Science denial from the left
Aug. 26th, 2011 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleLest I ever be confused for a partisan, I must take pains to point out cases of science denial from any and all quarters. This one is kind of close to home - an effort to debunk estimates of heritability based on twin studies. I actually came to it via a critique from Alex Tabarrok that is right on the money.
I don't know why some people are so allergic to the idea that personality characteristics are heritable. FWIW, to take a particularly contentious example, I think it's true that some people are literally born criminals; they have such high innate aggressiveness that they will never fit into modern society, and no environmental influence can overcome that. Not many people, mind you, but some. But that doesn't mean that criminal justice is immoral because they "can't help themselves" or because there is "no free will". Even if personality characteristics were 100% heritable I don't think it would have any implications for justice at all; you'd still use the same strategies of deterrence and punishment to control crime.
The problem is that any study can be nit-picked and "debunked" on narrow grounds. This case is particularly amusing because, as Tabarrok points out, the critiques offered actually make the case for a larger genetic influence.
It's very rare for any experiment or study to be completely free of interfering factors. A lot of scientific judgment is oriented around deciding what interfering factors are significant, and what ones are not. Human genetics is an easy target because people are not fruit flies, and you have to work with them "in the wild" rather than culturing them in flasks. The number of confounding factors is huge, the statistics are subtle and confusing, and the majority of published results - taken individually - are poorly supported or simply wrong.
Nevertheless, clear results do emerge from the swamp of questionable data, and are supported by multiple converging lines of evidence. The heritability of personality traits is one of those. The problem is that the "scientific method", narrowly conceived as the testing of single hypotheses in single experiments, is only a part of the process of understanding nature. The way it actually works, and the way individual results are synthesized into broader paradigms, has never been formalized or even clearly articulated. And that is what makes it so hard to defend.
I don't know why some people are so allergic to the idea that personality characteristics are heritable. FWIW, to take a particularly contentious example, I think it's true that some people are literally born criminals; they have such high innate aggressiveness that they will never fit into modern society, and no environmental influence can overcome that. Not many people, mind you, but some. But that doesn't mean that criminal justice is immoral because they "can't help themselves" or because there is "no free will". Even if personality characteristics were 100% heritable I don't think it would have any implications for justice at all; you'd still use the same strategies of deterrence and punishment to control crime.
The problem is that any study can be nit-picked and "debunked" on narrow grounds. This case is particularly amusing because, as Tabarrok points out, the critiques offered actually make the case for a larger genetic influence.
It's very rare for any experiment or study to be completely free of interfering factors. A lot of scientific judgment is oriented around deciding what interfering factors are significant, and what ones are not. Human genetics is an easy target because people are not fruit flies, and you have to work with them "in the wild" rather than culturing them in flasks. The number of confounding factors is huge, the statistics are subtle and confusing, and the majority of published results - taken individually - are poorly supported or simply wrong.
Nevertheless, clear results do emerge from the swamp of questionable data, and are supported by multiple converging lines of evidence. The heritability of personality traits is one of those. The problem is that the "scientific method", narrowly conceived as the testing of single hypotheses in single experiments, is only a part of the process of understanding nature. The way it actually works, and the way individual results are synthesized into broader paradigms, has never been formalized or even clearly articulated. And that is what makes it so hard to defend.
