11/27/2004

John Tyndall Arrested — Free Speech in Peril in Britain

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John Tyndall (left) speaking at the recent New Orleans Conference. You can see his stirring speech on the DVD and VHS videos.

John Tyndall is imprisoned!

The attack against free speech is raging all over the Western World. All Western nations are facing a massive immigration invasion that will wipe away the European heritage and values we cherish. And now, to even protest against this genocide of this racial and cultural genocide of our people is punishable by imprisonment.
Tony Blair and George Bush and the mass media relentlessly boast of the free speech, thought and expression in Europe and America, but the truth is that in many nations simply expressing opposition to White genocide is crime punishable by imprisonment.
Recently, my longtime friend, John Tyndall, one of the co-founders of the British National Party was arrested for uttering political incorrectness!
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11/24/2004

Crisis in Ukraine — Government by Media

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Government by the Media
News commentary by David Duke

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Kiev to protest the apparent election victory of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych over Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko.

They were driven into the streets by the mostly Jewish-owned newspapers and media outlets in Ukraine that alleged Yanukovych had really won but was denied victory by election fraud. How did they know that? Well, they said their quote “exit pollsâ€? showed a 6 percent win by Yushchenko. That is supposed to settle it. Forget about counting the actual votes. Political pollsters paid by the Jewis-dominated media can tell us who should rule over the people. Not I am not saying that Yanukovych is better than Yuschenko, but this whole process is indicative of how so-called democracy is controlled by the spin of the press. (more…)


11/23/2004

The shooting in the mosque: how it endangers our troops

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Support our Troops –
Bring ‘em Home!

The shooting of an unarmed, wounded Iraqi in a mosque (church) accidentally recorded by an “embedded” reporter is extremely damaging to every American and indeed every American military man and woman. Now that the whole world has seen this war crime, when Americans go into battle and we have wounded who are captured by the enemy, they are more likely to be killed rather than cared for.

Remember that the Iraqis did not kill, rape, or torture our most famous prisoner of the Iraq War, Jessica Lynch. Injured from the wreck of her vehicle, she was well-treated by the Iraqis in a hospital by doctors and nurses! Contrast that treatment to the gratuitous shooting of wounded Iraqis left in a mosque that American forces had swept through earlier. (more…)


Who Rules the Media?

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You already know that the news and entertainment media are biased. Now you will find out why they are biased.

Comments by David Duke:

The information in the following article is vital to securing the heritage and freedom of our people. First penned by Dr. William L. Pierce, this article has been edited in various forms for over 25 years. In that period of time, many of the names of the most powerful people in the media have changed. However the changes have typically been the change of Goldenson to Greenberg or perhaps Cohen to Levin. The names change but the ethnicity typically remains the same. If you are not aware of the extent of Jewish supremacy over the mass media, you will be astounded by this well-documented article. (more…)


11/22/2004

A Kosher Stamp On Murder

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A Kosher-Stamp On Murder
by Uri Avnery

Read this recent article by Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli Peace activist who says that what unites Jewish supremacists is “a primitive, atavistic morality that says that “we” are a superior race, God’s chosen people, a master race, etc., while ‘they’ are inferior races, untermenschen. We may do to them whatever we please, with a clear conscience; they are not allowed to do to us anything at all. Full article at antiwar.com


11/16/2004

How Israeli Terrorism and American Treason Caused 911

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How Israeli Terrorism and American Treason
Caused the September 11 Attacks

Every terrorist involved in the September attacks, which caused the death of thousands of Americans on September 11, should suffer the ultimate punishment for his crime. No person or nation that commits terrorism against America should escape punishment. But now I am going to make a statement that may well shock you.

If you agree that those who commit terrorist acts against America should be punished, then America should put Israel at the top of our hit list; for in this article, I will prove that Israel has committed deliberate acts of murderous terrorism against America such as the Lavon Affair and the attack on the USS Liberty. These murderous acts of terror are easily documented, but most Americans are unaware of them because of media suppression. (more…)


Norman Finkelstein: Is criticizing Israel Anti-Semitic?

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The son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Norman Finkelstein is author of the The Holocaust Industry. a book exposing the monumental fraud woven in the promotion of the “Holocaust” of European Jewry. He has also been one of the most ardent Jewish critics of Israel and its brutal treatment of the Palestinian people as well as Israel’s blatant manipulation of the American governmental and media establishment.

You can experience a streaming video of his speech by clicking on his photo./ (more…)


11/12/2004

The Truth about the SPLC

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How the SPLC Lies About Our Movement and Leaders
The latest Duke Report exposes a SPLC attack on the European American Unity and Leadership Conference in New Orleans. The SPLC completely distorted the essence of the New Orleans Protocol and purposefully misleads its readers on the purposes and motivations of our Cause.

Click here to subscribe to David Duke Report

Read Both Sides and Expose the Real Lies!
By David Duke

My two main opponents are two Jewish supremacists: Abraham Foxman of the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith) and Mark Potok head of media for the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center). (more…)


Freedom of Speech and My Book Jewish Supremacism

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Jewish Supremacism: A Modern Day Bookburning

David Duke

The Canadian government has now officially banned my book Jewish Supremacism. Canadian Customs officials routinely seize and burn the book from Canadian booksellers who order it. With unabashed chutzpah, the government then sends a bill for the cost of seizing and incinerating their book!

Such is the state of freedom in the West in the early years of the 21st Century.

I frequently use the phrase heritage and freedom to focus on the most important issues confronting us. Heritage and Freedom are mutually dependent.

Our survival depends on freedom, for our heritage will face certain extinction unless we have the freedom first to know the truth and secondly to act on it. (more…)


11/11/2004

Dr. Roger Pearson – The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought

The Concept of Heredity in Western thought: Part Three
The revival of interest in genetics

by Dr. Roger Pearson

from Mankind Quarterly Sept. 1, 1995
Vol. 36, pp. 73

The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought: Part One
Vol. 35, Mankind Quarterly, 04-01-1995, pp 229.
posted at http://www.mugu.com

The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought: Part Two
Vol. 35, Mankind Quarterly, 06-01-1995, pp 343
Social Engineering and the Social Sciences

The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought: Part Three
Vol. 36, Mankind Quarterly, 09-01-1995, pp 73.

As noted in the two preceding articles in this brief series,1 European and American thought had historically recognized the role of heredity in shaping both human physiology and human personality. The early beliefs of the Classical and Medieval worlds were reinforced by an improved understanding of plant and animal breeding, which made especially rapid progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Subsequently, the discoveries of Darwin and Mendel led to an even clearer recognition of the significance of the role of heredity in human affairs, and this reinforced interest in the possibility of applying to human beings the breeding techniques used so successfully with plants and animals.

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The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought: Part Two

The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought: Part Two
Vol. 35, Mankind Quarterly, 06-01-1995, pp 343

Social Engineering and the Social Sciences

Introduction
Franz Boas
Simplistic Behaviorism Strengthens the “Anti-hereditarian” Cult
Stalinist-Marxism adopts the Lysenkovian Myth
Institutional Restrictions on Freedom of Academic Research
Media Misrepresentation
Conclusion
Footnotes
Bibliography

Anthropology and sociology were not always committed to egalitarianism and many of the original pioneers tended to favor the concept of eugenics in so far as breeding from highly regarded members of the community was concerned. Both society at large and members of academe at that time still recognized the vital importance of heredity, and as we earlier noted, many of the great names of sociology, anthropology and psychology were ‘outspoken in their emphasis on the role of heredity, working in conjunction with environment and culture, as a prime factor in shaping human behavior. Amongst these “hereditarian” social scientists we must include such names as Ales Hrdlicka, W. G. Sumner, Ernest A. Hooton, William McDougall, C. H. Cooley, F. H. Giddings, R. M. McIver, Pitirim Sorokin, E. S. Bogardus, and E. A. Ross. Even Lester Ward condemned socialism as creating an artificial equality, recommending instead the concept of a “sociocracy” (1899) which would benefit each according to his or her merit, but would provide equal opportunity to all. Ward supported the concept of eugenics, and recognizing the need for “race elevation” and “continuing the race”,1 he stressed the importance of women as progenitors of the race. Similarly, Thorstein Veblen (1922) warned against the inherent threat of “race suicide” and held that “providence is a virtue only so far as its aim is provision for posterity.”2

The indisputable fact is that most pioneer social scientists were by no means egalitarians, and were quite open-minded so far as the possibility of incorporating biological knowledge into their altruistic plans to improve the human lot was concerned. The attempt by egalitarians ensconced in academe to deny the relevance of biology to the human condition is of relatively recent origin, and has its roots in the activities of radical political ideologues who have consciously infiltrated the academic world in order that they can advance the egalitarian thesis from respected positions of influence and authority.

On the other hand, the study of human behavior was from its inception strongly linked to the natural human urge to use knowledge to improve the human condition. Indeed, sociology is customarily traced back to Comte Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) – one of those extraordinary French aristocrats who acknowledged a degree of corruption in the ancien regime and genuinely desired to create a “brave new world” – though one that differed substantially from the teachings of Voltaire and Rousseau. Saint-Simon was an idealist who enrolled in the French army at the age of seventeen, fought with the French expeditionary force sent to help fight the British in the American Revolution, and was present at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. He believed that a scientific, positivist approach to the study of society could eradicate many of the evils that beset mankind; but not being an egalitarian, he did not support the ensuing French Revolution which had a far different character from that of the American Revolution.

Imprisoned, because of his aristocratic background, during Robespierre’ s reign of terror, Saint-Simon was fortunate in surviving this bloody period and began to devote himself to the question of social and political reform. His ideal was a hierarchical society organized around an efficient system of industrial and agricultural productivity such as that which had made it possible for Britain to stand up against the power of Napoleon. His writings caught the eye of Napoleon, who attempted to impose some of them on the new United Europe he sought to create. Saint-Simon hired a young secretary, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who admired his employer’s ideas so much that he decided to expropriate them as his own. Consequently, it was Auguste Comte, writing after Saint-Simon’s death, who is more commonly regarded as the founder of sociology.

Like his employer, Auguste Comte conceived of sociology as a science aimed at developing a system of efficient social control which would nevertheless be in harmony with man’s biologically determined nature (1830-42). His ideal was also an hierarchical system, with captains of industry holding the controlling positions; it was in no way egalitarian and it rejected the idea of biological egalitarianism. However, egalitarianism steadily gained strength as a result of the various revolutionary passions that swept Europe in the nineteenth century, and while some socialists identified with the eugenic concept, others moved in the direction of egalitarianism, accepting Saint-Simon and Comte’s advocacy of social engineering while rejecting the hierarchical concept of society implicit in more traditional philosophy. Notable amongst these was Franz Boas, who migrated to the United States from Germany to become the head of the first American Ph.D.-granting university department. Equipped with all the trappings of extreme environmentalism and egalitarianism, Boasian anthropology eventually became the bulwark of those in American academe who were committed to the myth of biological egalitarianism.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas (1858-1942) was born in Minden, Germany, and grew up in a strongly radicalized environment. Both his parents were radical socialists who were active in the 1870-71 revolutionary movement that swept Europe. Abraham Jacobi, his uncle by marriage, had actually been imprisoned after being found guilty of armed violence in Cologne during the revolution of 1848, after which he had emigrated to America, where he soon became influential in the early rise of radical socialism. Boas’s family background was thus intimately interconnected with the radical socialist revolutionary movement, and also provided him with ready contacts in the United States.

Although lacking any formal training in anthropology, Boas had studied a certain amount of cultural geography in addition to his main doctoral subject, which was physics. What gave him an entree to anthropology was a report he wrote on the Eskimos of Baffin Land in 1883 for Der Berliner Tageblatt, a liberal newspaper. After serving as a docent in geography at the University of Berlin, he migrated to the United States in 1886 to take up a position at Clark University. It was here that the first U.S. doctoral degree specifically designated as being in the area of anthropology was awarded under Boas’s supervision. Boas subsequently became the head of a department of anthropology established at Columbia University, where he was able to train and award doctoral degrees to numerous students. Equipped with the earliest American doctorates specifically designated as being in the field of anthropology, his students by default became the leaders and prime builders of academic anthropology in the United States, rapidly establishing themselves as the arbiters of a controlling network which heavily influenced the future of anthropological research, publishing and teaching in American universities.

Interestingly, as late as 1911, in his book The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas had admitted that:

[d]ifferences of structure must be accompanied by differences of function, physiological as well as psychological; and, as we found clear evidence of differences of structure between races, so we must anticipate that differences in mental ‘characteristics will be found.

However, Boas was shortly to reverse this position when he realized that the recognition of genetic forces conflicted with the goals of his egalitarian and internationalist ideology, which sought to demolish the unity and coherence of national units. Instead he began a massive campaign to undermine national and ethnic consciousness and “combat racism” in whatever form it might find expression. In particular, his Anthropology and Modern Life (1928) was devoted to downplaying the concept of heredity and undermining the eugenic ideal. The egalitarian ideology steadily gained ground as Boas’s disciples and their pupils gained increasing influence throughout American academe. The spread of Boasian doctrines was further facilitated by the position of world dominance then enjoyed by the Western nations. Spurred by an ethical desire to shoulder “the white man’s burden” in a shrinking world, many academics came to believe that mankind should now abandon the Darwinian struggle and treat the formerly competing subspecies of mankind as members of a single, international, gene pool. This was a reversal of the evolutionary process which has for all time been firmly rooted in procreative competition, and was an ethical concept not shared by the non-Western nations, who adhered to more functional, self-promoting, competitive patterns of behavior.3

Thus, despite mounting evidence that genetic factors were of profound importance in determining human physical and mental behavior, the desire that biological egalitarianism should be true gained strength as human altruism was redirected away from the immediate group toward even the most disparate members of diverse breeding populations. The evolutionary trend toward greater speciation, already threatened by increasing population and migratory pressures, was now further vitiated by cultural factors rooted in an ideology which favored overall sapiens homogenization. The new radicals in U.S. social science found it convenient to downplay heritability; and Boas’s earlier acknowledgment of human biological disparities was edited out of the 1938 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man.

Those to whom Boas chose to award doctoral degrees in anthropology generally shared his ideologies and became prime disciples of egalitarian universalism. As the only holders of designated doctorates in anthropology, they were natural candidates to head up newly-formed departments of anthropology in other universities where they, in turn, could train and award doctorates to a new generation of Boasian anthropologists. One readily perceives how much the egalitarian bias in anthropology owes to this one immigrant of solid egalitarian-revolutionary credentials.

In his biographical work Franz Boas (1953, p. 65), Melville Herskovits, himself a student of Boas, publicly acknowledged that Boas’s “political sympathies leaned towards a variety of socialism common among Nineteenth Century liberals.” A cynic might add that the nineteenth century liberals with whom members of Boas’s family were connected included some of the bomb-throwing variety! The records of the United States House of Representatives (1944, p. 9) actually attribute Boas with no less than forty-six communist-front connections.

Herskovits went on to confirm that:

[t]he Four Decades of the tenure of [Boas's] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who . . . have continued the tradition in which their teachers were trained. . . .

Despite such an open admission by his pupil, friend and biographer, few today fully appreciate the extent of Boas’s influence on the subsequent history of anthropology in America. Yet it is readily apparent when we look at the careers of just a few of Boas’s pupils, all of whom sought to revolutionize Western thinking about social relations and to minimize the role of heredity in the shaping of human abilities:

Margaret Mead, often called “the mother of American anthropology,” became the author of many influential but distorted anthropological texts. Mead earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia in 1929 under Boas, and obtained an influential position as associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Her Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) was a particularly blatant, now-transparent attempt to demolish support for Western family traditions in favor of free sex, and has since been shown to be based on a broadly false and flagrant misrepresentation of Polynesian customs.4 She co-authored with Gene Weltfish a pamphlet entitled The Races of Mankind (1940), which somehow came to be adopted by the War Department for distribution among American World War II military personnel, until it was withdrawn when it was judged to be communist propaganda. Its general thesis reflected the very core of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, extending the concept of “class exploitation” to include “race exploitation” and portraying race as nothing more than a cultural invention designed to keep the colored races in submission -or a conceptual artifact designed to promote a specialized form of class exploitation. Mead was officially cited as having numerous communist- front affiliations.

Melville Herskovits obtained his Ph.D. under Boas in 1927 and was subsequently hired by Boas as a research associate in anthropology at Columbia. Herskovits later became chairman of anthropology at Northwestern University, and a major power in the increasingly narrow, incestuous world of American cultural anthropology, in which virtually all the key positions were controlled by students of Boas. As the first granter of doctorates in an area specifically designated as anthropology, Boas had brought off a political coup which enabled his views not only to dominate subsequent generations of American anthropologists, but also to inspire leftist thinkers in sociology and other branches of the social sciences throughout the English-speaking world.

Ashley Montagu, born in England as Israel Ehrenburg, changed his name several times, adopting not merely a set of Anglophone names – which would not have been unusual – but one of uniquely aristocratic flavor, Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu. For a surname he appropriated the name Montagu from one of Britain’s oldest medieval titled families, and for good measure reinforced this by hyphenating it to the name of Ashley, since hyphenated surnames conveyed an additional aura of social status in Britain.5 Resenting the hereditarian views of Britain’ s leading anatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, under whom he was studying, he dropped out of the University of London without getting his bachelor’ s degree, and disappointed by the failure of the 1928 General Strike in Britain, the new “Montagu” migrated to America where he was awarded a Ph.D. by Boas in 1936 – and was appointed chairman of anthropology at Rutgers University. “Montagu’s” entire career was built around a bitter crusade against the work of respected scholars such as Carleton Coon,6 who recognized race for what it is – a very real product of human evolution. A widely influential torrent of publications, such as his widely promoted book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (1942), all sought to dismiss the zoological reality of race.

