SCOOP: Largest Cryobank in the U.S. to Offer Ancestry Testing
Sharon Kochlany and Vanessa Colimorio's four-year-old twin girls had a classic school assignment recently: make a family tree. They drew themselves and their one-year-old brother branching off from their moms, with aunts, uncles, and grandparents forking off to the sides.
The recently-gained sovereignty of queer families stands to be lost if a consumer DNA test brings a stranger's identity out of the woodwork.
What you don't see in the invisible space between Kochlany and Colimorio, however, is the sperm donor they used to conceive all three children.
To look at a family tree like this is to see in its purest form that kinship can supersede biology—the boundaries of where this family starts and stops are clear to everyone in it, in spite of a third party's genetic involvement. This kind of self-definition has always been synonymous with LGBTQ families, especially those that rely on donor gametes (sperm or eggs) to exist.
But the world around them has changed quite suddenly: The recent consumer DNA testing boom has made it more complicated than ever for families built through reproductive technology—openly, not secretively—to maintain the strong sense of autonomy and privacy that can be crucial for their emotional security. Prospective parents and cryobanks are now mulling how best to bring a new generation of donor-conceived people into this world in a way that leaves open the choice to know more about their ancestry without obliterating an equally important choice: the right not to know about biological relatives.
For queer parents who have long fought for social acceptance, having a biological relationship to their children has been revolutionary, and using an unknown donor as a means to this end especially so. Getting help from a friend often comes with the expectation that the friend will also have social involvement in the family, which some people are comfortable with, but being able to access sperm from an unknown donor—which queer parents have only been able to openly do since the early 1980s—grants them the reproductive autonomy to create families seemingly on their own. That recently-gained sovereignty stands to be lost if a consumer DNA test brings a stranger's identity out of the woodwork.
At the same time, it's natural for donor-conceived people to want to know more about where they come from ethnically, even if they don't want to know the identity of their donor. As a donor-conceived person myself, I know my donor's self-reported ethnicity, but have often wondered how accurate it is.
Opening the Pandora's box of a consumer DNA test as a way to find out has always felt profoundly unappealing to me, however. Many people have accidentally learned they're donor-conceived by unwittingly using these tools, but I already know that about myself going in, and subsequently know I'll be connected to a large web of people whose existence I'm not interested in learning about. In addition to possibly identifying my anonymous donor, his family could also show up, along with any donor-siblings—other people with whom I share a donor. My single lesbian mom is enough for me, and the trade off to learn more about my ethnic ancestry has never seemed worth it.
In 1992, when I was born, no one was planning for how consumer DNA tests might upend or illuminate one's sense of self. But the donor community has always had to stay nimble with balancing privacy concerns and psychological well-being, so it should come as no surprise that figuring out how to do so in 2020 includes finding a way to offer ancestry insight while circumventing consumer DNA tests.
A New Paradigm
This is the rationale behind unprecedented industry news that LeapsMag can exclusively break: Within the next few weeks, California Cryobank, the largest cryobank in the country, will begin offering genetically-verified ancestry information on the free public part of every donor's anonymous profile in its database, something no other cryobanks yet offer (an exact launch date was not available at the time of publication). Currently, California Cryobank's donor profiles include a short self-reported list that might merely say, "Ancestry: German, Lebanese, Scottish."
The new information will be a report in pie chart form that details exactly what percentages of a donor's DNA come from up to 26 ethnicities—it's analogous to, but on a smaller scale than, the format offered by consumer DNA testing companies, and uses the same base technology that looks for single nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA that are associated with specific ethnicities. But crucially, because the donor takes the DNA test through California Cryobank, not a consumer-facing service, the information is not connected in a network to anyone else's DNA test. It's also taken before any offspring exist so there's no chance of revealing a donor-conceived person's identity this way.
Later, when a donor-conceived person is born, grows up, and wants information about their ethnicity from the donor side, all they need is their donor's anonymous ID number to look it up. The donor-conceived person never takes a genetic test, and therefore also can't accidentally find donor siblings this way. People who want to be connected to donor siblings can use a sibling registry where other people who want to be found share donor ID numbers and look for matches (this is something that's been available for decades, and remains so).
"With genetic testing, you have no control over who reaches out to you, and at what point in your life."
