The Problems with Behavioral Genetics

3.6%, 6%, 32%, Oh my

So the argument here seems to just be that “heritability is more likely than conditioning” as a general rule. Well – it isn't more likely in the case of complex behaviors for all the reason I illustrated earlier – any heritable aspect would likely only be for vulnerability to paraphilia not for paraphilia itself and as such paraphilia couldn't occur outside the presence of conditioning. No, the typical geneticist/hereditarian refrain of “multiple genes” wouldn't work either – it would just be multiple genes inducing vulnerability. You could have 1000 genes all in a row and it wouldn't make a complex behavior without a physiological pathway for the behavior to sensibly emerge from without conditioning and there is observably no such pathway. The article he cites doesn't change my mind about that – it's a rather uninspiring list of four “laws” of genetic behavior poorly illustrated – I remember it was three when I was younger but that's inflation for you.

The fourth law is the statement that genetic behavior is built out of many genes each performing a relatively small percentage of behavioral variability. Well I would object to the certainty there – I find when behavioral geneticists get the percentage gleam in their eyes you're about to hear something unfounded, but still – my heart belongs to emergent informational structures and these sorts of relationships are what characterizes those structures. It's like language in which the words gather round one another to support and direct – a few kingly champions laying atop their dutiful guard. All my favorite words: emergent, interactionist, constructivist and yes even complex. Wonderful thing it is – you seem to forget though that what emerges, interacts and is constructed – why a huge proportion of that complexity – is conditioning and environment. Your gene expression is dependent on the things you experience (that's why I always find it silly when Genes are treated like nature made series of letters). Your DNA isn't in an ancient lockbox giving you instructions from your ancestors – it's a living thing shaped by its own experiences. Living in the tangle of life. That brings up the first law here – everything is heritable. Well of course it is heritable – everything is environmental too. On the most basic level we would have no human behavior if we weren't humans, but there would be no humans if there wasn't Earth.

Unfortunately complexity can too often become a fallacy in the world of behavioral genetics, as the dutiful hereditarian confuses complexity for plausibility. It goes something like this: there are so many genes and they just do so much and they all fold back in on each other – why it makes your head spin. When you head starts spinning like that it's easy to think just about anything is possible. It isn't. Something has to work on the large scale before it works on the small. Biology-driven paraphilia is not shown to work at all on the large scale – so the small scale can't make up the difference. It doesn't matter if you've got 1, 10 or 100 genes – if there's no physiological mechanism then all you got is some fancy statistics. You can get 100 guys together – without any wood or tools you can't raise a barn. Thankfully innate paraphilia advocates rarely inflict their statistics upon us. Still, I would like to take this opportunity to address some of the other fallacies present in this article and the field of behavioral genetics as a whole: Schoolhouse Fallacy, Consumerism as State of Nature, The Gene in the Room Fallacy.

Before I go much further I should probably stop for a moment and say that I don't having anything against genes – obviously I think all of material life is a process of informational emergence governed by genes. My model values the microbiological – it always will. That having been said – Genetics as a field is contaminated with Razzle Dazzle. Genetics might be the most overtaken by science marketing of any STEM field (worse even than neuroscience) – no other field so loves its advertisements, its baseless percentages, its confident declarations of unfounded “truth”. Perhaps you think I'm making confident declarations – I am. They're not unfounded though.

Let's talk figures: 3.6% - that's a very small percentage and if I could only support 3.6% of the things which I said I would hide myself away and refuse to come out. Shockingly though – cited in a few studies – only 3.6% of genetic association studies were replicated consistently when replication was attempted (many were not attempted). I didn't pick the worst one either – there was 1.2% in another study and it would have been .5% in the first if we counted the unattempted ones as unreplicated. These aren't genetic conclusions by the way – just associations and they can't nail that down. They aren't attempting to prove anything but an association between a phenotypical trait and gene and they can't do it. Yet Genetics enjoyers have the gall to talk percentages of heritability and populations and genetic causes. All they're doing is science marketing: they're making a political or social claim and throwing a gene and a statistic on it for rhetorical advantage. I hate that, I hate it even more knowing the vast majority of genetic associations are weaker in any follow up study. These are just temporary statistical figments used like cudgels – but their weakness never stops the razzle from dazzling. 32% was the very best figure I could find using a special method (and I'd assume the method ended up also selecting a certain kind of study). At very best only 1/3 of these correlations are supported – and people have the bluster to say “genetic origin of that behavior”. Codswallop.

You want to try your hand at the research I've been doing in regards to autism? Take a big handful of jacks and throw them up in the air. When they land see if you can build a shape by connecting them like dots. That's what it's like trying to study behavioral genetics of autism in a meaningful way in this anti-rigorous research environment. No one will be honest about the replication or lack of their correlations – they won't even admit they're just correlations. They'll weave all kinds of wacky tales only to find that “oops” another one bit the dust. Genetics further tries by taking this uppity position of complex truth – it's just too hard for you commoners to understand – you're SIMPLIFYING too much!! Well, you don't get to playact like you have special access to truth when you can't even crack double digits for replication. Especially when all you're doing is moving beads around to find correlating statistics to empower various insinuations and grant-accessing schemes. One more number – 6%, that's a bit higher. That's the percentage of genetics papers that had notable errors in their sequencing. Yes, that's careless sometimes. It's intentional lying other times – and very few in the genetics world seem to be willing to do the vicious gardening needed to sort these things out. So I hope you'll understand why my epistemology doesn't treat wild gesturing at a gene as a form of knowing even if someone assures us that the condition is 78% heritable (or maybe 41 or maybe 63 or maybe 82, but for some reason the symptoms are 12% - it's just so complicated!). I know this isn't strictly associated with paraphilia – but I needed a moment to address the genetic menace. Genetics is a worthwhile field of study but it will never be worth anything until we take it back from the forces of advertiser psychology who attempt to use the gene as a way of naturalizing desires rather than a way of bettering our species' self understanding.

