#410 - The Social Genome: A Dialogue with Dalton Conley

Converging Dialogues

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Dalton Conley about the social genome. They discuss the nature/nurture debate, polygenic index (PGI), and ethics of PGI and Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) studies. They give some critiques of The Bell Curve, three major Gene-Environmental interactions (active, passive, reactive), epigenetics, the social genome, and many more topics.

Dalton Conley is a sociologist and professor of sociology at Princeton University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and faculty affiliate at the New York Genome Center. He has his Bachelors from the University of California-Berkeley, MPA in Public Policy and PhD in Sociology from Columbia University as well as a Masters and PhD in Biology from New York University.

His research has focused on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic and health status from parents to children, the impact of parental wealth in explaining racial attainment gaps; the causal impact of birthweight on later health and educational outcomes; sibling differences that appear to reflect the triumph of achievement over ascription; and, finally, genetics as a driver of both social mobility and reproduction.

He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation fellowships as well as a CAREER Award and the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of numerous books including the most book, The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture.

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