Ep 79: How the genetic lottery affects complex human traits (with Kathryn Paige Harden)
Does our DNA matter for our life outcomes? Can and should we use it for better social policy? And why have these questions caused such a stir?
On this episode of Big Biology, we talk with Kathryn Paige Harden, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab. Paige is the author of a new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. In the book, Paige advocates for using genetic information to better understand variation in our life outcomes such as how many years of school we complete and other complex social, economic and educational conditions. She thinks that genetics can be a tool to help create a more equitable society, but her ideas have both ardent supporters and vociferous critics. We delve into why her book has been so controversial, how human genetic data might be used constructively and ethically, and whether the incorporation of more explicit evolutionary thinking about what genes actually do might prevent future misunderstanding and maybe even the misuse of genetic data.
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
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SPEAKERS
Paige Harden, Art Woods, Marty Martin
Art Woods 00:00
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Marty Martin 00:07
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Art Woods 00:16
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Marty Martin 00:23
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Art Woods 00:43
And now here's the show.
Marty Martin 01:02
We've known about the basic structure of DNA for decades now. And we've developed some awesome tools for describing it, culminating in the first publication of a full human genome sequence back in the early 2000s.
Art Woods 01:12
Since then, there's been an explosion of sequence data on people and on many other species too, with the related problem of what to do with all those data.
Marty Martin 01:21
These data have helped biologists make major progress understanding how genomes are organized and how much genetic variation populations contain.
Art Woods 01:28
These data have also generated new business opportunities. For example, companies like 23andme, which use genetic data to deduce genealogical histories and to predict phenotypes, including risks of various genetically based diseases. We talked with scientists from 23andme on Episode 30.
Marty Martin 01:44
Yet another example and an insidious one at that is the misuse of genetic data by certain groups to bolster what are quite frankly, eugenics ideas. These groups lean on cherry picked scientific literature, interpreted unfairly and inaccurately to support their own agendas.
Art Woods 01:59
And even in contexts in which intentions are genuinely good, confusion about the roles that genes play in human behavior has raised deep skepticism about the wisdom of using genetic data to inform medical, social and educational policies.
Marty Martin 02:14
Perhaps part of the problem is that we and here we refers to many scientists, but especially the media, we continue to oversimplify the roles of genes in biology. The effects of genes on phenotypes are very, very complicated.
Art Woods 02:26
The first complication is that rarely do genes have strong effects by themselves, they tend to cause phenotypic variation by interacting with one another. Genes inherently belong to large networks of other genes, all taking part in feed forward and feedback loops. All of this complexity means that phenotypic outcomes can be very difficult if not impossible to predict from information about sequences alone.
Marty Martin 02:50
The second complication is plasticity, a favorite topic of the show. The rub, as frequent listeners well know by now, is that genes and environments influence traits together. For an example check out our last episode with Nick Levis and David Pfennig, on the amazing plasticity of spadefoot tadpoles in the American Southwest.
Art Woods 03:07
For humans, there's every reason to believe that the same rules hold. We might be very sophisticated animals, but we are animals nonetheless. So just like any other species, environmental factors and genes influence our traits.
Marty Martin 03:19
The point is that the path from genotype to phenotype is neither straight nor narrow. Rather, it's messy and winding. One approach evolutionary biologists have used to deal with such a tricky issue is something called the reaction norm. Instead of putting genes on a pedestal as the prime movers in biology, the reaction norm framework gives genes and environments equal consideration.
Art Woods 03:38
And more importantly, it captures better the complex path by which traits take their form in organisms. For humans, a reaction norm framework can help us to understand genetic variation in conjunction with things like childhood nutrition, socio economic status and other forces important to us as a species.
Marty Martin 03:54
Which brings us to today's guest, Kathyrn Paige Harden, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Paige studies the roles that genes play in shaping complex traits in humans, and she's written extensively about how our understanding of human genetics could and should shape social policies.
Paige Harden 04:08
One way we can think about life outcomes, is to think about what is the shape? What is the narrowness? What is the height of the peaks that separate the valleys? What are the social structures that shunt people into one life outcome versus another? And another perspective is, well, how much does it matter where on the top of the hill you begin that journey?
Art Woods 04:32
One of the major complex traits she's analyzed is educational attainment. How many years of schooling a person has.
Marty Martin 04:38
She and others have shown that educational attainment mostly in populations of white Americans and people from the UK and Iceland, is correlated with several aspects of underlying genetics.
Art Woods 04:47
For example, if you have information on hundreds or thousands of genome wide SNPs.
Marty Martin 04:52
Single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are single base pair variants of the genetic code.
Art Woods 04:56
You can construct what are called polygenic indices. These indices essentially weighed each SNP by some value that says how much having it increases or decreases your educational attainment.
Marty Martin 05:07
Each individual SNP has a miniscule effect, and typically we don't even know what genes they're correlated with. But it turns out that a person's total score, their polygenic index summed across all SNPs, has some statistical power for predicting their level of educational attainment.
Art Woods 05:20
Paige also emphasizes that what we know about the links between genotypes and phenotypes within particular populations doesn't translate well into understanding differences among populations. In other words, any given population of humans is unlikely to resemble other human groups because population itself is a really abstract concept.
Marty Martin 05:39
For example, we can talk about the population of Missoula, Montana, the population of the United States, the population of the Earth in the year 1200. Each one of those populations is apt to be different from another one just because there's so many ways to group groups.
Art Woods 05:53
In modern human genetics, the current conundrum is that the vast majority of data available so far come from just a few and mostly western countries.
Marty Martin 06:01
But there are many reasons to expect genetic variation in those populations to be different than other populations. Not different in the sense of better or worse, that doesn't really make sense anyway, given how complex we just described genetic defects to be.
Art Woods 06:13
It simply means that whatever we learned about the relationships between genes and phenotypes in one population might not be borne out in another.
Marty Martin 06:21
Untangling the effects of genes on human behavior is obviously complicated. And confronting it directly is what makes Paige's books so controversial. That book, The Genetic Lottery, why DNA matters for social equality, has provoked a lot of commentary and critique.
Art Woods 06:35
But Paige also argues that incorporating genetics into studies of human traits can have large payoffs in terms of amplifying the power of basic research to identify effective medical and educational interventions.
Marty Martin 06:47
We talk to Paige about this approach, and ask her to lay out how she envisions that this information will change how our kids are taught in school, and what genetics means for social policy more broadly.
Art Woods 06:56
I'm Art Woods.
