You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out.
Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a similar experience.
She introduces many comfortably room-temperature premises: measurement is essential to science; people differ genetically; genes cause conditions such as deafness; a recipe for lemon chicken produces variable results but never leads to chocolate-chip cookies. Lulled to complacency by such anodyne and often homey observations, we soon find ourselves in a rolling boil of controversial claims: genes make you more or less intelligent, wealthier or poorer; every kind of inequality has a genetic basis.
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Harden’s purpose in The Genetic Lottery is to popularize the claim that social inequalities have genetic causes, and to argue that if progressives want to address inequality, they’d better confront this fact. In presenting her case, Harden revives central features of the earlier, now-discredited biological theories of intelligence: the presentation of interpretive opinions as objective facts, as we’ve seen; spurious reduction to a biological mechanism that is not only hypothetical but unspecified; and a claim to be writing in the interest of social progress.
