Prominent atheist and genome advocate Dick Dorkins is genetically hardwired to treat human beings as chattel, according to some interpretations of preliminary results from the amateur analysis of his genome.

The findings come from Project Dick, the widely publicized effort to sequence and analyze the Dorkins DNA. After initial setbacks, Project Dick has become one of the most over-hyped genomics efforts, which is saying something. While Project Dick started as a conventional private sequencing effort, in recent months it has become a group project. Dorkins approved the posting of DNA data online and solicited analyses from the online community—a type of public science made possible by “open-source” genome analysis programs. Like the popular online encyclopedia, content may be contributed by anyone, although it is subject to editorial approval before it goes live. So-called “genome bloggers” have contributed markedly to the analysis of the Dorkins genome. “It’s a Dorkipedia,” said one Project Dick spokesman.

A recent Dorkipedia post, contributed by the genome blogger “SnipDaddy” compared Dorkins’s DNA to that of 5 antebellum plantation owners and found a common set of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. SnipDaddy’s three roommates, none of whom own slaves, do not have the mutations. SnipDaddy concludes that the SNPs constitute a genetic signature for slaveholding. SnipDaddy concludes, “Dorkin grate grate grandad like wippin ppl—he lik wippin em 2. Its inz jeans.” Analysis of the post suggests that SnipDaddy is implying the existence of a slaveholding gene that is correlated with sadism.

The findings could be related to the recent discovery of a genetic predisposition to violent crime. Attention will be focused on finding any basis whatsoever to the claims.

Jonah Lehrer has a new post in the Wall St. Journal on the applications of genetics to finance. For several years, two neuroscientists at Claremont Graduate University have been studying genetics, neurophysiology, and investor behavior. Their latest paper suggests that in the ever-elusive search to balance risk and reward, the sweet spot of maximum investor longevity (i.e., not going bankrupt) was predicted by their dopamine levels.

The paper is a masterpiece of handwaving. It illustrates beautifully how behavior genetics embraces the correlation-suggests-causation approach we like to condemn in those silly, bad old eugenicists from the Progressive Era. Kids, you couldn’t ask for a better example of genetic determinism. Here’s their abstract:

What determines success on Wall Street? This study examined if genes affecting dopamine levels of professional traders were associated with their career tenure. Sixty professional Wall Street traders were genotyped and compared to a control group who did not trade stocks. We found that distinct alleles of the dopamine receptor 4 promoter (DRD4P) and catecholamine-O-methyltransferase (COMT) that affect synaptic dopamine were predominant in traders. These alleles are associated with moderate, rather than very high or very low, levels of synaptic dopamine. The activity of these alleles correlated positively with years spent trading stocks on Wall Street. Differences in personality and trading behavior were also correlated with allelic variants. This evidence suggests there may be a genetic basis for the traits that make one a successful trader.

Of course there’s a genetic basis for it. The trick in finding it is in defining “trait” such that there is a genetic basis for it, and then you find it.

In a typical rhetorical move for overhyped scientistic explanations of fantastically complex behavior, both the scientists and Lehrer suggest a deterministic future by denying it. Let’s take the last three sentences one by one and translate them:

Dr. Zak notes that it’s far too soon to use his genetic assay as a hiring tool—the results still need to be replicated.

I.e., “We have no basis whatsoever for saying this, but…”

Still, it’s possible to imagine a future in which the financial sector requires less oversight because firms have found a way to hire more prudent employees.

“…Wall St. could hire people based on their DNA! If it works–and why shouldn’t it?–we could save so much money! And MAKE so much money!”

Given the massive amounts of money at stake, spending a few hundred dollars on a DNA kit might strike Wall Street as a particularly wise investment.

“What the hell? Go for it, data or no!”

Why so conservative? Since we already have one study–no one likes to do those boring “replication” studies anyway–why not just do away with resumes and job interviews and have would-be stockbrokers simply submit their genome profiles to potential employers? With minimum genetic standards for their mates, in a few generations we could have a race of genetically superior investors who would lead the market ever skyward!

The quote above is from a new study, getting media play over the last few days (“Is that a gun in your genes or are you just opportunistic?” it begins). It is an unselfconscious (i.e., not historically aware) contribution to a long and dangerous literature claiming to show the biological basis of crime.

