Philosophy of Genetics

Reading ability found to be genetic

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Research in Reading, "genetic variability accounted for most of the differences in skills that predicted later reading ability. These skills included understanding the sounds in words, familiarity with letters and verbal fluency." [The quotes here are taken from a review in ABC Science Online.]

"The study of pre-school age twins from Australia, the US, Norway and Sweden followed into their early school years, found genetic variability accounted for most of the differences in skills that predicted later reading ability."

According to Australian researcher Brian Byrne, professor of psychology from the University of New England in Armidale, "we don't know which genes are involved but some of the genes in question affect brain development, maybe even embryonically ... My guess is that in about five years, we will have identified a suite of actual genes that are driving this."

No Gene Left Behind

In America, the conservative Republicans believe there's a natural hierarchy in society.  Some people are born leaders (or born geniuses) and they should be allowed to rise up the social ladder without discrimination, even if they come from a humble background.

Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, believe that anyone and everyone has the innate capacity to become anyone they please, given the right training and opportunity.  They don't believe that some people are "born that way".

Back in 1994, the conservatives Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" in a politically incorrect attempt to advance the conservative viewpoint, which generated mainly outrage, but changed few minds.

So, when he became president in 2001, conservative George Bush decided on a different tactic, to force uniform educational standards and testing, to see whether Herrnstein and Murray were right after all, and whether he could teach the liberals a lesson in the process -- that some people are naturally more motivated to learn (and capable) than others, and that no amount of training can change that.

According to a recent story on NPR, Bush promoted a new "No Child Left Behind" law, which now nears its sixth year of implementation.  Each year, the law "spells out progressively stronger interventions" that schools must undertake, if their standardized test scores fall below a certain threshold.  There is even a loophole in the law that allows for the exclusion of 1 out of every 14 children's test scores -- "Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed."

The NPR story details the lack of progress at Levi Barber Middle School, in Detroit, which "has been on Michigan's list of failing schools for six years in a row."  40% of students there fail to meet the minimum standard test scores for reading and math, and 20% of students are enrolled in special education programs (as compared with, say, 14% in Vermont).

The school has "done just about everything that struggling schools are required to do under No Child Left Behind. Barber has revamped its curriculum, provided a lot more one-on-one tutoring, brought in special advisors and even overhauled the way the school is managed, just like the law requires."

In other words, the schools are perfectly fine, it's the students who don't want to learn.

So does George Bush now have the data he needs to prove Herrnstein and Murray's thesis correct, that some people are born more motivated to learn reading and math than others?  What could liberals do to disprove the theory?  Some commentators blame it on laziness (implying that students could make a different choice, of their own free will).  But as we have seen many times, motivation itself is innate.

A human is a virus's way of replicating itself

A recent article in Discover Magazine claims that viruses may have evolved well before other types of life on earth, and indeed may have "played a key role in inventing the very cells of which humans ... are made. ... Evolution's archvillain looks more and more like its vital and formative force."

When life first arose on Earth some 4 billion years ago, there is a possibility that a large virus entered a bacterium and "harmlessly persisted there", forming the world's first nucleated cell, similar to our own.  In this case, we may be "all decended from viruses".

More shocking, "most of the genetic material on this planet is viruses" and "the better part of the human genome is composed of viral DNA" and "the human genome, considered as a mass, contains more retroviral sequences than actual genes" (a retrovirus like HIV can insert its own genetic material into our own).

So, let's speculate on what this all means!  Instead of thinking of ourselves as being occasionally infected by viruses, we should consider that we are simply a collection of viral genes, cobbled together over billions of years.

Or, perhaps humans are constructed by and for viruses as their own personal playground, battleground, nursery and hospital.  Perhaps we are in the midst of a great war between viral factions, who design their own hosts (such as humans) to inhabit (and discard) for their own purposes.

Followership

This year's Kravis Institute Leadership Conference will focus on "followers" -- those people who seek out leaders with whom they can identify emotionally, and receive approbation and approval from (without whom there would be no need for followers).

As I have repeatedly shown, leaders differ from followers in their genetic traits, which implies that followers have their own distinct genetic variations.  Those variations are responsible for shyness and how high they are able to rise in the social pecking order, before feeling stress, fear and anxiety.

Followers don't seem to mind that leaders like Steve Jobs become billionaries at their expense -- being given a disproportionate share of society's resources due to their genetic differences -- because followers are too busy seeking their approval to notice.

How to become hyper-sociable, through genetics

An interesting article from the Salk Institute shows that having certain gene variants can provide you with the following abilities:

• Enhanced drive to greet and interact with strangers
• Enhanced ability to remember names and faces
• Eagerness to please others, and empathy with others' emotions
• Unusually adept language skills

So far, studies have focused on children with Williams Syndrome, which is so extreme that those children suffer from mild mental retardation.  But a milder form would certainly be desirable to most people.  Pharmaceutical companies should isolate the target, and create a new hyper-sociability drug, a guaranteed best seller, to be sure.

Social Anxiety and Selective Mutism

Social anxiety is not a free choice. It’s estimated that 7 in 1,000 children have "selective mutism" (SM), one type of social anxiety that renders children absolutely silent in public (e.g. they never speak up in class), even when they are normally talkative at home.

According to an article in Time magazine, SM has a strong genetic component because it runs in families. Until about 15 years ago, the condition was known as "elective mutism, which suggests the silence is willful and controlling. It was seen as a power struggle that manifested as a refusal to speak … Now it is characterized as a failure to speak". Until the late 1980’s, SM was falsely attributed to "emotional or physical abuse … even though there was no proof".

So, yet again, the notion of free will is found to be hollow. The interesting question now is understanding how the brain manifests SM. Clearly, a learned ability (i.e. recognizing that one is in a public place) is exploited by the genes, which then switch off another learned ability (i.e. the ability to speak). This implies that the development of the brain decides where to place those abilities, so it can later harness the neurons involved for other purposes.

Another interesting question is determining why the incidence of SM is 7 in 1,000 children.  Over the course of evolution, it must have been determined that having this rate of SM was beneficial to society, in the overall distribution of traits.

Social anxiety is not a free choice. It’s estimated that 7 in 1,000 children have "selective mutism" (SM), one type of social anxiety that renders children absolutely silent in public (e.g. they never speak up in class), even when they are normally talkative at home.

According to an article in Time magazine, SM has a strong genetic component because it runs in families. Until about 15 years ago, the condition was known as "elective mutism, which suggests the silence is willful and controlling. It was seen as a power struggle that manifested as a refusal to speak … Now it is characterized as a failure to speak". Until the late 1980’s, SM was falsely attributed to "emotional or physical abuse … even though there was no proof".

So, yet again, the notion of free will is found to be hollow. The interesting question now is understanding how the brain manifests SM. Clearly, a learned ability (i.e. recognizing that one is in a public place) is exploited by the genes, which then switch off another learned ability (i.e. the ability to speak). This implies that the development of the brain decides where to place those abilities, so it can later harness the neurons involved for other purposes.

Another interesting question is determining why the incidence of SM is 7 in 1,000 children.  Over the course of evolution, it must have been determined that having this rate of SM was beneficial to society, in the overall distribution of traits.