Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's a great honor to have doctor Robert Pulman on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Doctor Poulman is Professor of Behavioral Genetics at
Speaker 1: the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College, London.
Speaker 1: He previously held positions at the University of Colorado, Boulder
Speaker 1: and Pennsylvania State University. He was elected a Fellow of
Speaker 1: the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the British Academy
Speaker 1: for his twin studies and his groundbreaking work in behavioral genetics.
Speaker 1: The author or co author of many books, including Gas
Speaker 1: for Genes, The Impact of Genetics on Education and Achievement
Speaker 1: with Catherine Asbury, and most recently Blueprint How DNA Makes
Speaker 1: Us Who We Are? Robert so great to chat with
Speaker 1: you today. Thanks. I look forward to it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: an honor. I mean your research was foundational for my
Speaker 1: studies in the field of human intelligence, and you're one
Speaker 1: of the top should we say founders the field of
Speaker 1: behavioral genetics. Would you consider yourself a founder of that discipline? No,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, most people consider the founding like
Speaker 1: Scotton Fuller's book in nineteen sixty. So I was part
Speaker 1: of the second generation. I think, you know, the first
Speaker 1: generation was people like John de Frize, and people came
Speaker 1: out of agricultural genetics and really animal husbandre whereas I was,
Speaker 1: you know, a real psychologist. I was trained as a
Speaker 1: psychologist and I got into behavioral genetics just by chance
Speaker 1: because I went to the University of Texas at Austin,
Speaker 1: you know, where they had the first behavioral genetics program.
Speaker 1: How don't you know that story about Gardner Lindsay No,
Speaker 1: past president of the APA, and for his presidential address
Speaker 1: he gave a talk about sort of genetics and evolutionary stuff.
Speaker 1: But he did the early work in the fifties with
Speaker 1: inbred strains of mice and kind of looking at genetics
Speaker 1: with Marty Mansovitz. So with the Sputnik era. Texas tried
Speaker 1: to recruit him from Harvard Gardner Lindsay and they said,
Speaker 1: we'll give you whatever you want. He says, right, well,
Speaker 1: I'd like to have the first program in behavioral genetics
Speaker 1: at the University of Texas at Austin. And he could
Speaker 1: hire anybody he wanted. So he hired just about everybody
Speaker 1: in the world who was doing it then. This is
Speaker 1: in the late sixties, people like Jamduel who studied fruit flies,
Speaker 1: del Tiessen, who studied mice. There was only about a
Speaker 1: dozen people in the world, and he got about six
Speaker 1: of them or so. So it was really amazing. And
Speaker 1: I went to graduate school at Texas not because of
Speaker 1: that program. I didn't even know about it, but you know,
Speaker 1: they had one of those I don't know if graduate
Speaker 1: programs in psych in the US still do this, but
Speaker 1: they had a core course set of core courses in
Speaker 1: the first two years. Really fortunately I did school they do. Unfortunately.
Speaker 1: I think they were good in a way because they
Speaker 1: made everybody take the same courses clinical perception learning, you know, personality,
Speaker 1: and at Texas, uniquely, behavioral genetics taught by all these
Speaker 1: phenomenal people, you know, not just Gardner, Lindsay, but John Lowland,
Speaker 1: I certainly should have mentioned him. All those guys they
Speaker 1: just taught some lectures on this course, and so I
Speaker 1: had to take this course and forty students in the class,
Speaker 1: and it completely blew me away. Yet thirty nine other people,
Speaker 1: you know, didn't hit them at all. And I often wonder,
Speaker 1: you know, what is it that, Why did it affect
Speaker 1: me and not anyone else? And I really don't know
Speaker 1: the answer to that. Isn't the answer your DNA because
Speaker 1: these needs are obvious based on your research. No, I'm
Speaker 1: extraordinarily interested individual differences my whole life. I have always
Speaker 1: wondered why am I so interested in individual differences? I've
Speaker 1: wondered that. Now I'm interested in all of the causal
Speaker 1: factors that predict individual But I have always been I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, being five six years old and on the
Speaker 1: playground and just massively curious, why is that person able
Speaker 1: to go in that jungle gym and swing on it
Speaker 1: or like I can't you know, when I try, I
Speaker 1: fall and I, you know, get hurt very bad. And
Speaker 1: I was really curious about that at age five. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder if there is a genetic contribution or influence
Speaker 1: to the extent to which you're interested in studying the
Speaker 1: science of individual differences. Is it lucky though, that you know,
Speaker 1: you kind of find out what you like to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think you only do well at what you
Speaker 1: like to do. I mean, we could probably do okay
Speaker 1: at a lot of different things, yeah, including just making money,
Speaker 1: you know, in business or something. But it's really a
Speaker 1: tremendous joy in life to find something you really love,
Speaker 1: even though when I talk to people about it, very
Speaker 1: few people really like you and me. They really don't
Speaker 1: know why it is they like what they like, but
Speaker 1: you know that you do well. Yeah. I think that's
Speaker 1: a really good point. And I actually just came across
Speaker 1: the study about five minutes before I had this conversation
Speaker 1: with you, So this is actually a really good timing,
Speaker 1: this study showing that like the single best predictor of productivity,
Speaker 1: You know how everyone has all these like ideas for
Speaker 1: what is productivity or what causes productivity? The single best
Speaker 1: predictor of pro activity was just simply how much fun
Speaker 1: do you consider the task? You know, there's all these
Speaker 1: other proposed hypotheses and you know, ideas and hack productivity hacks,
Speaker 1: which I'm putting quotes the word hacks and quotes. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe at the end of the day, that is important,
Speaker 1: and that does seem to relate to a central thesis
Speaker 1: of your new book of going with the green, not
Speaker 1: against the green of your nature, and it seems to
Speaker 1: be a core theme of your book. And I'd love
Speaker 1: if you could outline for our listeners a little bit
Speaker 1: how you arrived at this conclusion, some of the research
Speaker 1: you went through. I mean, you've had a career of
Speaker 1: forty five years and you said that you've been willing
Speaker 1: to write this book for thirty years. So my first
Speaker 1: question is that first fifteen years, what happened there, you know,
Speaker 1: that transformed you to then you know, after the fifteenth year,
Speaker 1: you decided, well, I really kind of want to write
Speaker 1: a book about this. And then if you could just
Speaker 1: go through some of the seminal studies that you conducted
Speaker 1: after that, after you lay that out, then we'll go
Speaker 1: through the five major discoveries. But first, if you don't mind,
Speaker 1: just tell me a little bit about the methodology. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: as I say, in the second year of graduate school
Speaker 1: at the University of Texas at Austin, I was exposed
Speaker 1: to this core course in behavioral genetics, and I just
Speaker 1: knew at that point that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And I still don't know why, but I really did.
Speaker 1: I mean, I hadn't had genetics before. I guess part
Speaker 1: of it was maybe personality, you know. At that time, well,
Speaker 1: I was everything undergraduate, you know, I was just taking
Speaker 1: undergrad with courses that fit in with my work schedule.
Speaker 1: I was working full time while I was in university,
Speaker 1: and I was in film in English, and then a
Speaker 1: long time in philosophy. But then I had this magic
Speaker 1: moment in philosophy where I was at the Paul University
Speaker 1: in Chicago and they were into phenomenology. So for the
Speaker 1: third time I was hearing about deskness, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea of phenomenology. And I kept getting in trouble in
Speaker 1: philosophy because I kept saying, well, how do we know
Speaker 1: what this guy argues is any better than what this
Speaker 1: guy argues? And I kept trying to come up with
Speaker 1: testable hypotheses and I was kind of stonewalled on it.
Speaker 1: And then I just had the realization that if you
Speaker 1: can test it, it's no longer philosophy and it's psychology.
Speaker 1: So I just walked out of class and that was it.
Speaker 1: I became a psych major, which you know, in the
Speaker 1: States you can do you can change your major, as
Speaker 1: I did four or five times. But that was really
Speaker 1: kind of an important moment in my life, realizing I'm
Speaker 1: just kind of an empiricist. I just want data to
Speaker 1: solve problems. I don't want to just argue about things.
Speaker 1: Then I happened to go to the University of Texas
Speaker 1: at Austin and they were you know, I knew that's
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do, and so I got involved
Speaker 1: a little bit with John Lowland and Joe Horn who
Speaker 1: were working on the Texas Adoption Project at that point.
Speaker 1: But my supervisor was Arnie Buss, who is one of
Speaker 1: those guys who if they weren't so smart, they'd be
Speaker 1: locked up, you know. I mean we had some incredibly
Speaker 1: difficult times. I grew up in a family where it
Speaker 1: was impolite to argue, whereas Ernie Buss would start conversations like, God,
Speaker 1: I didn't know you were so stupid. I mean, how
Speaker 1: could you say something like that? You know? Was that
Speaker 1: n Buss's father? It is indeed? Wow, And David Buss
Speaker 1: got to run to that too. I could tell you
Speaker 1: some stories there as well. But Arnie, you know, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like the Marines. You're not sorry you did it,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't do it again maybe, you know, But
Speaker 1: it was a very important you know. I learned to
Speaker 1: be tough and I could give as well as I got,
Speaker 1: you know, even in sort of bare knuckles verbal fights,
Speaker 1: you know. So that was a good experience. And so
Speaker 1: Arnie was into personality at that time, Ernie Boss he
Speaker 1: wrote books on aggression and that sort of thing, and
Speaker 1: so I was doing work in personality. I thought what
Speaker 1: would be cool is to study what at that time
Speaker 1: was called temperament. Was trying to find the more genetic
Speaker 1: aspects of personality, and so I did my dissertation on that,
Speaker 1: a twin family study, that sort of thing. And so
Speaker 1: for quite a while there I did work on personality,
Speaker 1: including observational twin studies, you know, where we go into
Speaker 1: the home. So the new thing was I thought, let's
Speaker 1: not just do self report, how about parent ratings, how
Speaker 1: about observers going in the home and looking at kids,
Speaker 1: you know, getting different. I was just worried that everything
Speaker 1: in personality seemed to be heritable and maybe that's a
Speaker 1: self report sort of bias. I thought, you know, this
Speaker 1: is back in the early seventies. So then I did
Speaker 1: observational studies in the families with David Rowe, who was
Speaker 1: my first student when I was at the University of Colorado.
Speaker 1: That was kind of cool. He was in his second
Speaker 1: year and he was in social psychology, and when I
Speaker 1: gave an initial talk on behavioral genetics, he had that
Speaker 1: same experience where he said, I'm not doing social psychology,
Speaker 1: I want to do that individual differences genetics, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So I became his sort of shadow supervisor
Speaker 1: and we did work together and that was great. You know,
Speaker 1: David did a lot of important early work. David Rowe
Speaker 1: Do you know him? Do you know of his name?
Speaker 1: I do know of his name. Yes, yeah, I've seen
Speaker 1: as a co author on various papers. Yeah. Yeah, he died,
Speaker 1: you know, pancreatic cancer. It seems like my best friend
Speaker 1: seemed to die of that. David Folker also died of
Speaker 1: pancreatic cancer. So anyway, that was all great in terms
Speaker 1: of getting going. But then I decided personality measures even
Speaker 1: parent reports observer reports, the measure which just aren't as
Speaker 1: well conditioned as cognitive abilities. So that's when I got
Speaker 1: into I just kind of made a conscious decision to
Speaker 1: get into cognitive abilities, and I began the Colorado Adoption Project,
Speaker 1: which is a study of two hundred and fifty adoptive
Speaker 1: families in two hundred and fifty match non adoptive families,
Speaker 1: where I had tested the biological mothers of those adopted
Speaker 1: kids myself when I first got to Colorado. Tell me
Speaker 1: if I'm jumbling the story too much. But I was
Speaker 1: in the University of Texas seventy to seventy four, got
Speaker 1: my PhD. I was going to stay there. They were
Speaker 1: even thinking of hiring me as an assistant professor. But then,
Speaker 1: as an example of non shared kind of random environmental influences,
Speaker 1: someone at Colorado, at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics committed
Speaker 1: suicide in June. So John Lowland got a call from
Speaker 1: Jerry McClaren at Texas. At in Austin, Jerry McClaren found
Speaker 1: at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, and Jerry asked John
Speaker 1: if they had anyone who could fill this slot, and
Speaker 1: so John said, oh, yeah, We've got this guy. Robert
Speaker 1: Plumman he'd be great, done deal. You know, they just said, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you come and visit. But you know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't like today. I mean there was no advertisement, there
Speaker 1: was no you know, no anything. So, I mean, it
Speaker 1: was the ideal job for me. It was a joint
Speaker 1: appointment in psychology and at the Institute of Behavioral Genetics,
Speaker 1: and you know, it was phenomenal. That was the only
Speaker 1: institute for behavioral genetics then in nineteen seventy four. So
Speaker 1: I decided I'd do something different, having seen the Texas
Speaker 1: Adoption Project and realizing that since the forties and fifties
Speaker 1: there really weren't many adoption studies. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of twin studies. So I thought it would be good
Speaker 1: to use this very different design of the adoption study
Speaker 1: to study behavioral development. And that's what the Colorado Adoption
Speaker 1: Project was about. So it took three tries to get
Speaker 1: an NIH grant because back then it was not a
Speaker 1: cool thing in psychology to be studying genetics. Students nowadays
Speaker 1: find it hard to believe that it was dangerous professionally
Speaker 1: and even personally to study genetics in psychopagical Well, well,
Speaker 1: I just want to pause a second. To reflect. It
Speaker 1: seems like things are actually reversed. It seems that it's
Speaker 1: not terribly cool if you're an environmental researcher these days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I always say that genetics provides the best evidence
Speaker 1: of the importance of the environment. It's just you know,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to find out what those environmental are.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that. No, No, we'll get to that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can you describe a little bit the specific methodology that
Speaker 1: based some of your conclusions in the book on in
Speaker 1: the sense like treat our audience Some of our audience
Speaker 1: listeners as not. I mean a lot of them are
Speaker 1: not psychologists. Right, So when you say, when we talk
Speaker 1: about the twin methodology, could you just like the twin
Speaker 1: separated at birth sort of paradigm. Could you describe the
Speaker 1: paradigm a little bit? Okay, Yeah, Now I assume that
Speaker 1: people following you would be more newer, but not all
Speaker 1: the necessarily. Oh well, yeah, when you say twins, people
Speaker 1: think of the twins were apart. Did you see this
Speaker 1: film that's come out It has it's about to come
Speaker 1: out in the UK, Three Identical Strangers. No, No, It
Speaker 1: was released in the States in June. I understand. It
Speaker 1: won a special award from sun Dance, the sun Dance
Speaker 1: Film Festival. But you know, it's the story of those
Speaker 1: twins separated by the psychiatrist Neubauer in New York. And
Speaker 1: you know, these are the Eddie and they were identical triplets,
Speaker 1: separated in the same adoption agency in New York. And
Speaker 1: you know they got together because one of them went
Speaker 1: to university in upstate New York and everybody kept calling
Speaker 1: him Eddie, how are you Eddie? And he said, I
Speaker 1: don't know you. And then the next day he found
Speaker 1: Eddie and it was like looking in the mirror, and
Speaker 1: they pieced it together that they were both adopted from
Speaker 1: the same adoption agency in New York. And then because
Speaker 1: of that publicity, a third one came up and said,
Speaker 1: oh my god, you know, I'm an identical twin with
Speaker 1: you guys too. So they're phenomenal. It's such a powerful design.
