Enormously exciting era, advances in genetics and neuroscience are giving us new tools that will enable us to take giant strides in understanding human behavior, human societies, policies, and economies. We are like physicists, i like to say at the outset of the 19th century poised at a moment in history that would produce faradays in md is in the coming years. People need and dalton ought to be excited and in our case i think we both are but a lot of social scientists arent. Why . Because for almost a century now the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodoxy that is scared stiff of biology. At the moment it takes the form of three widely and loudly proclaimed truths, gender is a social construct, race is a social construct, class is a function of privilege. I have stated those tenants very boldly. If you go to a University Campus and chat privately with faculty members Whose Research touches on these issues you will find many of them have a much more nuanced view than that, they acknowledge that biology plays a role but only a few of them are willing to say so with lectures, articles or books. What it amounts to is that i have set out in this book with the aim of demolishing the academic orthodoxy and making it easier for the same numbers of academia to do their work. I probably overreaching in that goal. It is a way of framing the findings of the book, things that i think we really dont need to argue about anymore i set out 10 propositions. The quickest way to summarize the book is with those tenants propositions. The first four are about gender differences. Consistent with Current Practice among a growing number of specialists i dispense with the word gender and return to sex i also dispenser this folder because its playing havoc with my ability to read my text, hang on a second. The first proposition is sex differences and personality consistent worldwide and tend to widen more gender the egalitarian cultures. Consistency is quite marco. Everywhere women are on average always stressed that word, talking about differences and means with big overlaps in the distributions. They are on average higher on measures of warmth toward others, ultra sequencer, sensitivity, sympathy and sociability. Conversely, men are on average more reserved, utilitarian, unsentimental, and solitary. These tendencies hold true in every culture with virtually no exception to the most traditional to the most advanced. Furthermore, contrary to the expectations of sex as a social construct, those differences tend to widen in cultures that are more gender egalitarian. Sex differences in personality are wider in a country like denmark than they are in uganda. A very interesting phenomenon i hope we have a chance to talk about. Second proposition, on average, females worldwide have advantages and verbal ability and social cognition also many forms of memory while males have advantages in visual spatial abilities. Within the normal range mathematical ability is about the same in both but males have a substantial advantage at the six extremes of mathematic ability. There is no Net Advantage to either sex in general factor, men and women just have distinctive cognitive profiles. Proposition three, on average women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. The people things dichotomy with men and women is a very old way of thinking about male and female differences. And is actually widely accepted by a lot of people. It certainly holds true for personality and cognitive strengths as i just described. It also holds true for womens vocational choices. Here we see a definite shift in the data in the 1970s as you had a variety of educational and vocational opportunities for women especially in sciences, Hard Sciences and you also see a very definite response by women during the 1970s as the proportions women going into those fields increased. But then the increases in these things associated occupations leveled off and by the late 1980s a new equilibrium had been reached that was persistent through the decades. It has effectively been flat for the last three decades. I will add that the people things distinction also applies to within the scientific disciplines. Women plopped into the sciences primarily biology and when they flocked into medicine it was primarily those specialties in medicine that a very patient intensive interactive interpersonal reactions. Proposition four, many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. For me whats the most fascinating material in the book is also a very dense chapter i wish i couldve made it easier but its very complicate itself. I wish i could at least give you a glimpse of what this fascinating material is but i have six more propositions to get through. Maybe in the q a we can come back to this. Its really cool. Now we move to the propositions regarding race. Once again, im going to follow contemporary practice among specialists i discard the word race and substitute for ancestral populations. This is not some silly politically achange. Race is a word really has required a lot of cultural baggage and appropriate to substitute something else, talking about genetics. Proposition number five, human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond and self identify race and ethnicity. This point i dont need to make into a proposition of why is it you can send in some of your saliva to 23 and me and plus 100 and get back information that you are 45 percent bavarian and 24 percent french and 31 percent polynesian. They can do that reflecting two decades of very sophisticated work that identified the kinds of genetic distinction in the characterize populations around the world. I want to note these distinctions are not based on genetic bits of information that are known to affect traits, on the contrary, they are based off noncoding bits of dna. They simply show distinctive patterns for different ethnicities. If a race and ethnicity were really exclusively social constructs that would be impossible its actually a sure thing. Proposition number six, evolutionary selection pressures and humans left africa as been extensive and mostly local. The linchpin of the race as a social construct position advanced most famously by