Montagu was the rapporteur primarily responsible for drafting the academically absurd, but politically sententious, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 1950 Statement on Race, which sought to deny the significance of racial disparities. 7 This was widely protested by scientists from many countries, notably by the pre-eminent French paleontologist Henri Vallois, director of Musee de l’Homme.8 Not all the members of UNESCO’s own social science department accepted the original United Nations Statement. Professor Georges A. Heuse, director of the UNESCO ethno-psychology department, condemned it, commenting that it was “conceived chiefly by Ashley Montagu – an anthropologist who conceives race a social myth – and by a group of sociologists substantially ignorant of anthropology” (1955, p. 379). Indeed, the statement prepared by Montagu was so absurd that it was rewritten and republished in 1952, only two years after it was initially adopted. The revised Statement, although still largely reflecting universalist-egalitarian views as is only to be expected in view of the political composition of the United Nations, generously conceded the role of genetic factors in human life and admitted that human groups which were distinguished by “well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from other groups” might justifiably be called races.9

It would not be irrelevant to note that in 1942 Montagu chose to lecture at the so-called School for Democracy, which was classified as a communist organization by the New York legislature, and that he is on record as stating that “Soviet Russia is the outstanding example of perfect management of ethnic group relations” – a claim that might be challenged by many ethnic groups who had the experience of living as a minority under communist rule.

Ruth Bendedict obtained her doctorate at Columbia University and became a lecturer at Columbia under the patronage of Boas, having been retained by him to teach there, where she eventually became a full professor. In 1945 a high point in the Boasian war against the concept of race and heredity was reached with the publication of Ruth Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics, which essentially argued that the study of race was “a vicious and brutal impediment to human progress, brotherhood, and understanding.” Her book Patterns of Culture (1959), containing an introduction by Boas and a preface by Margaret Mead, similarly sought to emphasize the role of culture to the exclusion of biology in determining human achievement. It became required reading in so many college courses taught by acolytes of the Boas tradition that it eventually sold over a million copies.

Isador Chein obtained his Ph.D. in 1939 under Boas at Columbia and became one of the prime court witnesses to give “expert” testimony in favor of school desegregation. Chein gave the Court only his opinion about segregation, as though that opinion, coming from him, was ipso facto “scientific,” without attempting to provide any scientific evidence to support his opinion.10

Kenneth B. Clark, a Panamanian Afro-American, obtained his Ph.D. under Boas at Columbia in 1940 and similarly became an “instant expert” on the American school system. Clark’s testimony before the Supreme Court played an important role in determining the decision to force the racial desegregation of American schools in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision (347 U.S. 483). Central to his testimony was his claim that because seven out of sixteen black children in a all-black school, shown white and black dolls or drawings of such dolls, chose the white doll as that “which most looked like them, ” segregation had “harmed the development of their personalities.” The speciousness of his testimony was revealed by Ernest van den Haag, of New York University and the New School for Social Research, who showed from Clark’s own data, collected in a study involving 253 black children from both segregated and nonsegregated schools, that a higher percentage (39%) of black children from racially integrated schools chose the white doll than did black children from segregated schools (29%).11 In other words, Clark had mislead the Court with data that appeared to support his contention, while the data from his larger study clearly showed that the reality was the reverse of what he presented to the court.

Otto Klineberg was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia, but also studied anthropology under Boas. He is credited with having helped persuade Boas to suppress his former belief that race and intelligence were linked. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology, Klineberg was promptly hired by Boas as a Columbia research associate in anthropology, and became noted for his persistent attacks on “hereditarian” views.

Leslie Spier constantly supported the egalitarian claim that there was no evidence of any race being inferior in its ability to participate in any culture or even to create any culture, a sweeping statement which denies any validity to the concept of the inheritance of personality. The cultural achievements of different breeding populations were supposedly due. solely to environmental circumstances and never to inherited differences in personality, intelligence, or any other forms of ability.

Gene Weltfish obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia under Boas in 1929 and, after further studies under Alexander Goldenweiser at the New School for Social Research, where Margaret Mead also underwent postgraduate training, was hired by Boas to teach at Columbia. It was he who co- authored with Margaret Mead the notorious pamphlet The Races of Mankind (1948), mentioned above.

This is a remarkable and formidable list of politicized scholars, all educated under the same man and all reflecting his positions. The insidious and collective influence of these politicized academics within American academe soon became obvious, and it has been said that the Galton Society regarded the need to combat Boasian egalitarian and extreme environmentalist propaganda as one of its chief goals. But since the Boasians infiltrated academe as paid faculty members, working together to seize control of key positions and recruiting into academe only those of their students who had accepted their views, the members of the Galton Society were outgunned and outmaneuvered, and fought a losing battle. At this point those who still recognized the importance of genetics found themselves confronted by a new ideology, Marxist-Leninist Lysenkovianism.

Simplistic Behaviorism Strengthens the “Anti-hereditarian” Cult

Scientifically, the ground for the spread of egalitarian environmentalist theory was fertilized by the emphasis placed on the environment by the simplistic behaviorism of J.B. Watson (1878-1958), who expanded Pavlovian research into a broad philosophy which assumed that human beings were essentially plastic organisms all equally able to develop in virtually whatever direction might be determined by their environment and schooling. Watson, who spent a good part of his adult life as an executive with large advertising firms such as J. Walter Thompson, sought to account for sociopsychological phenomena in strictly behavioristic terms. In this he was close to reality, but his weakness was his denial of significant differences in the heredity of individuals, In short, he was a purely environmentalist behaviorist who assumed that all “healthy” human beings were equally capable to responding to training in any direction. His philosophy excluded what is now called behavioral genetics. His views were extended into the field of education by John Dewey (1859-1952), a pragmatist who believed that environmental manipulation could reshape human behavior in virtually any desired direction and whose influence on the shape of American education persists to this day. These environmental behaviorists rejected the idea that biologically programmed behavior affected human behavior and chose largely to ignore the possibility that disparate heritable influences might to any extent predetermine the limits of the individual human personality.

The importance of environment had never been ignored in European thought, and indeed traditional educators had always placed great importance on a strict regime of training and schooling; the older tradition differed from the new behaviorism in that it was recognized that heredity placed limits on the individual’s ability to benefit from experience and from educational opportunity. The new emphasis on environment, to the exclusion of all biological factors, proved a fertile field for those whose political agenda depended on promoting the myth of biological egalitarianism.

Stalinist-Marxism adopts the Lysenkovian Myth

The Boasians were not the sole source of anti-hereditarian views in academe. The idea of the biological equality of all mankind was a virtual necessity to political egalitarianism. In Russia, a quack geneticist named Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and claimed that the environment could directly modify the genome. This fallacy, linked to the equally false Lamarckian doctrine that adaptations acquired during the lifetime of individual organisms could be inherited by that organism’s offspring, reduced breeding and to philosophical irrelevance, thereby promoting the cause of egalitarians and those who believed they could reshape mankind at will by means of environmental manipulation without the need to resort to any form of genetic selection. This view were immediately adopted by Stalin, who declared Mendelian genetics to be a capitalist conspiracy, and the acceptance of the Lysenkovian fallacy became mandatory throughout the Soviet Union. Lysenkoism justified the doctrine of revolution by consigning Mendelian genetics to oblivion: if all races and individuals were potentially equal, given the appropriate manipulation of their environment, the argument that all economic inequality was the product of class exploitation would be logically justifiable.

With the advent of Stalinist-Lysenkovian doctrine, revolutionary Marxists, like the Jacobins before them, could forget Marx and Engels’ racist convictions and join the anti-hereditarian chorus with renewed enthusiasm. Outside the Soviet Union, Marxists now joined non-Marxist egalitarian activists in attacking all and any scholars who adhered to Mendelian theory, especially when these persisted in drawing attention to the link between genetics and human ability. In Britain, the ardent eugenicist J. B. S. Haldane resigned his communist party membership, and in America the university of Texas Nobel Prize-winning eugenicist, Hermann J. Muller, who had long been a card-carrying member of the U.S. communist party, abandoned his party membership after narrowly escaping arrest during a visit to the USSR. His crime: he had publicly condemned the Lysenkovian myth as unscientific.

Lysenkovianism remained for many years the only legally permitted form of genetics in the USSR, and most Marxist activists ensconced in the social science divisions of Western universities accepted the Stalinist-Lysenkoist doctrine out of political conviction. The story is well-documented in Conway Zirkle’s illuminating book, Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene (1959)12 Biological egalitarianism also became the only “politically correct” doctrine among Marxist- Stalinist thinkers elsewhere in the world, and Zirkle shows how widelywhat he calls “Marxian biology” permeated Western anthropology, sociology, and related studies through the teachings of faculty members who were ideologically attracted to egalitarianism but were balefully ignorant of even the simplest of biological knowledge. To quote his words:

Marxian biology . . . exists also in non-Communist countries – in countries where it is not protected by Marxian dictators. Moreover, it exists not merely as an intellectual lag among the unlearned, but as a carefully protected faith in disciplines whose members are equal in education – quantitatively. at least – to the biologists themselves. (1959, p. 418) … The usual course is to treat the human species as if it were composed of an amorphous, uniform and plastic raw material, as if it were a species which could be molded (conditioned is the usual word) to suit the heart’s desire.” (p. 420)

All kinds of eugenics are anathema to Marxists, Zirkle affirms, even though already in 1959 our knowledge of the machinery of hereditary was sufficient to enable us to assert that the outcome of any rational eugenic program would be beneficial. Indeed, the situation was so bad that the Marxists ensconsed in Western academe

. . . actually set the fashion not only in letters but also in popular up-to-date attitudes in morals and ethics. . . It is even possible that they furnished the dominant directives to the social sciences. This statement is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first, for practically all social scientists are familiar with the works of the more progressive writers, but almost none of them is technically equipped to evaluate the new discoveries in biology . . . . Marxian biology has always had allies, and this has been one of the sources of its strength. On the other hand, scientific biology has had few friends. The moment it grew to the point where it applied to Homo sapiens, it acquired enemies.”(p. 298)

Forty years later, contemporary Marxist-Leninist ideology, although humbled by events in Eastern Europe, remains alive and well in Western academe; and large numbers of faculty members in social science departments still refuse to recognize the implications of the fact that human beings are biological organisms, even though an overwhelming majority of psychologists now acknowledge the importance of heredity in shaping the limits of human personality and abilities.13

The earlier list we cited of radical social scientists was restricted to some of the more prominent of Boas’s pupils.14 However, the Boasians were soon joined by other blatantly radical academics. Gerhard Lenski and Marvin Harris, for example, advanced an essentially Marxist analysis of social behavior rooted in the concept of egalitarianism and class warfare which exerted a major influence on American sociology.15 In addition, a bitter campaign of guerilla warfare against those who acknowledge the role of heredity has been carried out for years by associates of an activist radical publication known as Science for the People – which uses the term “people” in its most traditional Marxist interpretation, reminiscent of the “Hall of the People” in Beijing.

In Storm over Biology,16 the late Bernard D. Davis, a respected molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, charged Science for the People with aiming “to destroy the field of human behavioral genetics 11 (1986). The names of Richard Lewontin, Stephen J. Gould and Leon J. Kamin, in particular, feature prominently in this connection. Lewontin’ s 1984 book, Not in Our Genes, co-authored with Kamin and Britain’ s arch-antihereditarian Stephen Rose, was an outright attempt to undermine any proper understanding of the importance of heredity. Lewontin himself was a prime force behind Science for the People, although he has perhaps adopted a somewhat more moderate tone in light of the solid evidence provided by ongoing genetic research. Stephen J. Gould speaks out in a pro-egalitarian fashion as a scholar who has taken the trouble to fully acquaint himself with ongoing research, but who has not abandoned his ideological commitment to what he believes the facts ought to be rather than what they are. His widely promoted book The Misrneasure of Man (1981) notably created confusion in the minds of its readers concerning the heritability of intelligence. Kamin, the author of The Science and Politics of IQ (1974), by contrast, still participates in personal attacks against those who attempt to draw the attention of the public to the role of heredity in human behavior. A former New England editor of a weekly communist party newspaper, he shows little interest in abandoning the egalitarian dream and even recently has attacked “hereditarian” scholars in published letters which contain such flagrant inaccuracies that one can only suppose that he places an unscholarly reliance on secondary sources which he has not troubled to check for accuracy.

Institutional Restrictions on Freedom of Academic Research

With their intellectual underpinnings threatened by the advance of biological and genetic science, the egalitarians perceived that their most fertile field of influence lay in the quasi-scientific fields of sociology and anthropology, where their theories could be advanced without being subject to experimental test. Consequently these areas increasingly attracted egalitarian attention, and soon new generations of scholars were being trained and graduated in that tradition. Physical anthropology was cut off as something totally separate from cultural and social anthropology, thus allowing the latter field to develop a purely environmentalist approach which left students ignorant of the possibility of human biological differences.

The Great Depression created a political atmosphere which facilitated the promotion of the myth of biological egalitarianism, and the events of World War II made it even easier. Biological egalitarianism now became the “scientific” underpinning for the environmentalist conceptions of society which spread throughout both the social sciences and the media. Political pressures swung major foundations which fund both educational research and socio-political programs into alignment with the egalitarian creed, and a vast body of pseudo-science rapidly came to dominate the fields of anthropology, sociology and philosophy, with biased academic opinions about biological egalitarianism even influencing court decisions and governmental policy relative to social issues.

During the 1960s and ’70s, there was widespread intimidation by Marxists and other egalitarians of scholars who refused to ignore the genetic component behind human behavior. Violent Marxist SDS-organized17 campus riots were frequent, as documented in Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Pearson, 1991) and in more specific detail concerning the harassment of Nobel Prize-winning William Shockley in Shockley on Eugenics and Race (Pearson, 1992). Marxist student organizations and their sympathizers, encouraged by similar-minded faculty members, rioted on campuses, disrupted lectures, threatened faculty members, and attacked the right of “hereditarian” scholars to report their research findings or to express their opinions either on and off the campus. During the 1980s, a degree of order returned to academe, but by now many of those who had been student activists in the 1960s and ’70s had followed the course advocated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1977), and had abandoned violent revolutionary activities in favor of infiltrating the established institutions of societies as paid employees. Numbers of the rebellious students of the 1960s and ’70s became the faculty members, the university administrators, and the government bureaucrats of the late 1980s and ’90s. Whereas universities such as the University of California, Berkeley, had hitherto defended the right of faculty members to express their opinions, numerous universities and other educational institutions now became leaders of the egalitarian cause, imposing restrictions on the freedom of faculty members to engage in research and practice free speech wherever this involved the influence of genetic factors on human behavior. Guidelines were laid down as to “racially sensitive” and “politically correct” terminology at Pennsylvania State and other universities and faculty members who published papers on the genetic basis of personality were discriminated against at universities such as Western Ontario, Delaware, and City University of New York.

As the myth of biological egalitarianism gained further political and emotional support, it began to inhibit not only individual scholars but also grant-making foundations. Even foundations which had been originally established by eugenic-oriented benefactors, such as the Carnegie Institute and the Kellogg Foundation, began to eschew support for research that might favor genetic rather than exclusively environmental solutions to human problems.

Unable successfully to refute solid research into the significance of genetic forces in determining the limits of human behavioral potential, in medical and non-medical fields, the egalitarians have in fact fallen back on (1) attempts to accuse individual researchers of poor methodology or even outright fraud, such allegations relying on the principle that when mud is thrown, some at least will stick, and (2) the argument that any research into the role of genetics in human behavior will lead inevitably to “discrimination” and therefore is morally unjustifiable. Currently, there is considerable publicity aimed at research into the genetic basis of breast cancer, on the ground that this will lead to “discrimination” by insurance companies and employers. What the media should be discussing is the vital importance of medical genetic research, the benefits that mankind can obtain from knowledge about genetic causality, and the fact that as medicine advances there is an increasing possibility of developing a humane eugenic program, based on the development of genetic surgery, which could largely free future generations from the ills which plague the present generation.

Media Misrepresentation

As has been revealed by Snyderman and Rothman in The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy (1988), radical ideologues have generally found willing collaborators in the media. The intimidation of “hereditarian” scientists, as the radicals liked to call behavioral scientists, became a major plank in the politics of what has more recently come to be dubbed “political correctness.”

Because of media bias in favor of the fantasy of the biological uniformity of not just individuals but of all mankind, there was little favorable publicity for those like Bernard Davis. An outstanding scholar with an unimpeachable scientific reputation, Davis documented leftist distortions of scientific knowledge about heredity, protesting that these were promoting irrational public policies which assumed that contemporary Homo saplens were somehow exempt from biological forces and thus were completely malleable and subject to environmental manipulation. Yet his Storm over Biology received little attention from the media, and on his death the New York Times obituary completely ignored his extraordinary scientific achievements and represented him to the public as a holder of fringe views. Only under open pressure from Nobelist Arthur Kornberg did the Times publish a second more objective account of Davis’s achievements and scientific status. (Holden, 1994).