Speaker 1: It's so dramatic. You know when you see these identical twins.
Speaker 1: When you see identical twins, we're together. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: pretty dramatic too, But these identical twins, we'red apart, and
Speaker 1: they find it's like looking in a mirror, not just physically,
Speaker 1: but they came to realize how similar they are and
Speaker 1: everything in personality. You know, there's differences, but it's like
Speaker 1: variations on the same theme. And for example, you know,
Speaker 1: they were all interested in kind of different things, like
Speaker 1: one was I think, going to be an engineer. But
Speaker 1: by talking to each other, they all realize they really
Speaker 1: have a strong artistic drive. And they're now actually all
Speaker 1: in acting school because they've kind of just decided that's
Speaker 1: really what they want to do. So I think that's
Speaker 1: really dramatic. So that's a great film to kind of
Speaker 1: recommend Three Identical Strangers. I can't wait to see it myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: guess what people think about when you say twins identical
Speaker 1: twins apart? I did do with Nancy Petterson and Jerald
Speaker 1: mcclaran a large study, the largest study of twins verd
Speaker 1: apart in Sweden, because unlike the Minnesota study, which is
Speaker 1: what I was describing, you could use systematic records. There
Speaker 1: was always the question in Bouchard's twins verd apart study,
Speaker 1: maybe these twins, like the ones I just described, identical
Speaker 1: twins vert apart, maybe they got to know each other
Speaker 1: because they're so unbelievably similar looking. And you know, maybe
Speaker 1: there are identical twins verred apart who aren't so similar,
Speaker 1: but they don't know about it because they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're not so similar. So we did a large study
Speaker 1: of twins verd apart in Sweden because they have excellent records.
Speaker 1: There are no phony birth certificates as there are in
Speaker 1: the US. You know, your biological father on your birth
Speaker 1: is your biological father. And you know in the States
Speaker 1: they put in the adoptive father on the birth record
Speaker 1: as if he's the real father, for example. I don't
Speaker 1: know if they still do that, but they did it.
Speaker 1: I was there. So in Sweden we could get these
Speaker 1: a systematic study, but we get the same results, you know,
Speaker 1: showing everything's at least fifty percent heritable. But when I
Speaker 1: went to Colorado, I decided there's enough twins studies, Like
Speaker 1: there was the Louisville Twins study, and that's studies of twins.
Speaker 1: We're together. You know, one percent of all versa twins,
Speaker 1: one third of them are called identical twins monozygotic a
Speaker 1: single fertilized egg, so they are clones. In fact, they're
Speaker 1: more clones than clones because if you or I were cloned.
Speaker 1: We took a cell from our body and made it
Speaker 1: omni potent or whatever that's called, so that we could
Speaker 1: or a stem cell or something, so that we could
Speaker 1: use it to create a new individual. That individual, our
Speaker 1: clone with the same DNA as us, would be raised
Speaker 1: in a different woman, unlike twins who are raised in
Speaker 1: the same woman, and they'd be in a different era,
Speaker 1: you know, they grow up in trump Land rather them
Speaker 1: in the Swinging sixties like me. So identical twins are
Speaker 1: actually more clones than clones. And then the other two
Speaker 1: thirds of twins are I said, one percent of all
Speaker 1: births are twins. One third of those are identical twins.
Speaker 1: The other two thirds are like any brother and sister.
Speaker 1: They're fifty percent similar genetically, but they're born in the
Speaker 1: same womb at the same time, grew up in the
Speaker 1: same family in the same era. So, if the twin
Speaker 1: method is simply saying that, if it's a really simple
Speaker 1: design at some level, a biological experiment in a way
Speaker 1: quasi experiment, if a trait is heritable, you'd have to
Speaker 1: predict that the identical twins, who are twice as similar
Speaker 1: as fraternal twins, would be more similar for the trait.
Speaker 1: So that's the twin method, and there were quite a
Speaker 1: few of those studies around. The Louisville Twins Study was
Speaker 1: a study begun by Steve Vandenberg, who was at the
Speaker 1: University of Colorado when I went there, and then carried
Speaker 1: on by Ron Wilson. Had interest in particularly in cognitive
Speaker 1: development in twins. So I thought there were enough twins studies,
Speaker 1: and based on the Texas Adoption Project, I wanted to
Speaker 1: do an adoption project. So I talked to John DeFreeze
Speaker 1: about it, who's always been my closest colleague, and he
Speaker 1: was very encouraging, you know, he was a professor and
Speaker 1: I was there as a new assistant professor. But some people,
Speaker 1: including John, said, this is like the classically bad idea
Speaker 1: for an assistant professor to say, I'd like to do
Speaker 1: this long term, longitudinal study of adoption, you know, and
Speaker 1: we to get tenure before you can do yeah, which
Speaker 1: is not very good for long ter studies. Tweak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. So I'm always an optimist, though, and somehow
Speaker 1: I didn't. That really didn't worry me at all. But
Speaker 1: I spent the first three years trying to get a
Speaker 1: grant for this, and you know, it was at a
Speaker 1: time when nobody would get grants for genetics. Genetics was
Speaker 1: really not cool in terms of psychology. So for about
Speaker 1: three years I was in Boulder and that's about what
Speaker 1: thirty miles from Denver, and that's where I found these
Speaker 1: adoption agencies that were very keen to participate in this
Speaker 1: research because our basic questions of nature and nurture are
Speaker 1: sort of applied questions in terms of adoption agencies. You
Speaker 1: know that adoptive parents sort they want to know, you know,
Speaker 1: how important is genetics on important is environment. So anyway,
Speaker 1: they were very cooperative. But because I had no money,
Speaker 1: I wanted to test the biological mothers because in those days,
Speaker 1: and this is the early seventies, so it's the end
Speaker 1: of the swinging sixties, and it was before birth control
Speaker 1: was available to unmarried women, and it was before abortion
Speaker 1: was legalized. Today we heard about Brett Kavanaugh and you wonder,
Speaker 1: is Roe V. Wade going to survive. But back then
Speaker 1: abortion was legal, and so many young women who were
Speaker 1: pregnant went to adoption homes they called homes for unwed mothers,
Speaker 1: and they you know, in a different city and they
Speaker 1: would have their kid and then leave the kid for
Speaker 1: adoption and never have any contact again. So unlike adoption
Speaker 1: today where there's often communication between the birth parents and
Speaker 1: the adopted parents, that didn't happen back then. So here
Speaker 1: you've got these women girls I'm thirteen to twenty eight,
Speaker 1: who were in the last trimester of their pregnancy living
Speaker 1: in these homes for unwed mothers in Denver, and so
Speaker 1: I spent my weekends driving from Boulder to Denver and
Speaker 1: testing them. I had three hours to test them, and
Speaker 1: then I could never have contact with them again because
Speaker 1: part of the deal was anonymity that they sort of
Speaker 1: wanted to give their baby up for adoption and get
Speaker 1: on with their life. So they were my only problems.
Speaker 1: I couldn't get out of there because they were so bored.
Speaker 1: They were thrilled to be taking these tests and have
Speaker 1: someone taking an interest in them, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And so then we've studied the idea of an adoption
Speaker 1: study A twin studies like a biological experiment where you
Speaker 1: have two types of twins, one one hundred percent similar
Speaker 1: genetically pair by peer, the other fifty percent similar. The
Speaker 1: adoption method is like a social experiment. We know that
Speaker 1: nature and nurture go together. When you say schizophrenia runs
Speaker 1: in families, environmentalists had no problem with that. You know,
Speaker 1: that's nurture. But we say, well, it could be nature,
Speaker 1: and now we know it's all nature. What runs in
Speaker 1: families is nature, not nurture. So the adoption design separates
Speaker 1: nature and nurture through this social experiment by studying parents
Speaker 1: who adopt these children and give them their homes from
Speaker 1: early in life, so they share family environment nurture, but
Speaker 1: they're not genetically related to the kids. And then you
Speaker 1: have adopt biological parents who relinquish the kids for adoption
Speaker 1: at birth. They share nature genetics, but they don't share
Speaker 1: that post natal family environment with the kids. And then
Speaker 1: in that I was proud to think that in the
Speaker 1: Colorado Adoption Project, it would be good to have what
Speaker 1: we call control families match to the adoptive families. These
Speaker 1: are families who, you know, there's no good word for it,
Speaker 1: not regular families, but parents in offspring who share genes
Speaker 1: and environment, you know, the usual sort of family environment.
Speaker 1: So I finally got funding after the third try in
Speaker 1: the late seventies to follow these kids and their families
Speaker 1: and then other kids born into those families, and we've
Speaker 1: been funded at IBG. I'm only a co investigator on it,
Speaker 1: but we've been funded to follow them up at forty
Speaker 1: years of age, which is pretty cool. Yeah, that's sort
Speaker 1: of how my early career started. In the Colorado Adoption Project,
Speaker 1: we tried to study everything because we knew there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be other studies like that. And what I've learned is
Speaker 1: when you try to do a study of everything, you
Speaker 1: don't really do a study of anything, you know, because
Speaker 1: you can't study anything well enough if you try to
Speaker 1: cover the waterfront. But we did do a lot of
Speaker 1: interesting novel things, and one of those was to put
Speaker 1: in environmental measures of the home environment. There's this measure
Speaker 1: called Home Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment, and
Speaker 1: it's probably the most widely used observational measure of infant
Speaker 1: and early childhood home environments relevant to cognitive development. And
Speaker 1: so we put that in the Colorado Adoption Project because
Speaker 1: I'm interested in development, the interplay between genes and environment
Speaker 1: in development, but then also to get a handle on
Speaker 1: the environment rather than just always treating it as the
Speaker 1: non this component of variants. That's a residual from what
Speaker 1: you don't explain from genetics. So one example of what
Speaker 1: came up that was quite shocking is when I looked
Speaker 1: at the data for adoptive and non adoptive siblings, we
Speaker 1: found evidence for genetic influence on home environment. You know,
Speaker 1: like the home is one of the better correlates of
Speaker 1: cognitive development, and it's a measure of the environment, right,
Speaker 1: so it shouldn't show genetic influence. Like TV watching It
Speaker 1: has a heritability, right, something like that. Yes, it's just
Speaker 1: sort of that thing, did you say, TV wh Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: television watching. That was surprising when I saw that as
Speaker 1: a pretty that was also in that study too. But
Speaker 1: what we found is that all these measures of the
Speaker 1: environment in the adoption design showed genetic influence, like a
Speaker 1: number of books in the house, right, things like that. Yeah, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: And I decided so that led to this idea of
Speaker 1: the nature of nurture, which I'm sure we'll get onto.
Speaker 1: But the television viewing, which you bring up now, I
Speaker 1: decided to do because after several years I started realizing,
Speaker 1: I think that measures of the environment usually show some
Speaker 1: genetic influence, and that's kind of a profound thing. In
Speaker 1: a way. You know, it suggests that the environment isn't
Speaker 1: out there happening to us. We make our environments, so
Speaker 1: I use this television viewing thing. By then I was
Speaker 1: a professor, and the nice thing about tenure is you
Speaker 1: don't have to care so much you know about what
Speaker 1: people think. And really, some people said it was like
Speaker 1: a suicide note, writing a paper saying television viewing is
Speaker 1: genetically influenced because it's used in thousands someone told me
Speaker 1: five thousand studies as an environmental measure. You know, it's
Speaker 1: a big deal back in the seventies and eighties. And
Speaker 1: you know, I even had I was even surprised by
Speaker 1: it because you know, you think parents control whether the
Speaker 1: kids watch television or not, but they don't really, and
Speaker 1: some kids want to watch television more than others. And
Speaker 1: I think, as the case of all environmental measures we
Speaker 1: use in psychology, it's not the environment and out there.
Speaker 1: People create their environments. So kids can turn television on
Speaker 1: or off, you know it will. So I think it
Speaker 1: makes a profound point about the genetic how genotypes become phenotypes.
Speaker 1: It isn't that DNA just can sit on the table
Speaker 1: here and create an organism. It has to work in
Speaker 1: an environment, and kids create and select and modify their
Speaker 1: environments in a way that's correlated with their genetic inclination.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's interesting. Do you think that some kids
Speaker 1: were more inclined to watch mister Rogers versus you know,
Speaker 1: we talked about individual differences and content of television viewing.
Speaker 1: When you get to that level, I mean, I really
Speaker 1: strongly want to believe that mister Rogers really influenced me
Speaker 1: profoundly as a child, that if I didn't have mister
Speaker 1: Rogers in my life, I would maybe have turned out different.
Speaker 1: But are you maybe suggesting that my actual active genotype
Speaker 1: sought out and was attracted by the messages he was providing. Yep. Well,
Speaker 1: we had this ten minute interview to measure the kids
Speaker 1: television viewing, as you know, any of these things to
Speaker 1: measure it, right, you know, someone say, oh, all I
Speaker 1: got to do is use this one hour interview. Well,
Speaker 1: we couldn't spend all that time when we went to
Speaker 1: the homes of these hundreds of families year after year.
