Cover illustration by Lizah van der Aart

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Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences.

I was reminded of this in Oxford last week, at the annual workshop of the European Social Science Genetics Network. Each year, PhD students and senior researchers gather there to learn about and wrestle with the big questions of our discipline. This time I was on a panel with Charlotte Payne, the senior editor of Nature Human Behaviour who handled the paper linked above (open access link), moderated by Melinda Mills, a co-author of the paper who organized this year’s workshop. As we shared inspiring conversations with everyone there, I was reminded that while our field sometimes needs defending, it also deserves celebrating.

The beauty of the field

Social science genetics encompasses the longest causal chain in science: from DNA to human culture. It asks how our socio-economic systems and our genomes interact — essentially, how human culture values and rewards (or punishes) different traits.

The modern version of this field began about twelve years ago, when we first took an approach from medical genetics and applied it to a social outcome: we started estimating the association between millions of genetic variants across the genome and educational attainment. As these studies grew, their estimates improved, and we began to notice something striking: the genetic signals for socio-economic outcomes looked very different from those for medical traits.

Why? Because the relationship between genetic variants and socio-economic outcomes is influenced by processes medical genetics rarely deal with: gene–environment correlations (where genes can influence the environments people experience), indirect genetic effects (where parents' genes affect children through the environment they create), migration patterns, fertility differences, and non-random mating choices. These processes make genetic signals much harder to interpret. Many people outside our niche see them as “confounds” that weaken the field. To me, they are the very heart of our field, and make our research far more interesting. Complicated, yes, but also richer.

As we untangle these dynamics, we learn about much more than bias. We learn about how societies interact with our genomes. We see that our DNA differences play a role in socio-economic outcomes, though often more modestly than earlier studies suggested, and that those same effects influence disease risks through the social environment. We also see that the way societies are organized creates those relationships, and even feeds back into the genetic make-up of the next generation. You can literally see in today’s genomes the traces of socio-economic outcomes influencing who mated with whom in the previous generations.

This is why I find it ironic that population geneticists are often the harshest critics of our field, while they should be its biggest fans. The very processes that influence the genetic make-up of a population over time — migration, mate choice, fertility, mortality — are, in contemporary humans, most tightly linked to socio-economic outcomes such as educational attainment, income, and occupational status. If you want to understand how evolution is unfolding in humans today, this is where you should be looking.

Confronting our past

Much criticism stems from our field's complicated history. Some of the people who laid its foundations carried with them ideas we now find deeply problematic: eugenics, racism, sexism. As a student I only learned the scientific side of their legacy. I remember proudly citing Francis Galton in a paper, until a journalist asked me: “But wasn’t he also responsible for the horrors of eugenics?” I mumbled something about how science can be used for good or bad. But the truth is, my education had been incomplete. I wasn’t taught to see these figures as complex people, shaped by their times, whose work left both key scientific tools and deep ethical scars. Our field attracts both critics and enthusiasts who try to link our work to eugenics. Part of maturing as a field is to recognize the full history: to decide what to keep, and what we need to outgrow, both in how we train the next generation of researchers and in how we help the public make sense of our past.

The controversy of applications

The urgency of this reckoning is clear when we look at current controversies. The one that stands out most today is embryo selection. Some of our colleagues are involved in companies offering polygenic screening of embryos, which includes approaches developed from research on genetic variation within and between families in socio-economic outcomes. The first line of criticism for embryo selection was that polygenic scores are too weak, that we don’t know what we’re selecting for, and that it opens the door to new eugenics. But as our studies improve, that first argument is fading. Polygenic risk prediction for complex traits is getting stronger. These companies don’t yet use social traits like education to screen embryos, but they are offering IQ, which is genetically about half-overlapping with education, but also positively genetically correlated with autism. That raises some legitimate concerns.

At the same time, I don’t think we should reflexively reject everything just because it reminds us of eugenics. Imagine a family that needs IVF to get pregnant and has a family history of a serious disease. They have to choose an embryo anyway. If they are given the option to peek at polygenic risk, many people would understand why they might take it. That doesn’t mean we should embrace embryo screening uncritically. There are still big risks and unknowns, especially at the population level if such practices became widespread. But it does mean that trying to stop it by simply calling it eugenics will not work.

Applications like these will continue to emerge and become more powerful, potentially having an impact on the structure of populations. As genetic predictors strengthen while regulation lags, it’s a matter of time before companies will offer to apply them in education, employment, insurance, and dating markets. How do we want to regulate this and who gets to decide where the line is?

The frontiers ahead

The developments in our field carry potential to change the world and transform how we think about society and ourselves. Genetic datasets are expanding, becoming larger and more diverse, even reaching back into ancient DNA. At the same time, our effect estimates are getting sharper and our methods more sophisticated. Together, these advances bring us closer to what I consider one of the main scientific tasks of social science genetics: finding out how and why the relationship between socio-economic systems and genetics varies between different cultural systems, across the world and across time. The biggest challenge, and the most exciting one, herein is how interdisciplinary this makes our field. We are trying to connect the DNA sequence, the most basic code of biology, to human culture, the most complex emergent property on earth. That means navigating everything in between: biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, history, law, ethics. We need all those perspectives, and we need to train our new generation of researchers to at least grasp the outlines of each layer.

That makes our field challenging and sometimes easy to criticize. But it’s also what makes it so beautiful. I hope that doesn’t scare people away. I hope it motivates more people to join in. Because whether you come from genetics, social science, or somewhere in between, your contributions could be crucial for how this field develops, and for what it will mean for the future of humanity.