The US right is misrepresenting science to support its racist agenda. There’s far more to it than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genes. Like so many of us, I was dispirited to wake up a few weeks ago to learn that Donald Trump will be back in the White House. This time he was aided by the world’s richest man and professional spaceship-crasher, Elon Musk. Among the many charming aspects of their partnership is a fondness for some highly unsavoury views on genetics. Trump is an enthusiastic advocate of “racehorse theory”, which he shares with white supremacists; the belief that he is personally superior and that this is rooted in his “good genes”. It’s a vapid idea, but it directly informs his toxic views on immigration, where he argues the country needs to be shielded from the “bad genes” of outsiders. Meanwhile, Musk has his own equally baffling take on genetics, infused with a characteristic messiah complex. Like some of his fellow tech moguls, he is determined to “save humanity” by producing as many offspring as possible, convinced that our future depends on it. This might all be laughable were it not for the fact that Trump and Musk now wield more power than they ever have before. The shared thread running through their rhetoric is genetic determinism: the idea that who you are, and what you can achieve, is all down to your DNA. Nothing else matters. The problem is that genetic determinism, with its odd fixation on the “master molecule”, is annoyingly pervasive. When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, they hailed it as the “secret of life”. In 2000, President Bill Clinton declared that sequencing the human genome was like learning “the language in which God created life”. Of course, science always carries the potential to be this thrilling; I don’t want to kill anyone’s science buzz. But I worry that in all the excitement, we can forget that DNA does not define us. This language has leaked far outside the world of science, to marketing that raves about cars “with adventure in their DNA”, or a discussion of a football club’s “DNA” – it has become a synonym for everything from “characteristics” to “values”. The ubiquity of rhetoric that conflates DNA and identity risks propping up some insidious ideas. This is the language Musk and Trump thrive on, making exclusionary policies look like rational decisions grounded in science. Because, if genes are everything, why bother with policies aimed at tackling inequality? Why waste time and resources addressing social problems when we’re all just products of our genetic code? In debates surrounding genetics and social policy, it is easy for the language of genetic determinism to lure you into an ill-advised “nature v nurture” debate. You know this debate: maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s the pervasive conditions of social inequality? But this debate misses the bigger picture entirely: it should not be seen as a binary choice. The truth is, humans are born with genes that require a good environment to thrive. It’s not either/or, but a complex interaction between the two that determines who someone becomes. We have a nature that requires nurture. Good science accounts for this complexity, rather than reducing it to a simplistic binary.
via guardian: Trump and Musk are obsessed with genetics – but there’s no science behind their simplistic views