Ten years ago, the historian of science Garland Allen published an article titled, “The biological basis of crime: an historical and methodological study” (History and Sociology of the Physical and Biological Sciences 31: 183-222). In it, he cited the recent spate of scientific studies purporting to show a strong genetic basis of crime. His focus was the 1992 “Violence initiative,” a federally funded program to help elucidate the genetic basis of crime and other antisocial behavior.

Allen pointed out the long tradition of finding the hereditary basis of crime, stretching back to the eugenic days of the Progressive era. Leading eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and the anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton claimed that criminal behavior was the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors and that elucidating the genes involved in crime could be a significant social and economic benefit. Davenport, Allen wrote, “brought criminal behavior into the biological arena as an inherited defect of the central nervous system.” (Allen 2001: 188) Hooton, in works such as Crime and the Man (Cambridge, 1939) dissociated himself from the cruder and discredited 19th century anthropometric studies of Cesare Lombroso but borrowed the notion that physical “stigmata” could be reliable indicators of specific criminal tendencies.

These research traditions, Allen shows, have clear continuation into the era of modern genetics, with findings such as the (now discredited) notion that an extra Y chromosome predisposed its carrier to a life of crime, and Richard Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson’s 1985 book, Crime and Human Nature.

“That most eugenicists did not envision the ultimate outcome of their program and ideology is not surprising,” Allen wrote. “Scientists are not very accurate social critics.” (2001: 220)

One could mount a critique of the science in the paper: it has no candidate genes and is based simply on association. It has a broad and subjective definition of “crime” that allows in dozens of subjective, uncontrollable variables. I leave that critique to others.

My argument is simply this: science needs social critics, because its findings carry increasingly potent social impact.

(If any readers have difficulty obtaining any of the linked articles cited above, post a comment with your email address and I will send them to you.)

Opinion piece in the NYT today by the child psychologist L. Alan Stroufe discusses the use of Ritalin and Adderall in the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in kids. Stroufe argues that the clinical evidence shows that these drugs do in fact work–for a while. A few weeks, on average. But he believes there is no good evidence that they are a long-term solution. In fact, he writes, what data there is suggests that these drugs eventually stop working.

To me as a historian, ADHD looks a lot like feeblemindedness. In the early twentieth century,  many human geneticists and psychologists believed this “disease” to be the root of a host of antisocial disorders, from poor academic performance to criminal activity to sexual promiscuity. Further, there was evidence that it was caused by a single Mendelian gene. In his landmark study of feeblemindedness, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard gathered the data, from his study of hundreds of students at the New Jersey school for feeblemindedness of which he was the head.

Feeblemindedness no longer exists.  The DSM, of course, is chocked with disorders that are consistent with feeblemindedness: below-average IQ, tendency toward antisocial behavior, and the like—and OMIM and GenBank contain plenty of genes that influence such behavioral traits. But Goddard is mocked for his foolish belief in a single gene for feeblemindedness, and one would be laughed out of the American Psychological Association if one now suggested doing a study of “feeblemindedness.”

It’s not just a matter of terminology. Nor is it a matter of getting the science “wrong.” Feeblemindedness was perfectly “real” in the 1910s–as were “hysteria,” “neurasthenia,” and other diseases we no longer believe in. Only a few decades ago, homosexuality was a clinically diagnosable disease. Malaria did not exist before agriculture. Cholera did not exist before cities.

Diseases have real biological substrates. But disease categories are socially constructed. The disease ADHD was created to solve medically a set of problems described by parents and teachers. The fact that we can find biological substrates and mechanisms that underlie it–and drugs that treat it–does not give the lie to the social construction of ADHD. Science and history can offer complete explanations of the same sets of facts.

Biomedicine works in part by finding mechanisms that underlie medical conditions. But what counts as a medical condition is negotiated by society as a whole. Disease entities are not natural categories; they are contingent, contextual, overdetermined. And drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall have not only biological side effects, but social ones.

Goddard, Henry Herbert. Feeble-Mindedness, Its Causes and Consequences.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914.

Maines, Rachel, and American Council of Learned Societies. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction.  Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/HEB00062.