Politicized distortion of scientific findings is not limited to the popular media. Sadly, a number of semi-popular scientific journals have come to be controlled by individuals who seem to minimize the role of heredity in shaping human behavior. These journals are influential because many do a remarkable service in spreading sound scientific information on subjects other than human behavioral genetics. The Scientific American is one such publication, which despite its general excellence sympathetically provides a platform for such politicized writers as Leon Kamin, whose views were further promoted by John Horgan in a generally informative article entitled “Eugenics Revisited” (1993). Horgan gave considerable space to Kamin’s politicized attempts to debunk the Minnesota Twin Studies research findings18 Kamin has also claimed to have disclosed fraud in the findings of Sir Cyril Burt – a prominent British psychologist who early proclaimed the largely genetic basis of intelligence. Following his death, Burt’s research records concerning his twin studies were reportedly lost under suspicious circumstances when boxes of his files were reportedly destroyed on the recommendation of a colleague who was not sympathetic to his work. However, Burt’s published findings on the intelligence of twins have since been replicated by other researchers and the charge that Butt manufactured his data has been examined and repudiated by Joynson, in The Burt Affair (1989), and by Fletcher in Science, Ideology and the Media: The Cyril Butt Affair (1991).19

Conclusion

Shattered by the deeply dysgenic impact of World War I, and by the economic depression that followed, many who had previously put loyalty to the national ideal ahead of selfish interests now fell prey to the egalitarian myth, which blamed the old elite for the war and portrayed any ranking of human talents as nothing more than an excuse for class exploitation. The idea of eugenic policies, based on a recognition of the reality of biological inequality, of competitive reproduction, and on the fear that modern social conditions negated natural selection, now became increasingly disturbing to those who desired only to live their own lives free from worries about the well being of future generations.

The outbreak of World War II and the ensuing military defeat of Germany made it possible for the egalitarians to smear all who sought to advocate eugenics by highly unsubtle propaganda alleging that any concentration of interest in human genetics was likely to promote totalitarianism and genocide. World War II gave the political edge to the anti-eugenicists. Germany had adopted earlier, primitive eugenic policies, and information about this became intermingled with the “Holocaust” reports coming out of post-war Germany. A shock-wave of horror swept over the Western world, and in the process all discussion of eugenics was illogically but effectively equated with inhumanity – an exact reversal of the moral drive that prompted most eugenicists to support the movement. The egalitarians, of course, never mentioned the historical fact that egalitarian enthusiasm could also lead to totalitarianism – and to the greatest genocide the world has ever seen in the mass slaughter of Russian “bourgeois” peasants, to mass deaths in the Siberian “gulags” and to the mass genocide of the cultured and landowning classes in Maoist China, all committed in the name of “equality.” Their ideology prevented them from seeing or even desiring to see objective reality.

Irrational political ideologies can severely retard the progress of knowledge, but in a free country they cannot suppress the search for truth altogether. While genetic research has proceeded rapidly during the past two decades, the Stalinist-Lysenkovian tradition still strives to raise barriers to research into human behavioral genetics. However, increasing numbers of psychologists and social science scholars are acknowledging the need to examine the role of genetics in relation to human behavior and abilities even though their interest draws passionate condemnation from those who remain rooted in a Stalinist-like commitment to the myth of biological egalitarianism. Seeing their cherished notions challenged by research into the link between heredity and human behavior, these latter still strive with a vigor born of desperation to suppress public recognition of the importance of heredity and to prevent any such recognition from influencing public policy.

To understand the history of academic fashion one cannot ignore the influence of political interests, since these exert a powerful influence on academic ideologies at any one time. Thus, Karl Mannhelm, an activist Marxist immigrant who fled to Britain from Germany, was certainly right in advocating the need for a “sociology of knowledge” (1955) on the grounds that scholarly research is influenced by the personal conceptions, values and politics of the researcher. Unfortunately he saw this issue only in a Marxist light, attributing all non-Marxist theories to bourgeois class bias, and so hindered rather than advanced the development of this branch of knowledge.

Outright Marxist egalitarian propaganda was powerfully aided by a separate development that now began to pervade even respectable segments of academia, of the media and of the political world. This was the redirection of altruism away from the welfare of the immediate gene pool to engulf the most diverse members of the species.20 The new spirit of biological egalitarianism was accompanied by a transmutation of humanitarian values. Altruism had evolved because the survival chances of a population were enhanced when individual members were prepared to make personal sacrifices to protect the intergenerational well-being of their own kind. Now, however, altruism became confused in its application. Improvements in communications caused local breeding populations to lose their cohesiveness and their sense Of distinctive identity: consequently, altruistic emotions became increasingly stimulated not by threats to the survival of their own gene pool, but by the plight of all the world’s expanding multitudes, which nature had traditionally trimmed back by natural selection. As a result, many of the more talented and creative members of the advanced Western nations increasingly devoted their efforts to helping the less fit, both at home and abroad, to reproduce prolifically, while allowing their own birthrate to fall below replacement level. As Garrett Hardin pointed out repeatedly, and most notably in The Limits of Altruism, this redirection of the altruistic impulse effectively stood evolution on its head. 21

The term “genetic altruism” had now to be invented to describe the actions of those who showed themselves willing to refrain from passing on their own genes to posterity while assisting less competent individuals and groups to multiply. This inversion of the evolutionary function of altruism was accompanied by a decline of interest in eugenics. A new morality was developing which demanded that advanced societies should fight against evolution. Natural selection was to be replaced by dysgenic selection; nature was to be prevented from wielding its genetic pruning knife, and no attention was to be paid to the well- being of all those future generations of mankind who would be doomed to eke out their existence in an increasingly overcrowded world blighted by man-made dysgenic population trends.

Although this new anti-evolutionary philosophy of life took hold primarily in the more advanced countries, where the birthrate began to fall dramatically, it was widely rejected among the peoples of the Third World. By adhering to more traditional evolutionary practices, these populations began to explode at geometric rates following the introduction of modern Western health measures, technology, and economic aid.

Evolutionary progress is rooted in the process of speciation and competition between populations and subspecies to reproduce and control vital resources. Altruism served an evolutionary function among advanced social animals – the enhancement of the survival chances of a specific phylogenetic continuum. When the breeding population was itself not only the community but also the total society this worked well. But modern communications and modern mass migrations have reversed the evolutionary impact of altruism, commonly redirecting it away from members of the immediate gene pool to aid the members of competing gene pools to reproduce at the expense of the altruist’s own genetic heirs. Humane though it seems to us, the modern redirection of altruism away from the “home” represents a reversal of the evolutionary process, and could potentially bring about the downfall of humanity unless applied in conjunction with sound eugenic judgment. This is all the more true because the altruistic extension of modern medicine to all corners of the earth has created an ecologically frightening threat of world overpopulation which calls for sound and intelligent policies if it is not to totally destroy the human species – and with it most other advanced species of plant and animal life. The problem is that the ordinary human heart rests easier when the mind maintains the pretence that all is well, even when reason should warn that it is not.

This author summarized his views. on the vital issues now at stake, which have resulted from the reversal of natural selection as a result of illogical social ideologies and the impact of modern technology, in the concluding chapter of his Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (1991):

If truth prevails in our society, social science and social and political philosophy will eventually be obliged to take cognizance of the fact that human behavior is subject to the law of causality, just like other matter throughout the universe. It is now clear that genetic factors set the potential limits of behavior by the human animal, while environmental circumstances and events influence the individual organism within the potential limits of its behavior as determined by heredity. Not that one can say that either is more important than the other. Environment and heredity are two different categories of causal factors which intertwine and interact. Even to ask which is the more important can be a misleading question – just as it is to ask which is more important, the cart or the horse?

Yet there is a vitally significant difference between genetic forces and environment, a difference which raises eugenic considerations to a level of superior concern. One can enhance the environmental component of intelligence by creating a more favorable environment for the next generation, but this is only a temporary boost, and must be maintained at the heightened level for each successive generation. Its effect is not intergenerational as the Lysenkoists believed. By contrast, an improvement in the genetic constituency of a population is permanent, unless eliminated by new dysgenic forces. A genetic improvement is an intergenerational improvement, and genetic or dysgenic decline represents a genetic loss which is likewise transmitted intergenerationally. Unfortunately, a single generation of severe dysgenic decline can destroy tens of thousands of years of evolutionary progress laboriously achieved by means of natural selection – and thus constitutes a permanent blight on posterity.22

Emotionally-motivated and unintelligent responses to our environment can only do more harm to mankind than good. We need to heed the ancient Greek injunction to”Know Thyself.” If we are to be motivated by truly altruistic emotions, We should focus our altruism to embrace all those untold generations yet to be born, or which could yet be born provided we do not wreck the biosphere in which we live and destroy the genetic heritage given to us by past evolutionary selection. We must direct our concern not just to the well-being of those who chance to be alive at this present time, but to the well-being of that far greater number who are to follow when we and our generation have passed away. We can do no greater good than to leave the multitude of future generations a healthy genetic inheritance in a healthy and unspoiled environment. Our duty is to avoid pollution of the human genetic heritage, and to pass on a healthy and valuable gene pool to future generations, just as it is to avoid ecological pollution and to strive to conserve the rich environmental heritage we inherited from the generations that preceded us.

Lord Justice Lawton of Britain once said that a new Edward Gibbon writing about the present age might well entitle the last chapter “The Age of Compassionate Fools.” As a nation, he observed, Britain has allowed idealism to override common sense. The same might be said of all the contemporary nations of the Western world.

Virtually all of those who have sought to suppress human knowledge about heredity have done so with kindly intentions, but sound policies can never be constructed on bad science or unsound data. Any society that sets itself against the immutable causal laws of biology and evolution will be an unsuccessful society. An inappropriate culture that is not in harmony with the mechanics of the universe has only a poor chance of surviving. Heavily dysgenic trends have dominated this century as a result of the selective elimination of air crews and other talented personnel involved in modern warfare in Europe; the genocidal slaughter of the elite in Europe, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; and the general tendency for the more creative members of modernized societies around the world to have fewer children than the less creative. Nor should one ignore the impact on mankind of the increasing destruction of the biosphere by the wanton use of harmful technologies and by the unprecedented population explosion which is devastating the environment in even the poorest and least technologically advanced countries. Nevertheless, if the world does not collapse beneath the triple pressures of pollution, overpopulation, and severe dysgenic trends, and if governmental policies could be modified to take into consideration the findings of a scientific community which was encouraged to continue research in human behavioral genetics, uncensored by radical Luddite ideologues, it is possible that the human race might then still have a future worth calling a future.

Current research in medical and general genetics promises a potentially brighter future for mankind, and this will be outlined in a third article in this series, to be published in the next issue of The Mankind Quarterly.

FOOTNOTES

1 Lester F. Ward, Outlines of Sociology, 1899, New York: Macmillan, pp. 147-149.

2 Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, 1922 NY: B.W. Huebsch, p. 26.

3 For more on this theme see A New Theory of Human Evolution by Sir Arthur Keith, 1940. London: Watts & Co., and other writings by the same author.

4 Mead’s prime claim to anthropological fame, the book she wrote as a graduate student about Samoan sexual practices, was eventually exploded by D. Freeman’s 1983 study entitled Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). The ensuing pyrotechnics were effectively documented in Hiram Caton’s 1990 publication, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists take Stock (Lanham, MD: The University Press of America). Although the egalitarian forces were unable to defend Mead from Freeman’s charges after the fraudulence of her research was exposed, it is significant that some of the most powerful forces in contemporary American anthropology still strove to rescue what they could of her academic image in view of her historic importance as one of the main disciples of anti-hereditarian egalitarianism and Boasian anthropology.

5 Pat Shipman, in The Evolution of Racism (Simon and Shuster, 1994, pages 159-160), documents the history of his series of name changes, from Israel Ehrenberg to Moses Israel Ehrenberg, then to the aristocratic Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu, and finally to today’s somewhat more modest Ashley Montagu. She also documents the opposition to the UNESCO statement by leading scientists of that day, and notes the “overrepresentation” of Montagu’s associates on the panel that devised the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.

6 Prominent as America’s leading physical anthropologist, Harvard scholar Carleton Coon has been persistently attacked by egalitarians despite the fact that subsequent research in blood groups, DNA and other genetic markers has shown that his system of racial classification, based largely on skeletal data and other outward phenotypical characteristics, was remarkably accurate in revealing the degrees of relationship among the diverse peoples of the world. See the bibliography attached to this article for mention of some of his leading publications.

7 Another notable contributor to this statement was the biased Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas, who in 1961 authored a chapter entitled “Racial myths’ which appeared in a book entitled Race and science published, not unsurprisingly, by the Columbia University Press.

8 See Henri Vallois, 1951. ‘UNESCO on Race.” Man, no. 28. Vallois became one of the earliest members of the editorial advisory board of The Mankind Quarterly, publishing in the journal and continuing to serve on its board until his death. In his article in Man, Vallois stated unequivocally that ‘the existence of races of Man is an uncontestable biological fact.’

9 Active consideration is currently being given to further amendments necessitated by genetic and biological realism, although it may be confidently expected that the political considerations which dominate the United Nations will prevent the adoption of a truly balanced revision.

10 See Cahn in “Jurisprudence’, 31 N. Y.U.L. Review, 1956.

11 In short, black children in segregated schools were less pronounced in their preference for white dolls than were black children in nonsegregated schools. In addition, more black children in northern schools rejected the black doll than did black children in southern schools. See Ernest van den Haag, “Social Science Testimony in the Desegregation cases – a Reply to Professor Kenneth Clark,” Villanova Law Review, Fall, 1960, 6:1, pp 6979. Data is based on Clark’s ‘Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Readings in Social Psychology, pp. 174-5. Newcomb and Harley, Eds., 1947)

12 Se also Jamieson

13 See Snyderman and Rothman, The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy, 1988. Transaction Books.

14 But the heirs of the Boasian school remain ensconced in the social sciences, and some ideologues have recently infiltrated even such a respected organization as the Behavioral Genetics Association, demanding the resignation of the Association’s outgoing president, professor Glayde Whitney, after he gave a talk suggesting the need to investigate the possibility of genetic factors behind the high incidence of black crime in America.

15 Lenski’s Power and Privilege (1966), a widely used textbook, presented an outright Marxist view of society in that it sought to examine human cultures entirely in terms of class exploitation and stratification.

16 Bernard Davis, Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment and Public Policy. 1986. Buffalo: Prometheus.

17 The ludicrously named Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was an outright Marxist organization whose activities are detailed in Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today by Harvey Klehr, Transaction Books, New Brunswick. 1988.

18 Journals and newspapers that publish distorted or erroneous material too often ignore letters of refutation. Vincent Sarich wrote a letter protesting Horgan’s article, which was never published. Furthermore, when they do agree to publish letters of refutation they customarily allow the original author space to respond, while generally denying further space to the complainant to refute any new distortions contained in the “response.”

19 We will quote one further example of media distortion favoring the survival of the myth of biological egalitarianism among the more gullible members of the public, which could only have been made as a result of a deliberate policy decision by the editors of Scientific American. The June 1993 cover of that influential publication chose to advertise the “The Dubious Links between Genes and Behavior.” Contemporary scientific research clearly establishes the authority of animal behavioral genetics, and no geneticist would ever consider alleging that human beings were not animals, and that the laws of causality do not apply to human beings.

20 To understand the wide range of disparate qualities which distinguish men from each other today, it is necessary to reflect upon the evolutionary history of our species. Earlier hominids evolved as a variety of widely differing subspecies which, in the normal course of evolution, isolated in widely dispersed regions, would eventually have evolved into quite separate species – but for the fact that the more advanced populations successively tended to expand into neighboring territories, either supplanting or admixing with the earlier occupants of those territories. As a result, today’s population of Homo sapiens comprises the descendants of a more advanced subspecies whose forebears mixed in remote areas with the remnants of older local subspecies. Through such local genetic admixtures, the diverse populations and peoples of the modern world were created. By supplanting the more primitive hominid subspecies, and absorbing others, Homo sapiens remained one species, capable of fertile crossbreeding among its various subspecies and mixtures of subspecies, characterized by the wide disparity of innate biological properties which distinguish both living individuals and races from each other.

21 1977, Bloomington: The Indiana University Press. However, see also other works by this author listed in the bibliography. The works of Robert Retherford, listed in the bibliography, are also relevant here.

22 For an overview of the evolutionary interrelationship of physical and culture anthropology, see Pearson (1974) and Pearson (1985).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth 1940 Race: Science and politics. New York: Modern Age Books.

Benedict, Ruth, and Gene Weltfish 1943 The races of mankind. Public Affairs Pamphlet no. 85. New York: Public Affairs Committee.

Boas, Franz 1911 The mind of primitive man. New York: Macmillan. 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton.

Bogardus, Emory S. 1928 Immigration and race attitudes. New York: D.C. Heath and Co. 1960 Development of social thought. 4th ed. New York: David McKay Company Inc. 1967 A forty- year racial distance study. New York: Cooperative League of the U.S.A.

Clark, Kenneth 1947 “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Readings in Social Psychology, pp. 174-5. Newcomb and Harley, Eds., 1947)

Caton, Hiram 1990 The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists take Stock (Lanham, MD: The University Press of America)

Comas, Juan 1961 Racial myths. In Race and science. New York: Columbia University Press.