Speaker 1: So we had a ten minute interview and all we
Speaker 1: could really measure reliably was the quantity overall quantity of viewing.
Speaker 1: But as I mentioned in the book, we also took
Speaker 1: a look at some other things, you know, like broad
Speaker 1: categories of content like comedy or action or educational programs,
Speaker 1: you know that sort of thing. And I was amused
Speaker 1: to find that, mostly because I don't get comedy very well.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't find many comedy programs funny, especially
Speaker 1: you know the TV serial sorts of comedy. Well that
Speaker 1: I'm honored you left at my joke. Then that makes
Speaker 1: it even more special that you left. Mister Rogers. I
Speaker 1: agree with you. You You know, what would we do without
Speaker 1: mister what we do without him? I mean it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's no mister Rogers, Gene. This is so sad, Scott,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, why is it sad? People are going
Speaker 1: to say God does boffins as they call them here
Speaker 1: in England. You know, boften sort of like a scientist
Speaker 1: in an ivory tower who can't button his shirt. You know,
Speaker 1: I've never heard that expression before often that maybe that's good,
Speaker 1: Maybe that means I've referred to here in England. Okay,
Speaker 1: but it you know, well, anyway, I did that television
Speaker 1: viewing study. It shows genetic influence on not only quantity
Speaker 1: of viewing, but one of the more heritable categories of
Speaker 1: viewing was comedy. There's strong genetic influence on how much
Speaker 1: you enjoy comedy and comedy television programs in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, which is probably quite a different thing
Speaker 1: from nowadays. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question, and that,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a whole separate pair question. How has
Speaker 1: comedy changed over the years? Really to go there, So
Speaker 1: let's really get into some of the biggest findings in
Speaker 1: psychology in your lifetime, you know, relating to this that
Speaker 1: your life's work. So falling naturally from what you just said,
Speaker 1: almost everything is heritable, every psychological trait. Could I catch
Speaker 1: you up there? I know where you're going with this,
Speaker 1: But I think that first law of behavior genetics, that
Speaker 1: everything is heritable, and not just significantly but substantially, is
Speaker 1: such an important point because in my career back in
Speaker 1: the seventies, convincing anybody that anything is heritable was a
Speaker 1: very difficult task. It's good to kind of step back
Speaker 1: and say, there's been a massive change. I mean to
Speaker 1: the point where I've even been telling people I wonder
Speaker 1: if you agree with this. I think we ought to
Speaker 1: challenge anybody to come up with any trait that's reliably
Speaker 1: measured and sufficiently powered in a behavioral genetics study that
Speaker 1: shows no genetic influence. You know, actually I did a
Speaker 1: broad literature search to answer that question when I was
Speaker 1: working on my book un Gifted, And I'm literally googling
Speaker 1: my book right now because I don't remember what the
Speaker 1: two I found were, but you might be interested to
Speaker 1: see what they are. Okay, I'm literally googling my book
Speaker 1: right now. Hold on, I'm going to find this, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I found it fascinating that. Okay, the most important
Speaker 1: lesson I'm just literally reading a paragraph of my book.
Speaker 1: Hope you don't mind. The most important lesson researchers I've
Speaker 1: learned over twenty five years worth of twin studies is
Speaker 1: that virtually every psychological trait you can measure, including IQ personality,
Speaker 1: artistic ability, mathematical ability, musical ability, writing, humor styles. There
Speaker 1: you go, creative dancing, sports, happiness, persistence, marital status, television viewing,
Speaker 1: female orgasm rates, aggression, empathy, altruism, leadership, risk taking, novelty seeking,
Speaker 1: political preferences, television viewing. Did I oh, I repeated television viewing.
Speaker 1: My editor never picked up on that. Oh well sorry,
Speaker 1: And even rates of Australian teens talking on their cell
Speaker 1: phones has a heritable basis. Because our psychological characteristics reflect
Speaker 1: the physical structures of our brains, and because our genes
Speaker 1: contribute to those physical structures. Is unlikely that there are
Speaker 1: any psychotocharacteristics that are completely unaffected by our DNA. And
Speaker 1: then I have a footnote where I do is something
Speaker 1: that I found, although a few traits such as love
Speaker 1: styles and materialism don't appear to have a heritable basis. Okay,
Speaker 1: so tho's the only I did find those two things? Yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know a little bit about that romantic love style thing,
Speaker 1: and I think there have been subsequent studies showing oh really,
Speaker 1: well this was published in twenty thirteen, so it's entirely possible.
Speaker 1: But what was the other one? Scott? Materialism? Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: I find that hard to believe because interests all show
Speaker 1: genetic influence, don't I know? Yeah, I mean you're right,
Speaker 1: locational interests certainly do, but you know, the extent to
Speaker 1: which you value money, it seems to have a much
Speaker 1: greater environmental influence. I could try to track down that paper,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. But you know, for my dissertation
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy four, in a twin study, a family
Speaker 1: twins study of personality development, I thought, what's troubling me
Speaker 1: is that everything seems to be moderately heritable. And this
Speaker 1: temperament thing I was working on with Arnold Buss was
Speaker 1: trying to say which aspects of personality are more ritable
Speaker 1: than others, and we came up. We wrote two books
Speaker 1: on this, the Easy Theory EASi emotionality, activity, sociability, shyness,
Speaker 1: and impulsivity, picking these as the most heritable traits. And
Speaker 1: they also seem to be evolutionarily important in that you
Speaker 1: see them in all primates and most mammals. You know,
Speaker 1: these traits emotionality. But then in the end, I think
Speaker 1: we've got to say there's no evidence that they're any
Speaker 1: more heritable than any other traits. Right, So for my dissertation,
Speaker 1: I did a survey of psychologists saying what traits do
Speaker 1: you think will show no heritability? And the ones that
Speaker 1: I put into my dissertation were things that I thought
Speaker 1: as well would not show heritable influence, like how about
Speaker 1: table manners? You know this isn't kids now and that's
Speaker 1: probably correlated with agreeableness. Well that's the thing, but you
Speaker 1: know that now. But back then, you know, I think
Speaker 1: it was a reasonable to think, well, these are the
Speaker 1: things that psychologists think couldn't possibly show because you know,
Speaker 1: table matters kids either their parents either insist on it
Speaker 1: or they don't. Brushing your teeth after meals, you know.
Speaker 1: So I put in those things and you know they
Speaker 1: came out just as heritable as everything else. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so this one was interesting. I didn't know this when
Speaker 1: I was reading your book. Did you say weather is heritable? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You got to explain that to our listeners. You know.
Speaker 1: I think when people get into this nature of nurture idea,
Speaker 1: the idea that what in psychology we call the environment
Speaker 1: isn't the environment out there? You know, like life events?
Speaker 1: Does shit just happened to you? Does divorce just happen
Speaker 1: to you? As if you don't have anything to do
Speaker 1: with it? You think about it for many to think,
Speaker 1: no way, and that's where the genetics comes in. You
Speaker 1: do have something to do with your environments. So I
Speaker 1: use this just to provi pative thing. When you start
Speaker 1: thinking about this, what environmental thing that we measure in
Speaker 1: psychology could not possibly show genetic influence. So then it's
Speaker 1: sort of a joke, you know about Mark Twain and
Speaker 1: people always talk about the weather, but you can't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. Nobody does anything about it, you know,
Speaker 1: and the thing and so then I said, is that true?
Speaker 1: If you had seasonal defective disorder, you might choose not
Speaker 1: to live in England, you know. And so people can
Speaker 1: choose it that way. But a more profound aspect of
Speaker 1: it that I talk about in the book is relevant
Speaker 1: to me. I'm such a you know, disgustingly optimistic person.
Speaker 1: I drive people kind of mad because you know, I
Speaker 1: always see positive aspects of things, and even the weather
Speaker 1: in England. You know, you asked me about last summer's
Speaker 1: weather and I remember sailing and swimming and you know,
Speaker 1: walks in the sun. And other people said, are you
Speaker 1: out of your mind? It was the worst summer on record,
Speaker 1: you know. But what matters to me in a way
Speaker 1: is my perception. That's my experience of it, even if
Speaker 1: it's totally off base, that's what affects me. I think.
Speaker 1: So that I think is the most more profound aspect
Speaker 1: of the weather. It's how you perceive it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a profound point right there, because that doesn't we
Speaker 1: can build up from weather or build down. I guess
Speaker 1: built down from weather. That's right, because you know there's
Speaker 1: like resiliency, you know, post traumatic growth. Who are those
Speaker 1: that have experienced post traumatic stress versus post traumatic growth
Speaker 1: from trauma? I mean, this is a very important question
Speaker 1: in the field of positive ecology, right, yeah, and other fields.
Speaker 1: So no, And that's a great example because you know,
Speaker 1: the trauma that you're talking about, this is horrendous stuff.
Speaker 1: But for you know, a lot of people, you can
Speaker 1: understand if someone's devastated by it and now life falls apart,
Speaker 1: But any any experience like that, some people will be
Speaker 1: more resilient to it. To the point where you're saying
Speaker 1: that it's actually what did you call it growth? Post
Speaker 1: traumatic growth? Yeah, the field on that, Yeah, not a
Speaker 1: whole field on that. But I was going to mention
Speaker 1: this later in the conversation, but it seems relevant now.
Speaker 1: I've been fascinated with research on the effects of extreme
Speaker 1: trauma on the brain. You don't go too much in
Speaker 1: your book on kind of extremes of environmental adversity, but
Speaker 1: I've been very interested to looking at some of that
Speaker 1: recent research on emotional abuse or severe sexual abuse in childhood,
Speaker 1: and it really does alter connections long term in the
Speaker 1: brain and how we process reward, how we process, you know,
Speaker 1: whether or not we are more avoidant in our lives
Speaker 1: versus approach oriented. But in that research, I found this
Speaker 1: subset of research within that field showing that surprisingly some
Speaker 1: brains has showed those connections, but those individuals are still
Speaker 1: thriving in life despite those altered brain connections, whereas some
Speaker 1: other individuals show the same exact brain alterations from these
Speaker 1: experiences but are suffered more from depression and anxiety. And
Speaker 1: I think that is absolutely fascinating line of research is
Speaker 1: understanding sort of what are the explanations for this despite
Speaker 1: you're taking people the same exact effect neurologically, you know,
Speaker 1: in the traumatic experience, and some people team seem to
Speaker 1: have maybe some protective factors of some sort to interact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's probably a good point, just to interject something
Speaker 1: that in all the media that comes about from my book,
Speaker 1: I realize it's so important to say you mentioned it
Speaker 1: that I don't talk much about extreme environmental events or
Speaker 1: extreme genetic events like mutations for exacts, A good points
Speaker 1: somal anomalies, and what we're studying is the normal range
Speaker 1: of variation in the particular samples that we can study.
Speaker 1: And that's not trivial. I mean, it's the world we
Speaker 1: live in. But we're describing the genetic and environmental causes
Speaker 1: of the differences we see in this normal bell shaped curve,
Speaker 1: and that those descriptive statistics can change in a different culture.
Speaker 1: It's kind of surprising how similar the results tend to
Speaker 1: be across different cultures, but they're not maximally different cultures,
Speaker 1: and they as the normal range as well. So when
Speaker 1: you go outside to trauma or abuse, you know, all
Speaker 1: bets are off. I mean, you can have a highly
Speaker 1: heritable trait and you can totally screw it up with
Speaker 1: a severe environment. But I also like to say you
Speaker 1: could totally screw it up with some weird genetic effect too.
Speaker 1: I mean, you feed kids mutangens and you can have
Speaker 1: weird effects as well. So I don't want to trivialize
Speaker 1: those extremes because for the people affected by single gene
Speaker 1: disorders or by severe environmental trauma, these are tremendous effects tremendous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't explain a lot of variation in the population.
Speaker 1: I'm truly glad that you made that point because I
Speaker 1: read a terrible review your book recently in Nature. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you saw that one. Oh yeah, it
Speaker 1: was so bad. It was good. And I think that
Speaker 1: what people sometimes mean do is project And I think
Speaker 1: I see this sometimes in the media, like project onto scientists,
Speaker 1: Well they must believe X, y Z because they said
Speaker 1: A or B. And so I'm glad that you are
Speaker 1: on the record making that point because I think that
Speaker 1: is a really important point. I mean, there were things
Speaker 1: that I read in some like that review and some
Speaker 1: other reviews where I'm like, well, I don't think Robert
Speaker 1: would actually say that to me, you know, like if
Speaker 1: we actually had a conversation. So I'm glad that actually
Speaker 1: happened where you made that point. So that was good
Speaker 1: that you made that point. And I think that, like
Speaker 1: it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, Like,
Speaker 1: tell me what you think of this. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have the genes we evolved to process a certain range
Speaker 1: of environments. But when we have such extreme conditions that
Speaker 1: are totally like uninterpretable to the genes so to speak.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a metaphor. It's not obviously like they're
Speaker 1: cognitively processing it. You know that it would make sense
Speaker 1: it would throw out of whack or from an entropy perspective,
Speaker 1: it would increase entropy dramatically, right, Yeah, I really agree?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, cool, Okay, So let's go into these biggest
Speaker 1: findings in psychology. So another one. In the first one,
Speaker 1: we did the nature of We sure did so we
Speaker 1: before to go, we affore to go. Right, So development,
Speaker 1: let's talk about development heal heritability cases first. I'd like
Speaker 1: to say, of those five, it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: two of them are very much about the environment, the
Speaker 1: nature of nurture and this the last one, the non
Speaker 1: shared environment sort of thing. And we only have those
Speaker 1: findings because we have genetic designs that consider environment in
Speaker 1: a genetically sensitive sort of design, and the decades of
Speaker 1: work that ignore genetics couldn't do that because they're completely
Speaker 1: confounding genetics and environment. The other thing I'd like to
Speaker 1: say about that is that these two environmental findings are
Speaker 1: the ones that kind of lead me to the implications
Speaker 1: that I talk about in the subsequent chapters. We'll kind
Speaker 1: of put those together. After we describe these findings so
Speaker 1: about development, The bottom line there is that for a
Speaker 1: lot of traits like personality, there isn't much evidence for
Speaker 1: changes in heritability. That is the extent to which inherited
Speaker 1: DNA differences are important in explaining the variance of a trade.