Stephen Jay Gould is that humans left africa too recently for significant evolutionary changes to fall. Thats true if we are talking about if evolution through random mutation. In the last 15 years its been found that evolution through changes in what is called standing variation can be and often has been rapid. Such changes have been usually confined to one continent. Proposition seven, i know im going to these things really fast but we did want to spend 45 minutes presenting the content of the book. Proposition seven, continental population differences in variance associated with personality abilities and social behavior are common. Over the last five years, hundreds of thousands of genetic variance have been identified that are associated with traits such as abilities and personalities and social behavior. Within continental populations, lets say we are comparing chinese and japanese, these differences in, trying to avoid the jargon, the differences in the abare very small. The correlations within continental populations of these variance is. 98,. 99, very close to absolutely perfect correlations. When on the other hand you start to compare east asians with europeans or east asians with africans or africans with europeans, those correlations drop remarkably. They are still high by the standards of social sciences ranging from about. 5 to about. 8 but even with correlations outside, you have lots of differences. And what is known to be affecting important traits, we know very very little about any more than i just said for a variety of reasons, first place technically very complicated, secondly, you need to have very large samples from all of the relevant populations in order to make authoritative statements. Those very large databases are being collected but they are not here yet. Im sending a very simple warning, the reality is geneticists are looking at genetics distinctions across continental populations that are radically different from the expectations implied by race as a social construct. The next three propositions are related to the biological component of socioeconomic class. Proposition number eight, the shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior. Im pretty sure we will be able to argue about this one. Parents hate this finding, me among them, says that our parenting in the schools we find for our kids in neighborhoods where we live doesnt make nearly as much difference in how our kids turn out as we like to think. This is old news for those who been paying attention do to parents just put it out to the general audience in 1998 and steve pinker made it famous in 2002 and the black slate. I will leave about that now. Class structure is importantly based on differences and ability that have a biological component. The discussion amounts to a documentation of the premises of richard orenstein, my coauthor in the bell curve first famously or notoriously stated in 1973 he has if difference as mental abilities are inherited and success requires those abilities and if earnings and prestige depend on success then social standing will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people. The genomic era has already added a lot to our knowledge in these relationships as i described in the chapter involved. The final proposition, outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior. Probably this will be the most fiercely contested of the 10 propositions. People hate the idea that we are quite limited in our ability to change personalities, abilities, or social behavior for the better in large numbers of people by design. Crucial distinction, can inspirational teacher change the trajectory of a students life . Absolutely. Can friends intervening with another friend who has a drug problem, can they change the trajectory of that persons life . Absolutely. Talking about programs that are trying to change lots of people in a kind of cookiecutter fashion. My reading of the evidence is we can change lives on a retail basis occasionally but not wholesale. The book concludes with two chapters about the shape of the coming revolution in the social sciences, can attach propositions to these because so much is still up for grabs. Some of you have may have seen my oped in the wall street journal yesterday lobbing the role apologetic scores in transforming social sciences, its already attracted denunciations from several wellknown scholars and i assume its just the beginning. Because the discussion of anything involving gender, race, and class, attracts so much anger and angst and namecalling, let me conclude by spelling out what i do not argue. I do not argue for genetic determinism. Gender race and class are indeed partly social constructs. The role of the environment and shaping personality and abilities and social behaviors is important. Many aspects of the roles of both genes and environment will remain elusive for decades to come. We human beings build our lives with an abundance of unpredictability both genetic and environmental and we are not helpless to change our lives. I do not argue that biology will let certain groups of people sexes or races or classes into hierarchies that go from superior to inferior stop human beings are way too complicated for that. On the contrary, i explicitly reject such claims. I also explicitly reject claims that differences among groups that have any relevance to human worth our dignity. I submit that no one who reads the book can have any confusion about my position on these things. The problem i have found is to get people who write about my books to read them. Do i have a hidden agenda . I do sort of, the subtext of human diversity is that everybody should just calm down. I hope the book leaves readers understanding that biological differences among human groups are not scary or painstaking. Theres no monsters in the closet snow drug doors we must fear opening. The other subtext of human diversity is that the doors will open whether we like it or not in the proper response to the discoveries to come is, thats interesting. I fear that the abgenetically grounded Group Differences in personality, abilities and social behavior cannot exist and ensures the discoveries initially will be created that way