Comte, Auguste 1896 Positive philosophy. Translated by Harriet Martineau. 3 vols. London: George Bell and Sons.

Davis, Bernard 1986 Storm over biology: Essays on science,sentiment and public policy. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.

Fletcher, Ronald 1991 Science, ideology & the media: The Cyril Butt affair. New Brunswick, N J: Transaction Publishers.

Freeman, Derek 1983 Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Gould, Stephen J. 1981 The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton.

Gramsci, Antonio 1977 Selections from political writings, 1910- 1920. New York: International Publishing Co.

Herskovits, Melville 1953 Franz Boas. New York: Charles Scribner’ s Sons.

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Holden, C. 1994 “‘Times’ Corrects Scientist’s Orbit” Science 263, 922.

Horgan, John 1993 Trends in behavioral genetics: Eugenics revisited. Scientific American June 1993, pp 122-131.

Jamieson, J. W. 1982 Conway Zirkle and the persistence of “Marxian biology” in the western social sciences. The Mankind Quarterly 22 (3).

Joynson, Robert B. 1989 The Butt affair. London: Routledge and Kegal Paul.

Kamin, L. J. 1974 The science and politics of IQ. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum.

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Klehr, Harvey 1988 Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.

Lenski, Gerhard E. 1966 Power and Privilege: A theory of social stratification. New York: McGraw.

Lewontin, R. C., S. Rose, and L. J. Kamin 1984 Not in our Genes; Biological Ideology and Human Nature. Pantheon, New York

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Pearson, Roger
1974 Introduction to anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
1985 Anthropological glossary. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company.
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1992 Shockley on eugenics and race, with an introduction by Arthur R. Jensen. Washington, D.C.: Scott-Townsend Publishers.

Sarich, Vincent. 1993 Unpublished letter of protest to the editors of the Scientific American

Schiff, M. and R. Lewontin 1986 Education and Class: The Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Vallois, Henri 1951 UNESCO on


The Concept of Heredity

The Concept of Heredity
from Mankind Quarterly, April, 1995

Introduction
Heredity in Ancient Europe
The Discovery of Evolution and Genetic Science
Early Eugenics in Britain
The Eugenic Ideal Finds Favor in America
The More Advanced Countries Adopt Eugenics Laws
Eugenicists as Conservationists
Biological Egalitarianism Infiltrates Academe
Positive and Negative Eugenics
Footnotes
References

The recent publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, reviewed in this issue of The Mankind Quarterly, has led to a remarkable controversy within the media itself.

Several of the initial reviews were favorable, as in The New York Times Book Review, but the commitment to the fanciful concept of biological egalitarianism, so strong in the politicized world that is contemporary multi-racial Western society, soon led to a violent reaction against the book and all associated with its message. Few if any of the reviewers who criticized it cared to challenge the data contained in it: most preferred to trash it by seeking to demonize it by emotional and irrational tirades. Unfortunately, co-author Richard Herrnstein died of cancer shortly before it was published, and this placed the entire weight of its defense on Charles Murray. In particular, Mankind Quarterly was criticized by several radical commentators, such as Leon Kamin, a former New England editor of the U.S. Communist Party’s weekly newspaper, and by journalist Charles Lane, also the holder of strong political views. Lane attacked Mankind Quarterly as the source of a number of the articles containing data cited in The Bell Curve, complaining that “[N]o fewer than seventeen researchers cited in The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. ” This is a charge the present writer, as publisher of Mankind Quarterly, does not dispute: though he regards it as an accolade rather than a criticism.1

However, the general reading public, including possibly a high percentage of those who have been exposed to contemporary politically biased university courses in the humanities, fail to appreciate the true history of Western thought concerning the role of heredity and race — for race is nothing if not a matter of heredity. The writer therefore feels that it might be useful to present a brief outline of this history, showing how committed the Western world was to a recognition of the efficacy of heredity until academic and media attitudes were affected in the first half of the present century by changes in the social, political and demographic climate. This first article is consequently designed to illustrate the deep belief in the importance of heredity and race which prevailed from the earliest times until roughly the end of the first quarter of the present century. It will be followed by a second article, in the Fall issue of The Mankind Quarterly, which will document the rise of politically-motivated egalitarian ideology in the classrooms, which with the support of a substantial portion of the media eventually succeeded in making the idea of biological inequality politically unacceptable. Despite the fact that there is today a rapidly developing body of scientific research which, when viewed without fear or prejudice, clearly validates the age-old comprehension of the role of heredity in shaping the potential limits of individual human abilities, too many people are unaware of the mechanics behind the swing toward the powerful political notion of the biological equality of mankind. It is to be hoped that the following observations will encourage readers to enquire more deeply into this remarkable development.

Heredity in Ancient Europe

Western tradition has long recognized that heredity plays a significant role in determining not merely the characteristics of plants and animals but also the mental and physical qualities of human beings. Some elementary recognition of the role of genetics as a causal force may have originated as early as the Neolithic revolution, when cultivators learned how to improve upon the various species of wild grasses and to breed domesticated milk- and meat-giving animals which were biologically more useful to mankind than those they found in the wild. By the time of the great classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome it had become commonplace knowledge – based on observing and remembering the generations from the same family – that heredity also played an important role in determining the character and abilities of men and women.

In most early European societies, as in virtually all early societies that achieved an advanced culture, the social group was seen by its members as an intergenerational affair, with the family and the ancestors playing an important role in the self-concept of the individual. Life does not begin, nor does it end, with the individual. As Fustel de Coulanges pointed out in 1864, in his classic study of ancient Greek and Roman culture entitled The Ancient City (1955), it was the idea of common descent from the same ancestral forebears – the idea of belonging to a specific community of families, and of sharing the same, hopefully eternal, thread of life – that held the freemen of the Greek city-state together. As long as the lineage survived, the ancestors lived on in the minds and bodies of their descendants; death was only final when the entire nation was eliminated. The biological reality was interpreted into religious terms. The individual was seen as the product of the forces of biological causality, a living link in the chain that was the lineage, just as the lineage comprised a vital component of the nation-state, and the nation-state was a distinctly biological unit, with its own distinctive gene pool:

Reproduction in the ancient community was a religious duty . . . The religious society was the family, the genos. Paternal dignity and sacerdotal dignity were fused: the eldest son, upon the death of the father, becomes the head and priest of the family. The deceased father is honoured by his children as a kind of divinity. He himself is honoured by his children as a kind of divinity. He himself rendered the same worship to his ancestors: thus the greatest misfortune that his piety had to fear, is that the line shall be stopped. For then his religion would disappear from the earth, his hearth would become extinct, the whole series of his departed ones would fall into oblivion . . .

The qualities that characterized individuals were acquired, it was believed, from their ancestors. Thus we find a speaker in the Odyssey (/V, 60) observing that “the blood of your parents was not lost in you, but ye are of the line of men that are sceptered kings, the fosterlings of Zeus, for no churl could beget sons like you.” Similarly there are references to the disguised Athena as being “delicate of countenance such as are the sons of kings” (XIII, 216), whereas in the Iliad Thersites is described as ill-formed with a warped head. It was recognized that well-born children still had to be schooled if they were to develop their abilities to the maximum; but their basic character was inborn. Indeed, even truthfulness – a revered value was deemed to be an hereditary quality, and to call a man a liar was tantamount to calling him a bastard, a man of impure, inferior descent. As late as Classical Athens, Aristotle defined the physical and moral characteristics that characterized nobility as “an inherited virtue” (Pol./V. 8). In this, as in so many of his opinions, Aristotle was echoing ancient convictions expressed in the Iliad, as when a speaker protests that: “Therefore ye could not say that I am weak and a coward by lineage, and so dishonor my spoken word” (II. XIV, 126).

According to L. R. Palmer, the authority on the Pylos tablets, Achaean kings held their office by virtue of the purity of their descent. Among the Achaeans, he wrote: “Where the ‘luck’ of the tribe is concerned, there is no substitute for blue blood” (Achaeans and Indo-Europeans 1955, p. 9). Werner Jaeger went even further in stressing the importance the Greeks placed on breeding, describing the Hellenic ideal as an “aristocracy of race.” (1945, p. 205)

Because of their respect for good breeding, the Greeks honored their women as the progenitors of the race, and it was said that men chose their wives as they chose their horses, by the length of their pedigrees. Only children born of legitimate wives (i.e., of women selected because of the quality of their forebears) could inherit the social status of the father. Indeed, in Athens and other Greek city-states, to be recognized as a eupatrid (a man of good ancestry) one had to be descended from no less than nine generations ‘of untainted noble stock on both sides of the family tree.

Plato, whose enthusiasm for eugenics is well known, praised the Spartan interest in eugenic breeding (Laws, 630). Aristotle was equally impressed by the need to breed good stock. Theognis of Megara constantly praised the importance of heredity, complaining that the well-born would sometimes accept inferior marriage partners for the sake of their wealth, lamenting that “We seek well-bred rams and sheep and horses and wish to breed from these . . . [but] men revere money, and the good marry the evil, and the evil the good. Wealth has confounded race.” (Theognis, V. 183). Racial purity was linked to physical appearance, with Spartan women renowned for their beauty; and character was seen as inherited along with personal features: “Thou art pleasing to look upon and thy character is like to thy form” (Stobaeus, 1xxxviii. 71). In Greek literature the importance of heredity is repeated again and again: “Noble children are born from noble sires, the base are like in nature their father” (Alcmeaon, Ft. 7); “I bid all mortals beget well-born children from noble sires” (Heraclitus, 7); “If one were to yoke good with bad, no good offspring would be born, but if both parents are good, they will bear noble children” (Meleager, Fr. 9).

The early Romans similarly held lineage in great respect and enforced a system of connubium, whereby freeborn Romans could only marry into certain approved stocks. However, the Romans were relatively few in number and, when their unparalleled military and administrative ability converted the Roman empire into a fully multiethnic community of enormous size, the circumstances became ripe for the rise of egalitarian political ideologies. Rome, the “multicultural giant,” disappeared before the onslaught of the smaller, more homogeneous, Germanic nations, which still retained a sense of group identity.

The Germanic peoples (the Germans, Dutch, Flemings, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Scandinavians, Goths, Burgundians and Vandals) who founded so many of the modern states of Europe following the demise of the Roman Empire, carried the concept of heredity to its logical conclusion in their virtually unique system of kinship. Unlike their kinsmen, the Greeks, Italics, Celts, Slavs, and East Baits, they did not organize themselves in patrilineal clans and phratries which recognized only their father’s kinfolk, but saw kinship in fully genetic terms. The Germanic “kindred” comprised all the individual’s relatives on both the paternal and the maternal sides, assessing the degree of closeness according to the closeness of their actual genetic relationship; this was a quite different system from the concept of patrilineal or matrilineal clans so widespread amongst other peoples of the world. This Germanic kindred was the subject of the exhaustive study Kindred and Clan in the Middle Ages and After (Phillpotts 1917). To this day most North Americans of European descent have come to accept the Germanic tradition, where kinship is determined by the closeness of genetic relationship, whether the relatives be on the maternal or paternal side, as distinct from patrilineal and matrilineal clan systems.

In ancient Scandinavia the belief in inherited talents was reflected in the concept of hamingja, an inherited “luck” force. However, it was recognized that siblings inherited qualities in different patterns, and kings who were “unlucky,” and under whose leadership things went badly, were readily replaced by more competent individuals from the same royal lineage that had already produced generations of distinguished and successful leaders. The belief in breeding and the intergenerational transmission of genetic qualities was overriding, or as the old Germanic folk dictum expressed it, one could not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!

Indeed, most Indo-European peoples, including those who resided outside the geographical borders of Europe, seem to have placed considerable trust in the powers of heredity. Max Weber documented the same emphasis on heredity among other Indo-Europeans. In The Religion of India (1958), Weber described the semi-magical xvarenah attributed to Indo-Iranian kings as a belief in inherited ability, calling it “familial charisma. ” The Indian caste system, he maintained, was sustained by a similar belief in the genetic inheritance of human qualities. The charisma of a caste, of a sib, and of a family, was genetically transmitted; its roots were to be found in the concept of inherited ability.

The coming of Christianity plunged classical philosophy into centuries of near-oblivion and clashed with the established and ancient European belief in the inequality of men. Spreading first among the slaves and lowest classes of the Roman empire, Christianity came to teach that all men were equal in the eyes of a universal Creator God, an idea that was totally alien to older European thought which had recognized a hierarchy of competence among men – and even among the gods. Opposing the traditions of classical philosophy and scientific enquiry, Christianity introduced the concept of a single, omnipotent “God of History” who controlled all the phenomena of the universe – with men and women being creations of that God. Since all men and women were the “children of God,” all were equal before their Divine Maker! Faith in the church’ s interpretation of supposedly prophetic revelations became more important than scientific or philosophical enquiry; and to question the church’ s view of reality came to be perceived as sinful.

However, traditional European convictions as to the significance of heredity never completely died. Heroes, aristocrats and other national leaders had been regarded as superior beings by virtue of their descent from famed heroes or even from the gods, just as the Germanic kings claimed descent from Woden.2 Kings and nobles were believed to inherit qualities superior to those of the average man, and to carry these qualities in their “blood.” In ancient myth heroes might even challenge the gods; and the Christian church, jealous of the “divinity” awarded to kings and nobles by virtue of their lineage,3 but finding it convenient to win their goodwill, offered them the “divine right” to rule as earthly representatives of the Christian God for so long as they obeyed the wishes of the Church as the representatives of God on Earth. The “divine right” to rule with the church’s approval was a very different concept from the “divinity” that came from well- born stock. Consequently, the idea of any disparity in genetic qualities came to be subtly discouraged by the church; and the success of the church was such that. by the Middle Ages those who tilled the fields began to ask the rhetorical question: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?

Stripped of their belief in the significance of human heredity and the notion of the state as a kinship unit – “a family writ large” – and believing instead in the essential equality of all men and women as the children of God, dissident sects espousing radically egalitarian ideals arose at intervals to protest social and economic inequality, especially at times when this became oppressive.

In time, secular political movements also began to assert the idea of biological equality, a theme which tended to be favorably received whenever the disquietude of a divided society erupted into revolution. Such was the case of the Levellers who fought alongside the Parliamentarians in seventeenth century Britain; of the Jacobins, who decimated the accomplished aristocracy of eighteenth century France; and of the Bolsheviks who wrought genocidal slaughter among the more successful members of Czarist Russian society – nobles and peasants alike – following the Bolshevik Revolution in the early twentieth century.4

In recent times, calls for political revolution have frequently invoked attacks on “genetic determinism” in favor of the alternate, wildly illogical, philosophy of human “biological egalitarianism.” Despite the fact that both Marx and Engels personally believed in the significance of heredity and race – Marx being particularly fond of resorting to some of the more vulgar racist terms to abuse his rivals in correspondence with his friends – the ideological movement that emerged from their teachings eventually yielded to the notion of biological egalitarianism as a necessary ploy to inspire revolutionary passions among members of what they chose to call the proletariat. It was under Stalin, who sought to spread revolution in the Third World against “capitalist imperialism,” that communist theoreticians found it convenient to overlook the fact that much economic inequality could be explained by biological inequality: the suggestion that one individual might be inherently more creative or productive than another tended to dampen the feelings of resentment so necessary to incite the masses to revolutionary action.

The Discovery of Evolution and Genetic Science

Yet even while the myth of biological egalitarianism was gaining ground in the Western world, the momentum of scientific inquiry, freed by the Renaissance from the shackles of medieval religious dictates, was deepening man’s knowledge about himself and the world around him. In addition, a renewed enthusiasm for the application of selective breeding to plants and animals in the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century focused enlightened thought once again on the significance of heredity.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin finally restored the concept of heredity to its rightful place with the completion of his epic work, The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life ([1859] 1914). It is of some small interest that his research troubled his deeply religious but loyal wife, because she sensed that it challenged the still dominant pattern of religious thought. Facing the need to defend his overall theory of evolution as applied to all living species, Darwin is described by his biographer, Sir Arthur Keith, as having decided to refrain from extending his evolutionary theory to explain the inequalities between the surviving races of man, which he regarded as being so apparent?

What Darwin found it necessary to avoid, so inundated was he with criticism of his claim that mankind as a whole had evolved from “lower” forms of life, his half-cousin Sir Francis Galton did not hesitate to tackle. Indeed, Galton established the science of statistics as he sought to apply mathematics to the study of inheritance. In his own way, Galton was quite as great a contributor to evolving science as was Darwin, for apart from the attention he directed to the need to study heredity, he not only laid the foundations for the science of meteorology, but together with his close friend, co-worker, and biographer Karl Pearson, he established the basic techniques of modern statistical methods and quite literally founded the science of eugenics. The goal of eugenics, a word created by Galton from the Greek eugenes (“well born”), was to apply scientific knowledge about heredity to the problem of human evolution in order to combat deleterious demographic trends which threatened to lead to a decline of genetic quality in modern societies. In Galton’s own words, the purpose of genetic science was “to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” Significantly he described eugenics as “that science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” (1909, 35). In short, Galton realized that nature and nurture work in tandem and are not to be seen as mutually exclusive opponents. Heredity was important, but so was a healthy and congenial environment.

