Jay Joseph on Heritability

The latest post by Jay Joseph at Mad in America is a good rundown of heritability:  Are DSM psychiatric diseases 'Heritable'?

Even when heritability is high, or even when it is 100%, a simple environmental change or intervention can have an important preventative or curative impact. In most cases, therefore, heritability estimates tell us nothing about the potential effectiveness or non-effectiveness of an environmental intervention, or to what extent a psychological characteristic is or is not changeable.

Rutter cited flamingos as an example of gene-environment interaction. He noted that both genes and environment play a crucial role in the ability of flamingos to turn pink, and that “you could feed seagulls for ever on the same diet and they would never turn pink.” He concluded that “it would make no sense to say that flamingos’ color was 50 percent due to genes and 50 percent due to diet. It is 100 percent due to genes (which have to be present) and 100 percent due to the environmental diet (which has to be present).”

As an example of how heritability estimates do not measure the “strength” or “magnitude” of genetic influences, imagine “Country A,” where all citizens (100%) carry the gene predisposing them to favism (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency), a disease marked by the development of hemolytic anemia. Favism is caused by an inherited deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate located on the X chromosome, combined with the consumption of fava (broad) beans or the inhalation of fava bean pollen. In other words, both “beans and genes” are necessary for favism to appear. Let us then imagine that 3% of the citizens of Country A, all of whom are of course genetically predisposed to develop favism, consume fava beans and are subsequently diagnosed with favism. 

In this case, because all citizens carried the gene but only some ate fava beans, all favism variation in Country A would be caused by environmental factors (fava bean exposure), and the heritability of favism therefore would be 0%. At the same time, it obviously would be mistaken to conclude that genes play no role in developing the disease in Country A, or that the genetic influence is weak or irrelevant. A genetic predisposition is, in fact, a prerequisite for developing favism.

On the other extreme, in “Country B,” 100% of the citizens eat a diet that includes fava beans, but only some citizens carry the favism gene. All favism variation in Country B therefore would be caused by genetic factors (carrying or not carrying the gene), and the heritability of favism in Country B would be 100%. As we see, heritability estimates assess variation as opposed to cause, and do not at all indicate the strength or weakness of the genetic influence—or by implication the strength or weakness of the environmental influence.In the above example, the heritability of favism is 0% in Country A, and 100% in Country B, even though the causes of favism are the same in both countries. As Moore concluded, “Because heritability statistics are about accounting for variation and not about causation, they do not actually reflect the strength of influence of genes on the development of a trait, even if it seems like they do.

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I have tried to give examples of both of the above in terms of behavioral analysis previously on this blog. Social behaviors are far messier than the fava bean example. So, when we turn to something like introverted/extroverted and start trying to understand and analyze behaviors (and I do find it best to turn such psychological trait into behavior speak), trying to tease apart what exactly genes are coding for in these examples becomes absurd. Furthermore, like the fava bean example, when we radically alter a social condition, analogous to replacing fava bean consumption with wheat consumption, we can radically alter behavioral expression. We can make it so that a “psychological trait,” or whatever genetically is structuring that psychological trait, such as introversion/extroversion, play a much different role in the life, identity, self of any individual.

On a simpler note, we have beliefs about identity, about why we are the way we are. So much of our identity becomes essentialized in the world. It becomes simply the way that “I am.” And to that all-encompassing personal gaze, it is all that it ever sees its self as. That is, having a self that has arisen in a socially contingent environment, its reflection on its own characteristics within such an environment gives us great difficulty in imagining a self, and thus behaviors, that would have arisen in our body given a vastly different environment. Similarly, parents have a difficult time understanding the contingent social factors that lead their girls to like pink, for example. Instead, they rely on a constant, consistent interaction and behavior anticipation that encourages them to see this as simply always an aspect of their child's identity. Perhaps the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is a pipe dream.

An example: You give me the right social matrix, and any set of genes will by necessity be a “wide receiver” within that social environment. That is, we may have reared apart identical twins that both bizarrely go on to be wide receivers, to exhibit “wide receiver” behaviors. They may, as well, have many other coexisting behaviors. But our inference about what exactly genes are encoding for within these two individuals is of course barren. If other complex factors go with the “wide receiver” social function, such as lack of school study and very high praise from social groups, then we may have further characteristics that are seemingly similar in these twins. Of course, the only things that were structured by the genes may have been that they would be (with certain environmental minimums) a 6'3” individual that runs very fast.