California Cryobank will require all new donors to consent to this extra level of genetic testing, setting a new standard for what information prospective parents and donor-conceived people can expect to have. In the immediate, this information will be most useful for prospective parents looking for donors with specific backgrounds, possibly ones similar to their own.
It's a solution that was actually hiding in plain sight. Two years ago, California Cryobank's partner Sema4, the company handling the genetic carrier testing that's used to screen for heritable diseases, started analyzing ethnic data in its samples. That extra information was being collected because it can help calculate a more accurate assessment of genetic risks that run in certain populations—like Ashkenazi Jews and Tay Sachs disease—than relying on oral family histories. Shortly after a plan to start collecting these extra data, Jamie Shamonki, chief medical officer of California Cryobank, realized the companies would be sitting on a goldmine for a different reason.
"I didn't want to use one of these genetic testing companies like Ancestry to accomplish this," says Shamonki. "The whole thing we're trying to accomplish is also privacy."
Consumer-facing DNA testing companies are not HIPAA compliant (whereas Sema4, which isn't direct-to-consumer, is HIPAA compliant), which means there are no legal privacy protections covering people who add their DNA to these databases. Although some companies, like 23andMe, allow users to opt-out of being connected with genetic relatives, the language can be confusing to navigate, requires a high level of knowledge and self-advocacy on the user's part, and, as an opt-out system, is not set up to protect the user from unwanted information by default; many unwittingly walk right into such information as a result.
Additionally, because consumer-facing DNA testing companies operate outside the legal purview that applies to other health care entities, like hospitals, even a person who does opt-out of being linked to genetic relatives is not protected in perpetuity from being re-identified in the future by a change in company policy. The safest option for people with privacy concerns is to stay out of these databases altogether.
For California Cryobank, the new information about donor heritage won't retroactively be added to older profiles in the system, so donor-conceived people who already exist won't benefit from the ancestry tool, but it'll be the new standard going forward. The company has about 500 available donors right now, many of which have been in their registry for a while; about 100 of those donors, all new, will have this ancestry data on their profiles.
Shamonki says it has taken about two years to get to the point of publicly including ancestry information on a donor's profile because it takes about nine months of medical and psychological screening for a donor to go from walking through the door to being added to their registry. The company wanted to wait to launch until it could offer this information for a significant number of donors. As more new donors come online under the new protocol, the number with ancestry information on their profiles will go up.
For Parents: An Unexpected Complication
While this change will no doubt be welcome progress for LGBTQ families contemplating parenthood, it'll never be possible to put this entire new order back in the box. What are such families who already have donor-conceived children losing in today's world of widespread consumer genetic testing?
Kochlany and Colimorio's twins aren't themselves much older than the moment at-home DNA testing really started to take off. They were born in 2015, and two years later the industry saw its most significant spike. By now, more than 26 million people's DNA is in databases like 23andMe and Ancestry; as a result, it's estimated that within a year, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable through these consumer databases, by way of genetic third cousins, even if they didn't want to be found and never took the test themselves. This was the principle behind solving the Golden State Killer cold case.
The waning of privacy through consumer DNA testing fundamentally clashes with the priorities of the cyrobank industry, which has long sought to protect the privacy of donor-conceived people, even as open identification became standard. Since the 1980s, donors have been able to allow their identity to be released to any offspring who is at least 18 and wants the information. Lesbian moms pushed for this option early on so their children—who would obviously know they couldn't possibly be the biological product of both parents—would never feel cut off from the chance to know more about themselves. But importantly, the openness is not a two-way street: the donors can't ever ask for the identities of their offspring. It's the latter that consumer DNA testing really puts at stake.
"23andMe basically created the possibility that there will be donors who will have contact with their donor-conceived children, and that's not something that I think the donor community is comfortable with," says I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics. "That's about the donor's autonomy, not the rearing parents' autonomy, or the donor-conceived child's autonomy."
Kochlany and Colimorio have an open identification donor and fully support their children reaching out to California Cryobank to get more information about him if they want to when they're 18, but having a singular name revealed isn't the same thing as having contact, nor is it the same thing as revealing a web of dozens of extended genetic relations. Their concern now is that if their kids participate in genetic testing, a stranger—someone they're careful to refer to as only "the donor" and never "dad"—will reach out to the children to begin some kind of relationship. They know other people who are contemplating giving their children DNA tests, and feel staunchly that it wouldn't be right for their family.
