The study of the genes which affect
intelligence could revolutionise education. But, haunted by the spectre of
eugenics, the science risks being lost in a political battle.
The appointment – followed, eight days later, by the resignation – of Toby
Young to the board of the government’s new Office for Students in January was
only the latest in a series of controversial interventions in education for the
self-styled Toadmeister (Young’s Twitter handle). Having established his media
profile on a platform of comments guaranteed to rile the “politically correct”
(sexism, homophobia, that sort of thing), he began to reinvent himself as an
educationalist through his initiatives on free schools – and he has been
raising hackles in that sphere too. Things came to a head late last year when
an article that Young wrote for the charity Teach First on intelligence and
genetics was withdrawn from the organisation’s website on the grounds that it
was “against what we believe is true and against our values and vision”.
Young’s article summarised – rather accurately – the current view on how genes
affect children’s IQ and academic attainment, and concluded that there is
really not much that schools can do at present to alter these seemingly innate
differences.
That affair is now coloured by the disclosure that Young had advocated
“progressive eugenics” as a way to boost intelligence in a 2015 article in the
Australian magazine Quadrant. The flames were fanned by Private Eye’s
account of how Young attended what was widely labelled a “secret eugenics
conference” at University College London that featured speakers with
extremist views.
All this is viewed with dismay by scientists who are researching the role
of genes in intelligence and considering the implications for education. They
are already labouring under a cloud of suspicion, if not outright contempt,
from some educationalists, and interventions by grandstanders such as Young
will do nothing to soften the tenor of the debate. Such polarisation and
conflict should trouble us all, though. Because, like it or not, genetics is
going to enter the educational arena, and we need to have a sober, informed
discussion about it.
Researchers are now becoming confident enough to claim that the information
available from sequencing a person’s genome – the instructions encoded in our
DNA that influence our physical and behavioural traits – can be used to make
predictions about their potential to achieve academic success. “The speed of
this research has surprised me,” says the psychologist Kathryn Asbury of the
University of York, “and I think that it is probable that pretty soon someone –
probably a commercial company – will start to try to sell it in some
way.” Asbury believes “it is vital that we have regulations in place for
the use of genetic information in education and that we prepare legal, social
and ethical cases for how it could and should be used.”
If that sounds frightening, however, it might be because of a wide
misapprehension about what genes are and what they do.
It’s sometimes said that the whole notion that intelligence has a genetic
component is anathema to the liberals and left-wingers who dominate education.
Young reliably depicts the extreme version here, saying “liberal educationalists…
reject the idea that intelligence has a genetic basis [and] prefer to think of
man as a tabula rasa, forged by society rather than nature”. He’s not
alone, though. The psychologist Jill Boucher of City, University of London has
lambasted what she calls “the unthinkingly self-righteous, hypocritical and
ultimately damaging political correctness of those who deny that genetic
inheritance contributes to academic achievement and hence social status”. Teach
First’s suppression of Young’s article contributed to that impression: it was a
clumsy and poorly motivated move. (The organisation has since apologised to
Young.)
Despite this rhetoric, however, you’d be hard pushed to find a teacher who
would question that children arrive at school with differing intrinsic
aptitudes and abilities. Some kids pick things up in a flash, others struggle
with the basics. This doesn’t mean it’s all in their genes: no one researching
genes and intelligence denies that a child’s environment can play a big role in
educational attainment. Of course kids with supportive, stimulating families
and motivated peers have an advantage, while in some extreme cases the effects
of trauma or malnutrition can compromise brain development. But the idea of the
child as tabula rasa seems to be something of a straw man.
That’s backed up by a 2005 study by psychologist Robert Plomin of King’s
College London, one of the leading experts on the genetic basis of
intelligence, and his colleague Sheila Walker. They surveyed almost 2,000
primary school teachers and parents about their perceptions of genetic
influence on a number of traits, including intelligence, and found that on the
whole, both teachers and parents rated genetics as being just as important as
the environment. This was despite the fact that 80 per cent of the teachers
said there was no mention of genetics in their training. Plomin and Walker
concluded that educators do seem to accept that genes influence intelligence.
Kathryn Asbury supports that view. When her PhD student Madeline Crosswaite
investigated teachers’ beliefs about intelligence, Asbury says she found that
“teachers, on average, believe that genetic factors are at least as important
as environmental factors” and say they are “open to a role for genetic
information in education one day, and that they would like to know more”.
Why, then, has there been this insistence from conservative commentators
that liberal educationalists are in denial? It’s just one reflection of how the
whole discussion has become highly politicised as left versus right, political
correctness versus realism. There’s more of that to come.
