Opportunity, equality, and genes, a seminar on The Genetic Lottery

teaching opportunity-equality-genetics

Notes on my seminar (German title “Chancen, Gleichheit und Genetik”) oriented around K. Paige Harden’s book “The Genetic Lottery” (2021).

Ruben C. Arslan https://rubenarslan.github.io
2022-10-19

Last autumn, I decided, on impulse, to base a Master’s level seminar in personality psychology around Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery. I had only recently obtained a review copy, but I already thought it could be good material for a discussion-oriented seminar based on the many reviews which disagreed with the book and each other. Also, I had enjoyed much of Harden’s writing on her (now-defunct?) blog.

In my opinion and according to the student evaluations, the seminar was a success. Some colleagues asked me about my syllabus, but I didn’t have anything in English. This year, I thought I’d try to keep notes on this blog. Maybe it’ll be helpful to others considering this/a similar format. Or to me, next year.

The course

The course is open to Master’s level psychology students, though one particularly bright B.Sc. student attended last year too. It’s a 2.5 hour session with a break in the middle.

Student’s tasks

Readings

The students read one chapter from the book per week. I added one session with a chapter on sex and gender from Kevin Mitchell’s book Innate, because Harden skips this topic entirely.1 I also added three videos from Matt McGue’s Coursera course (on eugenics, the John-Joan twins/David Reimer, & PKU) because he can add a bit of history that neither me or Harden lived through. Then, I have them read two blog posts by Scott Siskind on 5-HTTLPR (post cited in the book) and on ADHD (because it makes some discussion-worthy points about equality of opportunity/medically compensating for disadvantages when it comes to a normally distributed trait).

Quizzes and questionnaires

After the first session, I have them fill out a questionnaire which contains some items from studies discussed in the book

Then, for each session, there’s a brief quiz for them to check their comprehension of the book (and my notes in the margin). In the same quiz, they can submit comprehension questions to me.

Usual schedule

  1. 13:15-13:20 Organisational matters and short impulse from me
  2. 13:20-13:40 Comprehension questions about the chapter
  3. 13:40-13:50 Impulse talk 1
  4. 13:50-14:00 Discussion, questions 1
  5. 14:00-14:20 Break
  6. 14:20-14:30 Impulse talk 2
  7. 14:30-14:40 Discussion, questions 2
  8. 14:40-15:00 Discussion in small groups
  9. 15:00-15:25 Joint discussion
  10. 15:25-15:35 Teaser/preview next week from me
  11. 15:35 End/assigned tasks for next week

First session

In the first session, I introduce the author, the authors of the other readings, talk a little about eugenics and “this debate” in the German context (the book is quite US-centric). I talk about why I think it’s an apt course in the personality module. Then, I introduce the impulse talk papers and have them pick favorites via simpleassign.com.

I end with this video. Harden cites the study from which it’s derived (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003) in her first chapter:

Even monkeys have a sense of fairness. If two capuchin monkeys are “paid” in cucumber slices for performing a simple task, they will both happily pull levers and munch on their cucumber snacks. Start paying just one monkey in grapes, however, and watch the other monkey throw the cucumber back in the experimenter’s face with the indignation of Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers.

I ask the students to think about whether this video shows a sense of fairness or even “inequity aversion” in academese. This time, one noted that you could just call it “jealousy”. After all, the grape-ionnaire monkey is not indignant at all. Once we reach this point, I show a slide with tweets by several primatologists.

Cute videos are mind viruses that produce "zombie ideas" (i.e. ideas that just won't die, no matter how many times you kill them). https://t.co/CAEcOk2uFL

— Claudio Tennie (@CTennie) November 20, 2019

Problems with the logic of the paradigm:https://t.co/JaetGhAcOa
Failed replications (review): https://t.co/m79JvgFtig
Failed replication and alternative explanation for effect (example): https://t.co/s34WqpKZMr
and another (chimps): https://t.co/kq1osGrjCP

— Prof Nichola Raihani (@nicholaraihani) November 22, 2019

In short, many primatologists hate this video and study. There are conceptual issues.2 There are design issues.3 It doesn’t replicate.4 It fits Jeremy Freese’s immortal words “more vampirical than empirical, unable to be killed by mere evidence”.

Now, this study is no cornerstone in Harden’s book. She concludes the section as follows.

As human adults, we share with our children and our primate cousins an evolved psychology that is instinctively outraged by unfairness. Right now, such outrage is bubbling all around us, threatening to boil over at any moment. In 2019, the three richest billionaires in the US possessed more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the country. Like capuchin monkeys being paid in cucumbers when their neighbor is being paid in grapes, many of us look at the inequalities in our society and think: “This is unfair.”

So, it’d be interesting if a sense of fairness is so basic, so widespread, fundamental. But of course, if capuchin monkeys and children don’t share our moral views (and they don’t on things like dominance hierarchies and violence), we don’t have to change our moral views.5.

I use this teaser to say: Even Paige Harden6 gets things wrong and to turn this into more than reading a pop science book, we need to do read critically and do our own research.

  1. Even though it fits in perfectly in my opinion given that biological sex is randomly assigned, genetic, and we have lots of work unpacking the problem that identifying a causal effect doesn’t mean we understand the mechanism, or that a gene having a causal effect implies only biological processes). I presume she simply had her fill of explosive topics, but in my experience I can use SRY to build intuitions about other genes↩︎

  2. Is it inequity aversion if the better-paid doesn’t care?↩︎

  3. Monkeys switched from a model to an observer role, this seems to have induced the frustration.↩︎

  4. After correcting the design mistake↩︎

  5. Or we shouldn’t I guess. The kind of men who go for the alpha male world view rarely reference alpha male capuchin monkeys as their model for some reason. Too cute probably.↩︎

  6. who I’ve previously built up as pretty cool↩︎

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Arslan (2022, Oct. 19). One lives only to make blunders: Opportunity, equality, and genes, a seminar on The Genetic Lottery. Retrieved from https://rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2022-10-19-opportunity-equality-and-genes-a-seminar/

BibTeX citation

@misc{arslan2022opportunity,,
  author = {Arslan, Ruben C.},
  title = {One lives only to make blunders: Opportunity, equality, and genes, a seminar on The Genetic Lottery},
  url = {https://rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2022-10-19-opportunity-equality-and-genes-a-seminar/},
  year = {2022}
}

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