Abstract
Genetic explanation of complex human behavior presents an excellent test case for pluralism. Although philosophers agree that successful scientific investigation of behavior is pluralistic, there remains disagreement regarding integration and elimination—is the plurality of approaches here to stay, or merely a waystation on the road to monism? In this paper we introduce an issue taken very seriously by scientists yet mostly ignored by philosophers—the missing heritability problem—and assess its implications for disagreement among pluralists. We argue that the missing heritability problem, which isn’t going anywhere any time soon, implies that pluralism in behavior genetics is both practically ineliminative and theoretically non-integrative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The second law states that the environmental effects of families appear to be small in classical twin studies; the third law states that a substantial portion of the variance in human behavior fails to be explained by either genes or environment.
Because the estimates were first developed for pathological traits in medical research, GPSs are often referred to as Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs). Here we’ll use GPS.
Sometimes ‘SNP heritability’ or ‘h 2DNA ’.
Credit goes to Wylie (2015) for coining the phrase, “Plurality of Pluralisms”.
Note that Matthews’ (2015) notion of ‘embedded mechanisms’ would not suffice, in our view, to close the mechanism gap for any complex human behavior. Although embedded mechanisms play an important explanatory role in some pattern oriented sciences, such as population genetics and statistical phylogeneticists, it is not yet clear that either quantitative genetic or molecular genetic approaches to human behavior employ embedded mechanisms.
References
Bourrat, P., & Lu, Q. (2017). Dissolving the missing heritability problem. Philosophy of Science, 84(5), 1055–1067. https://doi.org/10.1086/694007.
Bourrat, P., Lu, Q., & Jablonka, E. (2017). Why the missing heritability might not be in the DNA. BioEssays, 39(7), 8723. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201700067.
Chabris, C., Lee, J., Cesarini, D., Benjamin, D., & Laibson, D. (2015). The fourth law of behavior genetics. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(4), 304–312.
Craver, C., & Tabery, J. G. (2016). Mechanisms in science. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/science-mechanisms/.
Crow, T. J. (2011). The missing genes: What happened to the heritability of psychiatric disorders? Molecular Psychiatry, 16(4), 362–364. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2010.92.
Evans, L. M., Tahmasbi, R., Jones, M., Vrieze, S. I., Abecasis, G. R., Das, S., et al. (2018a). Narrow-sense heritability estimation of complex traits using identity-by-descent information. Heredity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-018-0067-0.
Evans, L. M., Tahmasbi, R., Vrieze, S. I., Abecasis, G. R., Das, S., Gazal, S., et al. (2018b). Comparison of methods that use whole genome data to estimate the heritability and genetic architecture of complex traits. Nature Genetics, 50(5), 737–745. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0108-x.
Glennan, S. (2002). Rethinking mechanistic explanation. Philosophy of Science, 69(S3), S342–S353. https://doi.org/10.1086/341857.
Haier, R. J. (2017). The neuroscience of intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kellert, S. H., Longino, H. E., & Kenneth Waters, C. (2006). Scientific pluralism. In K. C. Waters & H. Feigl (Eds.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. XIX). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kong, A., Thorleifsson, G., Frigge, M. L., Vilhjalmsson, B. J., Young, A. I., Thorgeirsson, T. E., et al. (2018). The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes. Science, 359(6374), 424–428. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan6877.
Longino, H. E. (2013). Studying human behavior: How scientists investigate aggression & sexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25.
Maher, B. (2008). The case of the missing heritability. Nature, Personal Genomes, 456, 18–21.
Matthews, L. J. (2015). Embedded mechanisms and phylogenetics. Philosophy of Science, 82(5), 1116–1126. https://doi.org/10.1086/683444.
Matthews, L. J. (2017). On mechanistic reasoning in unexpected places: The case of population genetics. Biology and Philosophy, 32(6), 999–1018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9588-9.
Matthews, L. J., & Tabery, J. G. (2018). Mechanisms and the metaphysics of causation. In Stuart Glennan & Phyllis Mc Kay Illari (Eds.), Routledge handbook of mechanisms and mechanical philosophy. London: Routledge.
McGue, M., & Lykken, D. T. (1992). Genetic influence on risk of divorce. Psychological Science, 3(6), 368–373. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00049.x.
Mitchell, S. D. (2002). Integrative pluralism. Biology and Philosophy, 17(1), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012990030867.
Mitchell, S. D. (2003). Biological complexity and integrative pluralism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Plomin, R., & von Stumm, S. (2018). The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Reviews Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.104.
Tabery, J. (2009). Making sense of the nature-nurture debate. Biology and Philosophy, 24(5), 711–723. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9152-3.
Tabery, J., Preda, A., & Longino, H. (2014). Pluralism, social action and the causal space of human behavior. Metascience, 23(3), 443–459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9903-x.
Tabery, J. G. (2014). Beyond versus: The struggle to understand the interaction of nature and nurture. Life and mind: Philosophical issues in biology and psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 160–164.
Wylie, A. (2015). A plurality of pluralisms: Collaborative practice in archaeology. In J. Y. Tsou, A. Richardson, & F. Padovani (Eds.), Objectivity in science (pp. 189–210). Berlin: Springer.
Yang, J., Bakshi, A., Zhu, Z., Hemani, G., Vinkhuyzen, A. A. E., Lee, Sang Hong, et al. (2015). Genetic variance estimation with imputed variants finds negligible missing heritability for human height and body mass index. Nature Genetics, 47(10), 1114–1120. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3390.
Acknowledgements
Research for this project was funded in part by the Center for Genetics and Human Agency via the John Templeton Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Matthews, L.J., Turkheimer, E. Across the great divide: pluralism and the hunt for missing heritability. Synthese 198, 2297–2311 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02205-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02205-w