There is good reason to believe that identity and self-models complexly interact with the world they inhabit. But there are surely similar structuring factors. Thus, we can see the similarity of the identity and self models that have been internalized by our two wide receivers above. That is, there is good reason to believe that these individuals will exhibit other similar identity characteristics. This is especially true given environmental overlap, such as the fact that a certain group of 8-year-olds will be influenced by the movie Shrek at the same time and at similar developmental stages, and will thus hear the same message at a similar stage of development about how to treat ugly looking people (?). Or, better still, as budding 13-year-old star wide receivers, our twins above both internalize the public role models currently exhibiting “wide-receiver” behavior at that exact moment. Also important, all their friends and teammates also learn what it is to be a star wide receiver, and how one should “treat a star wide receiver.” This is of course some standard sociological theory from the likes of Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Berger and Luckmann. But, the key here is that the analysis of the identity and behaviors of these two twins (including most behavioral and emotional elements) will be far better told by asking about the interplay between socially contingent structures along with genetic factors. The final stories about why any given individual shows behavior X is going to be far more parsable within such an analysis than it is by many of the behavioral claims of the geneticists, of evolutionary psychologists (see this latest Guardian article about genes for sexuality). The messiness with heritability claims as shown above is but one slice of why genetic behavioral techniques and claims are problematic.

Comfort on Genetic Engineering

Well said by Nathaniel Comfort at the Nation and at Genotopia.

“Here’s why: Sci-fi genetic fantasies, whether hand-waving or hand-wringing, divert our attention from other, more important determinants of health. Studies by the World Health Organization, the federal Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and academic researchers leave no doubt that the biggest factors in determining health and quality of life are overwhelmingly social. Genetics plays a role in disease, to be sure, but decent, affordable housing; access to real food, education, and transportation; and reducing exposure to crime and violence are far more important. In short, if we really wanted to engineer better, happier, healthier humans, we would focus much more on nurture than on nature.”

I am in general agreement about social structures being a better, more robust line of attack for helping almost all people, for changing societies.

I see the fear of genetic changes as overstated as well. I agree that the cultural zeitgeist of genetic determinism leads to some current social conservatism. But surely both flowers can bloom. The genetic knowledge and manipulability that we are acquiring does not preclude making important social changes. Quite frankly, better genetic understanding should eventually lead to the call for greater and more precise social changes (assuming my understanding is right). Furthermore, there are many reasons for our rather conservative present, with genetic claims being but a small fraction of that.

This leads to the next point: Pushes for massive (but well-intentioned) changes to social structures can be just as damaging as pushes for genetic changes. Genetic alteration should not be placed in some anathema category of unacceptable anymore than social alterations. Perhaps we fear one from past eugenics movements, while others we fear from “argument from USSR” or from cult-like entities. The overreaction to both leads to dead ends, to poor social results and thus to poorer lives lived. Of course, some people took the failures of socialism to give us lessons about human nature (thus genes), which were really bad arguments.

I know I am not making much of an argument strictly for genetic engineering. But I do have confidence present day Germany or the US would harbor genetic technologies without reproducing stupidities of the past. Making sure no individual is born blind today or in the future is not casting aspersions on blind people or putting roadblocks to their living good lives today. The inequality argument is powerful, but (read Comfort above) our most pointed inequalities are happening for social reasons, ones that hopefully we eventually change. I would hope such changes would ensure more equal access to genetic technologies.  

This all brings me to: I am enjoying Peter Watts' scifi, very sciency, Blindsight.

Mental Imagery (or why most people are lying)

Every now and then the issue of mental images takes me in. In general it is an understudied and underdetermined conceptual schema. I get the feeling that it is just terminological and conceptual confusion. I will grant that it is one's own mental image, but we can still ask certain questions that clear the air. Here are the pointed questions that takes care of some confusion, but they are often not asked or illucidated within such discussions:

• Are your conjured mental images as robust as real life images? If you create a mental image of an apple, is it as detailed and vivid as looking at an apple on the table? (I find most people deny this when pressed.)
• What is the relationship between dream images and mental images? Are your consciously created mental images as strong as dream images?
• Do your dream images seem as real as everyday real images?

