The Politics of DNA Do genetic differences require us to embrace progressive politics?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

"LUCK," E.B.WHITE once said, "is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men." They worked hard, no doubt, to get where they are. But they also benefited enormously from good fortune, not just in life but in life's building blocks. A fortunate combination of thousands of slight genetic differences boosted their intelligence, motivation, openness to experience, task perseverance, executive function, and interpersonal skills.

"Like being born to a rich or poor family, being born with a certain set of genetic variants is the outcome of a lottery of birth," the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden argues in The Genetic Lottery. "And, like social class, the outcome of the genetic lottery is a systemic force that matters for who gets more, and who gets less, of nearly everything we care about in society."

Harden's book can be divided into three parts. The first is an introduction to behavioral genetics, the science of how differences between individuals arise through the interaction of their genes and their environments. The second is an insightful critique of social science researchers who refuse to consider genes' effects, showing how this leads them astray when devising interventions to ameliorate social ills. And the third is an argument, light on details, that genetic inequality can "be used to make the case for greater redistribution of resources." Behavioral geneticists construct polygenic indexes, numbers that summarize how the cumulative effects of small differences in genes contribute to complex traits. Those traits correlate with outcomes relevant to how well people's lives are likely to go, among them adult height, cardiovascular disease risks, physical strength, longevity, and--key to Harden's argument--educational attainment.

"In the US today, whether one is a member of the 'haves' or the 'have-nots' is increasingly a matter of whether or not one has a college degree," Harden writes. "If we can understand why some people go further in school than others do, it will illuminate our understanding of multiple inequalities in people's lives." Many people who do not go to college nonetheless make decent livings. But a recent analysis by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce found that the median lifetime income of college graduates in the U.S. is $2.8 million. For Americans who get only a high school diploma, it's $1.6 million.

Since 1970, Harden notes, rising percentages of U.S. students...