"With genetic testing, you have no control over who reaches out to you, and at what point in your life," Kochlany says. "[People] reaching out and trying to say, 'Hey I know who your dad is' throws a curveball. It's like, 'Wait, I never thought I had a dad.' It might put insecurities in their minds."
"We want them to have the opportunity to choose whether or not they want to reach out," Colimorio adds.
Kochlany says that when their twins are old enough to start asking questions, she and Colimorio plan to frame it like this: "The donor was kind of like a technology that helped us make you a person, and make sure that you exist," she says, role playing a conversation with their kids. "But it's not necessarily that you're looking to this person [for] support or love, or because you're missing a piece."
It's a line in the sand that's present even for couples still far off from conceiving. When Mallory Schwartz, a film and TV producer in Los Angeles, and Lauren Pietra, a marriage and family therapy associate (and Shamonki's step-daughter), talk about getting married someday, it's a package deal with talking about how they'll approach having kids. They feel there are too many variables and choices to make around family planning as a same-sex couple these days to not have those conversations simultaneously. Consumer DNA databases are already on their minds.
"It frustrates me that the DNA databases are just totally unregulated," says Schwartz. "I hope they are by the time we do this. I think everyone deserves a right to privacy when making your family [using a sperm donor]."
"I wouldn't want to create a world where people who are donor-conceived feel like they can't participate in this technology because they're trying to shut out [other] information."
On the prospect of having a donor relation pop up non-consensually for a future child, Pietra says, "I don't like it. It would be really disappointing if the child didn't want [contact], and unfortunately they're on the receiving end."
You can see how important preserving the right to keep this door closed is when you look at what's going on at The Sperm Bank of California. This pioneering cryobank was the first in the world to openly serve LGBTQ people and single women, and also the first to offer the open identification option when it opened in 1982, but not as many people are asking for their donor's identity as expected.
"We're finding a third of young people are coming forward for their donor's identity," says Alice Ruby, executive director. "We thought it would be a higher number." Viewed the other way, two-thirds of the donor-conceived people who could ethically get their donor's identity through The Sperm Bank of California are not asking the cryobank for it.
Ruby says that part of what historically made an open identification program appealing, rather than invasive or nerve-wracking, is how rigidly it's always been formatted around mutual consent, and protects against surprises for all parties. Those [donor-conceived people] who wanted more information were never barred from it, while those who wanted to remain in the dark could. No one group's wish eclipsed the other's. The potential breakdown of a system built around consent, expectations, and respect for privacy is why unregulated consumer DNA testing is most concerning to her as a path for connecting with genetic relatives.
For the last few decades in cryobanks around the world, the largest cohort of people seeking out donor sperm has been lesbian couples, followed by single women. For infertile heterosexual couples, the smallest client demographic, Ruby says donor sperm offers a solution to a medical problem, but in contrast, it historically "provided the ability for [lesbian] couples and single moms to have some reproductive autonomy." Yes, it was still a solution to a biological problem, but it was also a solution to a social one.
The Sperm Bank of California updated its registration forms to include language urging parents, donor-conceived people, and donors not to use consumer DNA tests, and to go through the cryobank if they, understandably, want to learn more about who they're connected to. But truthfully, there's not much else cryobanks can do to protect clients on any side of the donor transaction from surprise contact right now—especially not from relatives of the donor who may not even know someone in their family has donated sperm.
A Tricky Position
Personally, I've known I was donor-conceived from day one. It has never been a source of confusion, angst, or curiosity, and in fact has never loomed particularly large for me in any way. I see it merely as a type of reproductive technology—on par with in vitro fertilization—that enabled me to exist, and, now that I do exist, is irrelevant. Being confronted with my donor's identity or any donor siblings would make this fact of my conception bigger than I need it to be, as an adult with a full-blown identity derived from all of my other life experiences. But I still wonder about the minutiae of my ethnicity in much the same way as anyone else who wonders, and feel there's no safe way for me to find out without relinquishing some of my existential independence.
The author and her mom in spring of 1998.
"People obviously want to participate in 23andMe and Ancestry because they're interested in knowing more about themselves," says Shamonki. "I wouldn't want to create a world where people who are donor-conceived feel like they can't participate in this technology because they're trying to shut out [other] information."
