In 2012, NPR reported the startling news that a fancy preschool on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would require its little applicants to “submit to DNA analysis.” The school’s headmaster defended this choice by explaining that she was looking for genetic markers that predict intelligence, confidence and leadership.
At least a few listeners reacted with outrage, before realizing the date: April Fools! But someday soon, Dalton Conley asserts in “The Social Genome,” his mind-twisting journey into “a new science of prediction,” such “biologically informed” policies won’t be a joke. Today, all sorts of institutions and people are already selecting us (or not) based, at least partly, on our DNA.
Conley is a trained sociologist who once turned up his nose at biology-as-destiny, but eventually found a middle path. He is a founding member of the field of sociogenomics, which uses data from genomic screening to understand the complex interplay between our genes and our environment in shaping who we become. Your genes steer you toward or away from certain people, places and things; other people’s genes steer them to or away from you, and, out of this complex dance, emerges your social environment.
It’s nature and nurture; as Conley writes: “the social genome deletes the versus,” creating what he calls the Möbius strip of our lives. From genomic studies, scientists have developed the polygenic index, or PGI, a way to score the likelihood of a wide range of genetic outcomes. If you can measure a trait, Conley insists, you can get a PGI for it. Will you be pretty, will you be rich? The PGI can tell you.
PGI is complicated enough, but the really tricky stuff comes as our DNA interacts with the environment. “The Social Genome” will have you pondering all the genes and judgments that drove what you presumed were random coincidences, hard-won successes and measured choices — choices made by you, but also about you.
Parents turn out to be important for more than just the genes they pass along. One of Conley’s studies, for example, found that they unconsciously directed more “positive” parenting — reading stories, playing — toward children who have a higher-than-usual PGI for educational attainment, reinforcing their natural-born potential.
Positive responses to genetic attributes earlier in life can also end up predicting other positive responses down the line. Conley asserts that colleges like Princeton, where he teaches, accept students based on their beauty, height, body mass index and charm, even if there’s never any interview, because all the people those beautiful and charming students have met up until the moment they hit “send” on their applications have already responded to those traits by bestowing the students with other advantages.
“Even if admissions officers are trained to ignore” these qualities, he writes, “the rest of society has not gotten the memo.”
This infinite conspiracy between genes and environment reinforces homophily — the human tendency to seek out and stick with those like us. In particular, and increasingly, when it comes to income: The advantaged mingle with the advantaged, the disadvantaged with the disadvantaged.
The resulting social inequality is one of Conley’s main concerns, and in his ideal world, the federal government might, say, send more money to schools where students have a low PGI for educational attainment.
But leaving aside the question of whether such funding survives President Trump’s plans to eradicate the Department of Education, it’s far more likely that the people who benefit from PGI optimization are the people already benefiting from a genetic advantage for income and smarts.
Conley recognizes this, and maybe his publisher is banking on it: Publicity materials bill the book as allowing us to “analyze DNA to broadly predict a child’s future,” and you can imagine parents snatching it up as a how-to. (Trying for a child with his wife, Conley himself writes, he asked a fertility specialist to sequence the genomes of their batch of embryos and thus create the first PGI-optimized baby, but somebody else beat him to it.)
Conley eventually warns his readers against investing too much faith in the predictive power of PGI, or worse, using it to create castes based on genes. PGI is a “noisy” predictor that may be picking up all sorts of other environmental influences that we can’t see. It also can’t predict across racial and ethnic groups.
I wish he’d acknowledged more of the limitations of the genomic studies behind the PGI: Early on, the results were hard to replicate, and more skeptical scientists warn that they may, for instance, implicate irrelevant genes in causing disease, encouraging false hope for easy cures. Conley’s readers might miss these caveats, too caught up in wondering which set of alleles led to their rejection from Princeton.
But let’s say PGI can be refined and there are no castes, because everyone is genetically optimal. Even then, there might be cause for concern. In “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire,” Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, argues that we as a species have already optimized far too much and become so homogenous in our genetic makeups as to put ourselves on the brink of extinction.
In his dire prophecy, at once chatty and ambitious, Gee moves across hundreds of thousands of years of genetic evidence to explain the rise and fall of Homo sapiens. Earth once boasted at least nine human species, but when only one remained to spread across, change and dominate the natural environment, humanity lost a lot of genetic diversity. “There is more genetic variation in a troupe of chimpanzees in Africa,” Gee writes, “than in the entire human species.” We also overexploited the Earth’s natural resources, narrowing the genomes of the things we eat. We now rely on a smaller number of crops than ever before, leaving our food supply ever more susceptible to disease, the vagaries of weather and geopolitical conflict.
In our increasingly small and interconnected world, financial shock and disease both travel faster: Viruses and bacteria, unimpeded by quirky pockets of biological difference, will hit everything at once. That’s why optimizing for educational attainment or the perfect ear of corn could spell our end, even if we manage to avoid the fallout from global warming or nuclear war. We need genetic “sparring partners,” Gee insists, if we hope to survive.
Gee thinks the best way forward is to seek another world, beyond Earth, where new human species could develop. Start with the moon. Or maybe the inside of an asteroid, after it’s been mined of its wealth of mineral resources. Gee posits that the hollow husk of one largish asteroid could absorb at least the population of Canada — talk about a 51st state!
We must move fast, he argues: Extinction may be 10,000 years off, but we only have about two centuries to design these new space colonies, because as the population declines, so will our capacity for technological innovation.
Gee mentions the colonization of space so casually in his prologue that you might take it for another April Fools’ joke. When he returns to it near the end of his book, he leaves the details somewhat loose. He envisions artificial photosynthesis to fuel new sources of food, and a system of solar panels, optical fibers and mirrors to deliver sunlight: “There is no reason it shouldn’t be as bright as day.”
He raises but does not answer political questions, too: Might countries go to war over disputed mineral-rich territories in space? Might tech trillionaires decide to fund private colonies there? Of course, you think. Can we dismiss anything as a joke anymore?
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