The Genes Vs Environment Debate is a Red Herring
you don't need to be a 'hereditarian' to acknowledge that you can't completely eliminate differences in academic outcomes and lifetime incomes
One of the more tiresome debates I’ve ever encountered is the ‘Nature or nurture?’ or ‘Genes or environment?’ debate.1 While this question applies to all human traits, discussions typically fixate on intelligence and IQ, with participants rarely staking out clear positions. The thesis that advocates call ‘hereditarianism’ seems to be the view that differences in intelligence between people (or groups of people) are, to a great extent, genetic. Self-identified hereditarians are not always clear on how much of the variation in intelligence one needs to attribute to genetics in order to be a hereditarian. What matters is their core belief: genetics plays a significant role in intelligence, and this belief supposedly carries profound implications for social policy. I don’t think that’s true. I think that even if we could definitively settle the genes vs environment debate, our fundamental policy challenges would remain unchanged.
The New Hereditarian Left
The 2020s has seen the rise of a new kind of hereditarian: the ‘hereditarian leftist’. The hereditarian leftists are basically what you get when you divorce the view that differences in intelligence between individuals are largely genetic from the view that the difference in intelligence between groups (specifically racial groups, although sometimes they include socio-economic classes too) are largely genetic and combine it with the view that this thesis reinforces economic egalitarianism.
Whatever the merits of this position, it is at least a novel one. Most people who insist that intelligence is largely a matter of genetics are right wingers who think hereditarianism reinforces right wing views. This includes those who don’t buy into or aren’t concerned with all the claims about race science.
Being the kind of guy that’s really invested in hereditarianism is a bit like being the kind of guy that likes to start arguments about the age of consent. You better have a good reason for it or we’re going to think that you have bad intentions.
Freddie DeBoer, who is a card-carrying hereditarian leftist, occasionally writes about this issue. I’m going to call it the “Now what?” problem for hereditarianism.2 Hereditarians, right and left both, owe us an explanation of what exactly we’re supposed to do once we believe that intelligence is largely genetic and why it matters.
DeBoer argues that the genes vs environment debate matters because it has important ramifications for education policy and, more broadly, what kind of socio-economic system is morally justifiable. Right wing hereditarians seem to broadly agree on the ramifications for education policy and disagree on the broader political economy stuff.
Luck Egalitarianism vs Natural Inegalitarianism
A hereditarian's pre-existing worldview invariably predicts whether they believe hereditarianism supports right-wing or left-wing economic policies. I suspect this is because left-of-centre and right-of-centre folks have different background assumptions about egalitarianism. Left-of-centre people tend to endorse something like luck egalitarianism: the view that it is unjust when some people end up better or worse off than others because of brute luck. If it turns out that brute luck, in the form of genetics, plays a much greater role in socioeconomic outcomes than we previously thought then we have a good reason to support a more egalitarian economic system.
I haven’t found a convenient phrase to sum of right-of-centre views about inequality, so I’ll coin one of my own: natural inegalitarianism. On this view, it is assumed that economic inequality arising from an unequal distribution of talent is natural, and therefore good. One way of elaborating on this view is with the Ayn Rand-like approach of celebrating ‘producers’ as individualistic heroes who deserve to reap the rewards of their talents.3 The greatest ‘producers’ are people that should invoke feelings of awe and inspiration, not envy or jealousy. Redistributing income away from them is seen as punishing them for their success and limiting their potential. If it turns out that much of what makes someone a ‘producer’ is determined by the genetic lottery, then that means the inegalitarian right has a way of naturalising inequality. You can encounter this kind of thought in the writings of some right-wingers like Murray Rothbard who describes egalitarianism as a ‘revolt against nature’. Inequality is treated as a natural inevitability and any attempt to establish an egalitarian social order is doomed to fail.
This might explain why left and right hereditarians come away thinking that hereditarianism should make one more left or right wing. But you don’t need to be a hereditarian to be convinced by left-wing luck egalitarianism or right wing economic ideas; hereditarianism doesn’t reinforce these ideas so much as it provides a neat, though superfluous, way of naturalising them. Neither view can serve as a compelling answer to the “Now What?” problem.