Before the holidays, we printed the first part of an exclusive interview with Dick Dorkins, president of SPITOON, the Society for the Prevention of Intelligent design Or Other Nonsense. We now bring you part the second, in which Dorkins discusses religion, atheism, the pioneering work of Project Dick—the effort to sequence and analyze Dorkins’s DNA—and the Dick Foundation, Dorkins’s charity for the genetically underprivileged.

Genotopia (GT): when we finished up last time, you were telling us about the reduplication of your Bub666 gene, the so-called atheism gene.

Dick Dorkins (DD): Ah, yes. To expand, as it were, on the issue: Genetically speaking, I am the strongest atheist the world of science has known. Which is saying something.

GT: Saying what, exactly?

DD: Well, science is full of atheists, of course. It takes some real mental gymnastics to believe in God when you believe in evidence. Anyone with the testicles to confront trilobites, Darwin’s finches, Cro Magnon, and antibiotic resistance must bend over backward to believe in any kind of creator beyond some sort of ethereal, pre-cosmic Big-Banger. Frankly, most of us are just not that flexible.

GT: NIH director Francis Collins manages it.

DD: My point exactly. The Gumby of molecular biology.

GT: Getting back to your genome…

DD: The point is, even among scientists, my depth of lack of faith shines like a beacon. Always has. As a child, my mother took me to hear the music at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. My father didn’t attend; while Mom and I sang the Messiah he shuffled through the slush and got sloshed on bubbly at a local pub. My sister Babs says I must have gotten my Bub gene from him.

Anyway, even then, I antagonized the Church. By the age of nine, I had taught myself to sight-read music and I cussedly sang the hymns backward, note for note, over the top of the choir, in my pitch-perfect, pre-pubescent soprano. ‘Hajulellah!’ I’ve been that way all my life. Just ask my wives: I have never been faithful.

GT: And you believe the reason is genetic?

DD: It’s not a matter of faith. To put it simply, I believe the facts show that belief is not factual. This of course is the origin of SPITOON. I founded it with one goal in mind: to snap the suspenders of anyone idiotic enough to see anything even faintly spiritual in our modern scientific world.

GT: How successful have you been? You write learned yet accessible books, you give lectures, you debate creationists—if anyone can persuade the faithful of the folly of their ways, it should be you. How many converts have you won?

DD: To be frank, most religious people tell me my work actually increases their faith–a fact that keeps me awake at night. A Unitarian did write me an email once, saying she was even less likely than before to refer to the god in all of us in the third person. So I take comfort from that.

GT: Let’s get back to your DNA. What else does your sequence reveal? Do you have any of the much-publicized behavioral genes we’ve been reading so much about lately? The violent-drunk gene? The infidelity gene? Thalassophilia?

DD: Infidelity, yes, as I mentioned before. Turns out on that one, the so-called religious right in fact was. Monotheism and monogamy are controlled by the same gene. It’s an old gene, evolutionarily: it goes back to the split between the egg-laying mammals, like the platypus, and the higher mammals, which give birth to live young.

GT: Hang on–are you saying…?

DD: That’s right: monotremes are polyamorous polytheists.

GT: Incredible. What else?

DD: Well, my sequence confirms what I’ve been arguing vehemently all these years: that I am a very peaceful, even a melancholy drunk. I have a single-nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, associated with a threefold increase in the risk of retreating to a dark corner after three Scotches and regretting my divorce while humming soft hits from the seventies. Unfortunately, I also have an obesity-related allele that predisposes me toward quarts of Ben & Jerry’s. It doesn’t take a geneticist to appreciate the unfortunate synergism between those genes.

GT: What about single-gene diseases?

DD: No Alzheimer’s, thankfully, no cystic fibrosis, no Tay-Sachs, and no Alzheimer’s.

GT: That’s good to hear. Much of the cutting-edge research today, though, is on complex diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. What has Project Dick taught us about them?

DD: My genome has greatly added to our knowledge of basic disease processes that affect millions of people–knowledge that will revolutionize medical care in the twenty-first century. We have discovered dozens of SNPs associated with common disease. For example, I have a fivefold increased risk of nicotine addiction compared to the population as a whole, double the average risk of cancer of the stomach, half the normal level of alcohol dehydrogenase, and a tendency toward dangerously high levels of cortisol when I become excessively fatigued. What’s more, Project Dick has shown that these genes are all involved in a network, so that their effects multiply in combination.