Speaker 1: There's a much evidence that herotability changes during the ability,
Speaker 1: but when it changes as it tends to, it goes up.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's an example of heartability going down.
Speaker 1: And the reason that's important is that in psychology we
Speaker 1: need counterintuitive findings. If we're always finding things that confirm
Speaker 1: what your grandmother knew, you know, that's okay, that's science,
Speaker 1: but it's not very interesting or exciting. Whereas if you
Speaker 1: can talk to a public audience and tell them what
Speaker 1: heritability means and ask do you think heritability goes up
Speaker 1: or down during development over your life, they'll say it
Speaker 1: goes down, and you ask why it's because, well, in
Speaker 1: the environment builds up you know, accidents, illnesses, slings and
Speaker 1: arrows of outrageous fortune, you know, those increasingly playing the
Speaker 1: differences between people. Part of that assumes that genetics is static.
Speaker 1: You know, it happens at the moment of birth. So
Speaker 1: it's interesting to say that heritability increases, and the trait
Speaker 1: that is clearest is intelligence, where hairtability increases from like
Speaker 1: twenty percent in infancy to forty percent in childhood to
Speaker 1: sixty percent in adulthood, and some people say eighty percent
Speaker 1: in later life bar dementia, And those are huge percentages
Speaker 1: of variance. You know, when we talk about heritability being
Speaker 1: about fifty percent, it's important to say, what else in
Speaker 1: psychologic we got explains five percent of the variance, you know,
Speaker 1: so fifty percent is a lot of the variance, and
Speaker 1: increasing the variance explained from twenty percent to sixty or
Speaker 1: eighty percent is off the scale of what we find
Speaker 1: in psychology. So this is a really big change in
Speaker 1: these are the question, well, why could that happen? And
Speaker 1: I think the basic answer is nobody knows, but it
Speaker 1: seemed most people are kind of think that it has
Speaker 1: something to do with ge correlation. That is, it's sort
Speaker 1: of what I was saying before, that the environment, that
Speaker 1: genes don't just work by themselves, that genotypes become phenotype
Speaker 1: phenotypes through the use of the environment. So you know, musically,
Speaker 1: gifted kids you could almost it would almost be difficult
Speaker 1: to stop them from developing their musical ability. Ellen Winter
Speaker 1: has referred to them as having a range to master. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and whether it's mastery or not, whether it's just engagement,
Speaker 1: you know, getting off on music. You know, they'll just
Speaker 1: sing to themselves, they'll bang on pots, they'll listen radio,
Speaker 1: they'll hang out with friends who like music. So they're
Speaker 1: creating environments that are correlated with their genetic propensity, so
Speaker 1: that the genes nudge people in different directions, and then
Speaker 1: those differences snowball as you go through life, and so
Speaker 1: those genetic nudges become bigger differences later on. So I've
Speaker 1: got this ninety seven year old father who lives in
Speaker 1: a residential place with you know, a lot of older people,
Speaker 1: and the differences are in cognitive related ability experiences are amazing.
Speaker 1: You know. There's some people who just sit the bottomized
Speaker 1: by TV. You know, I think a lot of older, sad,
Speaker 1: older people do. But there's others who are desperate to
Speaker 1: engage in arguments and conversations with people, and they're still
Speaker 1: up on the news. And I think that's sort of
Speaker 1: the end of this snowballing process. I think so It's
Speaker 1: a very important concept. And intelligence is the best example
Speaker 1: of increasing heritability. Some people say it's there for weight
Speaker 1: and some people say for depression, but I think that's
Speaker 1: less well documented. Well, so I always tell me if
Speaker 1: I'm interpreting this incorrectly, I always view to that increasing
Speaker 1: heritability as I agree with you about the gene environment correlation.
Speaker 1: Explain the effect. But you can't, like Parr's environment out
Speaker 1: of that equation. Like, it's not like we become who
Speaker 1: we are just naturally completely regardless of the environment and
Speaker 1: we experienced in our lifetime. It seems like from a
Speaker 1: within type, from a like to explain this as a
Speaker 1: developmental within person perspective, not large populations, you know, trying
Speaker 1: to explain variants explain, but within a person. It seems
Speaker 1: like you can't simply remove you know, the opportunities that
Speaker 1: you've had in your life or that you know when
Speaker 1: you seek out these opportunities. I mean, people have to
Speaker 1: actually allow those opportunities to happen, right, And yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are others nine seventy seven paper Insight bullet, you know, John,
Speaker 1: with John Lowland and John de Freese, we sort of
Speaker 1: talk about this issue and it's a bit tricky because
Speaker 1: you know, as you're saying that genes by themselves can't
Speaker 1: do anything right, But it's this matter of genes kind
Speaker 1: of pushing you towards certain environments, you know, like where
Speaker 1: I see it. I particularly interested in the business end
Speaker 1: of cognitive development in schools. You know, with children, it's
Speaker 1: an educational achievement. And you know, teachers will tell you,
Speaker 1: you know that they're teaching the kids this sort of curriculum,
Speaker 1: but some of them just eat it up, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're shooting up, and others really struggle, and you know,
Speaker 1: you have to put more energy into it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they need that environment. You lock a kid in the
Speaker 1: closet and they're not going to develop cognitively. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's even more basic than that. DNA by itself can't
Speaker 1: do anything. It needs to sell. It needs an organism,
Speaker 1: you know, for that self, and it needs an extra
Speaker 1: an environment outside the organism, and the genes work to
Speaker 1: have you use those environments, you know, to follow that propensity,
Speaker 1: and it is just a nudge. It's not deterministic, which
Speaker 1: is another thing I get in these comments from my book.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not saying genes determined the behavior. It's
Speaker 1: just other things being equal on average in the populations.
Speaker 1: With these genes and these environments, we're finding genetics accounts
Speaker 1: for a huge amount of variance, but it's on average.
Speaker 1: So even with obesity, I mean, you know, could it
Speaker 1: surprises people to find it's maybe seventy percent heritable b
Speaker 1: M I. You know, body mass index maybe seventy percent heritable.
Speaker 1: But it's not the genes determining your body weight. It
Speaker 1: could have been one hundred percent heritability. But if you
Speaker 1: just stop eating, you're going to lose weight. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really good point, you know. Or let's say
Speaker 1: you have a genetic propensity towards alcoholism, but you'll grow
Speaker 1: up in a culture where you never see alcohol your
Speaker 1: entire life. You know, it's not going to trigger that propensity,
Speaker 1: which I mean brings up a really fascinating point about
Speaker 1: how we can change our destiny. You know, where does
Speaker 1: the free will come in? I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people are curious about that. It seems like one way
Speaker 1: is kind of tying yourself to the mass, or like
Speaker 1: limiting the experiences that won't tickle your genome in a
Speaker 1: bad way. I've never put it that way before. But
Speaker 1: it seems like that this is kind of the crux
Speaker 1: of the DNA revolution and how it's going to impact psychology,
Speaker 1: society and ourselves, you know, our self understanding. And I've
Speaker 1: been upsetting people by saying, you know, all the concerns
Speaker 1: about the director consumer testing, and I'm sure we'll get
Speaker 1: into the DNA side soon, but just to skip ahead
Speaker 1: to that, I think because it's relevant to this particular point.
Speaker 1: You know, we could say in behavioral genetics that if
Speaker 1: you're male and your father was alcoholic, you're at a
Speaker 1: what a fivefold greater risk of being alcoholic, But that's
Speaker 1: sort of a family wide risk for you and your
Speaker 1: brother and your sister. But with DNA, we can say
Speaker 1: you have a genetic risk, say tenfold, and your brother
Speaker 1: doesn't because siblings are fifty percent similar but fifty percent
Speaker 1: different genetically. And people say, oh god, you know, that's
Speaker 1: so terrible to have your genetic future foretold. Well, alcoholism
Speaker 1: is a great example because, as you say, you just
Speaker 1: cannot become alcoholic unless you drink a lot of alcohol.
Speaker 1: And what worries me is our universities are sort of
Speaker 1: like experiments to find out if you have a genetic
Speaker 1: propensity for alcoholism because you're so overloaded with alcohol. So
Speaker 1: I think if you found out that you had a
Speaker 1: genetic risk, I would like the NHS, the National Health
Speaker 1: Service in the UK. It is one of the great
Speaker 1: things about the UK. They already do genetic testing. You know,
Speaker 1: all countries around the world do neonatal genetic testing for
Speaker 1: PKU and things like that. For the same amount of money,
Speaker 1: they could get these snip chips and do this genetic
Speaker 1: sort of testing that I'm talking about. And then if
Speaker 1: you found that, you say, had a tenfold greater risk
Speaker 1: of becoming alcoholic, wouldn't it be almost unethical not to
Speaker 1: tell you. They're not going to say, you know, we're
Speaker 1: going to be totalitarian and take away alcoholic, just going
Speaker 1: to say, I thought you'd like to know that if
Speaker 1: you drink as much as other people, they're not going
Speaker 1: to become alcoholic, but you could you have a much
Speaker 1: greater risk of becoming alcoholic. And you can judge that
Speaker 1: information and say, yeah, is it worth it? You know,
Speaker 1: maybe I need to monitor my alcohol, Maybe I need
Speaker 1: to take these month long breaks from alcohol. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be cheeky for a second, but I mean,
Speaker 1: is this going to interact with other trades? It's like,
Speaker 1: what if you also have a hyperpensity for OCD or neuroticism.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't that make you like you live a life for
Speaker 1: your constant or where you look You're like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: that might wead alcoholism because I have a high probability
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Do you see what I'm saying, Like, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that interact with each other where you become like obsessed
Speaker 1: with this your whole life. But it's a good point
Speaker 1: that people aren't schizophrenic or alcoholic. They are people and
Speaker 1: they have various problems, as we all do. And so
Speaker 1: you know, I take your point, but I do think
Speaker 1: alcoholism is such a severe problem that it's probably okay
Speaker 1: to kind of focus on that and say, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: an individual and you know maybe if you're OCD or
Speaker 1: whatever and I tell you have a risk for alcoholism,
Speaker 1: you're going to freak out. Yeah, But you know, is
Speaker 1: that so bad? I mean, you know, right, but there
Speaker 1: could be other things. Yeah, but you could see Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you could see like other examples where it would
Speaker 1: be pretty bad. Like I mean, intelligence, Well, intelligence is
Speaker 1: a really interesting one because we actually know more about
Speaker 1: the genetics and influence low intelligence. We don't really know
Speaker 1: very much about genetics that influence like extraordinary high IQ.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting, Right, what would you to foretell in
Speaker 1: that situation that you have a genetic predilection to have
Speaker 1: a low IQ? And then what would that knowledge? How
Speaker 1: can that help you in life? Yeah? Well, intelligence is
Speaker 1: the toughest one, but I'll get it. I went right there,
Speaker 1: didn't I? Yeah, but you know that's good, And you
Speaker 1: know I have done studies, very large samples looking at
Speaker 1: low versus high intelligence, and in general you find that
Speaker 1: all of these what we call disorders are really part
Speaker 1: of the quantitative distribution, which we're going to get to.
Speaker 1: That's this finding on the abnormal is normal. But I
Speaker 1: think where you were going with this is to say,
Speaker 1: what if you find out you have a kid who
Speaker 1: has a genetic prediction of lower IQ? Yeah, like their
Speaker 1: a polygenic genic score, like because we're talking like about
Speaker 1: thousands of genes, right, but yeah, that's we're not saying
Speaker 1: like one gene, but we're saying that like all those
Speaker 1: genes together kind of we know that in the general
Speaker 1: population that's correlated with well IQ, Like do you think
Speaker 1: that is valuable information for anyone at that age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you find you have university parents, this is the
Speaker 1: toughest one you know to face when your kid isn't
Speaker 1: doing well at school. And I actually think we can
Speaker 1: take that on with pologenic scores. I think one of
Speaker 1: the biggest impacts going to be for people to realize
Speaker 1: how different siblings are. So parents who are university educated,
Speaker 1: they find one kid isn't doing well at school and
Speaker 1: the other kid is. This is like me and my sister.
Speaker 1: My sister was slowly learned to reach that didn't do
Speaker 1: well at school. She didn't like school. It was hard
Speaker 1: for her. I love school. I couldn't wait to go
Speaker 1: to school, you know, and I love to read, and
Speaker 1: you know, as a parent, you can't. My parents didn't
Speaker 1: go to university, so it wasn't the problem of university
Speaker 1: educated parents can't bear the thought of their kid not
Speaker 1: going to I suspect I haven't done this, but if
Speaker 1: I tested my sister, I bet she doesn't have a
Speaker 1: very high polygenic score for intelligence or educational achievement. And
Speaker 1: my parents didn't worry about that. I mean, no one
Speaker 1: in my family went to university, so the weird one
Speaker 1: was me going to university, not the rest of them
Speaker 1: not going to university. So I think it would be
Speaker 1: good for parents to know how different kids are. And
Speaker 1: if you found that one of your kids didn't have
Speaker 1: such a high score for educational achievement. It's sort of
Speaker 1: tough to take in one way because we're so we
Speaker 1: value intelligence so much in our society. We do and
Speaker 1: we don't. We do and we don't right like we
Speaker 1: maybe say we do, but we actually don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about it. Right Well, that's true, and there's all
Speaker 1: this stuff about we've had enough experts is you know,
Speaker 1: and a populism in a way might go against intelligence.
Speaker 1: But the point I wanted to make is that maybe
Speaker 1: it would be good for parents to know that one
Speaker 1: kid maybe isn't academically oriented. And it's the goal that
Speaker 1: all kids you go to university, maybe it's better to
Speaker 1: recognize some kids aren't really cut out for it, and
Speaker 1: they probably don't like it either, you know. It's this
Speaker 1: kind of circle of appetites and aptitudes. And I was
Speaker 1: doing a thing with CNN in Switzerland earlier today, and
Speaker 1: they're very keen on their vocational training with apprenticeships where
Speaker 1: people get into really good jobs, you know, highly paid,
Speaker 1: stable jobs that are very enjoyable because they value these jobs.
