Why Is Behavioural Genetics A Hated Science? - Dr Stuart Ritchie

Candidate gene research. This particular gene is related to depression. This particular gene is related to memory skills and so it makes you smarter. Endless research on that. Loads and loads and loads of papers published across all the top journals. Millions of dollars of research funding. People basing their entire careers, writing their PhD dissertations, doing job talks, getting employed at top universities on the basis of this candidate gene research. And it was all nonsense. (air whooshing)

Given your current academic background at the moment, can you explain to people why you think it is that behavioral genetics has so much distaste, distrust, dislike, generally?

There's a lot of different reasons. I think, uh, the main reason is some kind of a, a misconception about what it actually means to say that behavioral traits are related to genetics. So, uh, I think when people hear that, especially when the trait itself is controversial, like you can get into a whole debate about intelligence or personality without even mentioning genetics. You know, pe- people, people g- get upset by just, you know, mentioning those, those traits. But when you say they're linked to genetics, people make lots of assumptions. People think they know your politics. They think they know, like, what you, what you're trying to say, what you're trying to, like, slip under the, you know, uh, uh, under people's, uh, under, under the radar, under people's notice. Um, and those assumptions are things like, well, if it's related to genetics, it must be completely unchangeable. Uh, if it's unchangeable, then we don't need to do anything about our political situation, uh, uh, and we don't need to, you know, help people out. Uh, and people are just stuck like a tram on a tram line. They can't, they can't turn off or change or, or anything like that. And, uh, uh, you, you... If, if you're interested in behavior genetics, you must be using it to justify our current political situation. So, I think, I think that, that, like, that's one of the major assumptions, like immutability, the, the, the fear of immutability. Um, uh, uh, and that's of course not what behavior genetics says at all. Behavior genetics is about trying to understand, you know, how things are right now, not necessarily how things might be if we change things in the future, um, uh, or indeed they, i- if they may have been different in, in, in the past. We have lots of interesting studies of how, like, the genetic contribution to things, uh, uh, differs across different times and different places and different political regimes even. There's some interesting research on communist regimes and how that might have affected the, uh, uh, the, the, the heritability of traits. We can, we can talk-

How so? Yeah, t- tell us about that.

Well, there's some research, uh, in, uh, Estonia, which obviously used to be a, a communist, uh, uh, country. And, um, uh... So yeah, this is a, this is a research using a polygenic score, which, uh, your viewers may be familiar with from, uh, hearing your interview with Robert Plomin, uh, one of my, one of my colleagues, uh, here at King's College London. Um, uh, and so the idea is that you look at the genetic contribution to various traits and educational attainment being the, being the main one, um, before and after communism in Estonia. So that was, that was... It's just this incredibly cool paper that, that was done. Um, would be nice if it was replicated and stuff, but this is, you know, it's an interesting, it's an interesting, uh, uh, uh-