After all, it was the allure of that exact conceit—knowing more about oneself—that seemed to magnetically draw in millions of people to these tools in the first place. It's an experience that clearly taps into a population-wide psychic need, even—perhaps especially—if one's origins are a mystery.
[Editor's Note: This essay is in response to our current Big Question, which we posed to experts with different perspectives: "How should DNA tests for intelligence be used, if at all, by parents and educators?"]
Imagine a world in which pregnant women could go to the doctor and obtain a simple inexpensive genetic test of their unborn child that would allow them to predict how tall he or she would eventually be. The test might also tell them the child's risk for high blood pressure or heart disease.
Can we use DNA not to understand, but to predict who is going to be intelligent or extraverted or mentally ill?
Even more remarkable -- and more dangerous -- the test might predict how intelligent the child would be, or how far he or she could be expected to go in school. Or heading further out, it might predict whether he or she will be an alcoholic or a teetotaler, or straight or gay, or… you get the idea. Is this really possible? If it is, would it be a good idea? Answering these questions requires some background in a scientific field called behavior genetics.
Differences in human behavior -- intelligence, personality, mental illness, pretty much everything -- are related to genetic differences among people. Scientists have known this for 150 years, ever since Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton first applied Shakespeare's phrase, "Nature and Nurture" to the scientific investigation of human differences. We knew about the heritability of behavior before Mendel's laws of genetics had been re-discovered at the end of the last century, and long before the structure of DNA was discovered in the 1950s. How could discoveries about genetics be made before a science of genetics even existed?
The answer is that scientists developed clever research designs that allowed them to make inferences about genetics in the absence of biological knowledge about DNA. The best-known is the twin study: identical twins are essentially clones, sharing 100 percent of their DNA, while fraternal twins are essentially siblings, sharing half. To the extent that identical twins are more similar for some trait than fraternal twins, one can infer that heredity is playing a role. Adoption studies are even more straightforward. Is the personality of an adopted child more like the biological parents she has never seen, or the adoptive parents who raised her?
Twin and adoption studies played an important role in establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that genetic differences play a role in the development of differences in behavior, but they told us very little about how the genetics of behavior actually worked. When the human genome was finally sequenced in the early 2000s, and it became easier and cheaper to obtain actual DNA from large samples of people, scientists anticipated that we would soon find the genes for intelligence, mental illness, and all the other behaviors that were known to be "heritable" in a general way.
But to everyone's amazement, the genes weren't there. It turned out that there are thousands of genes related to any given behavior, so many that they can't be counted, and each one of them has such a tiny effect that it can't be tied to meaningful biological processes. The whole scientific enterprise of understanding the genetics of behavior seemed ready to collapse, until it was rescued -- sort of -- by a new method called polygenic scores, PGS for short. Polygenic scores abandon the old task of finding the genes for complex human behavior, replacing it with black-box prediction: can we use DNA not to understand, but to predict who is going to be intelligent or extraverted or mentally ill?
Prediction from observing parents works better, and is far easier and cheaper, than anything we can do with DNA.
PGS are the shiny new toy of human genetics. From a technological standpoint they are truly amazing, and they are useful for some scientific applications that don't involve making decisions about individual people. We can obtain DNA from thousands of people, estimate the tiny relationships between individual bits of DNA and any outcome we want — height or weight or cardiac disease or IQ — and then add all those tiny effects together into a single bell-shaped score that can predict the outcome of interest. In theory, we could do this from the moment of conception.
Polygenic scores for height already work pretty well. Physicians are debating whether the PGS for heart disease are robust enough to be used in the clinic. For some behavioral traits-- the most data exist for educational attainment -- they work well enough to be scientifically interesting, if not practically useful. For traits like personality or sexual orientation, the prediction is statistically significant but nowhere close to practically meaningful. No one knows how much better any of these predictions are likely to get.
Without a doubt, PGS are an amazing feat of genomic technology, but the task they accomplish is something scientists have been able to do for a long time, and in fact it is something that our grandparents could have done pretty well. PGS are basically a new way to predict a trait in an individual by using the same trait in the individual's parents — a way of observing that the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.
The children of tall people tend to be tall. Children of excellent athletes are athletic; children of smart people are smart; children of people with heart disease are at risk, themselves. Not every time, of course, but that is how imperfect prediction works: children of tall parents vary in their height like anyone else, but on average they are taller than the rest of us. Prediction from observing parents works better, and is far easier and cheaper, than anything we can do with DNA.