It may be that people’s readiness to accept innate difference decreases
when it is couched in terms of genes. If so, one reason could be a lingering
association of genes with eugenics – the notion of improving traits in a
population by selective breeding, and perhaps sterilisation, to promote “good”
genes and drive out “bad”.
That bitter stew gets stirred by media-fuelled fantasies about designer
babies and a genetic underclass (see the 1997 movie Gattaca). But I have
a hunch, too, that many detect a whiff of determinism in the current discourse
on genetics: that your genes fix from conception what kind of person you will
become.
The intended counter-piece to Young’s on the Teach First website was
written by Sonia Blandford, dean of education at Canterbury Christ Church
University College and author of Born to Fail?. Blandford was silent
about genes but wrote only about the inequities of a disadvantaged or
lower-class background. So Young and Blandford would have been talking past
each other, while leaving hanging in the air the idea that your genetics could
also leave you “born to fail”.
All too often genes are read as destiny. But in truth there’s rather little
in your genetic make-up that fixes traits or behaviour with any clarity. There
are some genetic diseases that particular gene mutations will give you if
you’re unlucky enough to inherit them. But most traits (including diseases)
that are influenced by genes manifest only as tendencies. If you’re a woman
with a certain variant of the BRCA1 gene, you have an increased risk of
developing breast cancer. But there’s nothing to say that you will.
Partly this is because a lot of traits are influenced by many genes,
interacting and correlating with one another in complex ways that are hard,
perhaps impossible, to anticipate. But it’s also because genes are themselves
influenced by environmental factors, which can cause them to be activated or
suppressed. When it comes to behavioural traits such as intelligence,
prediction from genes is unclear. Brain development is sensitive to genetic
influence, but it’s not completely determined by it. The way the brain gets
“wired” depends on early experience in the womb, childhood and adolescence, and
remains susceptible to environmental influences throughout life.
Quite why genes have acquired this deterministic, and therefore ominous,
aura isn’t clear. I strongly suspect that the rhetoric used to advertise the
human genome project played a big part, promoting the notion that your genes are
“the real you”. DNA sequencing companies such as 23andMe now use this line to
sell their wares. Talking of genes “for” this or that trait reinforces the
impression – there are no genes “for” intelligence, height, breast cancer and
so on, although some genes affect those things. Genetics is now trying to
backpedal out of a hole that, without such hype, it need never have got into.
The result is that the tone of a discussion of innate versus environmental
factors in intelligence is likely to plummet once genes are mentioned. “People
worry about the motives that researchers have for asking these sorts of
questions [about nature and nurture],” says Asbury. “I think eugenics still
casts a long shadow.”
Whatever the reasons, the fact is that almost all research on education and
genes is done within departments not of education but of psychology or
genetics, a point made by the psychologist Stuart Ritchie of Edinburgh
University. As a result, he says, while the science is fairly settled, “the
debate in education is lagging behind”.
****
What does the science tell us about genes and intelligence? For
geneticists, the challenge with any behavioural trait is to distinguish
inherited influences from environmental ones. Are you smart (or not) because of
your genes, or your home and school environment? For many years, the only way
to separate these factors was through twin studies. This is a somewhat coarse
way of controlling for genetic similarity, which entails looking at how the
traits of identical and non-identical twins (who are 100 per cent or 50 per
cent genetically identical, respectively) differ when they share or don’t
share the same background – for example, when they are adopted into different
family environments.
But now it’s possible to look directly at people’s genomes: to read the
molecular code (sequence) of large proportions of an individual’s DNA. Over the
past decade the cost of genome sequencing has fallen sharply, making it
possible to look more directly at how genes correlate with intelligence. The
data both from twin studies and DNA analysis are unambiguous: intelligence is
strongly heritable. Typically around 50 per cent of variations in intelligence
between individuals can be ascribed to genes, although these gene-induced
differences become markedly more apparent as we age. As Ritchie says: like it
or not, the debate about whether genes affect intelligence is over.
If that’s so, we should be able to see which genes are involved. But it has
proved extremely difficult to find them. For many years, extensive efforts to
zero in on the genes underpinning intelligence produced only a few candidates.
Over the past year or so, however, the picture changed dramatically, partly
because of better methods of searching but also because the spread of genome sequencing
has made much bigger population samples available: that’s the key to spotting
very small effects.
