Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics: Risks, Potential Benefits, and Ethical Responsibility

Abstract

Social and behavioral scientists are increasingly frequently collaborating with geneticists or adapting the methods of genetics research to investigate how genomic differences are associated with differences in a wide variety of behavioral and social phenotypes. The huge and varied range of phenotypes investigated in social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, broadly construed, includes smoking and eating behavior, schizophrenia, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a sense of well-being, introversion, risk-taking preferences, income, intelligence, and educational attainment. Researchers study these phenotypes because they believe that doing so can, among other benefits, contribute to more rigorous social (and health) science, which can in turn contribute to more just social policies.Because, as we detail in part 1, there is such a long history of attempts to use claims about genetic differences in such phenotypes to advance unjust social policies-and because of the potential of such claims to undercut efforts at creating more just social policies-SBG research can be deeply controversial. In this report, we seek to convey what our working group, composed both of scientists who conduct SBG research and of scholars who think critically about it (see boxes 1 and 2), learned from three years of wrestling with the historical, social, and scientific facts relevant to the ethics of SBG research. More specifically, we seek to articulate where a majority of our working group did-and did not-achieve consensus about the issues with which we wrestled.To understand the risks and potential benefits of SBG research in more depth, our group first had to wrestle with the scientific question, what can genetics tell us about social outcomes as complex as, for example, educational attainment? Addressing that question required us to put SBG research in the context of genetics research more S3 SPECIAL REPORT: The Ethical Implications of Social and Behavioral Genomics

Do we really need a new definition of dyslexia? A commentary

“…Recent studies that use polygenic risk scores (summing the influence of all identified relevant genes) show that genetic variation accounts for at most 12-16% of the variance in educational attainment (years of education measured in a sample of some 3 million participants; Okbay et al, 2022). Moreover, their effects are not direct and include effects of geneenvironment correlation and assortative mating (Meyer et al, 2023 for a review).…”

The Bell Curve at 30: A Closer Look at the Within- and Between-Group IQ Genetic Evidence

“…GWAS and PGS SNP associations may be spurious or non-causal, as, like the earlier candidate gene studies, they are subject to potential environmental confounds and other problems. GWAS/PGS problems and potential biases include population stratification, a lack of individual predictive value, the practice of increasing the sample size to find statistically significant gene associations, that "variation explained by" does not mean "caused by," and the potential fishing expedition aspect of "hypothesis-free" studies in which researchers base their conclusions on statistically significant yet chance associations (see Baverstock, 2019;Burt, 2023;Charney, 2022;Coop & Przeworski, 2022;Gusev, 2023;Joseph & Boyle, 2024;Meyer et al, 2023;Non & Cerdeña, 2023;Richardson & Jones, 2019;Turkheimer, 2016Turkheimer, , 2019Veller & Coop, 2024).…”

'Dysgenic fertility' is an ideological, not a scientific, concept. A Comment on: ‘Stability and change in male fertility patterns by cognitive ability across 32 birth cohorts’ (2023), by Bratsberg & Rogeberg

“…The concept of ‘dysgenic fertility’ stems from eugenic ideology, which was popularized in the ninteenth century by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton [ 1 , 2 ]. Galton and other eugenicists believed that human populations can be ‘improved’ through selective reproduction; encouraging those with ‘desirable’ traits to have children while discouraging reproduction in those with ‘undesirable’ traits.…”