Using mathematical techniques to demonstrate the role of genetics in shaping mankind, Galton argued that it was scientifically possible to increase the frequency of desirable qualities among human beings, and to prevent the spread of deleterious qualities, by eugenic measures, and the idea quickly attracted the favorable attention of most serious scholars following the publication of his epoch-making study Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869). This seminal text was followed by Natural Inheritance (1889) and Essays in Eugenics (1909).

It is on record that Darwin was impressed by his cousin’s work on Hereditary Genius. In a letter dated December 3, 1869 Darwin commended Galton on his “memorable work,11 stating that “I do not think I ever in my whole life read anything more interesting and original – and how well and clearly you put every point – You have made a convert. ” Two years later, in chapter seven of The Descent of Man, he developed Galton’s observations concerning the differences between human races, noting that:

. . . the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other – as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Everyone who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck by the contrast between taciturn, even morose aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted talkative negroes.”

Thus both Darwin and Galton came to the same conclusion, expressed by Galton as follows:

It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the university, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary . . . In whatever way we may test ability, we arrive at equally enormous intellectual differences.

Galton’s younger colleague, Karl Pearson, developed Galton’s novel statistical techniques to new levels of effectiveness, laying the foundations of modern scientific method in his publication The Grammar of Science (1892). Like Galton, Pearson realized that the genetic legacy each generation leaves to its successors is of prime importance for the future of mankind. Every generation, in fact, is a bottle- neck which sifts and determines which genes are to survive. Pearson delineated the fundamentals of the new field of eugenic science in a number of publications, including National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), Nature and Nurture: The Problem of the Future (1910). He expressed his concern for the genetic future of the British nation in a warning to his fellow-Britons in his Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1903:

“the mentally better stock in the nation is not reproducing itself at the same rate as of old – the less able and the less energetic are the more fertile . . . The psychical characters which are the backbone of a State in the modern struggle of nations are not so much manufactured by home and school and college; they are bred in the bone, and for the last forty years the intellectual classes of the nation, enervated by wealth or by love of pleasure, or following an erroneous standard of life, have ceased to give in due proportion the men wanted to carry on the ever-growing work of the Empire.” (Pearson, 1903)

Early Eugenics in Britain

Any people who recognize the significance of heredity must naturally think in terms of breeding. Once science had revalidated the concept of heredity in the Western world, the reaction in favor of extending the principles by which the quality of plants and animals had been improved to human beings was natural. The conditions of life in modern society seemed to be reversing natural selection and lowering the quality of each succeeding human generation. Support for the eugenic ideal quickly came from a wide range of varied intellectuals, including not only traditionalists who had always retained their belief in good breeding combined with good training, but also progressive thinkers. Those who cared for the unfortunates of this world saw how simply much human suffering could be eliminated in future generations by eugenic policies, and socialists such as George Bernard Shaw, whose Man and Superman (1965, p. 159) (essentially an ode to the inborn instinct to procreate the race) complained of contemporary society that “being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy. ” H. G. Wells, another reformer who likewise cared for posterity, proclaimed that “the children people bring into the world can be no more their private concern entirely, than the disease germs they disseminate” (Kevles, 92). Others who supported the eugenic ideal were the youthful J. Maynard Keynes; left-leaning Julian Huxley, who sought not revolution but the reduction of human suffering by genetic improvement; and J. B. S. Haldane, who adopted Marxist values but always opposed its anti-hereditarian extremes. Numerous other social reformers of that time, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, likewise embraced the eugenic ideal -they were patriotic in the tradition of William Morris and Charles Dickens and eschewed revolutionary socialism, but feared emerging capitalism as a threat to the traditional bliss of agrarian England, and felt that much misery could be eliminated by rearing fit and healthy children rather than those who were burdened by genetic handicaps.

Also joining the eugenics cause was the ardent advocate of social change, Havelock Ellis, who supported the call for female liberation but emphasized the essential role that women played in ensuring the future of the race. Ellis (1912 pps., 46-47, 205) declared that the aims of eugenics “could only be attained with the realization of the woman movement in its latest and completest phase as an enlightened culture of motherhood.” The new St. Valentine, he observed, would be a scientific saint, not one of folklore, because marriage should be for the procreation and health of the race, not merely for personal pleasure. Scholars and politicians alike applauded the new sense of responsibility in procreation,6 with diverse figures such as the Cambridge biologist Francis Maitland Balfour, founder of the British school of evolutionary biologists, British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour,7 and the young politician Winston Churchill, all paying homage to the eugenic ideal.

Galton, childless himself, applied his personal fortune toward the promotion of research into heredity and eugenics, funding the establishment of a biometrics laboratory at the University of London under the direction of his fellow-eugenicist Karl Pearson, for the primary purpose of studying heredity in man. He also helped finance the establishment of the Eugenics Education Society, which later changed its name to the more simple Eugenics Society. Patriotic Englishmen who feared a dysgenic trend in national ability eagerly supported the eugenic doctrine that the fittest, most intelligent and creative parents should be encouraged to have larger families. In this, they were joined by Fabian socialists, who sought to decrease what was seen to be an excessive rate of reproduction among the genetically unfortunate, so as to ” level up” society instead of “leveling it down” – which latter was the usual outcome of revolutionary socialism.

Possibly it was Julian Huxley who best summed up the confidence with which so many British academics who lived during the first half of this century viewed the future, when he wrote (1941, p. 22):

Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of religion of the future, or whatever complex of sentiments may in future take the place of organized religion. It is not merely a sane outlet for human altruism, but is of all outlets for altruism that which is most comprehensive and of longest range.

In all honesty, although it would seem difficult to envisage his prophecy becoming a reality in any foreseeable date in the Western world, tendencies in Mainland China, and in the Chinese republic of Singapore, strongly indicate that it may be the billion-plus Chinese people who first realize Huxley’s dream of the future.

The Eugenic Ideal Finds Favor in America

Scientific ideas are seldom confined to one country in the modern world, except where political suppression enters onto the scene, as in Marxist Russia, and although it was in England that the concepts of evolution and eugenics first saw light, European and American scholars soon responded. We will not here attempt to cover the continental scene, although scholars such as Ernest Haeckel, who became an ardent advocate of Darwinian evolution, seeing nations as potentially incipient races and the major racial divisions of mankind as virtually separate species, undoubtedly influenced the English-speaking world. At this time the determination of what constituted a species had not yet come to be linked to the concept of mutual inter-fertility, but was judged purely by the extent of phenotypical variation, as in the Linnaean system of classification still broadly accepted by biologists today. Consistent with such views, Haeckel and others began to urge not only eugenic breeding but also racial purity.

The concept of a new eugenic science was also welcomed in the United States, which shared the same traditional appreciation of the role of heredity held by those Europeans who had remained behind in Europe. At the turn of the century, the United States was still a land of opportunity, yet one which had already acquired a sense of nationhood, so that many of its most important families had developed a profound social conscience and a strong desire to ensure that the hopes they held for the well-being of their descendants, as Americans, would be realized. Idealists such as president Theodore Roosevelt were convinced that the existing American population possessed generally superior genetic qualities, shaped by severe selective evolution over the previous generations. Their forebears had been adventurous individuals who had first elected to undertake, and then survived, what was in earlier centuries a dangerous ocean crossing. After arrival in the New World, they had to protect themselves and their families from the depredations of the native Indian tribes who had the advantage of familiarity with the local environment. While doing this, they had to tame vast primeval forests and grassland wildernesses – something Europeans had not seen since their forebears first began to convert the forests of Europe into the rich but increasingly overpopulated farmlands of civilized agrarian and mercantile culture. Thus a century and a half ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected the views of his countrymen when he wrote that: “Where the race is right, the place is right”.8

Americans at that time did not think of their country as a potential microcosm of all humanity, but as an emerging micro-race of predominantly European origin. President Theodore Roosevelt, credited with advancing the “melting pot” ideology, wanted only quality immigrants from ethnic stocks which would readily assimilate into the “Old American” population – a term used to refer to persons descended from Europeans who had settled in North America prior to the War Between the States. While the British eugenicists were primarily concerned with maintaining the breeding quality of the resident population of the British Isles, Americans also debated the question of immigration, since they instinctively knew that immigrants affect what we would today call the national gene pool quite as significantly as differential selection within that pool.

Like Theodore Roosevelt, eugenicists felt that the new America must remain a vital and homogeneous nation. But, Roosevelt strongly believed that the Old Americans were not producing enough children, and that they must either change their ways or submit to an invasion of non- white peoples, most likely from Asia. Selected immigration from Europe was welcome, but those who would not fit in were not wanted. Immigrants should match the genetic character of the existing population, and, to ensure this, most favored the restriction of immigration to the nations from which the predominantly North European pioneers who had built the United States had been drawn. The eugenic ideal matched perfectly the optimistic, forward-looking spirit of the people of the United States as they entered the twentieth century (although Roosevelt was fearful that those who advocated negative eugenics might discourage large families). But when eugenicists looked at increasing Asian and Hispanic immigration, some feared that the “great race” – as eugenicist and conservationist Madison Grant (1924) described those whose ancestors had pioneered the establishment of European civilization in North America -might be drowned by hordes of immigrants from Asia and Central America, too numerous to be assimilable, if it failed to defend its coasts and increase its own rate of reproduction. Madison Grant’s own ancestors, it might be noted, had come to the American colonies from Scotland following the failure of the 1745 Highland uprising led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. His writings were therefore ‘well received by a generation of proud, self-confident, and essentially prosperous Old Americans who wished to see their lovely country remain in the hands of their own kind, and who like the Greeks of ,old treasured the memory of the achievements of their forebears. .American scholars, wealthy self-made industrialists, farmers, and even politicians saw the eugenic ideal as a means of ensuring the future well-being and happiness of the new nation to which they were proud to belong. Indeed, it was those who could claim to be Old Americans who gathered most enthusiastically in support of the eugenic cause.

The hopes of the eugenicists were raised in 1910 by the establishment of the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office by the Carnegie Institute of Washington. This was funded by Mrs. Mary Harriman,8 the widow of E. H. Harriman, whose forebears left England for America in the seventeenth century. The director was Charles B. Davenport, the Harvard zoologist who was twice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as president of the American Zoological Society. The superintendent was Harry H. Laughlin, a leading light in the eugenics movement which flourished in America during the first half of the present century.

The distinguished inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, figured prominently among the members of the Board of Scientific Directors established to support the work of the Eugenics Record Office. In a letter to Davenport, dated December 27, 1912, Bell revealed himself as a “mainstream” eugenicist who believed in “positive eugenics,” which aimed at increasing the percentage of healthy and talented individuals in succeeding generations, rather than in “negative eugenics,” the term commonly ascribed to measures designed to prevent the spread of deleterious genes. In light of the somewhat limited development of genetic and medical science at that time, and the heavily dysgenic impact of two World Wars which were shortly to follow, his observations reflect the perspicacity of a scientist whose name will live forever in history as a major contributor to technological progress and as a benefactor of the human race. Bell attended eugenics conventions, and himself authored several papers on eugenics, such as his essay entitled “How to Improve the Race,” which appeared in the January 1914 issue of the Journal of Heredity, edited by Paul Popenoe.

The Galton Society- formed in New York in 1918 at the American Museum of Natural History by Henry Fairfield Osborn, C. B. Davenport, and Madison Grant – became actively involved in endeavors to shape U.S. policy relating to population quality. Spontaneous eugenics societies were established in many American cities, and hopes for a bright future for eugenics and future generations were raised when in 1923 (due largely to the efforts of Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank and Charles B. Davenport) the American Eugenics Society was established, with branches in numerous American cities. With the foundation of the Society, the eugenics movement began to take shape in a businesslike manner, placing heavy emphasis on the participation of scholars as scientific advisors on various advisory committees. Other eugenics organizations proliferated at this time, among which were the Eugenics Research Association, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, the American Social Hygiene Association, and even such bodies as the American Genetics Association, and the American Association for the Study of Human Heredity. Eugenicists were kept informed of new developments in science through a publication the Eugenical News.

Devoted to the well-being of their young nation, many of the early American eugenicists were proud to claim to be of Old American stock? The term “Old American” was further popularized by the book of the same name, compiled by the anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka. Hrdlicka was himself a recent European immigrant, of Bohemian origin, who had accompanied his father to America at the age of fourteen and, after working in a cigar factory as a teenager, had entered the Eclectic Medical College of New York and graduated with an M.D. at the top of his class. Hrdlicka practiced medicine for a while but soon found his interest turning to the problem of human quality and the significance of racial differences, which he saw in an evolutionary context. Traveling extensively to study the diverse living peoples of the world, as well as paleontological remains, he emerged as America’s leading physical anthropologist, serving as editor of The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (which he founded in 1918), and as first president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Significantly he found nothing wrong in the historical pride of his new compatriots, and served for many years on the American Eugenics Society subcommittee on anthropometry and on the advisory council, being deeply concerned, as an expert on evolution, with the threat of dysgenics (of a deterioration in genetic stock) facing modern man. In his article “Race Deterioration and Destruction with Special Reference to the American People,” published by the Race Betterment Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan as part of the Proceedings of the Third Race Betterment Conference held on January 2–6, 1928, Hrdlicka defined “race deterioration” as “the degradation of its standards of mentality and effectiveness, generally attended also by the lowering of those of physique” (p. 82). “Race destruction,” another threat with which he was concerned, meant the loss of racial identity either “through complete submergence into another race” (p. 82) or simply by failure to reproduce itself.

History, Hrdlicka noted, recorded the rise and fall of nations. Vital, healthy nations tended to rise, but nations could also fall when, weakened by luxury and the exhaustion of ambition, they suffered a “dilution of the physical as well as mental status by admixture with poorer blood” (p. 83). He observed (pp. 84-85):

There are still some benevolent minds who would like to see aH men, white and black, potentially equal. Yet they will hold that there are differences between one family and another family, and even between the children of the same family, in the same racial group. If they did not, there would obviously be no use for eugenics . . . no use even for much of genetics and biology. As a matter of fact there are similarities but no absolute equality anywhere in living nature, either in races, or families or even individuals. The problem is merely how great in a given case is the dissimilarity. Races, especially the further distant ones . . . are not equipotential, or equally effective, or able . . .

The Race Betterment Foundation, which sponsored the conference at which Hrdlicka presented these views, was first established in 1906 as the American Medical Missionary Board (but soon changed its name to the Race Betterment Foundation). Its founder was John Harvey Kellogg, a descendant of an Englishman named Joseph Kellogg who had arrived in North America as early as 1651. Kellogg, who launched the breakfast cereals industry by introducing granola to the American public as a health food, was chief surgeon at the then world-famous Battle Creek Sanitorium.

Publishing a journal called Good Health, the Race Betterment Foundation became a major center of the new eugenics movement in America. Kellogg himself was an important and respected figure who authored numerous medical and eugenics treatises, and his circle of influence extended to several successful businessmen including J. C. Penney and C. W. Barron, whose names remain familiar to this day. Another member of the Kellogg family, Vernon Lyman Kellogg, a zoologist of international repute, also espoused the eugenics movement. As a personal friend of President Herbert Hoover, he served on various national health and agricultural committees, becoming a trustee of the young Brookings Institute and of the Rockefeller Foundation while continuously taking an active role in the eugenics movement as the latter grew in size and influence.

The movement was also early supported by famed educator David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford University.10 Jordan’s first American ancestor had arrived in the North American colonies from England circa 1700. Jordan’s status in the American education scene of his day is illustrated by the fact that he was a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Educational Association, and the California and Indiana Academies of Science, as well as vice president of the Eugenics Education Society in Britain. In the opinion of the present writer, his major contribution to eugenic thought was the emphasis he placed on the dysgenic effect of modern warfare in such books as War and the Breed (1915). Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University, trustee of the Carnegie Institution of New York, and one of the most eminent educators in America, also rallied to the eugenic crusade, as did astronomer William Wallace Campbell, president of the University of California, whose Scottish forebears had migrated to the colonies in the eighteenth century. Livingston Farrand, president of the University of Colorado and subsequently president of Cornell University, chairman of the central committee of the International Red Cross, and editor of the American Journal of Public Health, similarly espoused the eugenics movement, as did innumerable other educators and faculty members of note.

American paleontologists and anthropologists were also generally enthusiastic. Another leading anthropologist who served on the American Eugenics Society subcommittee on anthropometry was Earnest A. Hooton, the respected Harvard professor who later became director of the Peabody Museum. Hooton’s father had been born in England, and Hooton himself attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Returning to America, where he became one of the main pioneers of physical anthropology, Hooton was an active member of the American Genetics Association and the Galton Society. He saw eugenics in terms of different levels of human evolution, and strongly believed that different inherited personalities contributed to susceptibility to engage in criminal behavior. Hooton collated data on some seventeen thousand criminals, and took a keen interest in the effects of race mixing. His Up from the Ape (1931), Apes, Men and Morons (1937) argued that heredity was at least as important as environment as a determinant of human behavior.

Most scholars who were in any way connected with the study of evolution came to see races as representing different levels of human evolutionary development. Ellsworth Huntington, a Yale geologist descended from one, Simon Huntington, who had emigrated from England to the colonies in 1633, was at one time or another president of the Association of American Geographers, president of the Ecological Society of America, director of the Population Association of America, member of the American Eugenics Society advisory council and chairman of its Committee on Biologic Genealogy.11 A widely traveled scholar, Huntington expressed his fear that the more advanced human stocks would likely be overrun by the less advanced, and, as a prolific author (he wrote no less than twenty books and several hundred articles), his views reached a broad audience of educated men and women.