None of the genes identified this way are in any meaningful sense “for
intelligence”. They tend to have highly specialised functions in embryo development
– mostly connected to the brain. The influence of a particular gene might
manifest in one or more aspects of intelligence, such as spatial sense,
vocabulary or memory. There may well be hundreds, even thousands of such genes
that make a contribution to intelligence. And people show so many different
cognitive skills, ranging from imagination to an ability to remember historical
dates or do calculus, that it could seem ludicrous to collapse them all to the
single dimension of, say, IQ (see box, overleaf).
Recently, the introduction of a new way of adding up the influences of many
genes, known as a genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), has hugely boosted our
ability to identify the specific genetic variants that contribute to the
heritable component of intelligence. But if so many genes are involved, can we
meaningfully predict anything from someone’s genes about their likely
intelligence? Well, even if we don’t know quite how all those genes function or
integrate their effects, we can search for patterns – just as, although we
can’t know exactly what led some individuals to vote for Brexit, we can make a
fair prediction of how they voted from their age and demographic profile.
GPSs can now be used to make such predictions about intelligence. They’re
not really reliable at the moment, but will surely become better as the sample
sizes for genome-wide studies increase. They will always be about
probabilities, though: “Mrs Larkin, there is a 67 per cent chance that your son
will be capable of reaching the top 10 per cent of GCSE grades.” Such exam
results were indeed the measure Plomin and colleagues used for one recent study
of genome-based prediction. They found that there was a stronger correlation
between GPS and GCSE results for extreme outcomes – for particularly high or
low marks.
We could never forecast anything for sure. In Plomin’s study, the young
person with the second-highest GPS for intelligence achieved results only
slightly above average. That’s not surprising, though: environmental factors
still play an important role. There might be, say, a family problem holding the
child back. Or it may be that the GPS is not in this case an accurate indicator
of potential at all, and the child gets burdened with unrealistic expectation
and disappointment from teachers and parents. So using such measures for
individual prediction could be fraught.
Whatever the uncertainties, though, you can be sure some people will want
this information, just as they currently get their genomes analysed for medical
and genealogical data by private companies. “We predict,” Plomin and
behavioural psychologist Sophie von Stumm wrote in a paper published this
January, “that IQ GPSs will become routinely available from direct-to-consumer
companies.” They say that a GPS analysis – not just for intelligence but for
other traits – can be conducted at a cost of less than $100 per person.
The era of genetic forecasting of intelligence and ability is, then,
already upon us. We now need to grapple with what that might mean for
educational policy. “I believe that GPSs will be a real game-changer for
education and provide a realistic and practical way of using genetics in the
classroom,” says Emily Smith-Woolley, a researcher with Plomin at King’s
College. But how? Nothing here is obvious, for the same reason that no
scientific discovery implies moral inevitabilities: as David Hume put it, there
is a difference between is and ought. “Genetic research has no
necessary policy implications,” says Smith-Woolley. “What policymakers wish to
do with the research is a judgement based on values they do or do not class as
important.”
That helps presumably to explain why those with left-leaning inclinations,
such as Plomin and Asbury, want to see our understanding of genes and
intelligence used to level the playing field by applying a knowledge of
children’s genetic potential to tailor their educational regimes, rather than
persisting with a one-size-fits-all approach.
Toby Young, on the other hand, rejects such notions and favours a
sink-or-swim approach that will (he believes) let the most able rise to the
top: a philosophy far more suited to the instincts of the right. The correct
approach, he argues, is simply to introduce “all children to the best that has
been thought and said” and teach them “to value logic and reason”. And, one
supposes, to pull their socks up.
I’ll hazard a guess that most people, at least among New Statesman readers,
will feel sympathetic to the idea of finding ways to maximise every child’s
potential. This would not be about the vague and contested notion of “learning
styles”, but a more rigorous analysis of how certain genetic profiles respond
better to particular types of problem or environment.
“At the moment we are detecting ‘problems’ only when they are visible, and
at that point they can be detrimental for the child and hard to treat,” says
Smith-Woolley. “Genetics offers the potential for predicting and preventing.
For example, from birth we might be able to tell if a child has many genetic
variants associated with having dyslexia. So why not intervene straight away,
with proven strategies, before a problem emerges?” Whether such a scheme could
work for more subtle aspects of intelligence and learning – whether we could
realistically and reliably use genes alone to predict them, and then tailor
learning strategies to have an impact – remains far from clear.
Moreover, educationalists already know a great deal about what works in
education and what doesn’t, just as good teachers are attuned to the needs of a
child. In their 2014 book G is for Genes, Asbury and Plomin make several
sensible suggestions on education policy; but all of them – giving struggling
children support without belabouring labels, teaching “thinking skills”,
personalising and broadening the curriculum – could have been made without
recourse to gene-based arguments. Might a fixation on genes be a red herring
when there’s much more in education that we could fix now to far greater
effect? Do we really need yet another way of testing and classifying children?
