When recently reviewing The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden I discovered that a lot of people in online fora asked questions like “Did you win the genetic lottery” or “How did you win the genetic lottery”. This is a very vague question, as the term genetic lottery is by no means a scientific one:
The lottery of birth is a philosophical argument which states that since no one chooses the circumstances into which they are born, people should not be held responsible for them (being rich, being poor and so on). The lottery of birth argument has been used by philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but more modern day uses have been prompted by political theorists such as John Rawls, who explores the subject in depth in his book A Theory of Justice.
Harden gets the title of her book from John Rawls’s ideas. However, despite being a scientist she never makes it quite clear what the genetic lottery is. Most evolutionary biologists will struggle with the idea. For good reasons. Each spring I go to the pond with my children to catch tadpoles and have a look at them. There are thousands of tadpoles in the pond. When I ask my children how many frogs there will be in the pond in the following year, they tend to give me very high figures. The truth is, the number of frogs in the following year will be pretty much the same as in the current year, perhaps a few more, perhaps a few less. No way there will be thousands of frogs in a small pond, that’s basic ecology. It is estimated that only 1% of tadpoles survive into adulthood. Are those 1% the winners of the genetic lottery? No way. Almost all tadpoles will have genes that are optimally adapted to their environment and for reproduction. Very few will have genes that are more or less advantageous. Those may be considered winners or losers of the genetic lottery (even though their survival and reproduction is by no means guaranteed). So, what is the role of the genetic lottery in this story? The moral is that the genetic lottery is by far not as significant as it may sound.
And yet, only too often do we attribute people’s fortunes to the genetic lottery. Kylie Jenner’s net worth is now estimated at $700 million. It’s probably not unfair to claim that a lot of her worth is due to her looks - did she win the genetic lottery? What should be clear, when Kylie’s genes evolved it was in an environment where beauty could never have given her the same kind of advantage she has nowadays in a world where beauty can make you lots of $$$. The genetic lottery seems to have much more to do with the kind of world we humans create than a biological world.
Did I win the genetic lottery? We first have to answer the question: what is its currency? When you win the lottery you win $$$, what exactly do you win when you win the genetic lottery? The sole purpose of genes is to make copies of themselves, so the currency here would be “reproductive potential” (RP), anything that will help the genes to reproduce. People typically don’t think of reproduction as the meaning of life, however, almost everything we find desirable bestows a higher RP on us: beauty, money, status, etc.
Thinking of the genetic lottery this way, I considered myself a loser in the genetic lottery for the most part of my life. When I was a teenager, there was this popular song on the radio:
Some guys have all the luck
Some guys have all the pain
Some guys get all the breaks
Some guys do nothing but complain
I have never been one to complain a lot, but I had a hunch that I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. I had been a skinny kid, as much as my grandmother tried to feed me, my poor appetite didn’t help much, turning me into a strong lad. Since my early childhood I had been a loner, mostly only having one friend, sometimes even none. I was frequently sick. I was absent-minded (I probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD) if I had been born later, clumsy and accident-prone. If that wasn’t bad enough my teenage years were even worse: I was a late “bloomer”, girls weren’t interested in a nerdy loner with social anxiety like me, I got bullied, I felt like an omega male and had suicidal ideation. My reproductive potential? Zero (at the time). I guess those were plenty of reasons to feel like a loser of the genetic lottery.
Even though I did finish university with great grades I always had the hunch that in our wilder past I would never have made it into adulthood. Unless one day I had the hunch that I may have had it backwards all the time: my genes may have been better at surviving in our hunter-gatherer past than in our modern world. I began to search for evidence for this idea. One of the strongest indications was Thom Hartmann’s idea that an ADHD mind is a “hunter mind” that is less adapted to a “farmer world” but great for hunting.