Biologists were naturally prominent among those who recognized the role of heredity in human affairs, and many adopted the eugenics cause. Notable amongst these was H. S. Jennings of The Johns Hopkins University, himself of Old American stock, who wrote several influential books on the subject: notably Prometheus or Biology and the Advancement of Man (1925), which forecast a bright future for mankind through the application of eugenic policies, and The Biological Basis of Human Nature (1930). Jennings was president of the American Society of Zoologists and the American Society of Naturalists, as well as a member of the advisory committee of the American Eugenics Society.

Psychologists who were interested in intelligence also tended to become involved with the new ideal of population improvement. R. M. Yerkes, a descendant of Anthony Yerkes who had come to America from Holland in 1700, became an influential member of the American Eugenics Society and the Galton Society. A professor of psychology at Harvard, Yerkes is particularly known for his mammoth World War I study of the IQ ratings of one and three-quarter million U.S. military recruits, compiled while he was head of the psychology division of the office of the United States Surgeon General. Yerkes’s concern with the different qualities of individuals and races led him to become active in the matter of immigration control, and he was elected chairman of the Committee on Human Migration in 1922. Leaving Washington to take a professorship at Yale, Yerkes recognized the potential for sociobiological studies in helping to explain human behavior, and in 1929 he founded the Laboratory of Primate Biology in Florida for this purpose. He also served as chairman of both the American Psychological Association (1916) and the American Society of Naturalists (1938). Carl C. Brigham, professor of psychology at Princeton University and author of A Study of American Intelligence (1923) was another member of the American Eugenics Society who became involved in immigration control, seeking to ensure that the American gene pool would not be adulterated by inferior genes, and was a keen member of the Galton Society and the Eugenics Research Association.

Possibly the most influential of the early psychologists who were active in the eugenics movement was William McDougall. Born in England, and educated at the universities of Cambridge and Gottingen, McDougall taught at Oxford University before eventually emigrating to the U. S. to take up a position at Harvard. With his experience of anthropological work in Borneo, McDougall was a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society in Britain and the author of numerous major textbooks which earned him preeminence in the field of social psychology. His respect for heredity showed itself in a series of books, beginning with An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908). Acutely conscious of the role of heredity in shaping human behavior, McDougall was an evolutionist who realized that human behavior was shaped by the evolutionary past of the human race. Because of the significant degree of racial diversity within the living peoples of the world, he prophesied that “racial psychology” would one day become a recognized field of study. As a believer in the quality of the North European stock relative to diverse other populations in the contemporary world, McDougall also took an interest in the composition of the future population of America: his book Is America Safe for Democracy? (1926) stressed the need for a selective immigration policy which would ensure that the United States remained a relatively homogeneous nation, and the need to design a truly scientific eugenic policy.

Of equal significance, however, was Lewis Madison Terman, president of the American Psychological Association and of the National Academy of Sciences. Terman authored a number of popular books on psychology, sex, and mental health, but is academically best known for his revision of the Binet Scale (1916), his co-authorship of the Stanford Achievement Tests, and his massive four-volume Genetic Studies of Genius (1926- 30). Terman was a major voice in the eugenics movement, and was a key member of the Eugenics Society committee on psychometry.

Notable sociologists also rallied to the logic of eugenics. Franklin H. Giddings, author of several major works in early American sociology, professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College, later chairman of the sociology department at Columbia University and president of the American Sociological Society, was a strong supporter of the eugenics movement who helped organize some of the first international conferences on eugenics and population. Giddings was descended from George Giddings who came to the colonies from England as early as 1635. Frank H. Hankins, a Columbia University educated sociologist who taught at Clark and Smith Colleges, was an active member of the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society. President of the American Sociological Society, and of the later-formed Population Association of America, Hankins authored a penetrating study entitled The Racial Basis of Civilization (1926).

Another sociologist who firmly believed in the importance of heredity was Robert M. MacIver, a Scottish immigrant who had been born in Stornaway on the isle of Harris. Well known for his many sociology texts, MacIver taught at Barnard College and Columbia University, and later was president of the New School for Social Research, which did not prevent it from later becoming identified with leftist views. A dedicated humanist, MacIver recognized the importance of good heredity and enthusiastically served on the board of the American Eugenics Society.

Another realist was the renowned sociologist and social psychologist, Emory Stephen Bogardus, who likewise served on the American Eugenics Society advisory council. A professor at the University of Southern California, Bogardus edited the Journal of Sociology and Social Research for over forty years, was founder and editor of the Journal of Applied Sociology, and a contributing editor to the Journal of Social Forces and the Journal of Educational Psychology. He authored numerous textbooks which were widely used and his Development of Social Thought (1960), written toward the end of his life, remained a classic survey of the history of sociology right into the fourth quarter of the present century. Less remembered today is his Immigration and Race Attitudes (1928), which more clearly shows his personal convictions on the importance of an understanding of heredity to the shaping of national policies.

The common cause between liberals and the traditionalists who both initially welcomed eugenics eventually became somewhat strained over the question of the feminist movement. This was not because the traditionalists despised women, but because they saw the outcome of the feminist movement differently. In general, the liberals favored “negative eugenics,” the reduction of the excessively large number of births among the less favored, while the traditionalists tended to think in terms of the competition between nations and races, and favored “positive eugenics, ” which sought to encourage a higher rate of reproduction among the better stock.

Women made up an appropriately high proportion of those who attended eugenics lectures in both America and England, showing a proper concern for the future of the children they bore and the nation they nourished. Consequently, feminists such as Margaret Sanger, who for eugenic reasons wanted to make contraceptives equally available to the poor as to the middle and upper income groups, agreed with eugenicist Margaret Stopes when the latter proclaimed: “[m]ore children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control” (Hall 1977). Traditionalists such as the British eugenicists W. C. D. and C. D. Whetham, authors of The Family and the Nation: A Study in Natural Inheritance and Family Responsibility (1909), while agreeing with the female liberationists in that statement, nevertheless feared that feminism and the entry of the more intelligent women into the professions would reduce the birth rate among precisely those women who should be having more children: “Woe to the nation whose best women refuse their natural and most glorious burden,” they wrote, warning that “freedom from marriage and reproduction . . . is suicidal” (pp. 198- 99).

Today, the birth rate in the Western and other more advanced nations of the world, and the massive ongoing population explosion in the Third World, have rendered the views of these traditionalist eugenicists prophetic. Even the Singaporeans, who are not a Third World nation, have noted the low birth rate among the more intelligent and educated of their womenfolk. As Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, a leading supporter of the British Eugenics Education Society and the British Eugenics Review, warned in 1927, the spread of birth control devices has been “racially devastating” to the more advanced countries. Sir Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of the renowned evolutionist and one of the early editorial board members of The Mankind Quarterly, also stressed the threat of overpopulation – arising from reduced infant mortality in the Third World as a result of modern medical advances – in his book The Next Million Years (1951) and in his 1960 Mankind Quarterly article “World Population: Can Man Control His Numbers?”

Nevertheless in the early decades of this century, both in America and in Britain, there was a generally happy overlap of interest on the subject of eugenics between leading liberals, who espoused negative eugenics aimed at discouraging the genetically defective from procreating, and traditionalists such as Leonard Darwin and Coldstream Guards officer C. P. Blacker, who generally supported positive eugenics and who were more concerned that the talented and healthy should be sure to pass on their genes to future generations. This political overlap was matched by a softening of the attitude of the Church, and the Bishop of Ripon urged the greater procreation of the fit in order to populate the British dominions overseas. The same moderation of attitude toward eugenics among the more progressive churchmen was also to be found in America. As Rudolph M. Binder wrote in his article “Eugenics and Religion,” in the Eugenical News:

There has always been a double line in theological reasoning. One holds that God is not only omnipotent but controls absolutely everything; and all the various phenomena in the universe, including human activities are but manifestations of his power. This theory is best known by the term “predestination,” and would imply that . . . any attempt at contraception is an interference with the will of God. Hence, the opposition to eugenics which, while primarily concerned with the increase of good stock, is at least indirectly opposed to the propagation of poor stock.

This theological theory has gradually yielded to a more ethical conception of the deity. The omnipotence of God is less emphasized than His love. And the new theory permits a different interpretation of man. He has some liberty, he is held responsible for his acts, he is praised for his good actions as a co-worker with God and blamed for his bad ones.

With various other religious leaders such as Dean Inge of St. Paul’ s Cathedral supporting eugenics, the years between 1900 and the early 1930s were generally marked by a happy collaboration among those who truly desired to improve the conditions of life for future generations of human beings.

The More Advanced Countries Adopt Eugenics Laws

Today, continuing and rapid progress in genetic science holds out the promise that gene ‘splicing’ or genetic ‘surgery’ may make the elimination of many hereditary defects a real possibility in the foreseeable future. If individual deleterious genes can be replaced by healthy counterparts so that future generations can inherit all the desirable qualities of their forebears free from adverse mutations and other heritable disabling conditions, one of the major dreams of eugenicists will have been realized. Of course, this will not solve the entire eugenic problem, for although it is easy to repair a disabled Rolls Royce by replacing a leaking hosepipe or other defective part, it is not practicable to attempt to convert a Yugo or Lada into a Rolls Royce by replacing a major number of parts: not only is the task too large, but also many of the Rolls Royce parts would be incompatible with those of the inferior vehicle. The justification for “positive” or “mainline” eugenics — the encouragement of an appropriate rate of reproduction among overall healthy and competent individuals — would still remain.

However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, although the consciousness of responsibility for the well-being of posterity ran high, genetic engineering was still hopelessly out of reach, and eugenicists knew that if the members of their generation were to pass on their genetic heritage to posterity in at least as good a condition as they had received it, it was necessary to avoid an undue proliferation of deleterious genes and to ensure the transmission of at least an undiminished percentage of the more desirable genes. It was obvious to the more conscientious that modern conditions of life had undermined nature’s own methods of preserving the quality of the human stock in those populations that had emerged from a feral state of life and had advanced into what they so proudly called a “civilized” existence. Something had to be done to block the dysgenic trends that were weakening the quality of the population in the more technologically advanced nations. Native tribes living in the Amazon were still subject to nature’s pruning knife and did not yet face these dysgenic trends, but they too, as their lifestyle became “modernized,” were likely in the course of time to face the same dysgenic influences.

As a result, the more responsible members of the advanced Western nations, conscious of their duty to the well-being of future generations, came to press for eugenic laws, and the majority of the more enlightened nations of the West introduced some such kind of legislation. Some might argue today that they should have waited until genetic science had advanced to the level where genetic “surgery” had become a real possibility, but the immediacy of the dysgenic threat introduced by modern conditions did not permit the luxury of delay. The entire genetic potential of future generations was going to be restricted to whatever collation of genes those who were living in the early decades of the twentieth century passed on to their heirs. Eugenicists realized that the future genotype of a nation depends on the reproductive activity of each successive generation, and the massive dysgenic impact of modern warfare, combined with the emergence of disproportionate rates of reproduction between the fit and the unfit, indicated that there was no time to be lost.

In consequence, virtually all the more enlightened nations of the Western world decided to introduce eugenic laws intended to control the reckless spread of deleterious genes. With this objective in mind, eugenic laws were introduced in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Iceland and a number of Swiss cantons. Germany introduced similar laws and has been much criticized for this, but so also did Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Britain, which had largely pioneered the eugenics movement and was suffering from the decimation of its leadership class in World War I, did not get around to following suit. Even outside Europe, there were countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil where laws covering hereditary mental pathologies, hereditary feeblemindedness and serious hereditary physical pathologies were enacted.

It is of some interest that these legislative measures, designed to protect future generations, were largely pioneered by the United States; U.S. legislation being copied by many of the other countries, including Germany. By 1931 twenty-seven of the forty-eight states of the U.S. had eugenics laws on their statute books, and no less than thirty states in all passed such laws at one time or another. In addition, many states had statutes prohibiting miscegenation, on the theory that the scrambling together of separate gene pools created by nature might be dysgenic. In Canada, both British Columbia and Alberta adopted similar laws, and it seemed probable that in the course of time all the leading nations of the West would eventually take steps intended to free their future populations from the dysgenic threat already so apparent. Responsible individuals were confident that advancing scientific knowledge would eventually enable man to take the evolutionary steering tiller out of the hands of nature, and enable posterity- inspired by a high moral vision – to chart a rational course to a far happier future than any to which primitive man could possibly have dreamed to aspire. Julian Huxley’s prophecy seemed about to be fulfilled.

Eugenicists as Conservationists

To truly appreciate the social conscience of those who supported the eugenics ideal it is revealing to note that those who most desired to preserve the genetic quality of the human population were also anxious to conserve all else that was wonderful in the world of nature. Indeed, it was those who sought to conserve the genetic heritage of mankind who pioneered the conservationist movement – seeking to preserve the rich variety of plant and animal species that nature had bequeathed to the care of man.

Possibly the most notable figure in this conservationist movement was Gifford Pinchot, a grandson of one of Napoleon’s generals. A respected and popular figure who had the honor of having Mount Pinchot named after him, Pinchot was a professor of forestry at Yale who was twice elected governor of Pennsylvania and who combined his services to the environment with an active engagement in the eugenics movement. But the list of eugenicists who were active in the conservation movement is a long one: to cite just a few examples, the foundation of the American Bison Society was largely due to the work of eugenicist Madison Grant, and the Save-the-Redwoods League owed its existence to eugenicists Madison Grant, the aforementioned Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the distinguished scholar John Campbell Merriam (president of the American Paleontological Society, the Carnegie Foundation of Washington and the Geological Society). Despite a very full calendar, Merriam, who was proud of his father’s “Old American” ancestry and his mother’s Scottish ancestry, distinguished himself as an extremely active president of the Save-the-Redwoods League, while seldom missing a meeting of the Galton Society or the Eugenics Advisory Council.

With the support of Theodore Rooseve


Ideology and Censorship in Behavior Genetics

Ideology and Censorship in Behavior Genetics
by Prof. Glayde Whitney
(Past President Behavior Genetics Association Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida)
Vol. 35, Mankind Quarterly, 06-01-1995, pp 327.

Presented below is the entire text of my presidential address presented to the Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) on the occasion of its 25th annual meeting at Richmond, VA on the second of June, 1995. Since the journal Behavior Genetics is sponsored by the BGA, some explanation is required as to why this presidential address is not published in the Association’s own journal.

The primary topic of the address was ideologically-based dogma and taboo hampering the pursuit of knowledge in the science of behavior genetics. The response to the address has been such a parody of political correctness that it might appear to be an instance of collusion between the perpetrator and the detractors for the purpose of exposing an absurdity of our times. However sadly, there is no collusion. Both the author and the detractors appear to be sincere.

The address was presented at an evening banquet. The very next morning at a meeting of the BGA Executive Committee the author was shunned except for a brief scolding, and was the recipient of demeaning ad hominem asides. The Executive Committee busied itself with how to distance the BGA from the offensive talk. The editor of Behavior Genetics refused to publish the paper (contrary to understood policy) and the Executive Committee voted (with one abstention – mine) to issue an official statement of denouncement. Then shortly after the meeting there began a call for the author to resign from the BGA. As stated in a public mention of the affair (Science, 1995), officers of the BGA, and a few others, began to post condemnatory “open letters” on the BGA’s electronic bulletin board.

The issuers of these calls for resignation seem to have lost track, in the finest Lysenkoist tradition, of the many distinctions between scientific organizations and political/religious organizations. Scientific organizations are composed of scientists with some common interests, wherein science consists of alternative hypotheses, the truth value of which is judged by their congruence with observable data. Typical as a scientific organization, the BGA bylaws state purposes which include the promotion of scientific study, assistance in training of research workers, and dissemination of knowledge. Nowhere in the BGA bylaws is there a creed or a listing of necessary beliefs.

On the other hand, political/religious organizations usually have an official creed, or party platform, to which members swear fealty. Those heretics that violate the faith are typically shunned, expelled, or forced to resign. Science has no heretics, and honest science does not thrive in an atmosphere of inquisitional control (Whitney, 1995). A century ago Andrew White (1896/1965) wrote an excellent historical account of the warfare between science and ideology. Although the battlefields shift, the war continues.

It would be highly misleading to leave the impression that the author is alone, adrift in a sea of condemnation. On the contrary, private letters of support and commendation greatly outnumber the public critics. In view of the attempt. at censorship, I greatly appreciate the editors of The Mankind Quarterly providing an archival repository for the address:

Twenty-Five Years of Behavior Genetics

Today there are more and better data concerning genetic influences on behavioral and neuroscience variables than ever before in history. We have tremendously benefited from the revolution in molecular genetic techniques – the new genetics. In 25 years behavior genetics has come from being a small field on the fringe of the social sciences to being recognized as central to an understanding of the human condition (Wiesel, 1994). Just a few weeks ago Science noted that the new director of NIMH should be someone who appreciated the role of genetics in mental health (Marshall, 1995). This is an amazing shift from 25 years ago when behavioristic environmental determinism still reigned supreme. We are obviously well into a paradigm shift of major dimensions, perhaps a true Kuhnian revolution in Science and Society (Barker, 1985; 1992; Kuhn, 1970). In the future it might be referred to as the Galtonian Revolution, on a par with the Copernican. The shift is but one illustration of the long-term self-correcting nature of science: Objective investigation of the real world, conducted with integrity and interpreted without intentional ideological bias, can eventually lead to real advance.