Marty Martin 06:57
And I'm Marty Martin.
Art Woods 06:58
And this is Big Biology.
Marty Martin 07:11
Paige, thank you very much for joining us on Big Biology to talk about your book, The Genetic Lottery, why DNA matters for social equality. It's been out for a little while now, and it's really caused a splash you've been on, wow, the time that you devoted to podcasts is really remarkable. And we've had the chance to listen to a bunch of those, and we'll talk about a couple of them. But it was an article in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis Krauss back in September that sort of inspired us and Art shared it with the team, and we were all excited about it, read the book. And we're here now. So it's our impression that a lot of the attention has come from the interesting topics, obviously, but also how amazingly well you write about these topics. But obviously, there's a controversy with a lot of these different things. So first, broad question, why has the book and your ideas broadly, been controversial? Or garnered the attention that they have?
Paige Harden 08:01
Oh, wow. I think because, I think two reasons. I think one is that the book really tries to be interdisciplinary. I'm trying to touch on issues not just in genetics, but also in psychology and economics and sociology and in political philosophy. A colleague of mine on Twitter, Molly Przeworski, who's a population geneticist, remarked that a discipline is a group of people who all agree not to question the same assumption.
Marty Martin 08:33
I like that.
Paige Harden 08:34
Which I think is brilliant. I think it's a brilliant observation. And so, you know, often when you're talking to just people in your field or just people in your subfield, you have a shared language, and you have a shared set of assumptions about what makes a question interesting, what assumptions are ignorable, you know, and I, a book that's kind of more of a big ideas book is trying to speak to a diverse group of people who do not share the same assumptions, and things that seem really uncontroversial, not in genetics, but in psychology, I think, right? Like in psychology, you know, the notion of measuring people is not controversial. It's part of how you make a science of human behavior.
Marty Martin 09:14
It's what you do, right?
Paige Harden 09:15
But just that idea can make people uncomfortable when they don't share the working assumptions of psychologists. So I think that's a big part of the controversy is that we go through our disciplinary lives as academics, on polite collegial terms with other, you know, people in adjacent disciplines. But we don't have to spend too much time with them, kind of looking under the hood of our assumptions. And then when you start to write things to multiple disciplines, those values conflicts, I think, come to the fore. So that's one reason and then I think, the genome just the idea of the genome, has such power in public imagination. There's a social psychologist who's written about the genes as essence placeholders that we, you know, in a secular society, we don't talk about souls anymore. But we all are essentialist thinkers, and so we've just swapped in genes as as our placeholder for the soul. And then when you start thinking about genes in relationship to behavior, in relationship to life outcomes, I think that troubles a lot of our intuitions about agency and justice and, and identity, and that makes people uncomfortable. Even if they're if even if they're not objecting intellectually to the conclusions, just raising those topics, I think can cause a little bit of unease among people. So I think that's part of it, too.
Art Woods 10:41
It feels to me like, you know, the culture at large has just sort of absorbed this idea of genetic determinism and genes as blueprints. And you know, Marty, and I, in our own work, think about that a lot. Like, how do you get from genotypes to phenotypes, and I think later in the show, we'd like to, you know, really sort of unpack that with respect to human traits. But it's just such an interesting and broad thing that I think most of the public doesn't realize how circuitous the route is from genes to phenotype, right?
Paige Harden 11:05
Yeah, yeah, it's such a sticky idea. And one thing that's been really fascinating to me in the response to the book is, as you know, if you read it, I spent a lot of time specifically talking about why genetic determinism isn't true, right? Like why these paths are probabilistic and circuitous and not well understood, and environmentally dependent. And yet, the number of critics who have alleged that I'm advocating genetic determinism has been surprisingly high, and I find that I find that really, really interesting. When you say, I don't believe this, and people still can't help but hear that very thing you've just objected to, I think that speaks to the stickiness of an idea in our discourse and rhetoric.
Art Woods 11:51
And as a working biologist, I mean, I could see you going way out of your way in the book to say no, like, you know, this, this sort of genetic determinism doesn't work.
Paige Harden 11:58
Yeah, yeah.
Art Woods 12:00
Maybe let's unpack just circling back to the book a little bit also. What do you mean by lottery in the title, genetic lottery.
Paige Harden 12:06
Yeah, so it's a play on two things. And the first is the phrase, the natural lottery, which is a phrase that comes from the political philosopher, John Rawls. So in his theory of justice, he proposes this idea that there's a natural lottery, which are your talents and physical characteristics and various things that you've got by virtue of your biological inheritance. You know, this was a political philosopher right in the 1970s, so he's not using the word gene in the same way that we would or he's not talking about biology, and he talks about the social lottery. And the rest of the book is really, given that people's outcomes in these two lotteries, basically, given that people's luck in life differs, how then do we think about building a fairer society? So when I was writing my book, you know, a big challenge with a lot of behavior genetics is if if genetic findings do trouble our intuitions around agency or fairness, how can we then make sense of them? And rather than kind of coming up with ideas from scratch, I really thought of a big part of my work here as as a translator, to say, okay, well, this is what political philosophers are writing about with regards to luck, and chance, and this is what geneticists and psychologists are talking about. How can we connect those two ideas? So a big part of the the motivation behind that kind of titular metaphor of the genetic lottery is I'm borrowing this phrase from Rawls. The second is that social science is hard, right? Like studying free range humans that get to create their own environments, and whose environments are shaped by their parents, is a really difficult problem. And so all of us in psychology and education and sociology and economics, in particular, has been the leader in this, are looking for natural experiments in which something is randomly assigned. And here we have genetic inheritance in which, you know, you have two you have, as your listeners know, you know, parents have two copies of every gene and their kid gets one of them. And the randomness of that lottery, of which of your parental alleles that offspring inherit, is the sort of natural experiment that my colleagues in the social sciences are really used to thinking about exploiting. And so I wanted to highlight that as an underutilized, natural experiment that's happening for every human in every generation that could be leveraged or exploited to try to get at some of these really, really difficult questions about human capital development. So that's the other kind of focus on the metaphor of the lottery in the title.
Marty Martin 14:45
The lottery is, I mean, it is vivid for the reasons that you say, I thought that your pitch of it in a YouTube video that you just had out a couple of weeks ago, I can't remember what the what the group was. What was the name of that group Art? The How-to Academy of Science?
Paige Harden 14:59
Oh, yeah.
