Amy Harmon's DNA is not definitive

Before I dig into Amy Harmon's recent NYTimes cover story about exploring her own DNA, two caveat/disclosures:

1. I am not constantly critiquing NYTimes stories in this blog because the Times does a particularly bad job of explaining the science behind genetics, talent and intelligence. As with nearly every subject, they do a much better job than most. I refer to them so often because I that's the daily paper I read, and because it's the paper of record. Because they're so good, they bear the burden of the most scrutiny.

2. Amy Harmon is a great science and technology reporter. I have long admired her work, and have talked to her a few times as she was reporting tech stories over the years. I think we also have some friends in common.

Ok, now onto her piece.

This is a good story that needed to be written. In a light and entertaining way, it begins to illustrate the thicket we're all stepping into as cheap consumer genetic tests become available. For those of you who haven't yet read the piece, Harmon writes about her experience in receiving a state-of-the-art genetic report about herself. From her report, she is able to see if she is more or less predisposed to a number of diseases and traits. This information carries a lot of emotional baggage and a ton of very practical concerns ranging from lifestyle choices to insurability.

But the story also leaves out what I think is the most important part: a true explanation of what "predisposition" and "risks" actually mean in this context. The heart of this story, for me, is when Harmon reassures herself about a supposed genetic disposition for poor verbal memory.

"Should I be recording more of my interviews? No, I decided. I remember what people say. DNA is not definitive."

What does that mean -- that DNA is not definitive? And what does it mean that Harmon has three high-intelligence mutations out of a possible six? What does it mean that her particular gene sequence "meant that I had been eligible for the 6-point I.Q. boost when my mother breast-fed me"? What does it mean that she is 23% more likely than average to have a heart attack?

We need to start with an essential -- and widely misunderstood -- truth about genes. While our number and basic sequence of genes does insure that each of us develops into a human being rather than a hippopotamus, our particular genes themselves do not dictate what we become. They are not individual blueprints of our future brains, bodies, personalities, talents, intelligence, creativity, or athleticism.

Instead, from the moment of conception, we become our individual selves through a dynamic process of interaction between genes and our environment. Genes are not instruction code telling our cells what to do; rather, they are switches getting rapidly turned on and off by external factors. That switching process subsequently tells cells how to behave.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to Michael Meaney, Director of the McGill Centre for the Study of Behaviour, Genes and Environment:

"There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment, and there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. Phenotype emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment. The search for main effects is a fool's errand. In the context of modem molecular biology, it is a quest that is without credibility."

That's what Harmon means when she says "genes are not definitive." It's actually a lot more interesting than that. Genes are just one part of the equation of our lives. They do not give us heart attacks, or Alzheimer's disease, or higher or lower I.Q.'s. It's the gene-environment interaction that leads to those things.

In other words, there is no nature vs. nurture. There is only there is only n N u A r T t U u R r E e , a tangled fusion of the two, inextricably intertwined, catalyzing one another.

So when someone says that DNA is not definitive, that may be the most profound understatement printed in the New York Times all year. When Harmon reveals that she has half the known high-intelligence mutations, this actually tells her absolutely nothing about her intelligence capabilities. Intelligence is something that comes out of a developmental process; it is not an innate ability.

Except for extreme and very limited cases, genes do not limit what we can become. They play an important role, but there's actually no evidence that they set true upper or lower limits on our capabilities. To the contrary, all the evidence seems to indicate that our limitations come out of the developmental process that is our lives.

Which means that Harmon is giving in to myth and not science in this paragraph:

"But I had decided not to submit my daughter’s DNA for testing — at least not yet — because I didn’t want to regard anything about her as predestined. If she wants to play the piano, who cares if she lacks perfect pitch? If she wants to run the 100-meter dash, who cares if she lacks the sprinting gene? And did I really want to know — did she really want to know someday — what genes she got from which parent and which grandparent?"

First of all there is no perfect pitch gene. Musicologists now think that perfect pitch is something available to all or most of us given the right developmental circumstances. More here.

There is also no sprinting gene. There are mutations that, under absolutely-optimal lifestyle and training conditions, will help make some faster sprinters than others. But there is no "predestined" genetic sequence that is going to make her daughter fast or slow.

With very rare exceptions, there is no predestined anything in our lives. Almost none of us will ever know our true limitations in any area unless we push ourselves to extraordinary lengths.

A lot of this probably sounds bizarre to an intelligent audience raised in a nature-vs.-nurture paradigm. Certainly Harmon owes us no apology for her articulate explanation of the science as it has been explained to her. But there's an enormous gap now in what the leading developmental biologists understand and our antiquated popular understanding of what genes do. That's what I'm trying help correct in my book.

Comments

[Donald Yates]

DNA Bloggers:

Elizabeth Hirschman and I have been asked by academic publisher Routledge to edit a multidisciplinary book of essays on evolution, culture, ethnicity and consumer behavior. I am pasting a prospectus.

Let me know if you are interested in making a proposal for an essay and I will send further guidelines. Manuscripts should be about 25-30 pages, double spaced. Proposals are due by September 30, 2008, with a deadline of December 31 for finalized versions.