But wait a minute. Prediction from parents isn't strictly genetic. Smart parents not only pass on their genes to their kids, but they also raise them. Smart families are privileged in thousands of ways — they make more money and can send their kids to better schools. The same is true for PGS.
The ability of a genetic score to predict educational attainment depends not only on examining the relationship between certain genes and how far people go in school, but also on every personal and social characteristic that helps or hinders education: wealth, status, discrimination, you name it. The bottom line is that for any kind of prediction of human behavior, separation of genetic from environmental prediction is very difficult; ultimately it isn't possible.
Still, experts are already discussing how to use PGS to make predictions for children, and even for embryos.
This is a reminder that we really have no idea why either parents or PGS predict as well or as poorly as they do. It is easy to imagine that a PGS for educational attainment works because it is summarizing genes that code for efficient neurological development, bigger brains, and swifter problem solving, but we really don't know that. PGS could work because they are associated with being rich, or being motivated, or having light skin. It's the same for predicting from parents. We just don't know.
Still, experts are already discussing how to use PGS to make predictions for children, and even for embryos.
For example, maybe couples could fertilize multiple embryos in vitro, test their DNA, and select the one with the "best" PGS on some trait. This would be a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Such scores aren't effective enough to be very useful to parents, and to the extent they are effective, it is very difficult to know what other traits might be selected for when parents try to prioritize intelligence or attractiveness. People will no doubt try it anyway, and as a matter of reproductive freedom I can't think of any way to stop them. Fortunately, the practice probably won't have any great impact one way or another.
That brings us to the ethics of PGS, particularly in the schools. Imagine that when a child enrolls in a public school, an IQ test is given to her biological parents. Children with low-IQ parents are statistically more likely to have low IQs themselves, so they could be assigned to less demanding classrooms or vocational programs. Hopefully we agree that this would be unethical, but let's think through why.
First of all, it would be unethical because we don't know why the parents have low IQs, or why their IQs predict their children's. The parents could be from a marginalized ethnic group, recognizable by their skin color and passed on genetically to their children, so discriminating based on a parent's IQ would just be a proxy for discriminating based on skin color. Such a system would be no more than a social scientific gloss on an old-fashioned program for perpetuating economic and cognitive privilege via the educational system.
People deserve to be judged on the basis of their own behavior, not a genetic test.
Assigning children to classrooms based on genetic testing would be no different, although it would have the slight ethical advantage of being less effective. The PGS for educational attainment could reflect brain-efficiency, but it could also depend on skin color, or economic advantage, or personality, or literally anything that is related in any way to economic success. Privileging kids with higher genetic scores would be no different than privileging children with smart parents. If schools really believe that a psychological trait like IQ is important for school placement, the sensible thing is to administer the children an actual IQ test – not a genetic test.
IQ testing has its own issues, of course, but at least it involves making decisions about individuals based on their own observable characteristics, rather than on characteristics of their parents or their genome. If decisions must be made, if resources must be apportioned, people deserve to be judged on the basis of their own behavior, the content of their character. Since it can't be denied that people differ in all sorts of relevant ways, this is what it means for all people to be created equal.
[Editor's Note: Read another perspective in the series here.]
[Editor's Note: This essay is in response to our current Big Question, which we posed to experts with different perspectives: "How should DNA tests for intelligence be used, if at all, by parents and educators?"]
It's 2019. Prenatal genetic tests are being used to help parents select from healthy and diseased eggs. Genetic risk profiles are being created for a range of common diseases. And embryonic gene editing has moved into the clinic. The science community is nearly unanimous on the question of whether we should be consulting our genomes as early as possible to create healthy offspring. If you can predict it, let's prevent it, and the sooner, the better.
There are big issues with IQ genetics that should be considered before parents and educators adopt DNA IQ predictions.
When it comes to care of our babies, kids, and future generations, we are doing things today that we never even dreamed would be possible. But one area that remains murky is the long fraught question of IQ, and whether to use DNA science to tell us something about it. There are big issues with IQ genetics that should be considered before parents and educators adopt DNA IQ predictions.