Marty Martin 15:00
So you started that lecture with Waddington's landscape, the epigenetic landscape, right. And I mean, we don't have images here, so I'm hoping that listeners generally know what that is. But that was really an intriguing way to pitch that because I don't remember that that was in the book, correct me if I'm wrong.
Paige Harden 15:16
No it wasn't but yeah, so you know, Waddington, it's that classic diagram, that line drawing of Waddington's, I think that's what 1957 I think? Is it around there? Right. And so it's this picture of a kind of a hill that has different valleys and peaks in it. And a ball is positioned at the top of the hill. And you can see, I mean, what's so evocative about the drawing is that you can imagine as the ball rolls down the hill, it's going to be channeled into this groove versus this groove. And then there's this like wide variety of outcomes, that the ball could end up, wide variety of places where the ball could end up. And once it gets there, jumping the track is really hard, like getting from one end of the landscape to the other at the bottom of the hill is very difficult. You know, like, if you've ever been skiing, like, if you take this path versus this path, like you.
Marty Martin 15:28
Or so, yeah, something like that.
Art Woods 15:29
Makes all the difference.
Paige Harden 15:48
It's really hard, you gotta go back up to the beginning and start again. But there's so much potentiality at the very beginning. And so, you know, one way we can think about life outcomes, is to think about what is the shape? What is the narrowness? What is the height of the peaks that separate the valleys? What are the social structures that shunt people into one life outcome versus another? And another perspective is, well, how much does it matter where on the top of the hill, you begin that journey downwards? So as a developmental psychologist, I really think of these two questions as operating hand in hand. So your social position, your parent's wealth, and the zip code that you came home from the hospital in, and your genotype, are part of, you know, where you're beginning on the top of that hill. And then we can also evaluate social structures in terms of, well, how much does that structure your subsequent life chances? What are the chances of, of moving from one trajectory to another in childhood and adolescence and in midlife? So, you know, part of the reason I love that metaphor is, so often people think of the study of genotypes and social structures as an opposition to one another, whereas I really think of them as they're both aspects of how an individual makes it through this life course, you know, runs down the ski slope of life.
Marty Martin 17:35
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I love that analogy. I think it's because it's close to my own research home has been one of the most inspiring things every graduate student comes to my lab. You know, I tried to indoctrinate them with the idea. But I brought I brought it up to talk about the lottery ideas that you were going through, but we want to spend a bunch of time today on, you know, our universe of science versus with the constants of your book. And so it really stood out that you used the Waddington idea, because when you talked about the different audiences that you were trying to write to, and maybe that was the reason for controversy, you didn't name neuroscience, and you didn't name evolutionary biology. I mean, you use Waddington as an example but but why not those fields?
Paige Harden 18:12
No, you're right. That's so insightful as a as an as a lacuna on my part.
Marty Martin 18:18
Well, there's only so many things you can do in a short book, right?
Art Woods 18:21
Yeah.
Marty Martin 18:21
Yeah, you know, and I think one of the one of the reasons that's really interesting, so I think of neuroscience as disciplinarily, very close to psychology, many neuroscientists are also trained as psychologists and most neuroscientists don't really need to be convinced that like a biological lens on the study of human behavior is important. Right? Like there, you know, there's it's very rare to find.
Art Woods 18:44
Background assumption.
Paige Harden 18:46
So I think, you know, in terms of, one way to think about the book is that it's, it's both a set of logical appeals, logical arguments, like this is how we think about causation, this is how, but also kind of an ethical appeal about like, why do I think this topic is worth studying, and neuroscientists, on the whole, in my experience, are close enough to my own priors around a lot of this stuff. I guess they were, and maybe this is wrong, but I was thinking of them in the camp of people who are interested, but probably sympathetic to begin with. The camp of you know, evolutionary biologists is interesting, because, you know, historically, as you know, and today, you know, even responses to my book, I would say that biologists have been some of the most vociferous critics of behavior genetics.
Marty Martin 19:37
Not totally surprised there.
Paige Harden 19:41
And, you know, in that way, I mean, we can, I have lots of theories about why that might be, but I, I guess I don't, when I interact with evolutionary biologists, it's because they've sort of sometimes unwittingly bumped into the study of human behavior, and so the fields that I just that I listed there, they're really about, fields that are centered around understanding the human life course. And I guess I was not thinking of an evolutionary biologist that I personally know, that being their kind of core domain of interest, which is like, human behavior.
Marty Martin 20:22
Well, that makes sense. I think a lot of biologists, you know, don't view humans as anything more than some other species, right. So most everything you write about, given, there's a lot more complexity, you know, our brains and our libraries, and all these sorts of things. But by and large, the rules that work in Paramecia, or orangutans or whatever it might be, you know, humans are just some other variant on a theme.
Art Woods 20:45
Spoken like a biology nerd.
Marty Martin 20:48
I get, I'll get a bunch of hate for that, but.
Art Woods 20:50
Yeah you will. But I agree. You know, we keep talking about behavioral genetics and genotypes versus phenotypes, I think it'd be nice to make that sort of concrete in a more fundamental way for the listeners, and maybe let's pick on one of the traits that you spend quite a bit of time on in the book, and that is educational attainment. And maybe let's just talk about what that is, and then you make the case that there are some genetic influences on educational attainment, and I want to talk about GWAS and polygenic indices as ways of understanding that influence.
