Biology and genetics are real things

We should be able to discuss this like adults

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

—Voltaire

I previously worked at a genomics firm, and saw that, in fact, genetics are very real for personalized medicine, assessing disease risk, helping guide reproductive health and informing much of our lives. I even produced a video with someone from my team asking what people know about genetic testing (some know a lot, some not very much). These are actual things we are born with, cannot change, and have material impact on our life and physical health. If you didn’t know, there’s an entire profession of genetic counselors that help patients understand their own genetics.

There are hard limitations for all of us based on our biology, which most people never even reach, but you can get to the high end of performance with some work. For example, you might genetically have the potential to be a certain strength, but you’ll never get there if you don’t lift and exercise. You might have extraordinary raw intelligence gifts, but if you do not do anything with them you just become comic book guy from the Simpsons (brilliant, but applying all his intellect to trivial matters).

When practicing medicine, none of this is controversial. And yet constantly we have people in denial of nature in other areas related to things that impact broader society. Let’s take one example I don’t think should be contentious, but apparently is to some.

Here’s a chart about intelligence and violence from a study at Cambridge. These things are strongly correlated, and it’s one of those “obviously this makes sense” graphs to see. I spoke with an evolutionary biologist friend about this and he agreed without hesitation this data shouldn’t be controversial.

In a study of 6,872 participants, lower IQ was associated with violence perpetration in the UK general population.

The conclusion from the study:

Lower IQ was associated with violence perpetration in the UK general population. Further studies are warranted to assess how low IQ can lead to violence perpetration, and whether interventions are possible for this high-risk group.

No one is saying that any one person is violent. It’s aggregate data, telling a story of human behavior. It also makes sense at a deeply common sense level, as many good studies do. Anyone who went to college has seen enough people get into fights at a game, or gone to a bar and watched who provokes violence. It’s never the smartest people in the room, and in odd cases it might be, their intelligence in that moment was impaired from too much alcohol consumption. But broadly speaking, smart people tend to put themselves at risk for physical harm less, and know the consequences of such actions. They have higher impulse control. They bias to problem solving over violence and aggression, using that only as a last resort.

We accept that there are genetic differences in size, strength, predisposition to cancer and rare disease. Why would we not also understand there are also intelligence differences, and those can lead to different behaviors?

I originally posted that chart to LinkedIn, but ended up deleting it after realizing it was the wrong platform for this kind of discussion. The commenting system isn’t great, and more importantly, LinkedIn isn’t exactly friendly to conversations about biological or genetic realities, which I guess challenge the HR-approved narrative that “we’re all the same.” The backlash was fascinating: several commenters essentially said “how dare I” share such data, and the responses were inappropriate enough that I didn’t want to subject my professional network to them. I could’ve just deleted the comments, but instead decided let’s bring this conversation here, where we can have a discussion without acting like toddlers.

It was also fascinating how some people saw that chart and jumped to try to explain to me other reasons why someone might be violent, and get upset such data exists in the first place. Of course there might be other reasons, too. But the knee jerk attempts to explain away genetics and downplay our differences are telling. It is part of a broader pattern of society that has been told again and again “everyone is the same.” Ironically, the very same people who preach the importance of diversity were upset we dare have a discussion about variances in humanity.

Nature and nurture both matter, at one point everyone was taught this, but somehow we’ve gotten away from the nature part and decided it’s all nurture. It’s both, like many things it’s a multivariate issue, and we shouldn’t discount (a very large, ~60-80% here) part because some people decided they personally don’t like it (as it goes against their church).

If you need more to support the claim that smarter people tend to be less violent:

• A Swedish longitudinal study of over 700,000 men found that lower cognitive ability at age 18 was strongly associated with an increased risk of violent criminal convictions, even after controlling for childhood socioeconomic factors and familial confounders.

• Studies of prison populations show that cell blocks with higher average IQs have lower rates of violence, further reinforcing the negative correlation between intelligence and violent behavior.

• The relationship between intelligence and aggression is also observed in adolescents and young adults, with higher cognitive and emotional intelligence linked to less aggressive behavior.

Humans are not blank CDs. We’re not all the same. And, that’s okay. Different people have different strengths, much of this is grounded in biology and genetics. Many can work to have that matter less, and anyway some with a lesser IQ vastly out-earn those who have far more raw intelligence. Brilliant losers exist (although there is a large body of research showing that, on average, people with higher cognitive ability tend to earn more over their lifetimes). But biology is real, it plays a role in the world, and there are truths tied to this in medicine, economics, marketing, etc. When we started denying that, I’m not sure.

It’s interesting because both the extremes of the left and right deny basic things about physical reality, as Jon Haidt and others point out. This has considerable implications for research, resulting in many studies that are outright fraudulent (replication crisis), less effective policy decisions and so on. Of note there is plenty of replication (and large sample sizes) in the intelligence and violent behavior studies, that data is quite durable.

Context for this image, it’s interesting because it was classically just the right who ignored biological realities, evolution etc.

It’s also fascinating that people on LinkedIn had a small breakdown about the intelligence chart, because while most companies don’t make you take an actual IQ test, top percent companies like FANG have a rigorous application process, and parts of it definitely resemble this sort of testing, or at least give the team a sense of competence, which involves having higher than average IQ. Corporate America absolutely selects for intelligence, and yet oddly some think we may not discuss that topic at all.

Humans are very capable of understanding what statistics mean without using them to nefarious ends or acting like jerks. But we’ve infantilized everyone to be unable to have broader discussions like adults because of some perceived potential to “hurt feelings” or it goes against the church. This is actually quite illiberal and gets us away from being a truth-seeking culture. Knowing realities helps us make better decisions, improve lives and build systems that give everyone the best chances of success.

The problem of modernity is people bring emotions to every discussion and a certain type of data has the potential to challenge their worldview, so it must be made off limits to discuss. But ideas should hold up to scrutiny, it is really only poor ideas that do not, and so it makes sense this is when censorship attempts are made, and truth is seen as ‘a distraction’. But almost no one is trying to make anyone else feel bad. They’re just trying to understand the world as it really is.