Asbury and Plomin say that eventually we will have a device that cheaply
and quickly analyses a child’s DNA – what they call a “Learning Chip” – to make
a reliable genetic prediction of “heritable differences between children in
terms of their cognitive ability and academic achievement”. This idea will send
a chill down the spines of many parents, who might fear that children will be
branded for success or failure from birth.
Yet, according to Stuart Ritchie, some studies have shown that when IQ
tests are used in this way they may identify more bright children among
disadvantaged and ethnic minorities than teachers do. Even with the best will in
the world, teachers may have cognitive biases that could influence the
assessment of such groups. An objective test of academic potential based on a
readout of a child’s genes might help to avoid such ingrained prejudices. And
discrepancies between prediction and outcome could flag up cases where children
are being held back by circumstance, or could help us learn from children who
excel despite apparently unexceptional genetic endowment.
Plomin, Asbury, Smith-Woolley and their co-workers – Toby Young is a
co-author on the paper too – have recently caused a stir with another
demonstration of how genetic analysis may inform educational practice. Using
GPSs from nearly 5,000 pupils, the report assesses how exam results from
different types of school – non-selective state, selective state grammar, and
private – are correlated with gene-based estimates of ability for the different
pupil sets. The results might offer pause for thought among parents stumping up
eyewatering school fees: the distribution of exam results at age 16 could be
almost wholly explained by heritable differences, with less than 1 per cent
being due to the type of schooling received. In other words, as far as academic
achievement is concerned, selective schools seem to add next to nothing to the
inherent abilities of their pupils. Again, politics informs conclusions. For
the Conservative peer and science writer Matt Ridley this research affirms the
futility of the left’s desire to “wish away” the role of genes in ability. For
Asbury it shows that there is nothing to commend grammar schools, which merely
cream off the best pupils without enhancing their innate capabilities.
All the same, Asbury avers that genetic assessment will only ever be an
accessory to, and not a replacement for, existing methods of teaching and
evaluation. “While genetic information can’t tell us everything,” she says, “it
can indicate risk and might catch some kids that other indices, focused on more
economic measures, miss.”
Those “economic measures” alert us to one of the most controversial issues:
whether the well-established correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and
measures of intelligence or achievement have a genetic component. Obviously there’s
a strong environmental influence – rich kids go to the best schools,
middle-class families have the resources to help with homework and go on
cultural visits – but is that the whole story? To put it bluntly, might some
children remain socially immobile because of their intelligence-linked genes?
It’s an uncomfortable thought, but the evidence seems clear: “SES is partly
heritable,” Asbury and Plomin say. Genes can explain 40 per cent of the
variability in people’s job-related status, and 30 per cent of income
differences. In a 2016 study using GPSs, Plomin and colleague Eva Krapohl found
that about half of the correlation between educational achievement and SES of
British 16-year-olds could be ascribed to genetic factors.
If we put it in everyday terms this isn’t seem surprising. People with
genetic learning disabilities face bigger obstacles than the rest of us to
becoming socially and economically secure, while very smart people from poor
families have a better chance of climbing the ladder. Still, it’s disturbing to
see it spelt out in hard data: social mobility is not all a question of
inequality
of opportunity. Our social structures may well exacerbate these genetic
influences – for example, in terms of how we choose to award status.
“We prioritise academic goals such as university entry to such an extent
that good goals that are less ‘intelligence-loaded’ are not encouraged,” says
Asbury, “and the children for whom they would be a good fit, leading to life
satisfaction, pride, fulfilment, happiness, are under-nurtured.” Psychologist
Wendy Johnson, a sceptic about how useful genetics can be in education, concurs
with that sentiment: “A big reason intelligence test scores are so associated
with all the ‘good things’ in life are because we reward its display.”
With unerring instinct, Toby Young seized on the most inflammatory way to
frame this discussion: Bring up the E-word. But he did so not in quite in the
way you might think. To read some media reports of his 2015 article on
“progressive eugenics”, you might imagine he was advocating eradication of the
IQ-deficient poor. On the contrary, he was pointing to the possibility that de
facto eugenics might arrive soon in the form of people using genetic screening
of embryos in IVF to select for those with the best intelligence profile. When
such technology arrives, said Young, it should be made available freely to
poorer people to avoid a widening divide in intelligence between the haves and
have-nots. Indeed, he said, it should then be welcomed as a means of raising
the intelligence of the whole of society – surely a morally valid goal?