Speaker 1: And do we only about in the England it's territ
Speaker 1: You either go into academic university tracks or you go
Speaker 1: into what they call O levels occupational levels. But that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, play with your pencils until you get to
Speaker 1: be sixteen. There's no training, there's no apprenticeship program, there's
Speaker 1: no job at the end of it other than you know,
Speaker 1: flipping hamburgers. So when you said some people are not
Speaker 1: cut out for, I think that's an interesting statement and
Speaker 1: it actually, I want to be honest, it raises my
Speaker 1: blood pressure when you said it, so I'm trying to
Speaker 1: really suppress my emotion when you said that, so I
Speaker 1: can really think about that as analytically as possible, because
Speaker 1: I feel like, should the genes tell us that information though,
Speaker 1: whether we're cut out for, or should the person the
Speaker 1: human tell us that once they've given had the opportunities
Speaker 1: and tell us how interested or motivated they are to
Speaker 1: do it. So absolutely, yeah. But what I'm saying you're
Speaker 1: upset about because you think it somehow has been deterministic,
Speaker 1: and I'm not saying that at all. You could make
Speaker 1: your kid, you know, force them to work hard at school,
Speaker 1: give them extra tutoring and all of that. But might
Speaker 1: it not be better to go back to what you
Speaker 1: were saying before about going with the grank, you know,
Speaker 1: going with the flow rather than swimming upstream. Just to say,
Speaker 1: maybe it's the cutout that bothers you, but maybe you know,
Speaker 1: as a parent, you want to do what's best for
Speaker 1: your kids. You want to maximize their strengths and minimize
Speaker 1: their weaknesses. You don't want to preordain what they ought
Speaker 1: to do, like go to university. So I agree with that,
Speaker 1: But I think another part of this is selection, and
Speaker 1: you know that's where a lot of this comes in,
Speaker 1: that we select kids for the better schools and university.
Speaker 1: And I agree completely with you. I would rather get
Speaker 1: rid of selection, and so like open university here in England.
Speaker 1: Let everybody go to university. Don't just take the ones
Speaker 1: who did well in high school. You know, that's a
Speaker 1: pretty good predictor of how you're going to do it university.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of kids, you know, grew up
Speaker 1: in high school, but then they get their act together
Speaker 1: and they really want to go to university. Let them
Speaker 1: go to university and see how they do it university,
Speaker 1: sort of like adaptive testing in a way. I do
Speaker 1: think that, Yeah, actually giving the people the opportunity before,
Speaker 1: not making decisions before. We do that. So analytically, the
Speaker 1: analytical argument here would have is that we only know that. Like,
Speaker 1: in terms of individual prediction, the highest essment I've seen
Speaker 1: is that polygenic scorers only explain fourteen percent of differences
Speaker 1: in IQ and maybe a little bit higher for educational attainment.
Speaker 1: Why not just stick with the phenotype. Why not stick
Speaker 1: with like their tests that are better predictors than polygenic scores.
Speaker 1: I published this paper in Intelligence with some of the
Speaker 1: leading IQ test constructors, finding that the correlation between the
Speaker 1: chief general intelligence factor and the academic achievement factor was
Speaker 1: like above point seven four starting at age two. So
Speaker 1: we looked at developmentally age two to seven, and the
Speaker 1: correlation did seem to increase, There was a trend. It
Speaker 1: actually went up to as high as point ninety four,
Speaker 1: the correlation being point I mean, that's talk about percent
Speaker 1: variants explain. That's extraordinarily high. It seems like that beats
Speaker 1: the pans off of apologenic score Yeah, but in fact,
Speaker 1: you can't predict from two year olds. You cannot predict
Speaker 1: what did you say, how much of the variants fifty
Speaker 1: percent of the variants of high school in the AH.
Speaker 1: We're talking about within so at the same age, so
Speaker 1: two year olds the correlation between there. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking about educational achievement in two year olds, right, I
Speaker 1: mean that's a good point. But when you looked at it,
Speaker 1: I'll take you seventeen point. Because DNA can predict from birth.
Speaker 1: Nothing else can predict educational achievement from birth. Well, what
Speaker 1: about Fagan's research on showing its involved in that? You
Speaker 1: know it doesn't predict anything? What people wrote a book
Speaker 1: chapter for my Cambridge Book of Intelligence where he he
Speaker 1: said that you can predict infinite tention measures about point
Speaker 1: three four with IQT seventeen. Yeah, not true. I think
Speaker 1: subsequent studies don't confirm that. I don't think you can
Speaker 1: predict anything, just like you can't really predict adult height
Speaker 1: from infant height. A birth weight, an infant weight doesn't
Speaker 1: predict at all later weight, right. The only thing that
Speaker 1: predicts in an individual is DNA, and having that predictive
Speaker 1: power I think could be useful to identify kids who
Speaker 1: are likely to have problems and give them extra help,
Speaker 1: for example. But intelligence is the hardest one of all.
Speaker 1: If I talk about reading disability, no one has problems
Speaker 1: with any of these issues right right sure to dyslexia.
Speaker 1: Maybe it could be useful information to see if you
Speaker 1: can't predict that from anything else. Kids don't. You can't
Speaker 1: test reading until they read, and by that time they
Speaker 1: have the reading problems. But what you can do is
Speaker 1: if you could predict who's going to have reading problems,
Speaker 1: they almost all have language problems earlier, and there are
Speaker 1: good intervention programs for language, like at two, three, four
Speaker 1: years of age before kids learned to read, So you
Speaker 1: could actually prevent reading problems by intervening with language interventions.
Speaker 1: What I don't understand is because this fourteen percent number
Speaker 1: for I qu Yeah, it shows that this matters to
Speaker 1: some extent, But it shows there's just so much unexplained
Speaker 1: variation that the question of like, at age two, do
Speaker 1: we want to like make that decision that person's not
Speaker 1: cut out for it, you know, at age two, based
Speaker 1: on like so much unexplained variables that we don't know
Speaker 1: in that child's life. Yet I would argue that would
Speaker 1: be dangerous in fact to do. No, it's useful information.
Speaker 1: And like the reading disability example I just gave you,
Speaker 1: it still is explaining a lot more variance than we
Speaker 1: can explain with other things. It's very predictive. And what
Speaker 1: you're saying is you could predict with childhood intelligence, you
Speaker 1: could make a better prediction of achievement. Well, you know
Speaker 1: with school achievement. Two years ago we could explain what
Speaker 1: two or three percent of the variants in educational achievement
Speaker 1: using educational attainment and adults in a genome wide association study.
Speaker 1: And yet it's still would predict two or three percent
Speaker 1: of the variants. Then you know last year with that
Speaker 1: new g BOSS for Educational Attainment, we can explain ten
Speaker 1: percent of the variance. This year with the paper that
Speaker 1: just came out a couple months ago with one point
Speaker 1: one point one million people, well we can explain fifteen
Speaker 1: percent of the variance in these GCSE scores. It's impressing.
Speaker 1: Now you say, well, that's not that much, But in
Speaker 1: England we have these amazing offseted ratings of schools. They're
Speaker 1: really twenty thousand pounds per assessment. They do it every
Speaker 1: three to five years of every school. They're the best
Speaker 1: sort of rating of a school quality you could do.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know they're not perfect, but nothing is.
Speaker 1: How much variance in GCS scores is accounted for by
Speaker 1: how good the school is? You want to and the
Speaker 1: answer is about two or three percent. So I certainly
Speaker 1: agree it's scientifically impressive. And by the way, like kudos
Speaker 1: to the researchers who are making such strides in their discoveries.
Speaker 1: What I'm questioning is, you know, how do you get
Speaker 1: from like fourteen percent of the experience explained to like
Speaker 1: fortune telling? To me, that seems like such a leap
Speaker 1: that you made in your book. That doesn't seem warranted
Speaker 1: massing the evidence, but you think it is warranted. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: What about alcoholism? You know that's not such a good
Speaker 1: predictor how much of the experience and liability of alcoholism
Speaker 1: can we predict? Now? What is the actually know, it's
Speaker 1: not much. I don't know what's six seven percent? But
Speaker 1: what else predicts alcoholism other than alcoholism in the parents?
Speaker 1: What in the individual would give you an individual prediction
Speaker 1: of alcoholism? Now it's all going to get a lot stronger, right,
Speaker 1: because heritability of the liability to alcoholism, what forty percent
Speaker 1: or something like that, fifty percent? So these are going
Speaker 1: to get stronger. But even right now, wouldn't you want
Speaker 1: to know that you have an elevated risk for alcoholism.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that through. I don't think the answer is
Speaker 1: obviously yes. So that's why I'm thinking this through, because
Speaker 1: of the extent to which there's so much error in
Speaker 1: that estimate. Yeah, but Scott, we never have strong predictors.
Speaker 1: How about this drinking. How much of the variance in
Speaker 1: automobile accidents is accounted for by blood alcohol levels? So
Speaker 1: I imagine it's pretty high. No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think it's quite low. There's a lot of reasons
Speaker 1: why people have accidents, and actually I did work on
Speaker 1: blood alcohol level. It's not that predictive of performance. It
Speaker 1: is true that people who are drunk out of their
Speaker 1: minds are more likely to have an accent, but there's
Speaker 1: actually a lot of people who can drunk, drive very
Speaker 1: drunk and not get an accidents. So all I'm saying
Speaker 1: is we make laws, very severe laws about drink driving,
Speaker 1: and I agree with them, but I don't think blood
Speaker 1: alcohol levels correlates that much with total accidents. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of things, like what about smoking two
Speaker 1: packs of cigarettes a day and lung cancer, one of
Speaker 1: the stronger relationship doesn't explain a lot of variants. You
Speaker 1: know people who smoke two packs a day and don't
Speaker 1: have lung cancer, and you know people who don't smoke
Speaker 1: much at all that do get lung cancer. None of
Speaker 1: our predictions are ever perfect, but those are ones that
Speaker 1: we make massive decisions about, almost legal decisions in the
Speaker 1: case of drunk driving. So I think it's unrealistic to
Speaker 1: expect that we're going to explore all of the heritability,
Speaker 1: even and we know we're not going to explain all
Speaker 1: the variants because these things are only fifty percent heritable
Speaker 1: to begin with. But I think it's very useful information,
Speaker 1: Like with reading disability, that's my main goal is to
Speaker 1: be able to predict early in order to prevent problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think it is an interesting question to what
Speaker 1: degree can then information inform a useful intervention, because I
Speaker 1: would hate to see it used strictly as a sorting mechanism. Now,
Speaker 1: if there's some purpose to it, like some sort of
Speaker 1: to help the child, then I can start to see
Speaker 1: a greater humanitarian purpose. But when it becomes strictly as
Speaker 1: like we're going to read the genetic information of tials
Speaker 1: and then use that information to sort those who are
Speaker 1: not cut out versus those who are cut out and
Speaker 1: give all the reasons. So now you're miss reading it.
Speaker 1: You know, you know my book, I very much say
Speaker 1: that's not the purpose. I don't want selection. I want
Speaker 1: to avoid selection. But if you are going to select,
Speaker 1: you ought to do it well. But I much would
Speaker 1: prefer or that we don't have any selection at all.
Speaker 1: The example that I would give that you're raising is
Speaker 1: I find university educated parents have a great deal of
Speaker 1: difficulty excepting that one of their children is not doing
Speaker 1: well at school. If they knew that kid had a
Speaker 1: lower genetic propensity, that doesn't mean they give up on
Speaker 1: the kid. It just means they have to decide how
Speaker 1: much extra effort do they want to put into that,
Speaker 1: and they can do it. It's not deterministic. You can
Speaker 1: make up for that difference, but to what extent You
Speaker 1: don't want to preordain that all your children have to
Speaker 1: go to university or their life is wasted. If a
Speaker 1: kid's going to struggle with it, like my sister. Instead
Speaker 1: of blaming her or blaming my parents, isn't it better
Speaker 1: to say it's just a lot harder for her. I
Speaker 1: didn't deserve credit for doing so well at school. She
Speaker 1: doesn't deserve blame for doing poorly at school. You know.
Speaker 1: So I think greater recognition and respect for genetically driven
Speaker 1: individual differences is important, and that polygenic scores can help
Speaker 1: us see that. Yeah, I'm listening to your perspective, and
Speaker 1: I'm taking it very seriously and trying to think through
Speaker 1: all the implications of it. You know, it's very interesting
Speaker 1: to think that we were all multidimensional right there, Like
Speaker 1: success is a multi factoral determination. So you know, when
Speaker 1: I look at the genetic output of someone on the
Speaker 1: young intelligence was one dimension out of many psychological dimensions.
Speaker 1: Other dimensions could be like test anxiety, And it's an
Speaker 1: interesting question the extent to which well is that person's
Speaker 1: test anxiety actually going to suppress their expression of their intelligence.
Speaker 1: I've tried to spend my whole career objectively as possible
Speaker 1: looking at this research, but I do still know that
Speaker 1: you know what happened to me. You know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: placed in You probably don't know my story but I
Speaker 1: was placed in special education as a child because of
Speaker 1: my intense anxiety that I had, just like generalized anxiety.
Speaker 1: I was anxious about everything as well as an auditory
Speaker 1: processing disability, and people treated me as I was stupid
Speaker 1: as a result of that, and that expectation, you know,
Speaker 1: over the years sculpted who I became. So I do
Speaker 1: wonder in terms of the implications of this, this research
Speaker 1: you're talking about, how much are we setting up a
Speaker 1: self fulfilling prophecy by having people have certain expectations. Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And as I say, intelligence is the hardest one of all.
Speaker 1: But what if you know, we said alcoholism, no problem?
Speaker 1: What about even you know, depression, If you knew you
Speaker 1: had a genetic propensity and depression, doesn't that help in
Speaker 1: terms of self understanding? I mean, as a parent, I
Speaker 1: would find it kind of useful information. It's not very
Speaker 1: predictive now, but you know, it's sort of useful information.
