Recently, President Bush signed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, into law. GINA makes it illegal for employers or health insurers to discriminate based on genetics. Virtually the entire genetics community has lauds this legislation, yet few have written why its wrong that employers and services review objective facts to make decisions.

“It’s not fair…” but why?

Irrational Bureaucratic Risk Abhorrence

The problem with institutionalized testing is that institutions tend to be irrationally risk adverse. This leads to social inefficiency and destabilizing stratification.

The problem is that people confuse what’s probable with what’s true.

Quick Quiz: Research shows that mutation X is strongly correlated with low intelligence. I am intelligent. I have mutation X. How intelligent am I?

And here’s the problem: how does society learn about one’s intelligence? am I admitted to school? employed? funded? will the guardian bureaucrats of society’s fine institutions be willing to risk their admission statistics and resources to learn how successful I could be?

Historically: NO. Thus, social injustice.

But maybe you think something silly like that institutions can or even try to reward aptitude, effort, and loyalty despite unrelated negative evidence like genetic test scores. So how about this one:

Quick Quiz: research shows that drug X is strongly correlated with poor job performance. I perform my job well. I fail a mandatory drug test for X. How well do I perform my job?

Guess who gets fired, not promoted, or not hired.

But you say: oh Andrew, drug use is a choice and genes aren’t and also Regan said drugs are bad because I learned that in DARE and so your example isn’t relevant.

Well, expression of intelligence is a choice too. The historical norm is that otherwise highly qualified people are neglected because they don’t have the right genes… I mean parents. Irrational risk-adverse discrimation is the rule because people believe “rational” means “justifiable when challeged.” Our challenge is to create policy to check that rule. GINA does.

Notes: I don’t have any such mutation, nor have I failed any drug test.

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