Paige Harden 21:28
Yeah, it's so interesting, that educational attainment has ended up being the phenotype that we talk about, because it's such a garbage phenotype, right? So educational attainment is just the number of years of formal schooling that you've completed. And anyone who's ever like applied for a loan has had to, you know, enter this. And the reason why that was the focal phenotype is because every medical and psychiatric study on Earth collects that information as part of their basic demographic survey, particularly thinking about the first iteration of the educational attainment GWAS were looking for, how can I compile data on a psychologically relevant phenotype, you know, related to human psychology at all, or in this case, it was headed up by economists, so economically relevant phenotype, from the largest number of people, you got this garbage phenotype that's on your medical records, and you know, that all the height geneticists also can collect and, you know, etc, etc. And, you know, when that first study came out, which was, I think it was, like 200,000 people, maybe I'm under estimating, no, I think it was like 200,000 people. So they, they had a bunch of different cohorts, where everyone had been measured on years of formal schooling, they did some work to try to translate that across countries, right, because like you go to, you know, if you didn't go to Gymnasium in Germany, you only went for 11 years of school, you know, like that sort of cross country differences, and then tried to control for ancestry using a number of principal components of ancestry, and then just correlated SNPs, you know single nucleotide polymorphisms, with number of years of schooling, and I think they had one or two significant hits. And I found it a really profoundly counterintuitive approach as a psychologist, because psychologists are obsessed with measurement, right, of human phenotypes like this is why we invest a ton into personality tests and intelligence tests and other ways to measure human behavior. And the idea that you could take a phenotype that was so crude, and was so messy, right, like people go to school for a long period of time for all sorts of reasons that are smooshed together into one number, that you could identify genetic correlates of that outcome that replicated really shocked me, it really, really surprised me. But I, you know, in retrospect, and it's interesting, because phenotypes that I think my prior would have been, would have worked out better for GWAS, like, would have found more replicable associations earlier with lower sample sizes is what I mean by better in that way. Something like major depression or something like schizophrenia, psychiatric diseases, addiction, opioid use disorder, have not yielded as quickly as educational attainment did. And I think that's telling us something really interesting not about biology, but about the way that education systems are structured, that they're so path dependent, and regardless of all the kind of minor variations in schooling that we obsess about, they do tend to emphasize the same sorts of skills regardless of whether you're in Norway or the US, that there's actually perhaps less heterogeneity in why people go to school, then there is in why people get depressed, or why people become schizophrenic. And that's, I think, an interesting observation that wouldn't have been clearer I think before the studies had started.
Art Woods 21:45
And are you saying that, so this past dependence of educational attainment, are you saying that sort of early differences in people's experience in school become magnified over time? And so even very subtle things early on can have a huge effect down downstream?
Paige Harden 25:13
Yes, exactly. That's exactly what I mean by path dependence. And that is apparent at every level of analysis, right? So if we look at, ignoring genetics, if we just look at what is the relationship between a measurement of conscientiousness or a measurement of visual spatial reasoning, in educational, some sort of academic performance, that relationship gets stronger with every passing year. And we build that path dependence in right, like we have high stakes testing, we have, you know, giftedness tests for four year olds, like all of our educational opportunities are structured by prior performance, and that begins very, very early in life. So to go back to that Waddington metaphor of the epigenetic landscape, you know, you can think about a landscape that's kind of like flat or undulating, right, and the ball has lots of movement across the landscape as it goes down and kind of serendipity. Our educational system works nothing like that. We channel people into groups very early, and make it very hard for them to jump the track once they're in that.
Marty Martin 26:15
So how do you want to connect that with GWAS? Because we do want to get, I think a lot for the other things that we want to talk about, and in spite of the shortcomings of this incredibly complicated phenotype, I mean, there have been efforts to use GWAS. What is GWAS? What are polygenic scores? What do we need to know?
Paige Harden 26:31
So So like I said, the GWAS is just correlating SNPs measured in a large number of people with this outcome, which is years of education. Subsequent studies have used progressively larger sample sizes, the most recent published, one used a GWAS of 1.1 million people, there's a forthcoming GWAS of educational attainment, people tend to number them. So this would be EA4, EA4 I think it's close to 3 million, 4 million. So it's a substantial increase in sample size. And so at the, you know, with each set of GWAS results, what, you know, what do you do with them? And, you know, one kind of hope was, this was going to yield a lot of biological mechanistic insight, which I think that's worked out less well. Another is that you just take those results, and you apply them to a new group of people. And you measure their SNPs, weight the SNPs by the correlations estimated in the first study, and add it all up into one number. And that number is called a polygenic score. What really, I think focused attention on educational attainment in particular, is that polygenic score is as strongly correlated with the likelihood of graduating from college as a variable like family income is. So you have something that, on the surface, you feel like you would hate, right? It's it's a garbage phenotype. You've thrown in you've done this hypothesis for a GWAS, you have no idea why the SNPs are related to the phenotype of interest, you smush them all together into a single number. But yet somehow, that really ugly, clunky thing is as correlated with rates of college completion as income is in, you know, samples of European ancestry, people from high income countries, which is, you know an important qualifier, how do you make sense of that result?
Art Woods 28:17
I want to just step back here for a second and contrast what you're just talking about, these polygenic scores and effects of, you know, many different SNPs of very small effect on a complex phenotype, versus other sorts of like, more monogenic kinds of traits and diseases that arise from single loci or single alleles, at single at a single locus, things like PKU or Huntington's disease. So we're talking about traits that involve many, many, like hundreds or 1000s of, of allelic effects of very small size, right?
Paige Harden 28:45
Yes, hundreds of 1000s of allelic associations, I mean.
Art Woods 28:49
Not, not even effects really.
Paige Harden 28:51
Right, like we don't know, if the SNP is the causal variant, or it's just tagging the causal variant, we don't know if that variant is actually causal, or is correlated due to population structure, you know, something like Huntington's, if you understand what the Huntington's disease gene is doing, you understand something about the pathophysiology of the disease, right? Like this codes for this protein. And if this has access repeats, then you know, like, there's a there's a, the genetic discovery and the and the mechanistic insight go hand in hand. And not just for education, but for human behavior generally, complex trait genetics generally has not yielded that same sort of like readily appreciable, because we understand genetic associations, we now understand a biological mechanism, at all right? Instead, it's like, well, here's a, here is a set of summary statistics, I'm like, oh, that's great, you've given me a data file with 17,000 rows, but like, what, how do we, how do we make sense of that information?
Marty Martin 29:53
So what's next in the space of GWAS because your field is behavioral genetics. And presumably that's going to be some form of genetics. You talked on another podcast and I'm not going to remember which one probably more than one, about the need to get genetic representation for more populations. And that is definitely a huge one. But but can you say something about that, and then also talk about the other forms of genetic variation that in any population, because SNPs is what we look for, because they're easy to find comparatively. What, how do we look for epistasis? How do we look for pleiotropy? I mean, these are the things that, okay, again, as an evolutionary biologist, these are the things that really get us going. So how are the GWAS crowd looking at this.
