Belsky

Belsky If the purpose of the current study is “productive public discussion of the new science of sociogenomics,” why no mention of eugenics?

this research assumes a genes -> environment causality. Did you consider epigenetic possibilities? 

In previous research, the correlation between parent and offspring polygenic scores was estimated to be approximately.6 (Conley et al., 2015)

“This hypothesis of social stratification of genotypes” (implying causality here)

Dunedin Study data confirmed that children with higher polygenic scores had grown up in families with more socioeconomic resources (Krapohl & Plomin, 2016). But the data also showed that even for children born into socially disadvantaged circumstances, higher polygenic scores predicted upward social mobility

Second, our study shows that polygenic scores also influence changes in social position within a single generation, thereby suggesting a mechanism to explain the gene-environment correlation in which children of socially advantaged families tend to have higher polygenic scores (969)

As concerns about economic inequality increase, are genes linked with socioeconomic success becoming concentrated within social and geospatial elites? (970)

And yet debate is already under way about the possibility for genetic testing to someday be used in forecasting human potential. (970)

Let’s grant a straightforward causal relationship between genes and phenotypic expression: that some variations in individuals’ appearance or behaviors are caused directly by variations in their genetic patterns. It would still be a huge leap to suggest that an association between genetic variations and educational or economic success implies that some genes are fitter than others. This leap would leap over the cultural and social nature of human life. No behavior’s meaning is fixed, and certainly not directly “more fit.” We have plenty of examples of arbitrary, genetically-based differences which function as arbitrary signs 

We also have a long history

Such an uninformed analysis is inexcusable in an interdisciplinary context such as school of education. 

 The study says its goal is “productive public discussion of the new science of sociogenomics,” and yet neglects the possibility that genetic differences are expressed as arbitrary phenotypic differences which then become caught up in culturally-defined structures of privilege. This study’s rhetoric fits neatly into past attempts to justify privilege via appeals to nature.

This article reports associations between genes and economic outcomes, mating success, and moving around the world. The logic behind these measures is revealed in the discussion to be an argument for a social darwinist view: 

GWAS findings for educational attainment may provide a clue to the genetic roots of life-history differences in free-living humans. Unlike education, which is a relatively modern human experience, patterns of migration, mate selection, and resource acquisition and management are ancient human behaviors that plausibly bear the imprint of our species’ evolutionary history. The finding that GWAS discoveries for education predict these ancient behaviors suggests a window into genetic regulation of humans’ strategies to survive and reproduce. Our data cannot reveal whether frequencies of education-associated genotypes reflect some Darwinian fitness strategy. Rather, the data suggest that individuals whose genomes carry more education-associated alleles are forging life histories that achieve success in the modern world, and the pathways to this success include some that would be familiar to our ancestors. (969)