The DNA in these districts is flecked with disadvantage

An interesting update on a field which has many nervous. From The promise and peril of the new science of social genomics by David Adam. Part of the concern is that the large swarth of blank slaters in academia simply refuse to acknowledge variant impact of heterogenous DNA and the capacity of DNA to affect behaviors. That is mostly Luddism mixed with ideological obsession.

The second concern among those who accept genetics, evolution and DNA is milder but still strong. Just how might people misuse new knowledge. It is always a fair question and the plausible scenarios are certainly frightening even though in almost instances, the reality is rarely anywhere new as dystopian as the chatter.

The deep coal mine at the Yorkshire village of Kellingley closed in 2015 — the last of more than 1,000 such pits that once drove British industry. As the mines closed, the jobs went with them. Faced with economic and social decline, many people who could moved away.

Geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui has never been to Kellingley or any of the United Kingdom’s other former coal-mining regions. But he has found something surprising about the towns and their inhabitants. His research shows that the DNA in these districts is flecked with disadvantage, just as the coal seams once threaded through the ground.

By looking at the genomes of people living in former coal-mining areas, he has found genetic signatures associated with spending fewer years at school compared with people outside those areas, and — at weaker significance levels — variants that correlate with lower socio-economic status. Some genetic variants even correlate with political persuasion and whether or not communities voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Abdellaoui, who works at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, acknowledges that he is venturing onto politically charged ground. “I try to understand human genetic variation and this is what I run into,” he says.

The study — published this week in Nature Human Behaviour — is a high-profile example of an emerging trend: using huge amounts of data and computing power to uncover genetic contributions to complex social traits. Studies published in the past decade have examined genetic variants linked to aggression, same-sex sexual behaviour, well-being and antisocial behaviours, as well as the tendency to drink and smoke. In doing such science, geneticists are heading for controversial territory. They have even been accused of “opening a new door to eugenics”, according to the title of a 2018 MIT Technology Review article by science historian Nathaniel Comfort2.

To the geneticists and social scientists doing this work, the results offer a useful and important guide to the relative contributions of nature and nurture to specific behavioural traits — just as genetic analysis can already highlight people who have an increased risk of cancer or heart disease. The approach could, for example, improve understanding of how the environment affects complex traits, and so offer a way to intervene to improve areas such as public education.

“It is super-exciting,” says Philipp Koellinger, a genoeconomist at Vrije University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “It gives us better and more-precise ways for scientists to answer questions they have been interested in for a long time.”

Caveats abound. The genetic contribution to any behavioural trait is relatively small and easily swamped by the influence of the environment. The studies can reveal only whether someone is likely to have a certain trait, and cannot predict the qualities of any one individual. Most scientists are quick to point out why they do this work — to establish what role, if any, genetics has in behaviour — and to lay out its limitations.

Read the whole thing for a useful update.