That brings us to the fallacies – the first is consumer capitalism as state of nature. You see this whenever they assume the similarities of people raised apart are a result of genetics rather than the emergence of genetics in a specific social environment (and perhaps more characteristic of that shared social environment than the genetics). Behavioral genetics is there to serve as the Leibniz of Capitalism and assure you this is the best of all possible worlds – and whatever thing you are conditioned to in this world is as good as innate because the advertisers have your best interest in mind and only give you what you really want in the end. A crown jewel of advertiser psychology is the biological insinuation – the philosophy that sees a gene as where the buck stops – rather than looking at the increasingly intrusive effect of the digital environment on people's minds. It's a shrugging off of responsibility in the end – with the same presumptions of “likelihood” Mr. Bailey has. You see – by his standard anything would be heritable: occupation, taste in music, political beliefs.

If you think any one of them might be driven by biology I can disabuse you of the notion by throwing you into Medieval France or just 50 years ago – hell I could just throw you into a world where social media was meaningfully different and assure you that your political beliefs (and sexuality too) would be different. Behavioral Genetics not only doesn't take power into consideration – it's entire purpose is to hide the hand of power and assure you that whatever happened was inside you all along.

That kind of “buck stops here” thinking extends far past just ignoring all cultural dynamics – it goes so far often as to just ignore biology and assume a gene being there must have had something to do it. That's what people are always getting at with their correlations – if you can prove a Gene was there, well that's certainly more than nothing! I call that the Gene in the Room Fallacy – you assume you can blame a gene for something if it happened to be there when it happened. Or in the language of Genetic Association – it happened to be around more often than expected by chance! (Be careful – chance is real slippery and will move on you about 90% of the time). It's obvious enough that a gene doesn't govern a behavior it's present for. This is obvious given everything we know about the behavior of genes – recombination, replication and the nature of those that can confound this sort of study. It's obvious given everything we know about the larger confounders like genetic expression and social emergence. If this is all too ideal for the reader to understand let's make a simple example.

Imagine we had a world where every girl with brown eyes was given a rose tattoo on her 18th birthday. In that world you could say there are genetic causes to the rose tattoo – because people with certain genotypes end up with that phenotype. The gene isn't the mechanism though – we know that. It's the tattoo artist, the culture and the person who first made it tradition for the brown-eyed girls to get that tattoo. We wouldn't say those were rose genes that activate at 18. It isn't the genes – and it doesn't become more likely for it to be the genes because there are 16 governing eye color. It doesn't become more likely because, given the nature of genes, there are almost certainly about 100 others that correlate with that rose tattoo. Obviously social conditioning anymore is rarely so cut and dry – but I trust you understand that this rose phenomenon is something occurring very often unrecognized. Maybe not brown-eyed girls – but look what happens to girls with high attention needs or more antisocial boys. Those girls don't have a social media self-sexualization gene and those boys don't have a 4chan acting out gene. Our culture has an internet regulation problem.

Finally you have the Schoolhouse fallacy – and this article has an absolute doozy of one in it. One of his laws is that certain behaviors are neither genetic nor environmental and that's true: I'm actually very preoccupied researching some of those (left-handedness, autism, gay). He however decided to make the ridiculous statement that identical twins raised in the same household/attending the same school don't have identical behavior – those differences are neither environmental or genetic. Absurdity, absolute absurdity. Nurture isn't the bricks in the schoolhouse, it isn't the floorboard in the living room. Nurture is a series of events you encounter in the course of your life – and they can be vastly different amongst people in the same house or attending the same school. Whose Mom's favorite? Did one have a bully the other didn't? How did their first relationship go? Did one get a friend who sucked them into a subculture deeper than the other one? Did one see a car accident or a deer dying by the side of the road? Did one get a meth problem for a while and warn the other off drugs? Did one join a church? Those are nurture questions. Nature is the relationships you have and the events you experience and the things you learn – we will never make any progress understanding human development if we keep at the rock-brain level of thinking it's a physical place like a School building.

Well – I've gotten off track because I've long wanted to talk about flaws in behavioral genetics and Mr. Bailey gave me the opportunity. Method validity in genetics outside of medicine (and often inside of medicine too) is nearly as bad as social science is and not as charmingly silly. The “hard nosed hereditarian” outlook is ridiculous and irresponsible in this culture that is so impacted by digital stimulants – not to mention drug use and relationship breakdown. All these kind of arguments are fuddle-headed when you see the changes that the internet is bringing to human nature – and we as a culture need to reckon with that. People aren't born with what the computer makes them into – we are living through a consciousness event and no one wants to talk about taking the reins. People are not born with behavioral addiction related cognitive decline. People are not born with dopamine-related impulsivity issues caused by hyperstimulation. People are not born with the nasty social reactivity conditioned by the social media reward system. People are not born with the compulsive nature of the social media algorithm inside their head or the endless supply of pornographic images on any given subject that the internet supplies. Well – you all know I'm Mr. Internet Addiction and could go on for pages but I need to finish up with his last argument.