I find in these discussions that people who claim they have mental images usually leave it baldly stated (“Yes, I have mental imagery”) and do not state what exactly they are experiencing. Often, if such people are pressed, they will allow that such images are not as vivid as dream images, or some people will say they do not have dream images as vivid as everyday life.

My general taxonomy here encourages me to say that all perception is mental imagery. When you look at an apple on the table, you have a mental image of that apple as mediated through sensory content. In a dream you (or I at least) have mental images of an apple, seemingly the same as if you are looking at it in real life. If in waking thought I try to create a mental image of an apple, I create nothing that is like the real life image or dream image of an apple.

I can accept that we need image-like or representational talk for much of our brain processing (see Damasio, for instance). My concentrating on a virtual apple allows me to do all sorts of things. It can instigate knowledge about apples, or instigate sensations of hunger and other emotions. I accept that my trying to image an apple is using and reproducing some underlying processes of “apple representing,” that it is using some "image-like" process broadly speaking. There is certainly a street from past immediately perceived imagery, to memory, to present recalling of that past image. When I have a night-dream image of a face I saw today (a perceived image that I had earlier), the image structures in the night-dream is similar as the earlier perception because the “picture” structures are in my head, so to speak. When I close my eyes and try to imagine that face, I am tapping into those “picture” structures and therefore can remember features of such a face or object.

I also admit that there are (at least) two other classes of people. On one hand there are people who have significant processing deficiencies or significant imagery deficiencies. There may be people who do not dream at all. Or there may be people who have significant perceptual and consciousness difficulties, such as blindsight. On the other hand, there may be people who have really strong hallucinations of non-existent phenomena. We should also say that psychostimulants or other conditions create robust images in some unusual way.

But back to the idea that there is a large percentage of people that have robust daydreamed mental imagery and another large (but supposed minority) percentage of people who do not have these mental images. The papers, the wikipedia pages, the Stanford Encyclopedia, and blogs that I have read do not give me confidence that this is anything more than two classes of people who are not expressing their selves in useful and coinciding ways. I will fully admit that fault may lie with me (and others who follow my schematization). That is, it may be that my seeming “darkness” of thought holds imagistic and representational processes that I access when doing my best to think about my house, and that these processes and thoughts may be worthy of the name image. I also agree that in some conceptualized way we may need to refer to what is happening in my brain as an image. That is, there may be brain processes that are relaying information about object structures. If daydreaming processes are giving information that is robust, such that those processes provide rich detail (so that I know or can imagine redecorating every wall of my house, and this provides further information), then it may be prudent to say that almost all individuals, including my self, have mental imagery.

As it stands, if I try to image an apple it is nothing like the vivid image of directly perceiving a real apple, and it is nothing like the vivid image of dreaming of an apple. I question that most people's phenomenology is that different from mine. It seems far more parsimonious to me that most people have rather similar experiences and instead we have had some stupid language and expression problem. If someone has a good study or a good way of explaining what they experience in their mental imagings, I am all ears.

(My latest perusing led me to Eric Schwitzgebel's account, which gels well with the issues I raised above.)

More on Evolutionary Psychology

Some remarks by Jonathan Marks: Evolutionary Psychology is Neither.

I had a long response in the comments that I will share here. I have said much of this before, but dealing with and understanding the social emotions is one of the common themes in the solidification of our social world.

My response to Mark Sloan, which is really a response to Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind):

Your (Haidt's) stance on the social emotions is precisely the problem. The idea that “shame” stands as some given is dicey, and likewise with most social emotions. Even if there is some strong basic emotion that people feel upon some social encounter, we can imagine a cultural world that downplays or systematizes out the responses to those emotional reactions. More still, we can imagine such a world that thoroughly recognizes the manifestation of such emotions within individuals and teaches individuals, as responses but also as social programs, to turn around and shrug off such emotions, and especially not to allow such emotions to create further social programs.