I had come across hunter-gatherers vs farmers before and I started to collect more such hunter-gatherer traits. I came up with an interesting list of traits that would characterize hunter-gatherer types:
- Highly egalitarian (including being less interested in status symbols)
- A radar mind (ADHD) with high distractibility and hyperfocus
- A mind that is interested in seeing lots of possibilities (tracking)
- Highly sensitive (HSP) to physical stimuli like sound and textures
- Low interest in materialism
- Later onset of puberty
- Ectomorph body type (which tends to be most visible in childhood when obesity isn’t so much of a problem yet)
- A higher risk for digestive problems regarding certain foods like dairy (herder) and wheat (farmer)
- A higher risk of facial scarring due to acne
All these traits described me and when I wrote about that on the internet a lot of people replied to me, telling me things like “This describes me to a T”. In my further research I found that people tended to fall into one of four temperaments and evolutionary types:
Kathryn Paige Harden sees the genetic lottery play out mainly through the heritability of educational attainment.
In the twin study that I co-direct in Texas, we designed a battery of measures to try to capture a breadth of traits thought to be important for success in school and beyond (figure 7.3). These include the “greatest hits” of the past few decades of social and educational psychology, including grit, growth mindset, intellectual curiosity, mastery orientation, self-concept, and test motivation. In our twin sample, non-cognitive skills are moderately heritable (around 60%), an estimate that is consistent with what most groups have found for IQ (50% to 80%).
There are a lot of fashionable terms like “grit” and “growth mindset” known from TED Talks. However, people familiar with personality psychology know that these are trendy terms for good old fashioned “conscientiousness” and “openness”, the two most important factors for academic and further achievement. I have argued that conscientiousness is an evolutionary adaptation to farming that includes: delayed gratification (waiting for the harvest rather than eating the seeds), industriousness (hard routine work), orderliness and detail-orientation, dutifulness, and neatness (avoiding the higher risk of pathogens due to sedentism).
I am not high on trait conscientiousness, which makes me somewhat of a loser in the genetic lottery of our socially constructed world. I am very high on the second trait that is important for educational attainment, though: openness. I have argued that openness is a hunter-gatherer trait: being interested in new environments (nomadism), preference for variety (especially foods), seeing many different possibilities and imagination (tracking) and lifetime curiosity (the best hunters are the oldest, most experienced not the youngest and fittest) and, last but not least: challenging authority (due to having an egalitarian mind).
So, at least I am a partial winner of the genetic lottery, right? Matters are more complicated than this:
To make matters even more complicated, many of these variants are also involved in phenotypes that are valued differently by society: many of the same genetic variants associated with higher educational attainment, for instance, are also associated with higher risk for schizophrenia. The suggestion from some conservative academics that we might edit children’s genomes to increase their IQs is not just scientifically unfeasible; it is scientifically absurd. [...] There has not been a GWAS or twin study of homelessness, but the statement is almost certainly true. About 20 percent of the homeless population has a serious mental illness, like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.1 About 16 percent are estimated to have a serious substance use disorder, such as alcoholism or opioid addiction. Ultimately, the cause of homelessness is not being able to afford housing.
I have argued that hunter-gatherer type people are what are described as “orchids”. We may thrive or just fade away being highly sensitive to the ground we grow on. A hunter-gatherer type may end up as a homeless person or as a university professor, a hobo or an Einstein. If this idea seems exaggerated, I can recommend the book From Foster Care to Millionaire: A Young Entrepreneur's Story of Tragedy and Triumph by Cody McLain. This is not a genetic lottery, it’s an environmental one.
Cody McLain, like Elon Musk, is both high in openness and conscientiousness. Many of today’s highly successful people are: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Gates, to name just a few. Are they the winners of a genetic lottery? High educational attainment is not only associated with schizophrenia but with neurodiversity in general. The incidence of ASD is highest in children of scientists, engineers and academics. Elon Musk has a son who is on the spectrum and he himself is too. Is it a genetic or is it an environmental lottery?
I am excited about future genetic research and I am sure it will unearth a lot of surprises. So, do I consider myself a winner of the genetic lottery? I guess I do, I have four children I dearly love and who I am able to support financially. There isn’t much more I ask from life. This is what has been most important throughout much of human evolutionary history, it only changed relatively recently.
Check out our book for more on hunter-gatherer minds:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KTH8V2F
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