but they should be. Thank you very much. [applause] since i dont have formal maroon marks more series of publications i will speak from here if thats okay. First of all, thank you very much for having me and i think you picked the right sociologist in terms of sharing your enthusiasm about the role of genomics revolution for social science. But one of your assertions is that in 10 years, in 2030 will no longer be able to publish any flagship social science without having considered given good reason for why you are not controlling the floor thats holding constant in your fiscal model apologetics score for a particular trait such as civic participation and Political Science or Educational Attainment and sociology and so forth. I pretty much agree with the proposition and think that agree that this is an incredibly exciting time in the social and Behavioral Sciences much like your metaphor of the physics and end of the 19th century. I think that that enthusiasm needs to be tempered for what the sciences right now. While im just stunned by your ability i think you said you started this book 3 years ago to come into a thicket of not just genetics were been spending a lot of time but also neuroscience which is above my pay grade and be able to not only assimilate a wide swath of literature but actually make a completely accessible to an educated lay audience is incredible to me. The remainder of my remarks i wanted to divide into three sections one is this notion of what i will say is a strong man about social construction of race. Im going to focus on race and class because im not an expert on gender and im not an expert on neuroscience so im happy we can have exchange and q a were after my remarks but i have some thoughts. Really thats not my wheelhouse. I will talk about the other two areas. What is race . What is its relationship to ancestral populations . The second thing i will talk about is what do we know about biological differences between these population groupings and particularly for social and behavioral traits and then thirdly, what are the policy implications of all this. Lets start with the social construction of race and gender for that matter. I think you kind of dispensed with it and say youre going to stick to talking about sex and ancestry but theres a really good reason why social scientists or sociologists and anthropologists in particular want to preserve a distinction between gender, which is specifically about the social relationships that generally correlate with sex differences but not necessarily so and change across ethics of history. Likewise, race as a social category which evolved and changes over across time and place that as you point out in our current moment in our current country can be very well predicted by a drop of saliva but is not the same thing. Its absolutely true that if we took a rudy in thisf we took everybody in this room and to swabbed them we would probably predict with 98 percent accuracy what someone self identified race viewing the classical u. S. Definitions of white nonhispanic, white or black hispanic, africanamerican or black and asian and others. However, thats a very particular moment in history and we are particularly diverse population in the u. S. That allows that to happen. Theres other instances of race that are entirely diverse. Take for example race in japan where the baraka mean our group comprised about 30 of the population and suffer from the same social and Health Disadvantages that native americans are africanamerican student in the United States. Lower test scores, lower life expectancy, higher rates of diabetes and other outcomes we read about minority populations in our country yet they are physically indistinguishable from the majority of japanese and genetically distinguishable from the majority of japanese through really more like a social cast that resulted from the Homeless People displaced are refugees displaced they just kind of collects and are discriminated against, parents prospective parents want to do research about their perspective daughter or soninlaw and make sure they dont have rock mean blood in them. It functions as we know races but yet there is no genetic basis. Or take my wifes former homeland former yugoslavia where you cant imagine a more racially charged or ethnically charged conflict in the 1990s including genocide there are basically no, with a little bit of caveat, theres basically no genetic distinctions between these groups that are literally murdering each other in the former yugoslavia. On the other hand, a place like rwanda where there is genocide at the same time, there are very distinct Genetic Signatures between tutsi and hutu populations. A lot of times there is a biological a very clear biological correlation of race but sometimes theres not. Thats why want to preserve a social sciences that distinguish between ancestry and biology for several figure disagree majorly with that. I think the bigger issue is what do we make of those differences and hear we get into a lot of complicated science. I will try to explain what apologetics score is. If you member High School Biology there are four bases of dna for possible two go with two and the other two go with the other two. There is variation across the genome in which base individuals might have in a particular location. What we duke to create apologetics form is abwe take a population and one of the papers that you are citing is apologetics score that predicts how far people go in school there was a people or i was involved in, series of papers we took 1. 1 Million People and each location about 3 million locations in the genome of common variation where you might have gg and thats why youre smarter than me and i have aa. We see that in the population level how much geez you have predicts a very slight increase in the likelihood you want to lookou went a little further at school. We some those across the 3 million locations we get a symbol score and charles is probably abgreater than mine and we predict that hes gonna go further in school. We take that score and we take it to a new sample so its not bias to any particular aspect of the sample we tested and developed in and retested and see how much variation