So, maybe in some bare sense “shame” would still be there, but its effects and lasting cognitive and emotional effects would be far different than under most of what we encompass in our social minds when thinking about shame. But this goes to show that even things like basic emotions are wrapped up in institutions and cultural mediation to produce reactions and further emotions in ways that we often assume are just part of what “shame” has to be. The reflective and social building creatures that we are do not have to pay homage to such emotions. In many ways we have done just that where we see fit. However, I will grant that these emotions have played into the dialectical build up much of our social and personal worlds, and thus into how we feel shame while living in this society.

You run into troubles by failing to imagine such a differing society, or in claiming that such a society would not be highly productive and enjoyable to live in (moral in general terms). You may be making an argument that you would not want to live in such a society, or think that trying to achieve such a society is dangerous, but the failure in imaging such a world leads to a bad description about human beings, which is what we are doing here, describing the world. 

The moral of the story is that pretty much any definition or conception of “shame” will not be able to parse out contingent social factors without thoroughly defacing the concept. There is a great difference in the bare mechanisms that exists in the natal brain/body (DNA) and how that gets played out in any adult. Evo. Psych's problem is really psychology's problem. By taking certain “mental traits” as given human qualities, instead of understanding their mechanistic underpinnings, they believe that such mental characteristic are necessitated, when in fact there are many environmentally and culturally mediated contingencies that fold into such expression. Much of psychology, by cataloguing their own personal milieu of “traits” and those in the society around them, take the givenness of those traits as essential. They make this mistake because they stayed far away from actually understanding the mechanisms that give rise to such behavioral expression. And, thus, we end up with traits that are overly salient given the mechanistic underpinning. It is of course then a mess when we turn back to history for an explanation of a given entity that is not as robust a concept as was assumed.

One of the keys is that an emotion is a brain/body process, but you (and Haidt) then want to say that this evolutionary inspired given emotion is what is producing “phenomenally cooperative social animals” in the present day, which has to do with actions taken and events produced. In the end, all thoughts and decisions are emotionally mediated, but there is a gap between a generic emotional tendency (e.g. shame) and the behavior and outcomes manifested by such a tendency. The reason why you can conflate the emotion with the action, and think this is a good explanation of humans, is the failure to imagine the social world that tears the two apart, which may be unlike any society we have laid eyes on. Failing to do this is why psychology now has an empty concept of shame. So, you either have to explain the contingent social factors that fold into shame, or you are left with a conception of shame in some bare mechanistic structure that is a shell of our normal use.



I will add here:

Though we are highly reflective beings, ones that can change our selves in drastic ways by asking about our institutions and what kind of beings we want to be, and then making such changes, we have not thoroughly undone broad emotional categories in ways that we are capable of doing. Christian and Buddhists monks, among others, have tried to thoroughly undo some rather throughput social emotions. How much they achieved this is probably varying, but also probably far short of what humans could do. We will become even better at rearranging our selves and our social institutions (including norms, social responses to others) both as we understand exactly what we are (the mechanistic underpinnings) and as we delve into biotechnology and medicine. In the end, there will likely be human beings and societies that look far different than what we are today, and they will have far different encounters with something like "shame." Perhaps they will laugh it off as a folly that we once thought was simply part of our repertoire. 

Ah, Fiction

Something from a more playful era when fiction or pseudo-fiction seemed more useful.

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Before getting started, I would like to talk about creativity. . . . There are those among us who have a much greater ability to create and combine ideas, experiences, and phenomena than others; and there are those among us with less ability for doing so. But all individuals have the experience of doing so, and those who stand at the higher end of the creative and combinatory scale are only those who are best at an ability that we all have, that we all know, that we all feel.

Like any good story there are events and a plot and an overcoming that will carry you along, upon which your emotions will rise and fall; but, to see this story for what is worth, it will be a complex and psychological unraveling—and this from an individual who denies much of what you claim to be psychological. Perhaps this is where it succeeds, by explaining the inexplicable, by showing how we move from the world of spirit and transcendence to a world of matter and groundedness—in the present age this is the only acceptable movement, even though some violate it perpetually (Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, John Searle, and many more).