IQ tests have been around for over a century. They've been used by doctors, teachers, government officials, and a whole host of institutions as a proxy for intelligence, especially in youth. At times in history, test results have been used to determine whether to allow a person to procreate, remain a part of society, or merely stay alive. These abuses seem to be a distant part of our past, and IQ tests have since garnered their fair share of controversy for exhibiting racial and cultural biases. But they continue to be used across society. Indeed, much of the literature aimed at expecting parents justifies its recommendations (more omegas, less formula, etc.) based on promises of raising a baby's IQ.
This is the power of IQ testing sans DNA science. Until recently, the two were separate entities, with IQ tests indicating a coefficient created from individual responses to written questions and genetic tests indicating some disease susceptibility based on a sequence of one's DNA. Yet in recent years, scientists have begun to unlock the secrets of inherited aspects of intelligence with genetic analyses that scan millions of points of variation in DNA. Both bench scientists and direct-to-consumer companies have used these new technologies to find variants associated with exceptional IQ scores. There are a number of tests on the open market that parents and educators can use at will. These tests purport to reveal whether a child is inherently predisposed to be intelligent, and some suggest ways to track them for success.
I started looking into these tests when I was doing research for my book, "Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics." This book investigated the new genetic science of social phenomena, like educational attainment and political persuasion, investment strategies, and health habits. I learned that, while many of the scientists doing much of the basic research into these things cautioned that the effects of genetic factors were quite small, most saw testing as one data point among many that could help to somehow level the playing field for young people. The rationale went that in certain circumstances, some needed help more than others. Why not put our collective resources together to help them?
Good nutrition, support at home, and access to healthcare and education make a huge difference in how people do.
Some experts believed so strongly in the power of DNA behavioral prediction that they argued it would be unfair not to use predictors to determine a kid's future, prevent negative outcomes, and promote the possibility for positive ones. The educators out in the wider world that I spoke with agreed. With careful attention, they thought sociogenomic tests could help young people get the push they needed when they possessed DNA sequences that weren't working in their favor. Officials working with troubled youth told me they hoped DNA data could be marshaled early enough that kids would thrive at home and in school, thereby avoiding ending up in their care. While my conversations with folks centered around sociogenomic data in general, genetic IQ prediction was completely entangled in it all.
I present these prevailing views to demonstrate both the widespread appeal of genetic predictors as well as the well-meaning intentions of those in favor of using them. It's a truly progressive notion to help those who need help the most. But we must question whether genetic predictors are data points worth looking at.
When we examine the way DNA IQ predictors are generated, we see scientists grouping people with similar IQ test results and academic achievements, and then searching for the DNA those people have in common. But there's a lot more to scores and achievements than meets the eye. Good nutrition, support at home, and access to healthcare and education make a huge difference in how people do. Therefore, the first problem with using DNA IQ predictors is that the data points themselves may be compromised by numerous inaccuracies.
We must then ask ourselves where the deep, enduring inequities in our society are really coming from. A deluge of research has shown that poor life outcomes are a product of social inequalities, like toxic living conditions, underfunded schools, and unhealthy jobs. A wealth of research has also shown that race, gender, sexuality, and class heavily influence life outcomes in numerous ways. Parents and caregivers feed, talk, and play differently with babies of different genders. Teachers treat girls and boys, as well as members of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, differently to the point where they do better and worse in different subject areas.
Healthcare providers consistently racially profile, using diagnostics and prescribing therapies differently for the same health conditions. Access to good schools and healthcare are strongly mitigated by one's race and socioeconomic status. But even youth from privileged backgrounds suffer worse health and life outcomes when they identify or are identified as queer. These are but a few examples of the ways in which social inequities affect our chances in life. Therefore, the second problem with using DNA IQ predictors is that it obscures these very real, and frankly lethal, determinants. Instead of attending to the social environment, parents and educators take inborn genetics as the reason for a child's successes or failures.
It is time that we shift our priorities from seeking genetic causes to fixing the social causes we know to be real.
The other problem with using DNA IQ predictors is that research into the weightiness of DNA evidence has shown time and again that people take DNA evidence more seriously than they do other kinds of evidence. So it's not realistic to say that we can just consider IQ genetics as merely one tiny data point. People will always give more weight to DNA evidence than it deserves. And given its proven negligible effect, it would be irresponsible to do so.
It is time that we shift our priorities from seeking genetic causes to fixing the social causes we know to be real. Parents and educators need to be wary of solutions aimed at them and their individual children.
[Editor's Note: Read another perspective in the series here.]