Speaker 1: It's not going to determine people's outcomes, but it's part
Speaker 1: of self understanding, understanding your kids, And in some ways
Speaker 1: I think it could be useful in education. As I said,
Speaker 1: for reading disability, no problem. What about ADHD? I think
Speaker 1: something you know, that's going along pretty strong. They're coming
Speaker 1: up with what I mean, the next goal of the PGC,
Speaker 1: the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, is something like eighty thousand cases
Speaker 1: of ADHD. And what's going to blow it open is
Speaker 1: when we get a polygenetic score. You know, that shows
Speaker 1: your genetic risks. And if you find for example, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like a treatment by genetic interaction. If you
Speaker 1: found that, you know, in the States, we're going through
Speaker 1: this battle now in the UK where people don't want
Speaker 1: to go the US way where any kid diagnosed with
Speaker 1: ADHD gets amphetamines, you know, methyl fenidate. But what if
Speaker 1: you found that kids at high genetic risk really do
Speaker 1: respond well to methylfenidate. But maybe kids who are diagnosed
Speaker 1: as ADHD and don't have a high polygenic score, maybe
Speaker 1: they don't. Or even more that, you know, you can
Speaker 1: get a polygenic score that can predict which kids will
Speaker 1: respond to methyl fenidate, which one or even more kids
Speaker 1: that will suffer from being on stimulants like methyl fenidate.
Speaker 1: So I know there's a lot of doom bongers about
Speaker 1: the DNA revolution, but I do think, as I say
Speaker 1: in the book, the Genie's out of the bottle and
Speaker 1: you're not going to stuff it back in anyway, So
Speaker 1: we might as well have these conversations to talk about, well,
Speaker 1: you know, what limits do we want to impose on it?
Speaker 1: And you know, some people are saying, well, regulate the
Speaker 1: whole thing, don't allow direct to consumer testing, and you know,
Speaker 1: I just feel it's a bit paternalistic in this day
Speaker 1: of you know, the web and free information to tell
Speaker 1: people you can't have access to your DNA data if
Speaker 1: you want it. What's happening now is parents doing it
Speaker 1: for their kids. Then you can say, well, the kids
Speaker 1: can't provide informed consent and that sort of thing. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of issues that come up around this,
Speaker 1: and I certainly don't have the answers. I'm not an
Speaker 1: ethicist and neither Yeah, and I agree with your book.
Speaker 1: I agree with you you state and now is the
Speaker 1: time to launch a broader public conversation about the applications
Speaker 1: and implications. That's precisely what I'm doing in this conversation.
Speaker 1: I wrote the book. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I'm glad you did.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're opening. We're going to get better and
Speaker 1: better polygenic scores and the pace of discovery is quickening, absolutely,
Speaker 1: So let's move on from intelligence, if that's okay with you. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I got out what I wanted to say, and I
Speaker 1: not too upset about it. Oh yeah, look I shouldn't.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't use what was actually made an analytical case though,
Speaker 1: you know that, like the we're so far from actually
Speaker 1: at this point in explaining individual prediction. It's getting pretty
Speaker 1: impressive in terms of group level prediction, but the individual
Speaker 1: prediction of that we actually the phenotypical test seem to
Speaker 1: be right now, better predictors. Yeah, but you know, I
Speaker 1: showed the book that even the last year's polygenic score
Speaker 1: that we used to predict we call them GCS levels.
Speaker 1: These are school Leaving of National Exams at the age
Speaker 1: of sixteen. We call those GCSE scores. We're all explaining
Speaker 1: ten percent of the variants. But if you take the
Speaker 1: kids in the top and bottom desk styles, you know
Speaker 1: that you're talking about what eighty percent of the ones
Speaker 1: in the top deescile going to university and twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of those in the bottom desktop. Now, you could say, well,
Speaker 1: that's a group thing, well, but it's not. That's just
Speaker 1: the reflection of a correlation of about point four that
Speaker 1: explains sixteen percent of the variance. You know, that's a
Speaker 1: point four is a correlation of moderate to large effects
Speaker 1: size in psychology. But you can say, yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of variation from that regression line that predicts.
Speaker 1: You know, GCS Scurse show in the book that with
Speaker 1: that sort of data, even though the mean difference is
Speaker 1: for these death styles, if you divide the polygenic scores
Speaker 1: into tens, the top and bottom desktop differ a whole lot. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: you can find a few kids in the lowest dust
Speaker 1: style who do better on tests than kids in the
Speaker 1: highest deatht style. So it's not at all a perfect prediction.
Speaker 1: I'm more concerned about how this could be applied. Maybe
Speaker 1: you're more optimistic than me optimist, Yeah, maybe what's going on?
Speaker 1: Maybe you're more optimistic that Oh we'll just you know,
Speaker 1: people will just use this in a way that is
Speaker 1: not going to turn into like, I mean, you don't
Speaker 1: mention the history of eugen X. You don't. You don't
Speaker 1: mention that in your book. And I could understand, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, why not to mention in your book
Speaker 1: because it's not relevant to the science you've conducted. However,
Speaker 1: based on that history, like it shows what humans are
Speaker 1: capable of, right, And my point is, you know I
Speaker 1: could see this unless we really have an open eyest
Speaker 1: conversation about what is the point of this information. So
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been working in the field of educational psychology,
Speaker 1: and you know, the field of gift education is moving
Speaker 1: away from just using IQ scores as a predictor of
Speaker 1: giftness because it's not actually informing any intervention. It's just
Speaker 1: operating as a way of taking those who are above
Speaker 1: a certain range and put them all in a room
Speaker 1: together and give them enhanced resources. I could actually be
Speaker 1: more on board if we if you said something like,
Speaker 1: you know, the dyslexia one's a great example, but you know,
Speaker 1: maybe some of the group factors of intelligence. But general
Speaker 1: intelligence is a tricky one because what if we say,
Speaker 1: to like a parent, you know, your child has a
Speaker 1: real probability here of not doing well in school. Then
Speaker 1: that does that mean that if the child is not
Speaker 1: doing well in school, we say the causal reason was
Speaker 1: because they are dumb or they are low intelligence. No, wouldn't,
Speaker 1: But wouldn't it be good to be able to predict
Speaker 1: I like the Finish model, for example, where you know
Speaker 1: you take kids. You just say we're going to put
Speaker 1: whatever resources are needed to bring kids up from the
Speaker 1: lowest to some minimal level of literacy and numeracy that
Speaker 1: you need to kind of to participate in our current
Speaker 1: technological sort of society. So I don't think any necessary
Speaker 1: there's no necessary policy implications from any of these data.
Speaker 1: I hear you, and I think that the research that
Speaker 1: you present you've conducted is quite pressive in the extent
Speaker 1: to which genetics matters. I do think you underestimate the
Speaker 1: extent to which environment matters. So I've been looking at
Speaker 1: some recent meta analyses I'd like to discuss with you.
Speaker 1: I think they paint a more nuanced picture about the
Speaker 1: role of the environment, and I just want to get
Speaker 1: your opinion on them. Sure, So I saw this Holderman
Speaker 1: at All meta analysis, which was one of the most
Speaker 1: impressive menalysis I've ever seen, where they looked at virtually
Speaker 1: every single isn't incredible, every single published and they have
Speaker 1: this whole visualization you can like play with it. I've
Speaker 1: been playing with it online than the nerd. I wait,
Speaker 1: what was the word to use before the in England?
Speaker 1: Of the nerdy person that I am yeah, the buffin
Speaker 1: that I am yeah. And on the one hand, like
Speaker 1: that conclusion from that paper, it is certainly that you're
Speaker 1: right that the shared environment effects are small, but there
Speaker 1: were effects. I mean, I see point one three for
Speaker 1: temperament and personality, So you know, to say that like
Speaker 1: there's no effect there at all, I think is not
Speaker 1: quite correct. Well, I do think it is correct, though,
Speaker 1: I mean for personality of psychopathology, I don't see any
Speaker 1: evidence for shared environmental influence if you look at the
Speaker 1: twin studies. I don't know why the meta analysis shows that,
Speaker 1: but you look at these studies, I think one thing
Speaker 1: you find is there's a special twin effect. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of well documented, isn't it that if you grow
Speaker 1: up with someone exactly the same age at exactly the
Speaker 1: same time, there's maybe a little bit more similarity than
Speaker 1: there would be in the population as a whole. I'm
Speaker 1: not against it, but I don't really see it. I
Speaker 1: don't except that there is evidence for shared environmental influence
Speaker 1: for personality. I mean Chimer's review, for example, in the
Speaker 1: Annual Review of Psychology, he doesn't find any does any
Speaker 1: But this was like the largest MEN analysis on the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's you know, it's not very satisfactory in terms
Speaker 1: of what it includes, right, I mean it includes all
Speaker 1: sorts of measures. I mean, I believe in men analysis
Speaker 1: then includes like everything you ever studied than a smaller sample, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: But it's not using the better studies, is it. For example?
Speaker 1: I mean, all the large studies I know are quite
Speaker 1: even for twin studies, consistently no evidence for genetic influence.
Speaker 1: So I haven't gone into that because you know, it's
Speaker 1: looked over tiny studies, big studies. I know, meta analysis
Speaker 1: has some advantages, but it also is gross, you know,
Speaker 1: and you look at the bigger studies that have been done,
Speaker 1: and they consistently show no evidence for shared environment except
Speaker 1: maybe for delinquency or anti social behavior. There's a little
Speaker 1: evidence there, but then there's counter evidence saying it's really
Speaker 1: being partners in crime in in adolescence, you know. So
Speaker 1: I just I don't see it. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: don't really have a card in this race. I just
Speaker 1: want to discuss these findings because I think they paint
Speaker 1: a more nuanced picture. And what I'm going to do,
Speaker 1: by the way, is on the show notes. I'm going
Speaker 1: to put all these studies so the listeners can read
Speaker 1: them if they want. So, I was fascinated by this
Speaker 1: Augustine Kong at All paper on what they refer to
Speaker 1: as the nature of nurture. How are you familiar with
Speaker 1: that paper? Yeah, I reviewed it. I had it rejected
Speaker 1: from Science I think when I reviewed it. So you
Speaker 1: don't think it as a high quality paper, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's explaining much variance, and I really
Speaker 1: disliked about it. Pretend that it called it nature of
Speaker 1: nurture and never noted that there's been twenty years of
Speaker 1: research on the nature of nurture. By the way, for
Speaker 1: the listener, I should actually explain what they found. So
Speaker 1: they showed that non transmitted illegles can impact a child
Speaker 1: through their effects on the parents and other relatives. So
Speaker 1: there is an effect of the parental genotype that is
Speaker 1: not transmitted. So that does suggest there is this kind
Speaker 1: of role of the parents matter, maybe more than you
Speaker 1: present it in your book. But you're saying, well that
Speaker 1: there's ge correlation, right, yeah, And do they reference this?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's like they pretend as if
Speaker 1: this research hasn't existed. For a long time. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a cute little measure, and it might lead somewhere.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's explaining much variance, but let's see
Speaker 1: what happens there. But to pretend that this has suddenly
Speaker 1: discovered the nature of nurture kind of irritates me because
Speaker 1: we've been saying this for thirty years. So I think
Speaker 1: the interesting question is what is the implication of that finding?
Speaker 1: And you know, Collinger and Harden wrote an interesting comment
Speaker 1: ury on that paper, arguing that we can use that
Speaker 1: understanding they nature to understand how parenting matters for children's education.
Speaker 1: I can kind of get us better at the mechanism.
Speaker 1: And they have this quote from this commentary. They say,
Speaker 1: for humans living in wealthy societies, genetic nurture might be
Speaker 1: more relevant for behavior and social achievements than for more
Speaker 1: biologically proximal outcomes such as body science. Do you disagree
Speaker 1: with that? Well, you know, that's if it even pans out.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's explaining much variance. You know, I
Speaker 1: remain skeptical, But you know, if it shows that it's
Speaker 1: a true effect, fine, but it's of no power compared
Speaker 1: to an adoption design. Well, we can relate biological parents
Speaker 1: with their kids, and we find evidence for a lot
Speaker 1: of GE correlation. And with these designs like parents of
Speaker 1: twin design, you can separate out passive and reactive and
Speaker 1: active types of gene environment correlation. So you know, I
Speaker 1: think people are interested in this non transmitted leal thing
Speaker 1: because it's new and it involves DNA. I don't know
Speaker 1: that fundamentally it's going to tell us very much that
Speaker 1: we don't know, and it's not very powerful. I would
Speaker 1: have predicted that you would say that, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: they even say straight up in their commentary. The phenomenon
Speaker 1: of genetic nurture underscores that the results of genetic association
Speaker 1: studies cannot be interpreted as support for a biological determinist
Speaker 1: account of human individal differences, as most social scientists who
Speaker 1: work with genetic data have stressed. Helped this data suggest
Speaker 1: just how tightly genetic and environmental mechanisms are entangled. We've
Speaker 1: been talking about GE correlation. DNA doesn't do anything by itself.
Speaker 1: For me, the bottom line is, if you take inherited
Speaker 1: DNA differences and you relate that the behavior, I'm going
Speaker 1: to call that causal I'm not saying I've explained the mechanisms,
Speaker 1: but I can tell you there's no backward causation as
Speaker 1: there is in most correlations in psychology, where X could
Speaker 1: cause Y, or why could cause that? The behavior, the brain,
Speaker 1: the environment is not changing your inherited DNA sequence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm certainly not disagreeing that genetics matter. What I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do is show you some papers that paint
Speaker 1: a greater nuance of the effect of the greater nuance.
Speaker 1: But you don't think, well, I mean, why is that nuanced.
Speaker 1: I mean, We've talked about ge correlation for a long time,
Speaker 1: and I'm saying, let's not have nuanced, Let's have power.