Paige Harden 30:37
Yeah your listeners can't see me making like the Edvard Munch, like, you know, scream face over here. So I think there's a couple obvious directions for it, and you've already mentioned one, which is who are we genotyping right? And so under that, I would say, yes, one representation of more than just white British people, or Icelandic people, which make up the, or Finnish people, which is like a huge dominance in terms of psychiatric genetics, I would see in addition to who, and another point under who I guess, is even within an ancestry group, representation of the population, right. So I feel like when people first started doing GWAS, they thought, well, we're going to discover the kind of pathophysiology of heart disease, and that's going to be the same in whoever we study, and so the fact that our samples are not actually that representative of the populations that we're drawing them from, isn't that big of a deal. And it turns out that it's a huge deal, because not only are our samples, European ancestry, but they're more educated, they're less likely to be in institutional settings, such as psychiatric hospitals or jail, they have access to the medical care system, and how that distorts the picture of how genes are associated with phenotypes, I think is becoming more and more clear. So diversity, representativeness, I think a huge push is going to be family members. So you know, most GWAS's are studying one person per nuclear family trying a lot of statistical tricks to control for confounding of population structure, the only real way around that is to leverage the natural experiment of genetic transmission from parent to child. And so I think there's this increasing emphasis on parent offspring trios, or full sibling designs, which is actually very gratifying for a behavior geneticist who's always been like, if you can do it in one kid for family, you should do it in all the kids for family. And you should measure the parents too, because I think increasingly, the biology community is coming to that.
Art Woods 31:42
There's a lot of shared environment there, too, right? That sort of helps.
Paige Harden 32:42
Yeah, so actually, one way to think about this is, you know, taking seriously the kind of methodological innovations of a lot of different fields, like anthropologists have long said, you can't just study weird people. Like you need diversity and representation. sociologists have said, the representativeness of your sample matters. If you want to draw conclusions about a population, psychologists have been like, let's study family members, not just one person per family. Economists have long said, where are the policy interventions? Where are the natural experiments? And I think that's going to be another big innovation of taking data on randomized controlled trials of medications of educational curricula or policy changes, and natural experiments in terms of, you know, something like the Biden Child Tax Credit, like we didn't have it, and we had it, and then we don't have it, right. Like that's a that's an exogenous environment. There's very few data sources that layer genetic information over this kind of these lotteries of environmental experience. So I think taking that seriously, I would say those would be the main four interventions from the social science side. And then I think, increasingly, as you said, like right now we measure SNPs, because we can measure SNPs cheaply and easily in lots of people, right, so how is all going to change as we measure the genome better at scale?
Marty Martin 34:08
Do you think are there people trying to measure epistasis? Because the genome itself is an environment, right, and this is part of the reason that we care about describing genetic variation in other human populations, right. It's not just the alleles, it's the alleles in context of the genome. In combination with that. Exactly yeah, so I mean, it's a monster. It's a nightmare, right? It's incredibly complicated.
Art Woods 34:30
Totally. And actually, let me just ask a statistical version of that same question, which is, you know, when you describe the construction of these polygenic indices, it's like you're adding and subtracting tiny amounts based on which SNP you have at which location? Is there also information built into those indices on interactions between SNPs from different locations?
Paige Harden 34:47
So those are two versions of the same question, right, which is, like it's a really naive additive model, right? It's a really naive, you have 0, 1 or 2 copies of this minor allele, I am multiplying that times a correlation, and then I'm adding those weighted sums up over the course of the whole genome. So there's no epistasis in that, and that is for statistical reasons. So like, think about the amount of the number of people that it's come up that it's required to come up with statistically robust, just main effects of this variant is correlated with this. And now think about the additional statistical power for interactions, and then all the possible interactions between all the possible variants, there's just literally like, there just isn't enough statistical power for that. And so it's remained in this really kind of simplified, overly simplified, obviously, like, additive world. In some ways, I think that's why people are kind of shocked that it works at all right. You know, I sometimes I sometimes think like we should step back and be like, we did like a, like, a really crude, Psych 101, linear regression of number of years of education on whether you got 0, 1, or 2, of these minor alleles. And then we just did that a bazillion times across all the SNPs for a million people, and then just added it up. Like 15 years ago, if one of your undergrads came to you and was like, I got this great idea. This is what we should do.
Art Woods 36:19
Yeah.
Paige Harden 36:20
Would you have thought that that would have yielded any like anything to work with? Like, it's kind of amazing in retrospect.
Art Woods 36:39
Let's, let's turn to another issue that Marty and I think about quite a bit, and that is plasticity. So you know, interactions between genes and environments as a sort of key mechanism that influences traits and trait variation in populations. And I'd say, you know, it's my impression that from from your book, and sort of other things, I've read about behavioral genetics, that people don't think a whole lot about that in the same way that that maybe evolutionary biologists do, you know, which is as a really fundamental part of generating variation in populations. How much are you incorporating plasticity thinking into this? And like, you know, can you think about how interventions interact with say, SNPs in these polygenic scores to change outcomes?
Marty Martin 37:20
So I guess I would push back on that? I don't think it's that, you know, behavior geneticists or psychologists don't think about plasticity. I think one, we tend to have a different language. I think a ton of this is the language around ideas, like if a developmental psychologist said to you like I study heterotypic continuity, or equifinality. Would that reach you as this is a person that's studying plasticity? Yeah, you know, the, the language barrier is almost definitely there. Do psychologists use the concept of the reaction norm
Art Woods 37:47
No.
Marty Martin 37:47
No. I think that, in some ways, this the the concepts of equi finality and multi finality in psychology and behavior genetics, which is that like you, you can have some genotype that can be expressed differently in different developmental contexts, but also that there's a lot of potentiality, to what the the emerging phenotype looks like. I think there is a huge theoretical literature on that, but it doesn't use any of the same language. And so there's a there's a real cross translation problem there. I think the other thing is plasticity, broadly speaking, I understand it as something that can be understood at multiple levels of analysis, right? So we can think about molecular plasticity, right? Like how does the gene product differ depending on the cell type? Or how does the cellular outcome depend on some sort of other milieu, but we can also think about plasticity in terms of I have some embodied psychological characteristic openness, or extraversion. How does that manifest in terms of some sort of more socially constructed life outcome? Right, like entrepreneurialism, like does that make me a CEO or a delinquent? Well, you know, that's another form of plasticity. So I think often it's, it's differences in language, but also differences in levels of analysis. Like, are we interested in the potentiality from a very early like the measure of the gene sequence itself to some cellular or molecularly measured outcome? Or are we thinking about potentiality in terms of some psychological functioning, which is itself to relate, you know, the outcome of plasticity over the course of development? But, you know, if I measure executive function in a seven year old child, what are the range of life outcomes that can be associated with that, given certain developmental inputs?
Paige Harden 37:57
They do, yeah.
