by runarberg | 2025-09-21 01:05:39+00:00
This was talked about in the book I cited Misbehaving Science. The field of behavior genetics had very lofty promises, claims of 80% heritability were followed by promises of isolating the genes involved and finding cures as soon as it became technologically feasible to do so. Well, now 50 years later, we have the technology, but the promises have failed to deliver, 80% heritability has not resulted in any treatments, or even better understanding other than 80% heritability. I call this a scientific dead end, and is very common among many of the fields Francis Galton started. The science fails to go anywhere beyond the initial predictions.

The response from Behavioral Geneticists has been to simply lower the expectations, now we are looking at 100s of genes encoding a very complex behavior which is only visible if you measure 1000s of people, and is only if you account for the interaction effect with the environmental factors (E + G + E×G) in your model. This is in stark contrast with sociology which has proven it self very worthy as a science (despite the replication crisis mentioned above). We do not treat e.g. autism by isolating the “autism genes” and creating a drug to “cure” it, rather we learn about the symptoms, see which environmental factors trigger unease with autistic people and accommodate them. Unlike behavior genetics, sociology has been able to guide policy which actually helps people out of e.g. poverty, etc. It has been over 100 years since behavior genetics promised us the same, and some of us are done waiting for them to deliver.

> Darwin theories proved to be completely right, yet it took 20 years to be accepted by the scientific community and 50 years to be broadly accepted.

This simply isn’t true. Darwin’s work was immediately accepted. The origin of the species was a best seller, and his subsequent books were as well. There was some question whether natural selection was a strong enough mechanism to properly explain evolution, but that was pretty much it. If anything people like Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer took his theories too far by extrapolating them to sciences where they simply did not apply. If you are interested in this story I recommend reading some Stephen J. Gould he had a habit of setting the record straight for what natural selection wasn’t).

> How else do you justify that smarter people get to be paid more and some specific behaviors are rewarded while others are punished. And how come sociopathic people always find their way to power and get away with many horrible things?

The latter was pretty well explained by behaviorism. In capitalism your clearest way to success is by externalizing cost, if you push your costs onto others you will succeed, if you don‘t you will be outcompeted by those that do. In economics this is called perverse incentives. And is very accurately described using positive reinforcement. The former is explained in sociology where your biggest predictor of success (by far) is your generational wealth. People who are already wealthy are much more likely to succeed in various aspects of society. In sociology there is a point made how rich culture is rewarded in the education system (e.g. knowledge of Mozart is valued higher then knowledge of ABBA).

Sociology and Behaviorism are successful sciences who are constantly producing new predictions, offering new tools, and opening new questions (sociology much more then behaviorism though). Behavior genetics on the other hand has this age old prediction that there exist a gene for this and that, but consistently fails to find the gene that they claimed they would. There is no rich gene, and there is no psychopathic gene. Instead of offering new predictions, based off of new findings and opening new questions, behavior genetics simply scales down their initial claims, and says they will find some interactions between hundreds of genes which predict a slightly higher chance of something showing up in a large enough sample size. Meanwhile they hold tightly into a century old methodology of twin studies and the concept of heritability promising us that heritability actually means something and is actually a useful concept, we just need more time to see the results.

This is the behavior of a dying science. Science that hasn’t offered us anything of use for a long time, and is populated by dinosaurs desperately trying to make a point about a universe which simply doesn’t work the way they think it works.