Speaker 1: Let's explain behavior and what explains behavior. Explaining behavior individual
Speaker 1: differences in behavior from inherited DNA sequences knowing nothing else
Speaker 1: to me is very powerful. And then it allows us
Speaker 1: to study the nuances of ge correlation, you know, and
Speaker 1: interaction and development with finally having a handle on the
Speaker 1: genetic side. Instead of saying, oh, it's all nuanced and
Speaker 1: complex and can you know, people use that as an
Speaker 1: argument to say, oh, you know, we just can't really
Speaker 1: explain these things, you know, at a mechanistic level, because
Speaker 1: it's all through complicated. I will holdly state that I
Speaker 1: think that some of these studies I'm going to I
Speaker 1: have a couple more. I do think present a more
Speaker 1: nuanced picture than you do in your book. So this one,
Speaker 1: can you use another word than nuance? Okay? Sure? Can
Speaker 1: I use a word that is not offensive to your
Speaker 1: program but adds additional data? Perhaps? Or actually I would
Speaker 1: say Connor Dix and let me see Conor di let
Speaker 1: me tell you about this study. Brand again at all
Speaker 1: variation in the heritability of educational attainment, and this is
Speaker 1: an international meta analysis. We find that heritability shared environment
Speaker 1: and unshared environment each explain a substantial percentage of the
Speaker 1: variance in attainment across all countries, and that the heritability
Speaker 1: varied by nation for educational achievement, there is not even
Speaker 1: in our studies, you know, we find about twenty percent
Speaker 1: shared environment for educational achievement. It's interesting. We did the
Speaker 1: first study of going into university, whether you go to
Speaker 1: university or not, that shows forty percent shared environmental influence.
Speaker 1: But performance in university, your score is at your grades
Speaker 1: at university show very little shared environmental influence. And what
Speaker 1: I think this is about is Yes, there is some
Speaker 1: shared environmental influence on educational teament, much much smaller than
Speaker 1: the genetic No, that's not what they found though they
Speaker 1: set for educational teament. Not only is our grand mean
Speaker 1: estimate of common environment of similar magnitude to our grand
Speaker 1: mean estimate of herritability, but in thirty two percent of
Speaker 1: the studies in our sample, the estimated effect of common
Speaker 1: environment actually exceeds that of genetic differences. Yeah. Well, we've
Speaker 1: done the biggest study by far, and we don't find that.
Speaker 1: I mean, find this one of the meta analysis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you say that, but there aren't many studies really on
Speaker 1: educational achievement that have sufficient power to look at these things.
Speaker 1: So I'm just skeptical. And the thing to keep an
Speaker 1: eye on is intelligence. You accept the finding that their
Speaker 1: shared environmental influence in childhood but not in later life.
Speaker 1: I do accept the conclusion that the heritability of intelligence
Speaker 1: increases as we age. Yes, But you accept the conclusion
Speaker 1: as well that shared environmental influences are important for intelligence
Speaker 1: in childhood, but they drop out to negligible levels in adulthood.
Speaker 1: That does seem to be what the data suggests. Yes,
Speaker 1: And then with educational achievement. You can only study that
Speaker 1: in childhood and then university. But there's very few studies
Speaker 1: in university. I think ours is one of the only ones,
Speaker 1: and I think we're going to find the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing. I agree that there's some shared environmental influence.
Speaker 1: I don't agree that it's as much as you're saying
Speaker 1: that it's as big as intelligence. I know you completely
Speaker 1: accept the results of a meta analysis. Well, what I
Speaker 1: think is interesting about this paper is it also as
Speaker 1: an international and they so it found that heart ability
Speaker 1: varied significantly by nation. To me, that does suggest that
Speaker 1: if we look take a broader view of cultural differences. No,
Speaker 1: I think that's fine, And there is some evidence that
Speaker 1: shared environmental influence is greater in the United States, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's papers suggesting that the reason for that
Speaker 1: is the decentralized education system, where education is allowed to
Speaker 1: maximumly differ across communities, whereas in England, to some extent,
Speaker 1: Australia and some European countries there are these national curricula.
Speaker 1: It's probably greatest in the UK, and so if you
Speaker 1: really have a universal education, it will cut down on
Speaker 1: environmental variation, which means genetic variation heritability will account for
Speaker 1: more of the variation that you see. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's a good point. And so that's a good point.
Speaker 1: And you're talk in your book about how we can
Speaker 1: use heretabilitical efficients as a way of actually judging the
Speaker 1: fairness and equity of environments and opportunities, and I am
Speaker 1: on board with that point. Yeah. So I agree that
Speaker 1: you can find different results in different countries, and you know,
Speaker 1: your results have to be limited the country you're studying,
Speaker 1: and meta analyzes are kind of good on that score.
Speaker 1: And it's an interesting possibility that shared environments greater in
Speaker 1: the States than it is in other countries if you
Speaker 1: look at the power, though I don't think they can
Speaker 1: show that it's significantly different, you know. I think relating
Speaker 1: to that is the Tucker draw, the Timothy Bates Tucker
Speaker 1: job paper large cross national differences in gene by socio
Speaker 1: economic status interaction on intelligence finding that you know, in
Speaker 1: this large Deale study and studies from Western Europe and
Speaker 1: Australia where social policies and shore more uniform access to
Speaker 1: high quality education and healthcare, gene by sees effects were
Speaker 1: zero or reversed. Yeah, what do you make of that? Well,
Speaker 1: I think when the first study was done by Turkkheimer,
Speaker 1: it had absolutely no power to detect the gene environment interaction, right,
Speaker 1: you know, the original twenty thirteen. But this paper seems
Speaker 1: to be much better. But then the only studies that
Speaker 1: are showing this effect are Tucker Drob or his students
Speaker 1: in the US. Most of those studies are incredibly underpowered
Speaker 1: to detect the gene environment interaction. I've done a paper
Speaker 1: where I show that you need about two thousand pairs
Speaker 1: of twins to get any sort of reasonable power. Those
Speaker 1: studies don't begin to approach that. So I am skeptical
Speaker 1: about it, and certainly fine with one of the largest
Speaker 1: studies no evidence was what we actually find an effect
Speaker 1: in the opposite direction, slightly but not significantly. So it
Speaker 1: isn't really a meta analysis of the world. It's a
Speaker 1: few studies in the States from even one of the
Speaker 1: bigger studies in the States, what is it, the Vietnam
Speaker 1: study or one of those studies don't show the effect.
Speaker 1: So I'm still a bit skeptical, and it's something you
Speaker 1: call it nuanced. You know, people want to find gene
Speaker 1: environment interaction and I'm not against it. It's just I
Speaker 1: don't see much evidence for it in that specific topic.
Speaker 1: But more generally, you know, all the candidate gene by
Speaker 1: environment interaction studies, you know, journals now aren't even accepting
Speaker 1: those unless you show replication because it's sort of like
Speaker 1: a poster child for failures to replicate, you know. So
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical or ge interaction, and I'm puzzled why people
Speaker 1: are so keen on it, whereas though I think, no,
Speaker 1: I don't see that, And what I think is important
Speaker 1: is gene environment correlation, and people don't get into that
Speaker 1: as much. That's how genes work, I think so. Also,
Speaker 1: Stuart Ritchie and Tucker Drab did the huge medice analysis
Speaker 1: showing that education has a causal effect on IQ. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they say education appears the most consistent, robust, and
Speaker 1: durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence. Yes,
Speaker 1: and how much variance does that account for proximally one
Speaker 1: to five IQ points for every additional year of education
Speaker 1: and that has huge social implications or how much variance
Speaker 1: is that? Stuart Richie is my colleague, you know I'm
Speaker 1: talking about this, and you know he agrees the effect
Speaker 1: is incredibly small in terms of the variants explained in
Speaker 1: the population because most places have compulsory schooling. You go
Speaker 1: to school for a certain number of years, right, So
Speaker 1: this is based on things where what you go to
Speaker 1: extra classes and you know, things that are outside the normal.
Speaker 1: And you know, all we're talking about is what exists
Speaker 1: in the real world. Isn't much variability. I mean, the
Speaker 1: vast majority of countries around the world they go to
Speaker 1: school compulsorily to what sixteen or something like that. So
Speaker 1: I don't think it's accounting for much. Arents it could
Speaker 1: make a difference. That's the way I interpret it is
Speaker 1: to say, you know, if we had kids go to
Speaker 1: school more, maybe it could have a bigger effect. That's
Speaker 1: it could be. It's actually an interesting point because I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this from like a variation perspective. Well,
Speaker 1: you say in the book use language such as like
Speaker 1: it doesn't make a difference education, parenting doesn't make a
Speaker 1: difference in becoming who you are. But technically what you're
Speaker 1: saying is it doesn't make much of a difference in
Speaker 1: explaining differences in who you are. But that's like saying,
Speaker 1: like fish in water, if you take the water, they
Speaker 1: don't vary at all in water. But if you take
Speaker 1: the water away, like the fish dye, so you know,
Speaker 1: your statement doesn't seem to be in who you are.
Speaker 1: That's a developmental question. You're misinterpreting. What I always say
Speaker 1: is parents' schools matter, but they don't make a difference.
Speaker 1: There a difference from individual differences point of view. Well,
Speaker 1: that's when I emphasize that I have a whole chapter
Speaker 1: saying we're only talking about individual differences. We're only talking
Speaker 1: about the one percent of DNA that differs. We're only
Speaker 1: talking about things that make a difference. And I try
Speaker 1: to emphasize that's not the only perspective on things. You
Speaker 1: can talk about universals. Why is the human species a
Speaker 1: natural language user? Why do we walk on two feet?
Speaker 1: Why do we have frontal vision? Those universal questions are important,
Speaker 1: But I'm particularly interested in, as you are, individual differences.
Speaker 1: So I try to throw that in every now and then.
Speaker 1: You know, it gets boring every time you say any
Speaker 1: trait to say individual differences in. But I hope I've
Speaker 1: made the case if someone reads the book that we're
Speaker 1: only talking about the sources of individual differences. You know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I'm going to give you a point
Speaker 1: of agreement, and I like to go back and forth
Speaker 1: between and let you know we're absolutely where I agree
Speaker 1: with you I thought, and where I think you had
Speaker 1: a good point. You know, you talked about parenting is
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, let's like observe like who
Speaker 1: our child is becoming, as opposed to trying to make
Speaker 1: them into something. One of my favorite psychologists, Abraham Maslow,
Speaker 1: you know, referred to he said, we should be horticulturists.
Speaker 1: That's what parents and educators should be. And I always
Speaker 1: really like that metaphor, you know, as a horticulturist, right
Speaker 1: because you're kind of sculpting who the person is already,
Speaker 1: you know, potentiality, and we're kind of helping them kind
Speaker 1: of become that person. You know, Elic's book, you know
Speaker 1: last year, Oh yeah, gardeners and carpenters and saying parents
Speaker 1: aren't carpenters, they should be gardeners. But in my book,
Speaker 1: I e didn't say I'm not so sure they should
Speaker 1: be gardeners either. It is by that you mean you're
Speaker 1: going to prune the plant and nurture it so that
Speaker 1: it grows to be a certain thing, you know, like
Speaker 1: this is an iris, it's supposed to be like this,
Speaker 1: but you know that's that's a bit of a subtlety.
Speaker 1: But I take what you're saying so interesting about the mattering.
Speaker 1: When you say they do matter, you say, well, they
Speaker 1: matter in the sense that the way we treat our
Speaker 1: children really impacts who they become. If we treat them
Speaker 1: in a way that's more controlling or forced, we can
Speaker 1: actually be taking them away from their destiny in a sense,
Speaker 1: So they matter. No, No, I don't think that's it
Speaker 1: at all. It's more like you were saying water and fish.
Speaker 1: You know that they can't say water isn't important for
Speaker 1: fish because if you take it away, they die. Well,
Speaker 1: in some ways, parent things like that, we're mammals, infants
Speaker 1: are born altricial. Parents matter in the sense that they
Speaker 1: provide the essential ingredients physically and psychologically for kids to develop.
Speaker 1: They will die without parents, you know, in the grossest way.
Speaker 1: But even more than that, you know, parents are a
Speaker 1: very important relationship for kids. Good, But do they make
Speaker 1: a difference? And I would say no, You know, it's
Speaker 1: there's two different levels of analysis here, which I think
Speaker 1: it's tricky. There's the developmental level of analysis, and then
Speaker 1: there's you know, partitioning sources of variance, Like things don't
Speaker 1: have to co vary between people a lot in order
Speaker 1: to be important, right, I mean obviously you would agree
Speaker 1: with that. I don't know what you mean, Like the
Speaker 1: water example was a good one. When you calculate heritability estimates,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the factors that we're controlling for the
Speaker 1: factors that vary environmental factors. I try to say, we're
Speaker 1: only talking about variants. We're talking about difference between people
Speaker 1: and what makes the difference. But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: the factors that don't show much variation, like having five
Speaker 1: fingers on my hand, you know, like most everyone has
Speaker 1: five fingers on their hand, but that actually obviously was
Speaker 1: biologically genetically determined, you know, even though it didn't have
Speaker 1: much variability. Like language use, and like frontal vision and bipedalism.
Speaker 1: These are all basically universal characteristics, right right, So if
Speaker 1: we're not clear about that, it's really important to get
Speaker 1: clear that we're not talking about things that make us human,
Speaker 1: like the ninety nine percent of the DNA that's the
Speaker 1: same for all of us. We're talking about the things
Speaker 1: that make us different, like the one percent of DNA
Speaker 1: that differs between us. I'm not saying make a difference.
Speaker 1: I'm saying parents matter, But they don't make a difference.
Speaker 1: They don't make you think they make a difference when
Speaker 1: it comes to things that we don't necessarily like, you know,
Speaker 1: just sending us to a school that doesn't have a
Speaker 1: roof that's about to fall down on the children's heads.
Speaker 1: I mean, doesn't that make a difference. Yeah, If it
Speaker 1: made a difference, it ought to account for variance. And
Speaker 1: what I see with the high hered abilities, especially in England,
Speaker 1: is maybe it's telling us that schools are probably good enough.