Marty Martin 37:58
Yeah. Okay, because when you showed the Waddington landscape, it immediately came to me, you know, reaction norm, and again, I don't remember reading it in the book, but I wonder if that way, you're totally right, that levels of interest are going to change and plasticity can be measured almost anywhere in a biological psychological hierarchy. But the reaction norm is a really nice way, an artificial way, like a lot of these things that we've been talking about, but we do the best we can, of decomposing variation and trying to, with SNPs or otherwise, think about genetic variation in the background of environmental variation. So it's putting them kind of in the same framework. And, you know, you don't want to get into the details of what percentage of this and that gets complicated, not always productive. But if they use it, how do they use it? And is it not something that really gains a lot of attention?
Paige Harden 40:37
Oh, that's, you know, I feel like there's such an interesting intellectual history within behavior genetics around that idea of the reaction norm. There is this very interesting back and forth between Irv Gottesman who was a psychologist who did some of the early work on children of twins, who are discordant for schizophrenia, who was a mentor to Eric Turkheimer, who was my PhD mentor with Gottlieb, I think is how you pronounce his name, around the concept of the reaction norm and the reaction range. And then also James Tabery, who's a philosopher of science has a really excellent book called Beyond Versus, which also talks about the different ways that people have used the notion of interaction, like what constitutes an interaction, what is an interaction, in different fields, and he talks a little bit about the history of reaction, reaction norms or reaction ranges. One difficulty, or I guess one difference is that, you know, when you think about reaction norms, outside of psychology, often biologists end up pointing to things that I guess I would refer to as sort of crossover interactions, where the relative ordering of a phenotype under one circumstance is not informative about the relative ordering of that phenotype in another environmental circumstance, like, you know, the the maze-bright rats become the maze-dull rats, if they're raised under a different environment. I think what's difficult is that those types of crossover interactions in human behavior are actually really hard to find. So most often what we talk about in terms of gene by environment, interaction in psychology and human behavior, is an environment exacerbates or suppresses a genetically associated difference that was apparent in another environment, but doesn't appreciably reorder individuals. The people who are high don't become the people who were low. And so I think that, like the empirical examples have become, that's one of the things that makes the ideas of how biologists have used reaction range, and the examples of gene environment interaction in human behavior have been difficult to translate to one another.
Art Woods 42:39
And to make that concrete again. So I think there's an example in your book that maybe illustrates this of leveling down with educational attainment. So under some circumstances, there's not much of an association between polygenic indices and educational attainment because people don't have the opportunity to progress further through school.
Marty Martin 42:55
Yeah, so a great example is, and this is back to the example of combining genetics with natural experiments on policy reforms, is there was this educational reform in the UK where everyone was required to go to school for an extra year. And so if you look at people who are high versus low in a polygenic score for BMI, you see that there's a gap in their adult body weight, that people are more genetically at risk of higher body weight, but that that gap narrows, after the school reform. So when you make everyone go to school, a year later, education reduces body size, education improves health, that's like a very standard finding, but it works more for people who are genetically more at risk for being obese. And so you end up with this narrowing. What you don't see is a crossover, you don't see the people who were genetically most at risk now become the thinnest. They become just less overweight relative to their. Yeah, well, and those are the challenges with human studies, right? I mean, if there are no environments that those genome genotypes are exposed to, you don't have the data to be able to see it. I mean, in any any other biological system, you can get everything, no plasticity, some plasticity, reversals of outcomes. I mean, anything is there, especially in cases where you can modify the environment. But one more one more thing, just on this topic is that in evolutionary biology, I mean, there's a big appeal really across biology for integration. The National Science Foundation is investing heavily in thinking and ideas and methodologies for bringing together levels of biological organization so we can understand how the genotypes map to the phenotype. And again, I'll go back to the biologists would say humans are just another species. So ultimately, maybe those are going to fit into the same kind of thing. But I think a rallying point with a lot of those initiatives is the reaction norm, as the thing that evolves as the thing that whatever level of analysis you want to focus on, understanding the relationship between gene and environment as it manifests in variation and phenotype, so the sentiment, the basic mindset of GWAS without considering the sort of arena in which the genetic variation plays its game, is experienced selection or whatever it might be, you know, it's sort of missing potentially missing part of that really important thing. Yeah, yeah. Because it's like looking at a static thing rather than how to things, which reminds me I think of another direction that I think GWAS's are going to go in, it's related to the combining genetic information with RCT. But I think it's the it's the making response to intervention or response to medication the phenotype, the focal phenotype of interest in the GWAS. So not doing a GWAS of depression, and then seeing how does genetic risk differ, you know, moderate your response to this antidepressant. But your response to the antidepressant being the thing that is GWAS'ed, right. So it is the, you know, the response to the environment, that more intra individual, which I, you know, I so I was trained at UVA, and one of my professors there was John Nestleroad, who was a quantitative psychologist who was on the dissertation committee of my, my partner was in graduate school, my ex husband, so I spent a lot of time thinking about Nestleroad when I was a graduate student. And he was a huge proponent of studying fewer people more intensely over time, and over development. His whole thing was, which I agree with really philosophically that, like, if psychology is about humans, which are interested in this human development, and and so he would always show this thing where you could think about, like, let's take a snapshot of 17 different horses while they're running. What does that tell you about running versus taking 17 photographs of the same horse running?
Art Woods 46:47
That's brilliant. Yeah, I love that.
Marty Martin 46:49
You want to understand that process, right. And so it's like toward that kind of more idiopathic kind of science.
Art Woods 46:57
We've talked about several other species, rats, now horses, not not in this context. But it does lead into a nice question about comparative biology and sort of drawing on non human systems. So how valuable do you think it is to study things like, you know, wild populations of primates, or mice or rats or whatever, in order to get insight into the same connections in populations in which you really can more ethically do sort of interventions or experiments?
Marty Martin 47:22
I mean, so the first thing that comes to mind is, especially in terms of trying to grapple with, okay, there are a few genes that are surprising, consistent discoveries for human phenotypes, right, like CACNA2 for schizophrenia, it's a calcium channel related gene, or CADM2, which is a cell adhesion molecule gene for risk taking, and ADHD and cannabis use and basically like anything behavioral impulsive, right, like, what are they doing? Why, why does that matter for the development of ADHD, that's a big mystery. So that the kind of like animal follow up translation work, is hugely important. I, you know, just generally, I'm kind of a, you know, let 1000 flowers bloom thinker, I think it's very unpredictable, where big insights are gonna come from and if someone's burning passion is to study wild turkeys or whatever, like, go forth, like, that may be where it is. I really think that convergence and a diversification of, of your of your intellectual portfolio as a society is how we make progress. We want to turn back to you know, a lot more of the specific things that were in the book. So we've talked about GWAS, we've talked about polygenic scores, you had a really fascinating conversation with Sean Carroll on MindScape, it's one of one of my favorite shows. And he asked you, how are we going to use genetic data once we get them? I think you also had a chat with Carl Zimmer on a different podcast, and Carl asked the same question. So how are we going to use that? Yeah, you know, it's really interesting to me about that question, because I think so many people's minds go to the most extreme dystopian example, right? Gattaca?