I do not know where I stand as far as creativity is concerned but it is probably close to the middle. Creativity is important and its first use comes in dreaming. I do not necessarily mean the standard night dream, though that is certainly one special case. Night dreaming is special because it happens—usually—without the conscious control that we prize so highly (Lucidity in dream is rare, but important). It is in those first hours and days of dreaming, of imagining so to speak, that experiences, phenomena, feelings, etc., are combined. These things are combined by very young potentialhumans, and in this combining, causes and resemblances become dreamed, become associated. If we touch the ball, it moves. And if we touch it again and again and again, it moves multiple and different ways. Then, the key moment comes, and in a flicker at first, the idea of an individual, the possibility of a central “I” emerges. “‘I’ am moving my(?) hand, the ball, my(?) ball.” As this potentialhuman continues to dream, the recurrence of this possibility of an “I,” of a being at the center of these thoughts, recurs again and again. And quickly, this central idea (the “I”) becomes a combinatory subject with great power and constant justification in simple empirical analysis—if the “I” decides to move the arm, then the body the “I” is attached to moves its arm—yes, we are all empiricist from birth.

In time, the power of the “I” becomes so useful and corresponds so well with everything that this previous conglomeration of ideas, experiences, and phenomena continues to experience and to dream, that this “I” becomes instantiated into essentiality, and an I (a given essence not needing quotation marks) emerges, never to be quenched again. The dreaming, the power of creativity, the power of combination, these powers which first created the I, become fully entwined with the I. The I, the individual, is not separate from the dreaming or from the combining of ideas, it is simply these things. The I wields this great power and yet wields it with ferocity. It now holds the key to the power of combination. When this I/dreamer thinks, dreams, combines—at least partly conscious activities—it only senses the decision being made but does not grasp how the decision is arrived at in its totality. The I not only takes full responsibility for the direction of the dream, it forgets, and actually is forced to forget, the necessities that caused the dream that created the “I” in the first place. By forgetting the necessities of its first activity, the I easily forms the notion of a power greater than exists for it, the power to stand outside the contingent historical and natural conditions upon which it was built and which it will always occur. In the end of course, the ironic thing, is that despite the power of the I, its wielding of creativity, its long memory—most of that memory is not exact reproduction but is always re-structured through the creative and dreaming processes—the ironic thing is that that I does not have the power to dream of its own creation. To do so, is to discredit a characteristic of that I that it long held to be indubitable, and that characteristic is the eternality and essence of that I.

Having forgotten its own creation, the I is placed in a precarious position. Day in and day out, minute in and minute out, from one thought to the next, the immediate phenomenal data from our perceptual apparatuses, along with the higher-order processing and walling off of lower order structures, encourages us, or perhaps mandates us, to believe that a conscious self is somehow autonomous from this data, and, especially, to believe that the thought processes and conscious awareness of that mainstream of thought, of that I, is certainly separated from the mere functionalizing processes of brain activity. This separation necessitates our conscious self to believe that the subsequent behavior that such an I carries out is free. That is, free from determination by the past genetic and historical situations, free from the brain processes that are equal to those mental thoughts (that is those brain processes that are equal to those brain “thoughts”). With the inability to understand or feel the vast array of underlying structures, (both genetic and historical, or as such genetic and historical structures are ensconced in the actual brain structures themselves) the conscious self believes that it itself, its I, its thoughts and decisions, are what are responsible for the next thoughts, decisions, and, by theoretical conceptualization, the behavior of that being—it’s supposed freedom. And just as it was once “natural” to believe that the sun was moving, that the sun was literally setting itself, we, too, by mapping the brain, will come to accept that our prior conceptions of the freedom of our behaviors and the freedom of our thoughts—as is postulated by the commonsensical, immediate phenomenal image of our self—was misconceived—but also “natural.”

