Report from “Social Science Genetics Workshop”

Evolutionary medicine to social scientists?

By Diddahally R. Govindaraju

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Social scientists, including some illustrious ones such as Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, have showed an enduring interest in evolution since its inception.  Recently, there is a resurgence of this interest among the younger community of social scientists.  Apparently, both economics and other branches of social science, including political science are facing challenges, as consumer behavior is so unpredictable. Therefore they are in a quest to discover more reliable and predictable biological indices, including conserved pathways and genetic markers such as SNPs. They are excited by the successful and the less successful results (published in high-impact journals) of genome wide association studies (GWAS) conducted on various epidemiological cohorts, initiated originally to study complex human diseases. As I am deeply interested in science and its social relevance, I attended a meeting titled, “Social Science Genetics Workshop” held in Boston on February 12, 2011. The workshop was organized by Daniel Benjamin (Cornell), David Cesarini (NYU) and Phillip Koellinger (Erasmus), and supported locally by the Harvard economics faculty.

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The workshop focused on collecting data on social variables particularly educational achievements (as measured by the number of years of education in various epidemiological cohorts), entrepreneurship, credit card borrowing etc.  Scientists from the field of education also participated in the meeting, and some of them expressed the difficulties involved in defining and measuring educational achievement.  The group has already published a few articles on the relationship between social science variables and genetic markers using the standard GWAS approach. The results are generally negative, as expected, which they have interpreted as a product of small sample size.  Hence they would like to reanalyze the data by increasing the sample size using the resources of the CHARGE (Cohort for Heart and Aging Research in Genetic Epidemiology) consortium.  At the moment, this consortium consists of over 80 cohorts. From these, they have now amassed close to 70,000 individuals in the data set and combing through the data set for appropriate standardized variables.

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I saw too many problems with the basic design and the scope of the study and its plausible implications and voiced my concerns. The most important one being, the genotype – phenotype map (G-P map).The map contains many developmental variables in it’s belly. The phenotype and its entire ontogeny as a whole are influenced by environmental variables. These variables are too many and often stochastic.  Natural selection acts on individual phenotypes, and each one of them has unique ontogenetic and phylogenetic history.  Do educational levels are subjected to natural selection? Of course not! Evolution does not care about health or happiness as Stearns rightfully argues. But social scientists argue otherwise. Educational attainment, credit card debt habit, and perhaps our political inclinations show individual variation and hence must have a genetic basis as shown by moderate levels of heritability. Hence, this genetic variation should be apparent in the GWAS – provided we have large sample size. They say so, because social, economic and educational status affects health, as shown by universal increase in life span among many populations. Hence, this improved health status must have a genetic basis. Also, individuals with similar “tastes” tend to cluster in social networks, and these apparently share genetic factors as well (Fowler et al. 2009, 2011). Evolutionary geneticists attribute these improvements in health to epigenetic and cultural factors. Christakis and his colleagues, on the contrary, suggest a genetic basis for human social clustering and offer evolutionary explanations.

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Is it a resurgence of human sociobiology or is it social medicine? or evolutionary medicine in progress? I think the evolutionary medicine community is confronted with a challenge here.

References:

Fowler JH, Settle, JE and Christakis NA (2011). Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks. PNAS: January 18, 2011

Fowler JH, Dawes CT and Christakis NA. (2009) Model of genetic variation in human social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:1720–1724.