A Study Tried to Use Genetics to Explain Why People Are Poor
By Dan Samorodnitsky,
VICE
| 01. 24. 2020
It’s tempting to see genes everywhere, lurking in every shadow. For geneticists trying to understand a disease, or Bret Stephens writing an unprompted article about "Jewish genius," genes seem powerful and mysterious, as if they could potentially contain the answer to any of life's questions.
Genetics’ allure can draw people away from more obvious explanations for problems. Here’s a hypothetical. Imagine a poor neighborhood on the side of a highway. If you notice that people living in poor neighborhoods next to highways get asthma more often than rich people across town, you could study their genomes and find some genes common in poor asthmatics. Some of those might even be for genes expressed in the throat and lungs, and then suddenly it seems like poor people are genetically predisposed to having asthma, all while ignoring the much simpler explanation that poor people are breathing in car exhaust while rich people aren’t.
Viewing genes as a determining factor while ignoring larger systemic and societal issues is misleading. For example, scientists recently went looking for a link between individual variations in people’s...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...