As has sometimes been the case for these after dinner talks, I want to take just a few minutes to share with you some personal reminiscences and some personal views. Twenty-five years ago I got my first full- time faculty position. This was after student days at Minnesota, a bit of a time-out for military service, and a post-doctoral stint in Colorado. At Colorado the Institute for Behavioral Genetics was a wonderful setting. Gerry McClearn and John DeFries, along with Jim Wilson, were running the place. There were a bunch of stimulating graduate students around: I recall Tom Klein studying the taste of mice and Boris Tabakoff messing with alcohol. Doug Wahlsten and I were side-by-side post-docs, Joe Hegmann had just left and Carol Lynch was just arriving. Wonderful friends and colleagues, all of them. The best of days in a stimulating environment.

Well then, I got hired to represent behavior genetics in the neuroscience program at Florida State University. A good program but vastly different in orientation. Not a lot of geneticists. I was there only a brief time when one of the old-timers who ran the place came by for a friendly chat. As polite southerners do, he began with a lengthy discussion of weather, trees, traffic, chiggers, and children. And then, finally, by-the-way, he said “Glayde, you know we hired you because we want genetics in our psychology program, but, as a Professor at a southern university, we hope you will have the good sense to keep away from that human business. Because of your location you would have no credibility, and none of us need the flak”!

Well. That in fact was consistent with my plans, I was busy setting up a mouse laboratory at the time and sure-enough had enough good sense to do passably well with mouse research. After all, I’ve still got the job and I’ve been invited here tonight.

To understand my mentor’s concern, we need to view it in historical context. 1970 was an interesting time. Tallahassee, being a state capital with two state universities, had already had its share of demonstrations, riots, burning and looting. It was in 1970 that Black Panther supporters got around to killing jurors and a judge; 1970 that a mathematics building was bombed on the campus at Wisconsin, also with loss-of-life (Collier & Horowitz, 1995).

It was also in 1970 that our colleague Arthur Jensen was taking a lot of flak (Pearson, 1991). As everyone in behavior genetics knows, Jensen published an interesting review paper in 1969 (Jensen, 1969). Interesting but hardly ground breaking. As a student at Minnesota, I had had the course in differential psychology. With interesting textbooks (Anastasi, 1958; Jenkins & Paterson, 1961) and team taught by such professors as Lykken and Meehl. We had considered fifty years worth of data, and various interpretative theories. Jensen in 1969 had a few new data, by-and-large consistent with all that had gone before. No big deal scientifically, at least not to any student of behavior genetics from Minnesota. But obviously a great big deal in some circles.

Over the intervening twenty-five years it has become obvious that Jensen’s sins were, and continue to be, two-fold. First, he did not stay within the confines of a reigning dogma, and second, he violated a current taboo.

The dogma of course is that of environmental determinism for all important human traits. This dogma has relaxed in recent years, at least for individual differences, and at least within science. But the dogma has not relaxed for group differences and has not relaxed within politics as differentiated from science. The attacks on Jensen, and by extension on all human behavior genetics, are clearly political, ideological, philosophical.

The Marxist-Lysenkoist denial of genetics, the emphasis on environmental determinism for all things human, is at the root of it (Davis, 1986; Medvedev, 1971; Pearson, 1991; Weiss, 1991). Economic oppression is at the root of all group differences and don’t you dare say anything else. The Marxist invasion of left-liberal political sentiment has been so extensive that many of us think that way without realizing it.

It has been suggested that I should talk about “Marxitis” that is, the Marxist infection of ideas. Many of the scholars that suffer from Marxitis do not realize that they are infected. The symptoms of this disease include an intellectual bias, an insistence on environmental determinism as the acceptable cause of group differences. In severe cases, it includes an unbending intellectual absolutism akin to medieval scholasticism. It is lethal to honest science.

A couple of quotes from heretics that have left the movement: “the utopianism of the Left is a secular religion . . . . However sordid Leftist practice may be, defending Leftist ideals is, for the true believer tantamount to defending the ideals of humanity itself. To protect the faith is the highest calling of the radical creed. The more the evidence weighs against the belief, the more noble the act of believing becomes” (Collier & Horowitz, 1995, p. 246).

There is a “readiness to reshape reality to make the world correspond to an idea” (Collier & Horowitz, 1995, P. 37). There is a “Willingness to tinker with the facts to serve a greater truth” (Collier & Horowitz, 1995, p. 37). And so it has obviously been with many of the critics of behavior genetics. Over the last twenty-five years, as the scientific data accumulate, as the paradigm shifts, the stridency of the critics intensifies. Driven by ideology and not constrained by the truth, when all else fails they engage in misrepresentation and character assassination. They accuse their targets of committing the very propagandistic excesses that they themselves are doing (Avery, et. el., 1994; Beardsley, 1995; Brimelow, 1994; Gould, 1994; Kamin, 1995; Lane, 1994; Miller, 1994; Murray, 1994; Weyher, Lynn, Pearson, & Vining, 1995).

Some one among them coined the term “Jensenism”. Near as I can tell “Jensenism” consists of scientific integrity, outstanding technical competence, and objective honesty.

Well, Jensen’s first sin was to venture outside the Left-Liberal Marxist dogma of environmental determinism. His second sin was even less forgivable, he violated a Taboo: He mentioned race outside the environmental envelope. The Behavior Genetics Association has been in existence for 25 years. The end of the Second World War was 50 years ago. Peter Brimelow (1995) has suggested that since the second world war we have been suffering what he calls “Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America” (Brimelow, 1995, p. 1). The posthumous revenge is that the intellectual elite of the western world, both political and scientific, emerged from the war “passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia” (Brimelow, 1995, p. xv). The aversion to racism has gone so far that the scientific concept of race itself is frequently attacked. The results are often ludicrous. For example, on three adjacent pages of a recent issue of Science we are led to believe that races do not exist, but that it is important to assess the genetic diversity of remaining native populations, and a black scientist at a black university should be funded to investigate the black genome as a route to appropriate treatment of diseases of blacks! (Kahn, 1994). The many and important distinctions between objective investigation of group characteristics, and prejudicial pejorative values are lost in a political atmosphere where objective reality is sacrificed to political creed.

Brimelow suggests that the term “racist” is now so debased that its new definition is “anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal” . (Brimelow, 1995 p. 10, italics in original). He suggests that we feel uneasy because we have been trained – like Pavlov’s dog – to recoil from any explicit discussion of race.

Let’s test Brimelow’s theory of emotional conditioning with just a couple of illustrations of data. Here and now is the setting for our experimental test. Here we are scientists, sophisticated with regard to behavior genetics. We tell our students that we are the scientists concerned with the causes of individual and group differences (Fuller & Thompson, 1978; Rowe, 1994). Any time you observe a phenotypic difference between definable groups, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that the difference might be caused by environmental difference between the groups, or the difference might be caused by genetic differences between the groups, or by some combination of genetic and environmental differences. Elementary.

Now to look at the data relating to the Brimelow test, we include five figures.

The first figure has data from a UN demographic yearbook (United Nations, 1994). The variable here is murder rate per 100,000 of population, for a few countries. This is a typical representative figure: Among so-called advanced nations, or industrialized nations, the United States suffers a high murder rate. The environmental determinists have many theories, some complex and all critical to aspects of American society. Often we are asked, for instance, “why are Scandinavians in the U.S. so much more murderous than are Scandinavians in Scandinavia?” The answer is that they are not. The premise of the question is false.

The second figure has the same “industrialized” European, largely Caucasian, countries along with an estimate of the murder rate among whites in the U.S. Surely nothing to be proud of, the murder rate among whites is pretty consistent across countries, the rate among U.S. Caucasians is identical to England, and somewhat lower than the two Scandinavian countries. The United States is of coursea multicultural, racially diverse country. This same point has been made previously, with data from different sources (Taylor, 1994).

The third figure has the murder rate for the United States across 22 years, by race. Obviously quite consistent, approximately a 9-fold difference averaged across years (Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 1988).

Like it or not, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that some, perhaps much, of the race difference in murder rate is caused by genetic differences in contributory variables such as low intelligence, lack of empathy, aggressive acting out, and impulsive lack of foresight.

The United Nations has a lot of indexes; another one is the HDI (that is, Human Development Index). The HDI is meant to index a bunch of desirable characteristics (such as longevity, knowledge, real income, etc.). Overall, the U.S. ranks fifth among the nations in the HDI. To get fifth on the international list, you combine U.S. whites, who rank first, with US blacks who rank 31st, a level similar to some other black countries (Eisenberg, 1995), and this after more than a generation of racially preferential social policies. If you equate for IQ, U.S. blacks are actually doing at least as well as U.S. whites (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994).

Back to murder rates. Environmental determinists seem generally befuddled by murder, and most of their social policy suggestions, when implemented, seem to make matters worse rather than better. Of course environments do matter, and environmentalistically based policies do have an impact. In 1994, the murder rate in New Orleans, LA, reached 86.5, while in Richmond, VA, the murder rate was 77.9, for second-worst large city in the United States (Perlstein, 1995). Obviously, the environmental determinists are not benign; they do not occupy a moral high ground; their policy recommendations do have consequences.

We can do a pretty good job of predicting differential murder rates, simply by considering racial composition of the population. For example, in the fourth figure we have aggregate data across the 50 states of the United States. The simple correlation between murder rate and percent of the population that is black, is r= +0.77. For Figures 4 and 5, the homicide data are from the U.S. Department of Justice (1981), while the population percentages are from the 1980 census (Race, 1981). I know of no environmental variable that accounts for more of the variation. Rather than the 50 states, we can look at all of the 170 cities in the United States that had a 1980 population of at least 100,000. With 170 data points, it would make a messy scatter- plot; the overall correlation between murder rate and percent of the population which is black is r=+0.69 (Kleck & Patterson, 1993; Kleck, 1995).

Simply for illustrative purposes, the fifth figure is the rate-by- state as in figure 4, but with the values for Washington, DC included. As you can see, the very high murder rate for Washington, DC is simply what one would predict, given knowledge of its population composition.

We could go on-and-on, there are books-full of variables (Baker, 1981; Rushton, 1995). But this is enough to conclude the Brimelow Test.

Do you have an emotional reaction? I know I do: Uncomfortable to even consider; Anxious; Repulsed; Upsetting. I conclude that I have been quite thoroughly conditioned. The Taboo against considering race runs deep. But some of our social problems continue to get worse.

I would like to conclude on an uplifting and happy note. But what to say? Perhaps the optimistic prediction that over the next 25 years, as we get further into the second century of the Darwinian revolution, we in behavior genetics will do for group differences what we already have accomplished with individual differences.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Richard Hagan for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft, Sharon Wittig for assistance in preparation, and Paul M. Hammersten for valuable assistance with references.

GRAPH: Figure 1. Murder rates per 100,000 of population for a few “industrialized” countries. Data are from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook, forty-fourth issue.

GRAPH: Figure 2. Murder rates per 100,000 of population for a sample of countries. The estimate of U.S. white rate is the average over 22 years from the U.S. Uniform Crime Reporting Program (1988). The values for other countries are from the U.N. Demographic Yearbook, forty-fourth issue.

GRAPH: Figure 3. Murder rates per 100,000 of population for the United States, by race, for the 22 years of 1965 to 1986. Data are from the U.S. Department of Justice, Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

GRAPH: Figure 4. Homicide rate per 100,000 of population, plotted against percent of the population that is black, for the 50 states of the United States. The homicide data are from the U.S. Department of Justice (1981), while the population percentages are from the 1980 census. The correlation is r=+0.77.

GRAPH: Figure 5. Homicide rate per 100,000 of population, plotted against percent of the population that is black, for the 50 states of the United States, as in Figure 4, with the addition of data for Washington, D.C. in upper right of the figure.

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Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press

Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press
by Bernard D. Davis

Introduction
Reviews in the popular press
The scientific reviews
Gould’s selective history
What is “biological determinism”?
The concept of general intelligence
The “deep fallacies” of reification and factoring
Objectivity in science
Politicizing and publicizing science
Neo-Lysenkoism
Footnotes
New York Times Corrects Scientist’s Obit

Stephen Jay Gould, a professor of geology at Harvard, has become one of the best known American scientists. His many essays on natural history are entertaining and highly readable, and his attack on the “establishment” version of Darwinian evolution has received so much attention that his picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek. He personalizes his expository writing in a breezy, self-deprecating manner, and he comes across as warm-hearted, socially concerned, and commendably on the side of the underdog. Hence he is able to present scientific material effectively to a popular audience–a valuable contribution, and a public service, as long as his scientific message is sound.

It is therefore not surprising that Gould’s history of the efforts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, received many glowing reviews in the popular and literary press, and even a National Book Critics Circle award.1 Yet the reviews that have appeared in scientific journals, focusing on content rather than on style or on political appeal, have been highly critical of both the book’s version of history and its scientific arguments. The paradox is striking. If a scholar wrote a tendentious history of medicine that began with phlebotomy and purges, moved on to the Tuskegee experiment on syphilitic Negroes, and ended with the thalidomide disaster, he would convince few people that medicine is all bad, and he would ruin his reputation. So we must ask: Why did Gould write a book that fits this model all too closely? Why were most reviewers so uncritical? And how can nonscientific journals improve their reviews of books on scientific aspects of controversial political issues?

Reviews in the popular press

Typical of the literary reviews of Gould’s book is the one that appeared in the New York Times Book Review. June Goodfield, a historian and popular writer on science, is effusive: In his “most significant book yet, Mr. Gould grasps the supporting pillars of the temple in a lethal grip of historical scholarship and analysis–and brings the whole edifice of biological determinism crashing down.” The Mismeasure of Man, she writes, also shows that, while science can never be wholly objective, “this gloriously human enterprise does provide us both with a method for challenging the status quo and for revealing true knowledge about the world.” Moreover, Gould “affirms that most things are humanly possible, and that attempts to confine human beings to limited categories are both downright wicked and bound to be self-defeating.”

In the New Yorker the book was reviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, a philosophically-inclined physicist. His analyses of scientific books have in general been excellent, and we might have expected him to be critical of Gould’s methodology. But in fact, because Bernstein saw the book as a powerful salvo against racism, he misread it, imputing to Gould his own, different views on intelligence. Bernstein’s answer to racism is to emphasize “how numerous the genetically expressed variations are within any social group,” whereas Gould in fact insists that in the area of behavior, genetic differences should be ignored. Missing this fundamental disagreement, Bernstein uncritically accepts Gould’s indictment of intelligence tests: “because of the false reification of intelligence hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of people’s lives have been circumscribed or even ruined.”

The most perplexing review is Richard Lewontin’s in the New York Review of Books. Lewontin represents a biased choice on the part of that journal, since he and Gould had taught a course together at Harvard on the dangers of applying biology to society, and he has called for the development of a true “socialist science” to challenge the “bourgeois science” of most Western culture. Yet he turns out to be an interesting choice, for his article is, as usual, brilliant, erudite, and idiosyncratic.

Lewontin agrees that political views, whether good or bad, will inevitably influence the conclusions of scientists, but be chides Gould for ignoring Marxist principles and overemphasizing racism: “The Mismeasure of Man remains a curiously unpolitical and unphilosophical book.” The emphasis “on racism and ethnocentrism in the study of abilities is an American bias.” Further, “In America, race, ethnicity, and class are so confounded, and the reality of social class so firmly denied, that it is easy to lose sight of the general setting of class conflict out of which biological determinism arose.” He concludes with a profoundly pessimistic bit of metaphysics: “The reification of intelligence … is an error that is deeply built into the atomistic system of Cartesian explanation that characterizes all of our national science. It is not easy, given the analytic mode of science, to replace the clockwork mind with something less silly.” But “the wholesale rejection of analysis in favor of an obscurantist holism has been worse. Imprisoned by our Cartesianism, we do not know how to think about thinking.” It is unfortunate that this truly gifted scientist trapped himself in evolutionary genetics, a field so at odds with his social convictions.

The popular press has thought the issues to be more clear-cut. Newsweek refers to “this splendid new case study of biased science and its social abuse.” The Saturday Review speaks of “a rare book–at once of great importance and wonderful to read.” The Atlantic Monthly says, “The tale would be funny if one could overlook the misery that such tests have inflicted on generations of defenseless school children.” The Key Reporter (of Phi Beta Kappa) calls the book “a strident, polemical, effective critique.”

The scientific reviews

While the nonscientific reviews of The Mismeasure of Man were almost uniformly laudatory, the reviews in the scientific journals were almost all highly critical. In Science, a widely read American publication that covers all the sciences, the book was reviewed by Franz Samelson, a psychologist at Kansas State University. He concludes that as a history of science the book has a number of problems. For example, he notes, Gould claims that Army intelligence tests led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1925; in fact, no psychologist testified before Congress, and the three reports of the House Committee on Immigration do not mention intelligence tests at all. On another point, Gould’s discussion of the “fallacy of reification”–the grouping of different abilities, such as verbal reasoning and spatial reasoning, into one measure of intelligence–”remains blurred, since Gould’s emphasis seems to shift about. Exactly what does he object to? [Gould] never tells us directly what his own proper, unreified conception of intelligence is.” Finally, Gould fails to acknowledge that ability testing is “a sizable industry in the real world and a smaller one in academia.” And all Gould’s incisive thrusts at finagling and fallacies seem to be almost irrelevant. … Whatever intellectual victories over the [mostly dead] testers Gould’s eminently readable book achieves … the real action seems to be elsewhere.”

