From The New Yorker, a quite liberal publication,
but open to contradictions.
It is long, but interesting.

from
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters

Profiles
September 13, 2021 Issue
(this was Published in the print edition of the September 13,
2021, issue, with the headline “Force of Nature.”)

Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?
The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front
campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on
her right those who insist that they’re everything.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

September 6, 2021
Kathryn Paige Harden
“Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is
building a house on sand,” Harden writes.
Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker

Until she was thirty-three, Kathryn Paige Harden, a professor of
psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, had enjoyed a
vocational ascent so steady that it seemed guided by the hand of
predestination. When she first went on the job market, at twenty-six,
her graduate-school mentor, Eric Turkheimer, a professor at the
University of Virginia, recommended her with an almost mystified
alacrity. “More than anyone else who has come through my lab, I find
myself answering questions by saying, ‘We should check with Paige,’ ” he
wrote. “I am absolutely confident she will be a successful addition to
any faculty, and she brings a significant chance of being a superstar.”
Her early scholarship was singled out for prestigious awards and grants,
and she was offered tenure at thirty-two. In 2016, she began co-hosting
an Introduction to Psychology class from a soundstage, in the style of a
morning show—she and her colleague drank coffee from matching mugs—that
was live-streamed each semester to more than a thousand students. She
couldn’t cross campus without being stopped for selfies.

Harden works in the field of behavior genetics, which investigates the
influence of genes on character traits (neuroticism, agreeableness) and
life outcomes (educational attainment, income, criminality). Such
research has historically relied upon “twin studies,” which compare
identical twins with fraternal ones to differentiate genetic from
environmental effects. As a new professor, she co-founded the Texas Twin
Project, the first registry engineered to maximize representation of
low-income families from ethnically diverse backgrounds. In a recent
paper, Harden asked, “You only have one life to live, but if you rewound
the tape and started anew from the exact same genetic and environmental
starting point, how differently could your life go?” She continued,
“Overall, twin research suggests that, in your alternate life, you might
not have gotten divorced, you might have made more money, you might be
more extraverted or organized—but you are unlikely to be substantially
different in your cognitive ability, education, or mental disease.” In
the past few years, Harden noted, new molecular techniques have begun to
shore up the basic finding that our personal trajectories owe a
considerable debt to our genes.

On sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, Harden and Elliot
Tucker-Drob, a colleague to whom she was married at the time, were
invited to New York City with their two young children—a three-year-old
boy and a nine-month-old girl—as visiting scholars-in-residence at the
Russell Sage Foundation. Russell Sage, which occupies a handsome Philip
Johnson building in Manhattan, primarily supports sociologists,
journalists, and economists, but it had recently launched an initiative
to integrate the biological sciences. Harden felt almost immediately
unwelcome at the regular fellows’ lunches. Many of the left-leaning
social scientists seemed certain that behavior-genetics research, no
matter how well intentioned, was likely to lead us down the garden path
to eugenics. The world would be better, Harden was told, if she quit.
When their cohort went to see “Hamilton,” the others professed surprise
that Harden and Tucker-Drob had enjoyed it, as if their work could be
done only by people uncomfortable with an inclusive vision of American
history.

Harden assumed that such leeriness was the vestige of a bygone era, when
genes were described as the “hard-wiring” of individual fate, and that
her critics might be reassured by updated information. Two weeks before
her family was due to return to Texas, she e-mailed the fellows a new
study, in Psychological Science, led by Daniel Belsky, at Duke. The
paper drew upon a major international collaboration that had identified
sites on the genome that evinced a statistically significant correlation
with educational attainment; Belsky and his colleagues used that data to
compile a “polygenic score”—a weighted sum of an individual’s relevant
genetic variants—that could partly explain population variance in
reading ability and years of schooling. His study sampled New Zealanders
of northern-European descent and was carefully controlled for childhood
socioeconomic status. “Hope that you find this interesting food for
thought,” she wrote.

William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke and perhaps the
country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality,
answered curtly, starting a long chain of replies. Given the
difficulties of distinguishing between genetic and environmental effects
on social outcomes, he wrote, such investigations were at best futile:
“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at
all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial
research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of
Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s
subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust
deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not
keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change
is a fabrication under consideration.”

Harden remarked that being called a climate skeptic was marginally
preferable to being called a Holocaust denier. She offered to host a
lunch to discuss the uncontroversial basics of genetics research for
anyone interested. Darity was reluctant to let the matter go: “One final
comment from me, and then I will withdraw into my pique.” In 1994, he
wrote, the political scientist Charles Murray and the late psychologist
Richard Herrnstein “published a bestseller that achieved great
notoriety, The Bell Curve. Apart from its claims about a genetic basis
for a ‘racial’ hierarchy in intelligence, the book claimed that social
outcomes like poverty and inequality in earnings had a genetic
foundation. Personally, I thought the book was outrageous and a
saddening resuscitation of ideas that had increasingly been dismissed as
‘pseudoscience.’ Belsky’s work strikes me as an extension of the
Murray-Herrnstein view of the world.” He concluded, “At some point, I
think we need to say enough is enough.” (Darity told me, of his e-mails,
“I stand by all that.”)

An admirer of Darity’s work—especially on reparations for slavery—Harden
was surprised that she’d elicited such rancor from someone with whom she
was otherwise in near-total political agreement. In the wake of the
exchange, some of the other fellows stopped speaking to Harden, and the
e-mail chain was forwarded to members of the foundation’s board. The
next year, after winning the American Psychological Association’s
Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to
Psychology, Harden applied for a grant from Russell Sage’s biosciences
initiative, which had supported similar research in the past. She
received enthusiastic peer reviews from its scientific advisers, and was
given to understand that the grant’s disbursal was a fait accompli.
During a contentious meeting, however, the full board voted to overturn
the scientific panel’s recommendation. Over the next year, a biosciences
working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in
the final draft that it would not support any research into the
first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. In the end,
the board chose to disband the initiative entirely. (A spokesperson for
Russell Sage told me by e-mail that the decision was based on the
“consideration of numerous factors, including RSF’s relative lack of
expertise in this area.”)

Harden has spent the last five years thinking about Darity’s objections.
As she put it to me recently, “When I reread his e-mails, it all struck
me as very Chekhovian. Like, here are all the guns that are going to go
off in Act V.” Harden understands why the left, with which she
identifies, has nurtured an aversion to genetics. She went to graduate
school in Charlottesville, the birthplace of Carrie Buck, a
“feeble-minded” woman who was sterilized against her will, in 1927,
under a state eugenics program sanctioned by the Supreme Court. But she
does not believe that a recognition of this horrifying history ought to
entail the peremptory rejection of the current scientific consensus. The
left’s decision to withdraw from conversations about genetics and social
outcomes leaves a vacuum that the right has gaily filled. The situation
has been exploited as a “red pill” to expose liberal hypocrisy. Today,
Harden is at the forefront of an inchoate movement, sometimes referred
to as the “hereditarian left,” dedicated to the development of a new
moral framework for talking about genetics.