Missing the point about heredity

Plus Australian climate policy, the nature of American history, and some thoughts on bail reform

A kangaroo stands in a burned forest after a bushfire linked to climate conditions. (Photo by Philip Thurston)

Zohran Mamdani rolled out a housing transition team on Monday, and it includes some very exciting names: Paul Williams from the Center for Public Enterprise; Carlina Rivera, who was a courageous YIMBY champion when she was on the City Council; and most exciting of all, Annemarie Gray, who runs Open New York, the city’s premiere YIMBY organization.

I am choosing to interpret this as Mamdani recognizing that his eye-catching pledge to “freeze the rent” (on the large minority of housing units that are subject to rent stabilization) can’t actually help the majority of New Yorkers and that if he wants to deliver on the spirit of his pledge, he’s going to need bolder action on housing supply.

Zagarna: I follow a number of accounts that cover Australian politics and am struck by the utter gulf between opinions on climate change there (even the right-wing party gets tons of bad press for backing away from the country’s ambitious net-zero-emissions target that it itself put in place under Scott Morrison, and numerous right-wing politicians have lost their seats to moderate independents who made climate change the centerpiece of their campaigns) and the United States, where even the Democrats seem ashamed to call for actual belt-tightening or emissions targets.

How does your theory of politics explain this? My theory is that Australians have had brought home to them (the huge wildfires of 2020 seem to have been a turning point) that climate change is not a culture-war issue, it’s a straightforward economic one. Did the US climate movement go astray portraying climate change as an issue of species extinction rather than a broad tax on housing and food production? And if so, doesn’t that point the way to revivifying climate change as a key and winning issue in US politics?

I checked with an Australian politics-knower, and his take is that climate is a broadly less-polarized issue Down Under. During the Biden era, we saw affluent climate-focused Democrats in the U.S. win the issue prioritization battle over less affluent Democrats’ preference for a more traditional focus on material issues. In Australia, by contrast, the primary locus of concern with climate change is still among affluent voters, but these voters act as a swing constituency that both sides try to court.

In part as a result of this, the Australian right is less uniformly hostile to climate action than American Republicans. But at the same time, Anthony Albanese’s efforts around things like electric-car subsidies and tailpipe emissions regulations are somewhat less aggressive than what Democrats proposed. And critically, the Albanese government is making zero effort to halt Australian coal mining or Australian coal exports.

Australian Labor has not adopted the American conceptualization of climate politics as an existential battle with fossil fuel interests. They’re trying to do what they can to reduce Australian pollution levels (it helps that Australia has abundant sunshine and land), but as long as the world is interested in burning coal, they want to manage Australian national resources in a way that benefits the Australian people. I think taking a similar approach to the American oil-and-gas industry would be smart.

Eric: Saw that paper about figuring out the “missing heritability” question. TLDR it claims twin studies inflated estimates of heritability by ~2x (so 30-40% vs the 60-70% found in twin studies). Are you updating any views based on this? Should the rest of us?

For those who don’t know what this is about, we understood the idea that people (and other living things) inherit attributes from their parents via genes long before we were able to say anything specific about the micro foundations of what the actual genes do. Yet without diving into the details of the molecular genetics, it was possible to do broad estimates of how heritable a given trait is by looking at twin studies. You could, for example, look at how similar identical twin brothers end up being on a given attribute like proclivity to develop depression.

Of course, it’s hard to know whether the depression rate is similar because they are genetically identical or because they were raised by the same parents in the same household. So you can also look at pairs of fraternal twin brothers and see how similar they turn out, depression-wise. If identical twins are even more similar than fraternal twins, that seems like it probably is due to their greater degree of genetic similarity.

More modern methods let us do actual sequencing of DNA and conduct what are known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and GWAS methods tend to give lower heritability estimates for almost all traits than we saw in older twin studies. That’s the “missing” heritability.

There’s a lot of debate about this, but I think the evidence is piling up that the twin studies are, in fact, overestimating the real level of heritability. You can read Sasha Gusev if you want more science on this.

I am not really updating my views much, because I read Kathryn Paige Harden’s book “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” (see my interview with her). She’s a big GWAS person, and I was already convinced that we should think of the twin studies as upper bounds on possible heritability, not the real estimates.

Which brings me to a point about framing and discourse.

I like Gusev and his writing, and I think he is correct on this point. He is also someone who I see most often arguing on the internet with people to his political right, making the case that true heritability is probably lower than they think.