Why I am Annoyed When Pinker and Plomin Don't Cite Me

It's not really the citation

Last week Jay Joseph pointed me to a video that Steven Pinker posted as part of some commercial thing he does. The 12 minute video is titled, “Nature vs Nurture: What Makes You Who You Are?” The basis for the video is what Pinker says “have come to be called” the three laws of behavior genetics, which then he proceeds to summarize in a superficial way, without ever mentioning my name.

Here is the link.

It is hard to look good when complaining about someone using your ideas without attribution. I posted about it on bluesky a couple of days ago, but once I started to get the usual responses about, “Dr. Pinker didn’t say that the Three Laws was his idea” I took it down again. The truth is, I don’t particularly care about the specifics of how I am cited. I am a Deadhead, and Jerry said something about how once he played the notes they were on their own. If some young person talks about my ideas, many of which are now ancient history, without recognizing where they came from, fine.

But somewhat oddly, when I have had attribution problems in the past they have almost all been with big shots. The other major guilty party is Robert Plomin, who in his popular book, Blueprint, footnotes the three laws with a citation to himself. (And by the way, Pinker’s bit about genes making us who we are is lifted from Plomin without attribution.) There are a couple of reasons I find this particularly galling. Obviously, both Plomin and Pinker know better. And although both Blueprint and the Youtube video are popular discussions, where one doesn’t expect extensive footnoting, looked at the other way they are both about making money, which makes taking someone else’s ideas more problematic. Pinker somehow finds the time to effusively credit Judith Rich Harris, who made many important contributions but had nothing at all to do with formulating the three laws.

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

So Robert and Steve have a dilemma. They like the catchy title of Three Laws, they like the idea that everything is heritable, but they don’t like everything I have concluded about genetics and human behavior over the years. If they acknowledge that these ideas came from me, they would have to explain to their novice audience that the author of the the three laws doesn’t actually agree with the hereditarian conclusions they are reaching. So the easiest way to go about it is to just ignore me. Both the Blank Slate and all of Plomin’s popular work can be read as an account of what behavior genetics would have looked like if I never existed. I would absolutely welcome an essay by either of them titled, “Why Turkheimer Is Wrong About the Implications of the Three Laws.” But then they would have to say my name.