Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

Is it just me or is a lot of this article is just the writer describing what the girl he was talking to was dressing like or doing when he talked to her about genetics?

That being said, this article does have serious points worth taking about:

Harden thinks that the conversation about behavior genetics will continue to go in circles as long as we preserve the facile distinction between immutable genetic causes and malleable environmental ones. We would be better off if we accepted that everything is woven of long causal chains from genes through culture to personhood, and that the more we understand about them the more effective our interventions might be.

The ultimate claim of “The Genetic Lottery” is an extraordinarily ambitious act of moral entrepreneurialism. Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort. She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.

The perspective of “gene blindness,” she believes, “perpetuates the myth that those of us who have ‘succeeded’ in twenty-first century capitalism have done so primarily because of our own hard work and effort, and not because we happened to be the beneficiaries of accidents of birth, both environmental and genetic.” She invokes the writing of the philosophers John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson to argue that we need to reject “the idea that America is or could ever be the sort of ‘meritocracy’ where social goods are divided up according to what people deserve.” Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

I do think including genetic differences as something we can build cushions against with welfare like all the other more external burdens that affect the less fortunate is a good reason to care about because then we would need to know what sections of any given person's genome would make them worse at various things we want to improve in our society in order to help them. I think the main problem is that fundamentally the more common assocations people have with genetics, which is (as mentioned in article) to either explain behavior by comparing it to the person's parents, something which was once used to advance racism and something which makes some people worse-looking through poor luck, which all have in common of (as is mentioned in the article) being entirely unsystemic and entirely unchangeable, which, as is also mentioned by the article, needs to be changed. Thing is, if some genetically caused issues are not entirely unfixable, then IMO it implies that we can solve genetic problems with solutions that are not genetic in nature, which makes understanding why we need to understand why we need behavioral genetics to solve these issues harder.

And more generally, the left doesn't seem to have a particularly understandable way of dealing with people's genetic differences. We have acceptance and making the language used to describe people who face those differences less negative with things like anti-ableism and preferring words like "plus sized" over "fat" which are fine but I find it hard to reconcile with when these conditions make people suffer for reasons that aren't easily addressed by a more accepting society, and changing how people use language is really hard to do, especially when simple etymological reasons for change may not be clearly within reach or perceived as up-to-date enough to push an argument.

I really liked this particular quote:

“A study of what is correlated with succeeding in an education system doesn’t tell you whether that system is good, or fair, or just.”

As depressing as this sounds, this recent paper seems to be supporting her claims https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635