intrinsic cognitive and
personality traits whose distribution
in a population follows a bell- shaped
curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—
as an objective fact. Harden then tells
us that “a polygenic index created from
the educational attainment GWAS
typically captures about 10 –15 per-
cent of the variance in outcomes.” All
these trappings of scientific objectiv-
ity notwithstanding, a polygenic index
“captures” differences in educational
outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s
Summertime painting captures the sea-
son: as a reflection of its creator’s rad-
ically subjective view of things (which
is just fine for abstract expressionism).If you find a magical hammer that,
whenever you swing it, rewards you with
funding and professional advancement,
you look at your research area and see
nothing but nails. Genome- wide asso-
ciation studies are the social sciences’
new magical hammer. Macular degen-
eration seems plausibly to be a nail:
genomic analysis revealed two sets of
single- nucleotide polymorphisms that
were importantly associated with hav-
ing the disease. Schizophrenia appears
not to be a nail, though it might have
some structural features a hammer
could help with. The things social sci-
entists have been swinging at aren’t just
non- nails. They are to nails as ships to
sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To
suggest that macular degeneration has
genetic causes is to make an empiri-
cally testable proposal; to suggest that
“grit” or “openness to experience” has
genetic causes is to make a category
mistake. These are interpretive de-
scriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and
practices, not molecules.
If we’re to have genome- wide as-
sociation studies for “growth mind-
set” and “mastery orientation,” the
possibilities are legion. How about a
genome- wide association study for a
trait called “corporate- speak suscep-
tibility,” which captures the tendency
to adopt terms often found in motiva-
tional pamphlets on leadership? Or
one for “bogus scientism,” which cap-
tures the tendency to present inter-
pretive opinions as objective facts? Or
one for “spurious reductionism,” which
captures the tendency to assume that
all phenomena are reducible to nucle-
otides? Reducing complex phenomena
to simple parts can be enlightening, but
it can also be spurious. This is not to
say that genes are inessential to social
life. It was essential for Shakespeare to
derive energy from respiration to write
his plays, but a diagram of the Krebs
cycle sheds no light on King Lear.
Before there were genome- wide as-
sociation studies, people arguing for
the genetic basis of social differences
conducted studies comparing frater-
nal and identical twins raised together
and apart. Harden continues in this
tradition: she codirects the Twin Proj-
ect at the University of Texas and
invokes analyses of twin data as evi-
dence that “genes cause differences
in educational outcomes.” She cites a
notorious 1969 paper by the Ameri-can psychologist Arthur Jensen, who
maintained that races differed in IQ
and who used twin studies to argue
that social interventions couldn’t over-
come genetic deficiencies in scholastic
achievement.
Harden condemns Jensen’s racism
and rejects his assertion that social in-
terventions are futile, but she doesn’t
question his basic claim that genetic
differences produce an innate hierar-
chy of scholastic achievement. She also
doesn’t acknowledge his dependence
on fraudulent data from a 1966 paper
by the English psychologist and ge-
neticist Cyril Burt purporting to com-
pare identical twins raised together
and apart. And nowhere does she
cite the Princeton psychologist Leon
Kamin’s 1974 devastating debunking
of Jensen and Burt or engage with the
critical problems Kamin raised there
regarding twin studies in general, be-
cause of the impossibility of isolating
genetic factors from environmental
ones. While Harden, who describes
herself as a political progressive, re-
pudiates Jensen’s overt racism, she
resurrects the misconceived science
underlying it.Harden’s purpose in The Genetic
Lottery is to popularize the claim that
social inequalities have genetic causes,
and to argue that if progressives want
to address inequality, they’d better con-
front this fact. In presenting her case,
Harden revives central features of the
earlier, now- discredited biological the-
ories of intelligence: the presentation
of interpretive opinions as objective
facts, as we’ve seen; spurious reduction
to a biological mechanism that is not
only hypothetical but unspecified; and
a claim to be writing in the interest of
social progress.
Regarding spurious reduction to
an unspecified mechanism: although
Harden pays lip service to the princi-
ple that correlation is not causation, she
both implies and explicitly argues that
correlations of genetic differences with
social ones indicate genetic causes of
social differences. When merely imply-
ing causation, she uses weasel words:
genes are “relevant” for educational
attainment; they are “associated with”
first having sex at an earlier age; they
“matter” for aggression and violence;
social and economic inequalities “stem
from” genetics. Harden also says it
directly: genes “cause” differences in
educational outcomes; genetic differ-
ences “cause” differences in social and
behavioral outcomes; a “causal chain”
links a genotype with the social behav-
ior of going to school, and another such
chain joins genetics to performance on
intelligence tests.
The confusion between correlation
and causation in fact first arose in con-
nection with arguments for the biolog-
ical, hereditary basis of intelligence.
The mathematical concept of correla-
tion—a measure of the degree to which
two variables are associated—came
into existence as a linchpin of the con-
joined sciences of statistics and eu-
genics in the 1880s. Galton developed
fundamental concepts of statistics, in-
cluding correlation, deviation, and re-
gression, to provide the mathematical
basis for a new “science of improving
stock,” for which he coined the term
“eugenics.” This mathematics of he-
redity, Galton believed, revealed evo-
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On sale April 12thTHREE RINGS
A TALE OF EXILE,
NARRATIVE, AND FATE
Daniel Mendelsohn
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Combining memoir, biography, history, and lit-
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