Feel free to pass this call for papers on to interested colleagues. Suitable proposals will be approved as they are received, so you may submit ideas at any time.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Donald Yates
dpy@dnaconsultants.com

EVOLUTION, CULTURE AND ETHNICITY:
EXPLORING TRIBALISM IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Elizabeth C. Hirschman
Professor II of Marketing
School of Business
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
hirschma@rbsmail.rutgers.edu

Donald N. Panther-Yates
DNA Testing Systems
Scottsdale, AZ 85258
dpy@dnaconsultants.edu

Over the past thirty years, perhaps no other intellectual debate has stirred so much passion in the social sciences than the issue of whether ethnic identity is biological or cultural in origin (Cornell and Hartmann 2007; Ferrante and Browne 2001). From the 1970’s through the 1990’s, the prevailing ideology held that ethnic identity was entirely the product of cultural circumstances: differing historical contexts, variation in power and status relationships, and patterns of interpersonal discourse were seen as entirely responsible for the formation, maintenance and dissolution of ethnic consciousness.
Within this ideology, the tribal and clan aspects of personal and group identity were depicted as negotiable, mutable, and ultimately controllable by the individual and group. Ethnic cultures could be swapped, borrowed, loaned, discarded and adopted through the choice of the individual consuming them. In essence, this view casts ethnicity as an expression of free will constituted on both an individual and collective level (Baumeister, Sparks, Stillman and Vohs 2008).
Yet since the 1990’s and most markedly during the 2000’s, challenges have been mounting toward this ideological monolith from both the social and biological sciences. Within the social sciences, ethnicity has been found to have a remarkable endurance and tenacity, even in the face of what would appear to be non-rational and sub-optimal choices by the groups themselves (Hughey 1998). Further, marked limits to the ease with which ethnic identities may be abandoned, swapped or adopted are being discovered. Do consumers really “choose” to be African-American, Ecuadoran, Hutu, Roma, Japanese or Ashkenazic Jews? Can, say, an Inuit identity be readily exchanged for White Anglo Saxon Protestant ethnicity; would purchasing the possessions usually associated with WASP-hood suffice to complete the transformation?
Perhaps an even more profound challenge to the hegemony of the social constructionist view of ethnicity, however, is emerging from the recent onslaught of evolutionary and biogenetics research (Stone and Lurquin 2007). Investigators have suggested that tribalism may be rooted in evolutionary bonds of kinship recognition and resource sharing (Stone and Lurquin 2007). The impulse toward ethnic affiliation may be more grounded in our species’ genetic legacy than in modern cultural norms and social stratification systems.
For example, biological processes as fundamental as fertility rates have been found linked to degree of kinship, with close cousinage being a strong predictor of both reproductive success and group cohesion. Evolutionary geneticists have suggested that the paternal grandfather determines a child’s eating habits and nutrition, impacting well being, social status and longevity (Kaati et al. 2007). Cognitive categorization procedures have been found to vary depending upon the physical similarity of the person one is categorizing – persons deemed to be “like oneself” are more rapidly recognized as individuals, whereas persons who are judged to be “not like oneself” in appearance are more rapidly categorized by physical characteristics, such as skin color, apparel, hair texture and facial features (Cosmides, Tooby and Kurzban 2003). Thus, the predisposition to form ethnic prejudices may have evolutionary and biological roots (Stone and Lurquin 2007). If this is the case, then the consumption patterns of various ethnic groups may be seen not just as a means of symbolic expressiveness, but as an active effort to form and maintain group boundaries.
The purpose of this volume is to explore these two competing ideologies of ethnicity and identity within a marketing, communications and consumer behavior setting. We explore the following issues:
1. How do race, religion and nationality function in a consumption context? What social markers are the most salient for creating and maintaining racial, religious and national identity among consumers? Under what circumstances do these markers become more or less potent? Under what conditions may they be altered?
2. Can consumer communities – which are based on socially-constructed notions of similarity/affinity – function as ethnic groupings? Are brands truly a viable basis for tribal identity?
3. How are conflicting norms of consumption resolved among persons having multiple ethnic ancestries? Does one ethnic identity always emerge as the ‘dominant’ self? What role do the actions and attitudes of persons external to consumers play in their choice of a dominant ethnic identity?

Contributions are welcome from professionals in the fields of marketing, communications, literature and literary criticism, history, philosophy, genetics, evolutionary biology, paleontology/primatology, sociology, psychology, and ethnic/cultural studies. This interdisciplinary monograph will be published by Routledge in London. Guidelines available from Elizabeth Hirschman at Rutgers Business School hirschma@rbsmail.rutgers.edu.

REFERENCES

Baumeister, Roy F., Erin A. Sparks, Tyler F. Stillman, and Kathleen D. Vohs, (2008),
“Free Will in Consumer Behavior: Self Control. Ego-depletion and Choice”, Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol. 18, 1, pp. 4 – 13.

Cornell, Stephen and Douglas Hartmann, (2007), Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Cosmides, L., J. Tooby, and R. Kurzban, (2003), “Perceptions of Race”, Trends in Cognitive Science, Elsevier

Ferrante, Joan and Prince Browne, jr., (2001), The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall.

Kaati, Gunnar et al. (2007). “Transgenerational response to nutrition, early life circumstances and longevity.” European Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 15, pp. 784-90.

Hughey, Michael, editor, (1998), New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity, New York: New York University Press.

Stone, Linda and Paul Lurquin, (2007), Genes, Culture and Human Evolution, Oxford, Blackwell