GT: Fascinating!  What are the therapeutic implications?

DD: Thanks to my detailed genome profile, I know that I should not smoke, should eat a balanced diet, drink only in moderation, and try to get plenty of rest.

GT: That should silence the critics who say this research is too expensive!

DD: You just can’t put a price tag on your health.

Gt: Another criticism, though, is that, valuable as it is, such medical advice will only benefit those with the willpower to follow it.

DD: Ah, but that is exactly where the biggest impact of genomic medicine will be felt. I *should* eat well, get enough rest, and keep my social vices in check–but the Genetic Virtue Project hasn’t been much of a success yet, has it? Fortunately, I no longer *have* to be virtuous—I just need good drugs. Project Dick has a team of clinicians on staff who are assembling a pharmacological regimen tailored to my genome. It will enable me to live to a spry and vigorous 120 years of age–while gorging myself and partying like there’s no tomorrow. And here is the truly remarkable part: health is simpler than we think. It will probably require only 20 or 30 different medications to achieve hedonistic immortality.

GT: Sign me up!

DD: I take MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal. Seriously, at the moment, in order to sign up you’d have to write me a check for a million dollars. But the cost is dropping faster than blood pressure on statins. Already, you can get a simpler profile–without the crack team of pharmacologists, of course–for a few hundred dollars. And our goal is to incorporate this kind of insight into everyone’s healthcare, right from birth.

GT: Sounds like a medical Plato’s Republic. But who will pay for all of these medications? Some of these drugs get pretty expensive.

DD: The NHS, obviously, at least while the money holds out. You Americans, however, have a much leaner, more efficient system in which healthcare isn’t simply doled out indiscriminately. You people are looking at a revolutionary future in which the ability to indulge without fear of the consequences will be directly proportional to one’s income.

GT: Soon, only the wealthy will be able to afford to eat at Burger King!

DD: That can only be good for the gene pool, don’t you agree? Rather a social Darwinist tit for tat, that one.

GT: Hm. Well, we’re out of time, so, final question: what’s next for Dick Dorkins?

DD: Ah. Well as you know, I have become fantastically wealthy as a result of my book sales and lecture fees. I won’t give hard numbers, but let’s just say that atheism and scientism have been kind to me. And to be honest, I have taken some criticism for profiting from the ignorance and stupidity of others. I think this is uncharitable, and to prove it, The Dick Foundation will be offering what we call Genome Scholarships to the Genetically Underprivileged, or Gizgoos.

GT: The genetically underprivileged?

DD: You catch on fast. Here’s how it will work: Clinicians at elite inner-city teaching hospitals will nominate candidates from their patient populations. Our scholarship committee–a blue-ribbon panel of Nobel laureates, National Academy members, and biotech CEOs–will identify the most genetically needy and provide them with a complete genome scan, a detailed health profile tailored to their needs and abilities, and totally comprehensive lifetime pharmaceutical coverage. Think of it: complete medical management for those who need it most.

GT: Heavens to Galton!

DD: But wait, there’s more. We will also provide the nucleically disadvantaged with the kind of complete high-tech pregnancy management that up till now has been available only to the Lexus-and-Mexican-gardener set. Tools such as in vitro fertilization and prenatal genetic diagnosis. We want those gardeners to be our clients—or, patients, if you will—too.

However, in order to achieve this utopia we must have education. And by education I mean compliance. In that light, we plan to educate Gizgoo winners in the principles of modern molecular health. Through a program of intensive observerships, team-taught technology-based learning, and multiple-choice questions, we will train the molecularly disadvantaged to manage their own health. Our hope is to simplify genome profiling so that someone with an IQ of 70 or a background of ethnicity will be able to identify the medications she needs to stay healthy and to avoid pregnancy. This in turn will lead to a twenty-first century healthcare founded on the principles of preventive medicine—prevention not only of disease but of the people who carry disease. It will truly be a kinder, gentler, healthier society!

GT: Um, Dick?

DD: Hang on, let me grab a Kleenex… OK, shoot.

GT: Hasn’t that been tried?

DD: Ah, but now we know how to do it right.