Paige Harden 49:20
That we're gonna like genotype all two year olds, and we're gonna like track them into the like, you get to go to Harvard track versus the like, you are conspired, like consigned to learn nothing track, and that's what we're gonna do with genetics. No, like, obviously, that's not what we should do. I think a really good, so just to back up a second, like I previously said that a polygenic score is as strongly correlated with your risk of graduating from college as knowing a child's family income is. Which is decently predictive, not determinative, right, like this is not like a dispositive piece of data that we have. And that's a really good starting point, which is like, well, how do we use knowledge of family income in education and research and policy, right? Like, well, we don't say. I mean, we do in like subtle ways, and I think this is a bad thing. But like we don't overtly say like, well, your family is rich, so you get to go to college and like, you get to go to the gifted track school, like those are things that we try to actively work against. But mostly, when we are trying to figure out what makes an effective classroom, what makes an effective teacher, what makes an effective school district, we are trying to not compare apples with oranges, we are trying to take into account that schools and neighborhoods differ in the concentration of children who have the challenges associated with learning that come from poverty, and we use it as a statistical tool to make our science better. And then once we have things that work, which isn't very often in education, and I talk about this in my book, if we're responsible, we follow up and we say is this working for everyone, or are the children who are most at risk who are coming from low income families being left behind. And I think we should use that as our model for how we think about the application of genetics in the social and behavioral educational space. So for most of the time, if people have a proposal for how to use genetics, or if they have a sweeping condemnation of genetics as useless, I think it's helpful to substitute in your mind measure of socioeconomic status with polygenic score and see if the sentence still makes sense. We don't know why socioeconomic status is associated with childhood, college completion, so it's not worth studying. Like, that would be a really egregious statement, right. Or we shouldn't collect data on it, or because kids who come from wealthy families are more likely to graduate from college, we should preferentially track them. Like that would also be. So that's that's where I think we should start from is how do we use information about other probabilistic social science variables that are indicative of these kind of starting point inequalities?
Art Woods 51:07
So I hear you on this stuff, and I think, you know, the, maybe another way to phrase what you just said, is that you're you're advocating also using these polygenic scores as a sort of covariant in studies and doing better studies on the things that matter by understanding another determinant or influence on on outcomes. And I'm totally on board with that.
Marty Martin 52:19
Which can either strike you, as you know, like, you should use genetics to do science, social science better, like I think that can strike can be either that's either a really banal statement or a really radical one. Because on the one hand, it's like, no, like, we shouldn't do Gattaca, like, just like, make your causal inference statistics better. On the other hand, that proposition, my proposition is coming from a place of thinking that social scientists have a responsibility towards understanding what causes what in human capital development as well as they can. And they have a responsibility, because knowledge of the world is important for the construction of social policy, that we can't be as effective as we want to bring about the world that we want that's consistent with those values, if we don't understand the structure that we're tinkering with. And so it's really, I think, DNA matters for social equality, because I think doing good social science matters for social equality. And I think DNA is a tool for doing better social science in a world where we don't have the same control that the rat folks do and the plant folks do to manipulate environments and do really clean experiments.
Art Woods 53:29
And I think, as you said earlier, I mean, that's, that's very different than this idea that many people might just just sort of resort to right away, of oh my kids are gonna get sequenced and you know, something's going to happen based on the SNPs that they have. But I do want to, I want to follow up with, just sort of riff off of a question that Carl Zimmer asked you. So sort of at the very end of your chat, this was in the fall, he asked, you know, if you could run the Harden Academy, how would you run it? And I think what he wanted you to talk about, I don't actually know, but I thought I think he wanted you to maybe say something about how would schools be different based on this genetic information? And you responded by talking about, you know, research programs and doing better social science? But like, there's still this sort of outstanding question of like, how actually, will schools change? If if we institute this as part of the research program? So like, in sort of a concrete way, is it possible to say how schools will change?
Marty Martin 54:24
Yeah, I mean, so I think one way to think about that is to think about, like, well, how has how have schools changed? Or like, what are some of the outstanding, really vivid debates that schools have recently had about best practice that are sort of getting to be resolved in certain ways? And so we can think about things like the quote unquote, reading wars, should we do like a whole reading approach or like an approach that's narrowly around phonics? I think it actually can be sort of wild for people outside of education to think that it's still an active area of debate, or at least was up until very recently, like, what is the best way to teach a five year old how to read? Or ability-based tracking, that's a huge controversy right now. Like, do people learn better, not just high skilled math learners, but low skilled math learners, if they're grouped with people of this of similar abilities in math, or are more heterogeneous groupings better? I don't actually know the answer to that question. If you look at some results from India, it seems like ability tracking is really good. If you look at some other more recent results from the US it's maybe like the high math learners do well, regardless, it's the low learners like the low skilled math learners that are like really hurt by being stuck in class with people that already understand everything, that is now seen in question. Does class size actually matter? Does Harvard Academy need to have eight kids per teacher, or like 25 is fine? There's evidence to suggest that like growth mindsets in teachers improve math motivation in ninth graders, but only amongst schools who already have norms that are kind of promoting of, of taking on math challenges. How the heck do you create peer norms in ninth graders around taking on challenges? Like have you been around ninth graders? Oh yes, I have one.
Paige Harden 56:18
There are bright spots, there are teachers that are really good at motivating kids to do math and finding out who they are. And what they're doing is really hard. Because teachers are non randomly assigned to students. And it's always difficult to figure out, is it the teacher? Is it the class? Or do they just happen to have a bunch of like white kids from Westlake with wealthy parents that are going for private tutors who have had no challenges in their life, and like, they would have been fine regardless? So I think that there are so many outstanding questions. Hardin Academy, I'd be like, I don't even know because I think the the the problem of really basic things is much more unresolved than most people know. And genetics is not the solution to that. But it is a tool for that. Because it's a tool for dealing with this confounding of environment versus pre existing characteristics.