When the I comes before an open situation, which actually is all the time—since, like Hegel, we can posit open possibilities in even the most closed off sort of space—the conscious self has no choice, given our limited understanding, to posit that it is only the I (or the “I,” the former is only an illusion) that will carry it in the direction that it does. That great entity that is our conscious self, arising out of the capacities of the brain, posits constantly the open counterfactuals of the situation before us. I mean by this only that it sees that it is capable of taking its body in this way or that way or that way—usually an endless array. It posits that nothing externally is preventing the self from opening door number 1 or door number 2, and that it has the power to choose one or the other. Even if we understand our inner thought processes or the determined chain of reasoning why we would always open one door over the other (think gun-wielding psychopath behind door 1 and answer to all of life’s riddles behind door 2), there is in the end a gap between understanding our main incentives and the actual carrying out of the action which we believe, given the endless reinforcement of such an idea by our immediate phenomenology, is always open to the self to haven chosen otherwise. But, again, if we were able to understand all our historical structures—the Behaviorist’s dream (see B.F. Skinner), and all of our genetic structures—the Evolutionary Psychologist’s dream (see Steven Pinker), or if we understood all the mechanisms and structures of the brain and we had the full layout of the current individual’s brain—the materialist’s dream (see Patricia and Paul Churchland): then we would not be so foolish to think our actions so free.

These ideas and structures are what scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind face today—their theories and discoveries point to the idea that this I, our agency, is a fully determined entity. But the natural condition of human kind, the transparency of innate and environmental conditions and the transparency of brain structure and processes, says that this I exists and exists with the “soul” like quality that humans have almost always granted it. Some of the reinforcement of this I comes from western traditions of radical individualism and of monotheistic creations of the autonomous soul that make it even harder to overcome, but even without these reinforcers the I is still incapable of accepting its historical creation by the random dreaming of an animal of increasing experiential content. This is the natural condition of human kind and it is destined to haunt us. Once “Man” only disease can make animal again—that is, make us see through the blinding and contingent categorizations that obscure our best understanding of the world around. To sum this up, two working concepts:

The Natural Condition of Humans

The Natural Condition of Humans is not that we are forced to be free, as Sartre would so elegantly put it. It is that we are forced to believe that we are acting freely. In other words, we are forced to think that we are “forced to be free.” The Natural Condition of Humans is that the transparency of most brain processes and of “our” history, including, especially, the forgetting of the original creation of each of our own consciousnesses, is why we are forced to think ourselves as free. But we are not free. Despite all we thought, we had yet to leave the garden, the apple had not yet been eaten. The first sin had yet to be cast. And I will take the apple now.

On Original Sin

Or the accepting of the death of the soul and the mere functionalism of consciousness, along with its historical creation in time; and, by seeing through the (false) “openness” of our consciousness, the acceptance of the Natural Condition of Humans. Only now do we take the fruit—only now does our knowledge of good and evil come to full swing, and we can thank Nietzsche for first reaching for that apple, among others, and encouraging us to do likewise. And, of course, so many others saw what that apple meant and ran the other way, back into Eden, back into the loving arms of God, back into the loving arms of freedom, radical individualism, and naivety of Capitalist and Culturalist closure. They said to themselves that if this is what science and philosophy is telling us, I would rather not read; I would rather banish academia to a self-imposed circulation of hermeneutic procedures. They took up the chant: “I will not think about free will, I will not think of the importance of education and socialization on determining who I am. I deserve praise for my good deeds; they deserve admonition and punishment for their evil deeds, including even death. Morality is real—and thoroughly objective.”

If your nerves are firing and fear is encroaching, if you see an existentialist malaise on the future, that is okay. It is wrong. This story is not about the despair of the natural human condition, though I may not have the power to eliminate that if you have already traveled down that road. This is a story of hope. It is not tragic, not in the least, though for some there may be tragic elements. If you buy into the character then you should not feel tragedy for any moment in the story, he would not wish it. In fact, he would find such emotions utterly wrong. He does care for your emotions, but only in a cold, utilitarian way. He sees in those emotions created necessities from your natural structure and your environmental history. If society is to succeed, from his viewpoint, it will succeed by reading the discourse of those emotions and the thoughts that lie behind them and in front of them; and by giving you the appropriate knowledge so you can see through your natural human condition, even if emotions try to persuade you from doing so. Of course, it would be easier on him if you would simply set emotion aside for the time being as best that humans can accomplish. He will not blame you for your inabilities to do so, whether because of natural or social causes—he knows it is not that simple. He accepts that to get rid of all emotions is impossible and he does not suggest that, but only of removing the impact of those emotions that prevent us from asking the most daunting and basic questions of human beings. He recognizes this, but believes to face these questions and bear such emotional unease is best, and if we are capable of doing this then great hopes for the betterment of society and us as individuals will be the reward. . . .