Genetics and the Social Science Explanation of Individual Outcomes

Abstract

Accumulating evidence from behavioral genetics suggests that the vast majority of individual-level outcomes of abiding sociological interest are genetically influenced to a substantial degree. This raises the question of the place of genetics in social science explanations. Genomic causation is described from a counterfactualist perspective, which makes its complexity plain and highlights the distinction between identifying causes and substantiating explanations. For explanation, genomic causes must be understood as strictly mediated by the body. One implication is that the challenge of behavioral genetics for sociology is much more a challenge from psychology than biology, and a main role for genetics is as a placeholder for ignorance of more proximate influences of psychological and other embodied variation. Social scientists should not take this challenge from psychology as suggesting any especially fundamental explanatory place for either it or genetics, but the contingent importance of genetic and psychological characteristics is itself available for sociological investigation.

Happiness and Success: Genes, Families, and the Psychological Effects of Socioeconomic Position and Social Support

“…Genes are useful in this regard in that they provide a mechanism for understanding how individuals respond to and shape their environment, and, as demonstrated here, investigating genes hardly obviates the importance of the environment. Among potential engines of action reflected in genes are personality, tolerance of risk, cognitive abilities, and time preferences (see Freese 2008).…”

Sibling genes as environment: Sibling dopamine genotypes and adolescent health support frequency dependent selection

“…Either within or between families, the fitness of each of the alleles studied here could confer varying advantage or disadvantage depending on the genetic context. Consistent with Freese's (2008) "phenotypic bottleneck" argument, the likely mechanism for an interaction between individual and sibling genotype is sibling phenotype. Having a very healthy sibling, for example, could enable an individual to be sickly or hypochondriacal (e.g., have frequent health-related absences from school).…”

The Biodemography of Fertility: A Review and Future Research Frontiers

“…Increasing evidence demonstrates that choice, agency and the behavioural outcomes that we examine in fertility, however, are not only sociallydetermined, but also linked to an individual's genetic architecture and beyond, such as proteins, hormones, neurons, gametes and other factors (Udry 1996;Wachter 2003Wachter , 2008Freese 2008). Furthermore, recent research demonstrates that as Udry (1996) and others hypothesized some time ago, that a portion of the genetic influence of fertility is related to the motivational precursors to fertility (Miller et al 2010).…”

“…It has been argued that all traits are heritable to some extent (Turkheimer 2000) and that heritability is ubiquitous in social science (Freese 2008). However, the genetic variance component provides insight into the extent to which genetic variation in a population is associated with variation in fertility.…”