Marty Martin 57:10
So that this is great to kind of circle back to something that's come up and it's been under the surface, a lot of the things that we've talked about genetics as a tool, but I know in the in the media, if you've been criticized in the sort of eugenics state. It's a tool, but it's a dangerous tool. Yeah. Well, so, is there something that you can say about avoiding the danger of this work being used for eugenic ends? Yeah. So I mean, I think with that, it's really important to realize that people mean eugenics in lots of different ways. Like, what does that mean, right? So some people mean eugenics specifically around the control of reproduction of other people, right. Like that was the eugenic atrocities of the early 20th century were we're going to forcibly sterilized people, we're going to murder people, right, it was these violations of bodily integrity. And so their, their eugenic concerns are really around how is this technology going to be used in reproductive medicine? Is it going to be used for like the selection of polygenic embryos? At the same time, we are having a lot of assaults on people's reproductive integrity in the US, and they're not coming from people who are saying, look at the polygenic score, they're coming from people who want to completely outlaw abortion entirely. So there's a sensitivity to that concern, which is we all know that like eugenic concern, and then it's also a recognition of what is the political landscape under which assault on reproductive integrity and autonomy are happening today. And if you look at the rhetoric of people who want to outlaw abortion, want to outlaw IVF, those kind of far right, anti abortion ideologues, they are not advocating for, for interfering with people's reproductive autonomy on the basis of their polygenic scores, they're actually echoing the critics of genetics and saying, look how dangerous this polygenic score stuff is. IVF is going to lead to terrible genetic engineering, like we should outlaw you know, not just embryo screening, but IVF entirely and abortion. So I think it's a really complicated landscape politically and ideologically, in terms of where are the threats to people's reproductive autonomy coming from, and what rhetoric around genetics are they adopting, because it is not an exact retread of the early 20th century. So this is where you know in reading your book, something that just kept coming back to me and I apologize in advance for continuing to invoke the reaction norm plasticity idea, but do you think as we started when you know many magazines are putting the gene for eye color and the gene for this the gene, potentiating determinism ad nauseam? Yeah, gene for. Yeah gene for gene for if we instead help to, like get the general public's brain more to the space of how genes behave, that that would help? Because if there's this sort of appreciation that genes aren't this simplistic kind of thing, and that it is going to be an interplay of many different complexities, social, environmental, whatever, that's just how it works, that we start to get away from the nasty forms of how genetic thinking can go. Yeah, I now I have an answer for you for like the Harden Academy is that high school biology would not start with Mendel's pea plants.
Art Woods 1:00:21
Perfect.
Paige Harden 1:00:23
We would not do Mendel's pea plants, we would not have any gene for the wrinkly peas, as their introduction to genetics.
Art Woods 1:00:30
This is a concrete example we all can rally around. Well, hey, Paige, we want to start wrapping things up. I want to ask you first about, we saw on Twitter that you're writing another book? So tell us tell us about that? What's the topic and where you going?
Marty Martin 1:00:44
Yeah, so the the title, the working title of the book is Original Sin, which if you were not raised with a religious background, the doctrine of original sin is the idea that you're essentially born a fallen person that you're born with a predisposition towards sin. And it was the kind of Christian theological justification for punishment. And the Calvinists took that in a really extreme way, and it was essentially, some people were predestined to be sinners, like before the beginning of time, and God had justified their punishment, and other people were not. So the book is not about Calvinism. The book is around, you know how our biology is related to behaviors that are punished in society, you know, we criminalize addiction, children with ADHD receive more disciplinary actions, children with genetic predispositions, conduct disorder, evoke harsh punishment from their parents. And then we also I, you're evolutionary biologists, you know, we also have evolved intuitions around punishment, right, like we have really deep rooted instincts about should there be consequences for like failure to uphold social contracts. I think one of the things that makes genetics troubling to people, so disconcerting to people is that, you know, it kind of peels away some of our some of our illusions about absolute freedom to do whatever we want. And I think in America, in particular, when you do that, when you pull away those illusions of freedom, what's left under there is our deep Christianization of our country, which is this idea of are some people damned? And I don't believe that that's true, but I want to explore both the science, the biology of, of punishment, and of punished things, but also, what is disturbing about that. So it's, I want it to be different. It's, I'm excited and nervous about it in the sense that, you know, the book proposal I put in is not an academic book, you know, it's definitely taking risks as a writer, I want to treat the material a lot more personally and a lot more kind of, I don't like this word, but I don't have a better one, a lot more literary approach than my first book. So it's a little bit of an experiment. I'm excited to see how it'll go. I'm nervous about it, but but also really pumped by the opportunity. Well it sounds good, and at least there's no controversial element at all. So you know, on that front you'll be fine.
Paige Harden 1:03:06
Genetics, punishment and Christianity.
Art Woods 1:03:11
And can we have you back on the podcast to talk about it?
Paige Harden 1:03:15
Definitely, of course.
Marty Martin 1:03:17
Paige this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for making the time. The last thing that we asked guests is just, you know, to give you space for whatever we didn't ask you. Is there anything else that you'd like to say we didn't cover? Um, no, you're excellent podcast questioners. You definitely did your homework in terms of following up on other podcasts. Um, no, I just I feel like no, nothing comes to mind. I'm curious to see what reactions you get from listeners. I bet they'll be all over the place.
Art Woods 1:03:44
Yeah, us too. We're really excited about it. Well, it's just super great to talk to you. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Marty Martin 1:03:49
Yeah, well thank you for having me. This was fun. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear, let us know via social media or leave a review on Apple podcasts.
Art Woods 1:04:06
And if you don't, well, we'd love to know that too. All feedback is good feedback.
Marty Martin 1:04:10
On the next episode, we talk to Briana Abrams about human wildlife conflict and how climate change and other anthropogenic effects are exacerbating it.
Briana Abrahms 1:04:17
At the same time, the marine heatwave also created a harmful algal bloom that made toxic conditions for crabs to grow. And so the crab fishery was delayed, and the time that it finally opened actually perfectly overlapped with when whales were migrating on the West Coast.
Art Woods 1:04:35
Thanks to Steve Lane, who manages the website, and Ruth Demree and Brad van Paradin for producing the episode.
Marty Martin 1:04:40
With help from interns Kyle Smith, Jordan Greer, RB Smith and Natasha Dhamrait.
Art Woods 1:04:44
Keating Shahmehri produces our awesome cover art.
Marty Martin 1:04:47
Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, the College of Humanities and Sciences at the University of Montana and the National Science Foundation for support.
Art Woods 1:04:55
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello.