Failing or struggling to update her priors

Firstly, I'll say what I found interesting about The Genetic Lottery.
She wrote about some research that she had done herself about what she called "general executive function" (which was extremely heritable) and also about whether or not the earlier teenagers had sex led to increased risk of emotional traumas and a plethora of other negative (social) outcomes. That was interesting and impressive research. I knew that the DNA one shares with one's sister or brother is on average 50%, but was surprised that it can vary as much as 37-63%. (I wonder whether it theoretically couldn't be 0-100% and that the amount of DNA that one shares is distributed under a Gaussian curve?) I might try and convince my brother to take a DNA-test from 23andMe to see how much DNA we share and whether there might be chromosomes, where we are either twins or foreigners to each other. She wrote about the possibility of using genetic data as a way of looking at where siblings were "twins" and where they were more like "adoptees" living in the same family for studying the importance of environment versus genetic inheritance. Either she wrote too little about it, I was too tired or too dumb to quite understand how that research could be done, but it sounded like an interesting and promising line of investigation within genetics.

But, I also have my reservations about her book and line of thought. They are:

1. I think that she’s unjust to the likes of Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray and Robert Plomin. I've read some of their work, and the malicious and nefarious persons one gets the impression of when one reads her book, is not fair. The way she uses and defines the word eugenist, they would be eugenists. They are not. If one should characterize them politically, Herrnstein would be a conservative, Murray I believe has called himself a libertarian at one point, and Robert Plomin wrote in his latest book Blueprint about his ideal of a "just" society instead of a meritocratic society that would place him within easy reach of herself, Arthur Jensen’s politics I’m oblivious of, but James Flynn, who is as liberal as Harden, I’ve heard saying that Arthur Jensen wasn’t any racist. I suspect she is somewhat blind to this because of her somewhat hardened us-liberal, political stance.
2. I am fully onboard when she bemoans the fact that there seems to be a "tacit collusion" within the social sciences not to mention or draw upon genetic research and findings from twin and adoption studies. Once I loved sociology and now I just find it embarrassing and disheartening when scientific institutions, media and politicians discuss and want to do something about the results from the latest study showing "X", but where they have never asked the question or checked whether or not it was explained by twin, adoption or genetic studies. It is truly a scandalous waste of people’s time and resources. Sometimes one wonders if it's a fact that people in fact already know, but everybody plays along. As Leonard Cohen sang "Everybody knows..."
3. I appreciate that she wants to include genetics in order to see what social/environmental interventions truly make a difference. I do not share her optimism, though, about all the positive environmental effects that are waiting to be discovered once the educational sciences include genetics. I'm more gloomy on that prospect. If there were any such wondrous possibilities looming, they would have been discovered, I suspect, by now, also without the help of genetics. When it comes to increasing children's intelligence, the best results have been to adopt them, but short of adoption the results are pauper. And a nationwide or global adoption program is not exactly going to be the prize winner in a humanist competition. As some of the scientists whom she is eager to distance herself from, I predict that she will also be disappointed with time, or maybe she will prove unable to update her priors that much.
4. Her phrasing of an "Anti-eugenic science and policy" is not impressive. I felt she created a straw man and used eugenics in her own idiosyncratic way, reducing the scope of what is meant by eugenics. I also don't think that a policy like "anti-X" will turn out to be viable in the long run. So when she speaks about her stance as "Anti-eugenics" and then has her own reduced understanding of what is meant by the term, then it's kind of confusing. In the book - or maybe it was in an article in the New Yorker covering her book (I can highly recommend the article as it gave me a much better understanding of the cultural context for her book) they used the term "hereditarian left" - I like that term a lot better than anti-eugenic. Peter Singer wrote about a darwinian left decades ago, and in a sense it's the same today. I remember Steven Pinker also wrote about the possibility of a Darwinian left in the Blank Slate.
5. Finally, I take issue with the fact that she just uses the Rawlsian theory of justice to discuss what would be the right thing to do. I like Rawls's idea about "a veil of ignorance" etc, but as she doesn't discuss Nozick’s rejoinders in "Anarchy, State and Utopia" then it is not that interesting. She doesn't seem well orientated into economic and political thinking. I suspect she runs with left leaning economical thinkers the likes of Marx, Piketty, Galbraith, Keynes etc, while the likes of Hayek, Friedman and Sowell, she hasn't read. If one has also read the later names, then the question of fairness, justice, inequality becomes more difficult as they are intrinsically linked to the question of welfare, prosperity, progress, individual rights and freedom. Kathryn Paige Harden considers society behind a veil of ignorance and she sees the injustices, the poor, and feels empathy for the homeless people living today. But, shouldn’t her empathy, her caring and concern not just encompass the people living today, but also people living in the future? If she started reflecting upon her ethical obligations toward (poor) people living in the future, I think she would find her own political and ethical stand questionable or untenable.

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