Speaker 1: They're allowing most kids to do their thing. You know,
Speaker 1: if some schools were particularly terrible and somes were particularly great,
Speaker 1: we'd expect that environmental variation to account for a lot
Speaker 1: of variance. And as I say, in England, where we
Speaker 1: have these excellent on site evaluations of schools, those ratings
Speaker 1: don't correlate with school achievement. You know, and you think
Speaker 1: of things like class size, right, how much variance does
Speaker 1: class size explain? Very very little one percent? You know,
Speaker 1: So it's always plausible to think that these things make
Speaker 1: a difference. I think they matter a lot. You want
Speaker 1: kids to go to schools that have roofs more than that,
Speaker 1: that don't have bullying, that have good teachers. You know,
Speaker 1: you want schools to be a good place for kids
Speaker 1: to be, but not because the kids who get the
Speaker 1: better ones of those the better schools or whatever, that
Speaker 1: they're going to do better at these things. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the difference between means and variance. I totally get
Speaker 1: what you're saying. Yeah, I totally get what you're saying.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of how, like, even if you're right,
Speaker 1: let's say that a child has a proquivity to be
Speaker 1: like very genetically to soak up knowledge like a sponge, like,
Speaker 1: how could it not matter that you have a teacher
Speaker 1: or a school system that is more likely to challenge
Speaker 1: and advance and accelerate that student. That's what I don't
Speaker 1: understand well because I think it's mostly self driven. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a difference between instruction and education. You know, instruction
Speaker 1: really means you shove it into the kid, and that's
Speaker 1: the way a lot of people think about education, Whereas
Speaker 1: from this genetics of experienced perspective, I really think of
Speaker 1: education as education which means to educarrate to lead out
Speaker 1: rather than raw. So you give kids the resources, the
Speaker 1: possibilities for doing their thing, for learning what they want
Speaker 1: to learn. And that's why I'm really excited about the
Speaker 1: possibility of personalized education and the potential that computers offer.
Speaker 1: You know, you see that with math. Now you know
Speaker 1: kids can with adaptive learning. They can go as far
Speaker 1: and as fast as they want. And the kids who
Speaker 1: don't do so well, who are slower at it, they
Speaker 1: can learn maths without failing a lot along the way.
Speaker 1: In contrast to our current system where you get a
Speaker 1: teacher in front of a classroom, boring half the kids
Speaker 1: and over the heads of the other half of the kids.
Speaker 1: People in education get so upset by this, but got
Speaker 1: it makes such good sense to me free of the
Speaker 1: teachers up from this sorts of you know, stand and
Speaker 1: deliver sorts of lectures and let them help the kids
Speaker 1: who need more help, or, as seems to be the
Speaker 1: case in education, spend time with its. Behavioral problems are
Speaker 1: as big a thing in the schools as you know,
Speaker 1: the actual learning process. So I kind of went far
Speaker 1: away from I think your initial point. No, and I
Speaker 1: agree about I think personalized learning is important, but I
Speaker 1: think that actually is consistent with my point that you know,
Speaker 1: teachers can make a difference, maybe just in a different
Speaker 1: way than people ordinarily think of. And also like there
Speaker 1: are lots of ways that we think they could make
Speaker 1: a difference, real they don't, and science can inform that,
Speaker 1: like learning styles, training has been shown to be pretty bunk. Right,
Speaker 1: So anyway, I'll move on, and I'm going to put
Speaker 1: all these papers and I hope that, by the way,
Speaker 1: I hope this generates a good discussion. You know, I
Speaker 1: certainly don't have answers. I wanted to openly discuss this
Speaker 1: in fascinating data with you. It's kind of interesting that,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm interested in the comments that come up
Speaker 1: as well, because we've done what do they call it
Speaker 1: a discourse analysis of the comments that have come up
Speaker 1: from the dozen things like you know, media presentations and stuff.
Speaker 1: And once you end up realizing it seems totally clear
Speaker 1: when you look at these like we had a thing
Speaker 1: in the Daily Mail and something in the Guardian. These
Speaker 1: are you know, the major papers in the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: and some of these had a thousand comments, you know,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. It's so much a function of
Speaker 1: the context of whether the guy who writes it is
Speaker 1: writing kind of a balanced piece or writing you know,
Speaker 1: kind of an you know, an extreme view, and also
Speaker 1: where it's published. And you know, so in the better places,
Speaker 1: you find that the comments are really, you know, very interesting,
Speaker 1: but the ones from the less good places, they're not
Speaker 1: even worth looking at. They're just arguing against, you know,
Speaker 1: in a really nasty way. You know. So that's why
Speaker 1: I'm keen to look at your comments, because I think
Speaker 1: you people, you know, listen to your sorts of blogs
Speaker 1: because they're you know, they're genuinely interested. They're not fanatics
Speaker 1: pushing one view or the other. I hope that's the case.
Speaker 1: I really look forward to the comments too. So what
Speaker 1: about the very recent study I thought was interesting. Maybe
Speaker 1: you don't think it is as interesting as I did.
Speaker 1: Daniel Belski on genetic analysis of social class mobility in
Speaker 1: five longitudinal studies. I mean, we're talking about pretty well,
Speaker 1: I'm only reading to you studies that are like either
Speaker 1: met analyzes or longitudinal across multiple samples. And they said,
Speaker 1: we tested if education linked to pologenic scores predicted social
Speaker 1: mobility in twenty greater than twenty thousand individuals and five
Speaker 1: longitool studies in the United States, Britain and New Zealand.
Speaker 1: Participants with higher pologenic scores achieved more education and career
Speaker 1: success and accumulate more wealth. However, they also tended to
Speaker 1: come from better off families, and this is the key test,
Speaker 1: and the key test. Participants with higher pologenic scores tended
Speaker 1: to be upperly mobile compared with their parents. Moreover, ensibling
Speaker 1: different analysis, the sibling with a higher pologenic score was
Speaker 1: more upperly mobile. Thus, education, GENI and wide association discoveries
Speaker 1: are not mere correlates of privilege. They influence social mobility
Speaker 1: within a life. Education GOS discoveries affect socioeconomic tament through
Speaker 1: influence on individuals family of origin, environments and their social mobility.
Speaker 1: To me, that is quite nuanced study, don't you think. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you think so, because the first study and
Speaker 1: the one in the UK is our study. Oh y yeah.
Speaker 1: And so what we show is that you can define
Speaker 1: this as social mobility just in terms of educational intergenerational
Speaker 1: transmission they call it. And so you can get kids
Speaker 1: who are have parents who go to university or not,
Speaker 1: and then some of the university educated parents the kids
Speaker 1: don't go to university and some do. And similarly with
Speaker 1: the parents who are on didn't go to university, some
Speaker 1: of the kids go to university and some don't. So
Speaker 1: we looked at the polygenic scores of these kids and
Speaker 1: what you find, of course, is that the university educated
Speaker 1: parents their children have higher polygenic scores, substantially on this
Speaker 1: eighth educational attainment polygenic score. But what was really interesting,
Speaker 1: I thought was that you can look at downwards social mobility,
Speaker 1: look at the it's who didn't go to university whose
Speaker 1: parents did. Their polygenic scores are right in the middle
Speaker 1: of the other two groups. And similarly, the kids whose
Speaker 1: parents were not university educated who went to university had
Speaker 1: non significantly different scores, so you got you know, they're
Speaker 1: in the middle. And what I like about that is
Speaker 1: to point out to people that social mobility isn't just
Speaker 1: upward social mobility, it's downward social mobility as well, which
Speaker 1: is really important. So I agree completely because you know
Speaker 1: that we I think we did the first study of
Speaker 1: that sort very cool, and I agree with Paige Harden's
Speaker 1: conclusion on this that that shows that by controlling for genetics,
Speaker 1: scientists can more clearly, see that our fane life is
Speaker 1: already determined by how much money our parents have. You know,
Speaker 1: you can control. You can take people with the same
Speaker 1: exact pologenic scores and show, you know, that's the one
Speaker 1: person going to have a much harder time getting rich
Speaker 1: as an adult when they're born in a world class
Speaker 1: family than someone with the same exact score who was
Speaker 1: born in a higher social class. I mean, don't you
Speaker 1: think that that is relevant? Absolutely right, you know, that
Speaker 1: was the point of what we were trying to say.
Speaker 1: But I think it also ties in with something I
Speaker 1: think is important if people are understanding all of this
Speaker 1: to say, I think heritability is an index of social
Speaker 1: mobility educational opportunity, because if you get rid of the
Speaker 1: environmental differences like privilege and wealth, you're left with the
Speaker 1: genetic differences. And it's also a reason why I think
Speaker 1: we don't have to worry about genetic casts. First of all,
Speaker 1: half of the variants is not genetic, and I think
Speaker 1: most of that is non shared, which I think is
Speaker 1: essentially random and still castic. And that there should be
Speaker 1: social downward social mobility as well as upward social mobility.
Speaker 1: You know, so anyway, it raises a lot of value,
Speaker 1: big issues to talk about. But I'm really keen on
Speaker 1: doing this sort of work my twins. Now that this
Speaker 1: twin study of ten thousand pairs of twins that I
Speaker 1: studied began when they were born in nineteen ninety four
Speaker 1: to ninety six, they're now in their twenties, and I'm
Speaker 1: really keen in We have DNA on those as well,
Speaker 1: So we're really keen to ask these sorts of questions
Speaker 1: about cool not just university education, but what about emerging
Speaker 1: adulthood and how people sort themselves out in life? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we don't know much about it now We've got
Speaker 1: this period from twenty to thirty. You know, it used
Speaker 1: to be like you know, Bruce Springsteen, you know, after school,
Speaker 1: high school, you get married, have kids, get a job
Speaker 1: for life, end of story. But boy, it isn't like
Speaker 1: that anymore. Yeah. Good, And I'm totally I am curious
Speaker 1: about everything. So I'm very curious what you find in
Speaker 1: this further research. So I'm going to end here with
Speaker 1: one last major point. So this idea of going with
Speaker 1: the grain in large, I agree with this idea. You
Speaker 1: know that to me, like one of the biggest factors
Speaker 1: in pol psychology research, predicting life satisfaction is just simply
Speaker 1: self acceptance, right, So this seems to delvetoe is in
Speaker 1: a way with your message. However, some things we don't
Speaker 1: want to go to the grain against. And I think
Speaker 1: the big question and some reaction from your book is
Speaker 1: what is that wiggle room that we can have to
Speaker 1: change the parts of our personality and that we don't like.
Speaker 1: And I came across this Brent Roberts meta analysis, a
Speaker 1: systematic review of personality trait change through intervention that does
Speaker 1: show that there are things like therapy matters. You know,
Speaker 1: therapy makes a difference. In fact, it doesn't just matter,
Speaker 1: it makes a difference in our personality traits. Anxiety disorders
Speaker 1: shows the largest effects emotional stability can be influence. So
Speaker 1: I just want to end here with a message as
Speaker 1: well that I think your book does show that DNA matters,
Speaker 1: but I think they're all this kind of merging research
Speaker 1: shows it's not everything right absolutely, And you know, I've
Speaker 1: tried to emphasize that in the book, that we're talking
Speaker 1: about things that make a difference. Now that's what is
Speaker 1: we're describing. What is you're talking about what could be
Speaker 1: and there's no necessary relationship between the two. So I
Speaker 1: have a very high polygenic score for body mass index,
Speaker 1: and if you could see I've also got a belly
Speaker 1: to go with that a bit, you know I'm doing
Speaker 1: it again. I'll take a screen capture which is moderately obese.
Speaker 1: But knowing that I have this even higher ninety fourth
Speaker 1: percentile polygenic score, it doesn't say, oh, I give up,
Speaker 1: I'm a genetic fatty. It actually is motivating. I say,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing too bad at the seventieth percentile. But
Speaker 1: it also means I've got a lifelong battle. It's not
Speaker 1: just losing the six pounds I gained the last Christmas.
Speaker 1: I've got a constant battle. I put on weight easy
Speaker 1: and easily, more easily than other people. I don't lose
Speaker 1: it as well, And I need to control my environment
Speaker 1: so that I lose weight. So if that matters to me,
Speaker 1: I can lose more weight, you know. And so I
Speaker 1: agree completely that it doesn't mean you can't change, and
Speaker 1: in some ways I think it might help you with
Speaker 1: some of these changes. So I agree completely that you
Speaker 1: can't and change behavior, and maybe we all need to
Speaker 1: be doing CBT come to behavior, therapy as a prophylactic,
Speaker 1: and you know, meditation has been shown to I think
Speaker 1: that meditation actually affects that pool of our genes and
Speaker 1: it gives us kind of a space between that pull
Speaker 1: and our action. Yeah, it's probably good for everyone, but
Speaker 1: if you knew that you were particularly vulnerable to stress
Speaker 1: or whatever, maybe that would most You know, we all
Speaker 1: know you're supposed to eat well and sleep well and
Speaker 1: exercise and be mindful. But you know, we'll get around
Speaker 1: to it. Sometimes you know, you just don't actually do it.
Speaker 1: But maybe knowing about the genetics could actually help you, say,
Speaker 1: you know, I really ought to do this. Thank you, Robert.
Speaker 1: Well indo there. You know. I know that we had
Speaker 1: some hairy, contentious moments in this chat. I thought it
Speaker 1: was great. I mean, this is nothing Scott. I think
Speaker 1: it bothers me more than it bothers me. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I love this too. Who's knowledgeable? You know what? I
Speaker 1: don't like out of these media interviews, But people don't
Speaker 1: know anything, you know, so it's wonderful talking to someone
Speaker 1: who's so knowledgeable about this stuff. I would like to
Speaker 1: say that if you get a lot of comments, maybe
Speaker 1: we can have a follow up conversation. Yeah, that's entirely possible.
Speaker 1: The rest of the statement I wanted to say, though,
Speaker 1: is despite some potentially contentious moments, I want you to
Speaker 1: really know that I respect your work immensely and it
Speaker 1: has influenced my own work and intelligence. And as we
Speaker 1: move forward, I'm glad that you're opening up these conversations
Speaker 1: because I really do think we need to have very
Speaker 1: honest conversations about the potential implications of this data that's
Speaker 1: going to come out. You're right, it's going to come
Speaker 1: out either way. So thank you so much for chaling
Speaker 1: with me today. Well, thank you, it was really terrific
Speaker 1: talking to you, Scott Likewise, I hope we do it again. Yeah, likewise,
Speaker 1: thank you. Okay, thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
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