Hereditarians vs ‘Blank Slatists’ on Education
I’ll turn to the second answer to the “Now What?” problem: the answer that says hereditarianism is an antidote to blank slate thinking in education.
Hereditarians of all stripes pit themselves against ‘blank slatism’. This is an old view, often attributed to John Locke, that all human minds begin as a blank slate at birth and only develop in response to sensory experiences. In other words, differences in personality, intelligence or knowledge are attributable in their entirety to differences in sensory experience. It follows from this that if we can make sure that everyone has the same experiences, such as by having children attend equally good schools, then we can ensure that there are no gaps in academic achievement between students.
If you’ve read other ‘anti-hereditarian’ pieces before, then this is the part where you might expect me to claim that blank slatism is a strawman and that blank slatists don’t actually exist. But in all honesty, I have to admit that there really are people out there who claim that the only reason any why some young adults might not know how to read Shakespeare or do long division is because they were failed by their teachers. Some people genuinely insist that the human mind is infinitely malleable and that implementing their preferred education policy will end inequality.
The practical flaws in blank slate approaches to education policy aren't related to environmental determinism itself. One could attribute our entire psychology to environmental factors without believing we can either equalize everyone's environments or close all academic achievement gaps through school reforms alone.
The neoliberal ‘education reform’ program pursued in the United States and many other countries did not fail because politicians had the wrong beliefs about the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors on academic ability. It failed for far more mundane empirical reasons.
It failed because, whatever the relative influence of genes vs environment, we know that students mostly sort themselves into different achievement bands and stay there. We know that tweaking around the edges of the school system, or trying to reinvent the wheel with alternative forms of schooling, only seems to produce small improvements at most. DeBoer shows how many different interventions seem promising at first, generate an inordinate amount of hype among education researchers and then turn out to have no effect whatsoever on academic outcomes.
That something is determined by environmental factors does not mean that we can change it. One’s environment and history encompass a whole range of things outside schools. We can try to make changes at the margins, but ultimately there is no way to ensure that everyone has the same experiences – at least not without engaging in wacky sci-fi villainy and kidnapping kids at birth, forcing them to grow up in identical pods and so on. There’s simply not much low-hanging fruit left in education reform.
A Concerning Distraction
I am generally sceptical of claims that this or that debate is a ‘distraction’ from the real issues. It comes across as a way of saying “It’s inconvenient to talk about this” that sounds more principled than it really is; but I really think it’s true in this case. We end up focusing on a licentious debate about intelligence and genetics where participants are all too keen to signal their love of Hard Truths™ that trigger the libs and involve themselves in controversies over eugenics.
The genes vs environment debate distracts us from more practical questions: How do we design educational systems that work for students with varying abilities and interests? How do we create an economy that provides dignity and security for all, regardless of academic achievement? These questions are not particularly salacious and that’s a good thing. We don’t want other people to avoid answering them out of a mistaken belief that doing so forces them to address controversial questions about genetics and IQ.
Whether differences in academic ability are 20% or 80% genetic is ultimately irrelevant to these questions. What matters is acknowledging that students will always vary in their academic abilities, interests, and achievements. Education systems should accommodate this variation, rather than attempting the gargantuan and infeasible task of eliminating it. We need multiple pathways, or ‘streams’, leading to rewarding careers that don’t all require the same academic skills. Students should be able to move between these streams when needed, of course, but it should be perfectly fine and expected that many won’t.
The central policy question isn't whether genes or environment determine academic outcomes – it's whether we want a society that distributes resources and opportunities based primarily on academic achievement. We need to figure out how to build institutions that accommodate human diversity regardless of its origins. These are moral and political issues, not biological ones.
All Substacks inevitably produce incredibly suspect essays on ‘hereditarianism’. This is my first and hopefully final entry.
Shamelessly borrowing the same name used for a similar objection raised against the error theory in meta-ethics.
There are other right-wing views about distributive justice that reject the idea that the rich do and should ‘earn’ their wealth through natural talent, instead appealing to private property rights and voluntariness to justify economic inequality. See Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.