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We all say things that we don’t quite believe. Sometimes, we do it because we want to sound smart, or avoid trouble at work, or even just to be polite. There’s nothing remarkable about the half-truths and white lies that make our lives a little easier.
Perhaps the most prominent example of a lie that intellectuals in the West are expected to tell is that genes play a negligible role in explaining differences in human behavior. While many people in the early 20th century accepted the idea of a genetic influence on behavior, the idea became taboo after the end of WWII.
The misuse of biology by Hitler’s inner circle to justify mass murder ultimately led many intellectuals after the war to reject any deep role for biology in explaining human differences.
The prevailing opinion of social scientists, journalists, and intellectuals now is that our abilities and personalities are not the product of our genes, but are sculpted solely by the hands of our parents, our peers, and our teachers.
Consider a survey of sociologists: Only one-third think biology explains why men engage in more violent crime than women. Is it reasonable to believe that such a universal phenomenon could merely be the product of socialization? Probably not.
While ideology often trumps common sense in the public arena, intellectuals understand the reality of genetic influence when it comes to their private choices. They are often very selective about the traits of the person they choose to marry and have children with, just as gay couples select sperm and egg donors on the basis of traits they want in their kids.
Many people are blank slatists in the streets, but hereditarians between the sheets.
Why does it matter?
The blank slate is false. With the use of twin and adoption studies as well as genome-wide association studies, scientists have shown that psychological differences are substantially the result of genetic differences. This finding has been so consistently replicated as to have been termed “the first law of behavioral genetics.”
In their highly-cited article “Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics,” Robert Plomin and colleagues go so far as to say:
"Significant and substantial genetic influence on individual differences in psychological traits is so widespread that we are unable to name an exception."
I believe that resistance to these kinds of findings among academics and journalists is rooted in the belief that if they were widely accepted, it would undermine the liberal commitment to moral equality. In reality, however, information about biological inequalities do not necessarily undermine moral equality. And sometimes the assumption of biological equality leads to perverse moral and political consequences.
Consider the move in America away from the political goal of promoting equality of opportunity toward the goal of “equity,” or equal outcomes. This move is a natural one when we assume all groups—men and women, rich and poor—have exactly the same physical and psychological traits, so that only oppression or discrimination can explain unequal outcomes. Beliefs like this make a prosperous and peaceful society impossible to achieve. It tends to make members of different groups suspicious of people in other groups who are disproportionately represented in different occupations or income brackets. Telling "noble lies" can have bad consequences, even if they're motivated by good intentions.
How will technology break the slate?
History is full of examples of technological innovations that not only change the way we live, but also change our culture.
The printing press helped enable the Protestant reformation, and later the American and French revolutions. The internet enables the viral spread of ideas, and was partly responsible for the Arab Spring and America’s recent cultural revolution.
The advent of reliable contraception gave couples significantly more control over when they have children. In turn, it changed our culture in profound ways and gave rise to the sexual revolution.
Another tech-driven revolution is on the horizon—the reproductive revolution. The most important recent development in this area is polygenic embryo selection.
When couples use IVF to have children, they often have multiple embryos. It will soon be possible to select on the basis of any measurable psychological trait—intelligence, conscientiousness, happiness, criminality, etc. Once polygenic screening for socially significant psychological traits is publicly available, it will bring profound cultural change. This change will not be a direct consequence of the technology, but will instead result from the fact that the option of choosing—or even altering—our genetic predispositions will put a tax on believing the blank slate.
When beliefs have no impact on a person’s life, there is little risk in believing things that are untethered to reality. But when parents learn that the genes of their future child could be influenced with technology, they will pay more attention to the influence of genetics on life outcomes.
At first, the market will be limited by the price of doing IVF and genotyping embryos. But as the tech matures and the price falls, parents will feel like they need to at least consider using polygenic screening.
Once this option is explicitly available, people will want to learn more about the heritability of traits, and how those traits affect life outcomes. For example, behavioral geneticists know that intelligence affects not only educational attainment and income; it is also associated with longevity and health.
Initially many American elites will privately use polygenic screening but publicly condemn it. But a gap will grow between what is privately done and publicly said.
At some point, some people will stop lying in public, initially at a cost to themselves. Finally, a preference cascade will lead ordinary people to move from skepticism to endorsement—not only of technologies like embryo selection and gene editing, but of the science of heritability that makes it all possible.
Once that happens, the blank slate will crumble and fields like social genomics will replace what we currently call sociology.
By then, we’ll be on our way to a world in which some societies, at least, will both improve their children’s prospects through genetic selection and reject a tired dogma that emerged and spread as an overreaction to the cruelty of the Nazi regime.
It would be a tragedy if the crimes of the past cast a shadow over the future. Thankfully, the love parents have for their children is so strong that they will be driven to learn the truth about genetic influence. Eventually, the truth will come to light, and the blank slate will be broken.