Is that scientifically possible, though? With intelligence thinly spread
across so many genes, many of which have other functions too, is it realistic
to think of selecting for intelligence? That’s not clear. “Any form of eugenics
is nonsensical from a scientific view, as well as being abhorrent from a
social, ethical and moral point of view,” says Asbury. But Ritchie points out
that some intelligence-linked genes also relate to other characteristics we
might consider beneficial, such as reduced chance of depression, obesity and
schizophrenia. He also says that some rough-and-ready estimates suggest “you
could get a pretty good benefit” in intelligence (on average)
from selection.
Embryo selection for intelligence is illegal in the UK under current
regulations. But it’s unlikely to be made illegal everywhere in the world.
Besides, Ritchie adds, in the West we already permit some degree of
intelligence selection in reproduction – for example by licensing sperm or egg
banks stocked by Ivy League graduates, and conversely by allowing for Down’s
syndrome screening.
The irony with the furore over Young’s eugenics musings, says Ritchie, is
that moral philosophers and bioethicists have already been discussing these
issues for a long time. That’s not to exonerate Young but to say that the
debate would be better served by turning to more serious minds than those of
incontinently provocative liberal-goaders. It’s a debate we can’t shirk. “I
feel a sense of anxiety that we’re not having it already,” Ritchie says.
In this fraught arena, we each need to place our cards on the table. As I
watch my daughters’ local state schools work wonders with a pupil intake of
hugely mixed ability and background, I can plainly see how significantly a
child’s environment, such as the family circumstances and teacher’s skills, can
impact on his or her attainment. So I believe that educational outcomes are
partly determined by circumstances. At the same time, as a child of an
unprivileged lower-middle-class family who found himself with an anomalously
high IQ – for which, unearned and unsought, I feel neither pride nor
embarrassment – I can see what advantages a lucky roll of the DNA dice can
bring.
If research on genes and intelligence helps both to reduce the injustices
of environment and release the full potential of every child, I would welcome
its consequences. It is by no means certain that it will do either; a possible
outcome is that it becomes an unwelcome distraction from addressing immediate,
soluble problems in education, and that it might even exacerbate inequality. I
do believe, though, that collectively we can and must decide which outcomes we
want – and that the first step is to look without prejudice at the facts.
****
How is intelligence measured?
The notion of an “intelligence quotient” (IQ) was introduced over a century
ago as the ratio of mental age (in terms of intelligence) to chronological age.
A ten-year-old child with an IQ of 120 has a mental age of 12, say. But there
are all sorts of questions about what that means.
After all, IQ testing can be coached, IQ changes over time, and average IQ
has been increasing over time. “Intelligence” is here in any case a somewhat
emotive, prejudicial and, arguably, narrow term for what IQ is meant to
measure, which is general cognitive ability. Yet what the notion of IQ reflects
is the well-established fact that people who score well in one type of
cognitive test tend to do well in others: there’s something generalised about
such abilities.
The flaws of IQ testing have been wellrehearsed, not least the accusation
that it is culturally biased. And it hasn’t yet fully expunged the stain of its
use to guide ideas about eugenic sterilisation in the UK and the US in the
early 20th century. But IQ seems to measure something meaningful. There are,
for example, clear correlations between people’s IQ scores and their academic
attainment, as well as their success in later life and their general well-being.
One response is: big deal. Our culture, you might argue, has simply elected to
reward those aspects of intelligence that IQ measures, so it’s a
self-fulfilling prophesy.
IQ tests might tap a host of cognitive abilities, but not qualities such as
empathy or loyalty that carry less guarantee of reward. Studies of genes and
intelligence should not, then, be divorced from a much wider debate about what
gets valued and nurtured in school and in life. The University of York
psychologist Kathryn Asbury agrees with those criticisms, but she believes
nevertheless that IQ is a worthwhile metric. “To my mind it is the jewel in
psychology’s currently rather tarnished crown. It is reliable, robust, stable
over decades and predictive of most of the things we care about.”
And it’s not just about measuring how good you are at spatial puzzles and
mental arithmetic. “IQ correlates with other aspects of a person such as
personality or motivation, and these factors are likely to make a difference to
education and life outcomes, too.” The problem is not the use of IQ testing but
how it is interpreted. IQ, Asbury and Robert Plomin say, is “just one predictor
of achievement – albeit a strong one”.
Philip Ball’s most recent book is “Beyond Weird: Why
Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different” (Bodley
Head)
https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/04/iq-trap-how-study-genetics-could-transform-education