In Nature, a distinguished British journal of general science, Steve Blinkhom, writing from the Neuropsychology Laboratory at Stanford University, is blunt: “With a glittering prose style and as honestly held a set of prejudices as you could hope to meet in a day’s crusading, S.J. Gould presents his attempt at identifying the fatal flaw in the theory and measurement of intelligence. Of course everyone knows there must be a fatal flaw, but so far reports of its discovery have been consistently premature.” More specifically, “the substantive discussion of the theory of intelligence stops at the stage it was in more than a quarter of a century ago.” Gould “has nothing to say which is both accurate and at issue when it comes to substantive or methodological points.” Finally, many of his assertions “have the routine flavor of Radio Moscow news broadcasts when there really is no crisis to shout about. You have to admire the skill in presentation, but what a waste of talent.”

Science 82, a journal designed for the general public, chose as its reviewer Candace Pert, a biochemist at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has been researching the application of molecular biology and cell biology to the study of the brain. “Gould’s history of pseudoscientific racism in measuring human intelligence,” she writes, “does not, despite his claims, negate the sociobiological notion that differences in human genetic composition can produce differences in brain proteins, resulting in differences in behavior and personality.” In her view, “if modem neuroscience reveals biochemical differences that account for human variability, we must deal with this important knowledge; … ignoring differences because they could become abuses will not make them go away.”

The most extensive scientific analysis of Gould’s book appeared in Contemporary Education Review. Arthur R. Jensen, of the Institute for Human Learning at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzes Gould’s technical arguments in great detail and reaches sharply critical conclusions. He also discusses recent research demonstrating a high correlation of IQ with speed of information processing, as measured by simple reaction-time techniques. These findings encourage a hope that a merger with neurobiology may soon make studies of intelligence much more penetrating and less controversial.

The review that appeared in Scientific American is an exception to the harsh criticism in the scientific press. Ordinarily Scientific American presents solid science in an interesting way to a very broad audience, and it has been restrained and non-partisan in treating most controversial issues of science. However, there is one exception: The publisher, Gerard Piel, and the book editor, Philip Morrison, have long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to racial justice. According to Morrison, as “a persuasive chronicle of prejudice in science, founded on scrupulous examination of the record, enlivened by the talent of a gifted writer, this volume takes on some of the sinister appeal of a tale of heinous crime.”

Gould’s selective history

It is important for the general public to understand why scientists close to the field have reacted so negatively to The Mismeasure of Man. The strength of science in analyzing reality comes from its strict separation of facts from values, of observations from expectations. Measurements of intelligence, and of its hereditary and environmental origins, are part of natural science–even though one must go beyond science, bringing in judgments of value, in order to probe the social implications of the results. Hence any purported scientific exposition of these topics must be as dispassionate and objective as possible about the facts, whatever the social views the author favors. These are precious standards, whose corruption we must resist. Unfortunately, throughout Gould’s book they are not met.

The early chapters describe in detail some extremely naive nineteenth-century attempts to measure intelligence in terms of brain size or body shape. These are fossils from the history of mental testing, and their excavation would ordinarily bore most readers. Gould, however, uses them skillfully, both to give the impression of a thorough scholarly analysis and to arouse indignation at such evil uses of science. Unfortunately, the advocacy and the emotional appeal betray the scholarship. In the early stages of any science, naive ideas, often reflecting the prejudice of the time, are inevitable. Gould infers that this legacy will persist; but history demonstrates that the advance of science depends on continually discarding false hypotheses and preconceptions. Gould further arouses the reader’s indignation by describing the ill-informed and prejudiced views of Paul Broca and Louis Agassiz on racial differences. But at a time when slavery was legal, and long before the science of genetics revolutionized our understanding of the nature of race, it is hardly surprising that these views were held by leading scientists–and even, as Gould notes, by such enlightened social critics as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. To remind us of these roots in the history of racism is instructive–but to imply a similar prejudice in today’s investigators of intelligence is unfair.

After emphasizing that Alfred Binet developed the first intelligence test, in France in 1905, only in order to improve the education of backward children, Gould goes on to describe misuses of the subsequent tests. His most horrifying example is a primitive study conducted in 1912, in which H.H. Goddard administered intelligence tests to a number of Ellis Island immigrants. He set his standards at an absurdly high level, classifying in the end an extraordinarily large percentage of subjects as “feeble-minded”–a term that then included “morons” who could nonetheless manage to make a living, though it is now applied only to those with a more severe deficiency. Probably nothing has so aroused antipathy to intelligence testing as his widely-cited findings that, for example, 83 percent of the Jews and 79 percent of the Italians he tested were “feeble-minded.”

Gould’s interpretation of Goddard’s findings is summarized as follows: “Could anyone be made to believe that four-fifths of any nation were morons?” But let us look at what Goddard actually wrote. The first sentence of his paper states that “this is not a study of immigrants in general but of six small highly selected groups” leaving out those at either end of the scale who were “obviously” either normal or feeble-minded.2 At that time immigration officers were using subjective impressions to reject those people who appeared to be too retarded to learn to make a living, and Goddard hoped that tests could provide a more reliable basis for such decisions. Surprised at the results, he added a discussion that Gould conveniently ignores:

“Are these … cases of hereditary defects or cases of apparent mental defects by deprivation? … We know of no data on this point, but indirectly we may argue that it is far more probable that their condition is due to environment than it is due to heredity. To mention only two considerations: First, we know their environment has been poor. It seems able to account for the result. Second, this kind of immigration has been going on for 20 years. If the condition were due to hereditary feeblemindedness we should properly expect a noticeable increase in the proportion of the feeble-minded of foreign ancestry. This is not the case.”

Goddard ended up favoring the immigration of people who appeared to possess limited present intelligence: Not only would they perform useful work, but “we may be confident that their children will be of average intelligence and if rightly brought up will be good citizens.” Goddard was hardly a great scientist, but he deserves a fair hearing. The statements cited here hardly warrant Gould’s conclusion that to Goddard “the cure [for feeble-mindedness] seemed simple enough: don’t allow native morons to breed and keep foreign ones out.”

After some years, as Gould notes, most of the early enthusiasts changed their views. Goddard, Terman, and Brigham each admitted that he had overestimated the ability of tests to detect innate differences and had underestimated the influence of cultural background. One might take this example of growth in understanding as a sign of the whole field’s increasing maturity and objectivity. Gould, however, sees these confessions only as support for his accusation of bias.

What is “biological determinism”?

Gould’s own degree of bias is unusual in a work by a scientist. What is the source of this passion? Not mental testing itself, he makes it clear. Rather, his arguments against this testing are merely weapons for attacking the real enemy: what he calls “biological determinism.”

As Gould correctly points out, early investigators who tried to measure intelligence were indeed determinists: They had the illusion that they were directly measuring a capacity determined by the genes. But while he continues to tar investigators of behavioral genetics with this brush, in fact they are now all interactionists. For while genetics necessarily began with the simplest relationships, in which a single gene determines a trait (such as the color of Mendel’s peas, or a human blood type), the science eventually moved on to the quantitatively varying (metric) physical or behavioral traits, which socially are much more interesting. These were found to depend on multiple genes, and also on their cumulative interactions with the environment. This concept is now precisely formulated as the concept of heritability: a measure of what fraction of the total variance in a trait, in a particular population, is due to genetic differences between individuals–the other fraction coming from environmental influences.

Since Gould would prefer to combat the straw man of naive, “pure” determinism, he fails to note that the science of genetics has altogether replaced this concept with interactionism. But since he is too familiar with biology to deny this conceptual shift, he appropriates it for his own ideological argument: “The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’s performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning. I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have ever denied the existence of innate variation among children.” Curiously, “hereditarians” (Gould’s misnomer for interactionists) are not credited with a similar appreciation of both factors. Instead, they are neatly skewered by being called “strict.”

What, then, is the quarrel about? According to Gould, “the differences [between the camps] are more a matter of social policy and educational practice. Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as measures of permanent inborn limits. Children, so labeled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology.” But good investigators, such as Binet, did not want mental testing to become a theory of limits. For them, Gould argues, “Mental testing becomes a theory for enhancing potential through proper education [emphasis added].”3

This is a deliberate effort to blur the issue. With one hand Gould concedes innate differences, and with the other he takes them away. If the two camps really differ mostly about social policy and not about the importance of hereditary factors, why does he struggle so to deny the latter? Similarly, whether the hereditary component is large or small, is it not a fact that individuals differ widely in their phenotypic, developed ability to absorb various kinds of education and to perform various kinds of jobs? Yet the book has not one word about the possible value of mental tests for educational and vocational placement or for comparing educational programs. (However, consistent with Gould’s admiration for Binet’s circumscribed aim, he does note the value of mental tests in guiding the therapy of his own child.) Finally, in describing the incredibly crude use of the Army’s “Alpha” tests in 1917, Gould ignores the current use of sophisticated tests to help the armed forces select candidates for expensive training programs.

It is sad that Gould, preoccupied with the destructive social consequences of earlier biological misconceptions, is convinced that any modem studies on human behavioral genetics must have similar consequences. For to the contrary, modern evolutionary biology has had an opposite effect–by providing a powerful argument against racism. In the past, a widely-accepted justification for race discrimination stemmed from a Platonic doctrine that prevailed for over two millennia: the belief that we can best understand groups of entities (including species and races) in typological (essentialist) terms, i.e., characterizing all the individuals in a group in terms of a hypothetical ideal type or essence, and dismissing differences from the ideal as trivial. Today, however, population genetics has shown that all species are genetically diverse, and that the differences are not trivial but rather are the source of evolution. With this shift from an essentialist to a populationist view, the genetic differences between races (except for some superficial physical traits) are now seen to be statistical rather than essentially uniform. And since the statistical distributions overlap extensively from one group to another, one cannot infer an individuals potential from his race.

If the pre-genetic, typological misconceptions still prevailed, the modern revolt against race discrimination would surely have encountered much greater resistance, and it might even have been impossible. Unfortunately, biology has received little credit for this major social contribution, and none at all from Stephen Jay Gould.

The concept of general intelligence

The historical chapters, constituting most of The Mismeasure of Man, serve to convince the reader that the measurement of intelligence is immoral. But after this build-up, Gould, shifting from historian to scientist, offers an even sharper objection: The measurement is also unscientific.

The problem arises because these tests were developed for teachers who often have trouble deciding whether a pupil’s poor performance is primarily due to limitations in motivation or to limitations in ability. The original purpose of intelligence tests, as we have noted, was to provide a more objective and reliable supplement to the teacher’s subjective impression, in order to help pupils who are doing badly. But this early use of testing inevitably led to the development of additional possibilities. For example, by ranking the whole class, the tests also detected students who could move faster than the average. In addition, more specialized tests have evolved, especially for advanced students and for purposes of job placement. But as practical tools in public education, the most widely used tests are still composite ones designed, like Binet’s test, to cover a range of abilities pertinent to the whole curriculum.

Psychologists generally agree that the greatest success of their field has been in intelligence testing–both practical, in estimating individual abilities, and theoretical, in exploring the cognitive functions of the human brain. For it might have turned out that the determinants of different cognitive abilities were uncorrelated: that is, that the levels of abilities might be distributed independently. But in fact, tests for different kinds of intelligence–the ability to assimilate, retain, process, and express different kinds of complex information–show a remarkably high correlation in their results. The rank-ordering of most individuals is similar–but not identical–on a verbal test, an arithmetic test, or a nonverbal test involving spatial patterns. These results confirm an impression that we all tacitly build on in our daily lives: Some people are generally brighter than others, but people also differ in their special aptitudes. Both sets of differences are partly inborn and partly due to factors affecting the development of the inborn potentials.

The common factor shared in different cognitive abilities, as determined by statistical analysis of their correlations, was named g by Charles Spearman. In the ordinary IQ tests it contributes well over half the variance within a population, the rest representing uncorrelated differences in special abilities. Someday, the basis for both kinds of variation will no doubt be better understood in cellular and biochemical terms. Indeed, it is encouraging that studies of the brain are rapidly progressing from its simpler integrative functions, such as the processing of visual stimuli, to more complex cognitive activities. Meanwhile, though, it is fruitful for psychologists to examine intelligence at the level of performance, and to compare ways of improving that performance, just as geneticists could usefully deal with genes as formal units long before discovering their molecular structure and mode of action.

Examined at this level, such tests have unquestionably helped innumerable teachers to identify pupils whose brightness was concealed by shyness, cultural barriers, or rebelliousness. On the other hand, there is also no doubt that the tests have often been interpreted or applied badly. If teachers focus excessively on general intelligence, measured on a one-dimensional scale, they may fail to encourage the development of each individual’s particular strengths. Moreover, the assumption that g is entirely innate may persist in some quarters even though the concept of heritability (fractionation into genetic and environmental components) has now completely replaced that early view among scientists. But perhaps the greatest danger is that the test results may tend to be regarded as some kind of index of social worth, instead of recognizing that they measure only a limited set of behavioral traits. For while these are key traits for certain educational and vocational purposes, the tests ignore many other traits that also have great social value: for example, physical attractiveness, motor skills, creativity, artistic talent, social sensitivity, and features of character and temperament. The concept of any single scale of social worth has no meaning. Gould, however, keeps the reader’s indignation alive by regularly defining the objective of the tests as the measurement of “worth”–sometimes qualified as “intellectual worth,” but often unqualified, or even denoted as “innate worth.”

Gould is clearly not interested in evaluating the past uses of intelligence tests fairly, or in improving their use. To him the tests must be extirpated because–and here we get back to the real villain–in using them to compare individuals one inevitably runs into consistent differences in the mean values for various racial and socioeconomic groups. “This book … is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity .. invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups–races, classes, or sexes–are innately inferior and deserve their status.”4 This statement, for all its hyperbole, captures what the book is about: Concerned with group differences, Gould has decided not to add to the polemics on their causes, but to attack the problem at another level. For if he can demonstrate that the very concept of measurable intelligence is meaningless, then it follows that all those disturbing data on group differences are meaningless as well. His weapon is his “discovery,” first announced in the New York Review of Books, of two alleged “deep fallacies” underlying the concept of general intelligence: reification and the factoring of intelligence.

The “deep fallacies” of reification and factoring

Gould’s argument on reification purports to get at the philosophical foundation of the field. He claims that general intelligence, defined as the factor common to different cognitive abilities, is merely a mathematical abstraction; hence if we consider it a measurable attribute we are reifying it, falsely converting an abstraction into an “entity” or a “thing”–variously referred to as “a hard, quantifiable thing,” “a quantifiable fundamental particle,” “a thing in the most direct, material sense.” Here he has dug himself a deep hole. If this implication of localization is a fallacy for general intelligence, why is it not also a fallacy for specialized forms of intelligence, which Gould professes to accept? Going even further, he seems to abandon materialism altogether: “Once intelligence becomes an entity, standard procedures of science virtually dictate that a location and physical substrate be sought for it. Since the brain is the seat of mentality, intelligence must reside there.” But we must ask what reasonable scientific alternative there is. A Cartesian dualism, in which mental processes exist apart from a material base?

Indeed, this whole argument is fantastic. The scientist does not measure “material things”: He measures properties (such as length or mass), sometimes of a single “thing” (however defined), and sometimes of an organized collection of things, such as a machine, a biological organ, or an organism. In a particularly complex collection, the brain, some properties (i.e., specific functions) have been traced to narrowly-localized regions (such as the sensory or motor nuclei connected to particular parts of the body). Others, however, depend on connections between widely-separated regions. Accordingly, the reality of generalized intelligence–or equally, of any specialized cognitive ability–does not require a “quantifiable fundamental particle.” Like information transfer in a telephone network or in a computer, cognition would be much the same whether the cells involved are grouped together in one region of the brain or are connected by fibers running between dispersed locations.

It is astonishing that a scientist with Gould’s credentials, and with ready access to colleagues in the relevant fields, would present such a phony “discovery” as the fallacy of reification, and on the basis of truly antiquated views of neurobiology. He writes that the existence of general intelligence could have been proved correct “if biochemists had ever found Spearman’s cerebral energy.” This phrase refers to a particularly thin speculation, in the 1920s, about the physical basis for differences in IQ. But neurobiologists today simply do not deal in such vague concepts. Instead, they measure variation in the richness of cells, and connections, and neurotransmitter molecules in different areas of the brain.

The molecular studies linking these features of the brain to genes have hardly begun. But it is clear that this molecular biology must build on the principle that genes code for specific molecular components in brain cells, as in all other cells, and that these genes, like other genes, will vary from one individual to another. Moreover, these gene products in the brain will give rise to variation not only in its wiring diagram but also in the switches (synapses) that transmit impulses between its nerve cells. We are unlikely to be able to correlate intelligence with the incredibly complex and subtle circuitry of the brain for a long time to come; but it is not hard to imagine correlation with molecular differences in a class of synapses in different brains, affecting the speed of processing information just like differences in the transistors of different computers.

Gould’s second “deep fallacy”, factoring, is statistical. Here he reconstructs an old controversy, which the field has long outgrown. In this dispute, Spearman calculated g (the measure of general intelligence) by running tests for different abilities and analyzing their correlations so as to extract their common component. Thurstone, whom Gould admires as “the exterminating angel of Spearman’s g,” preferred to focus on the specialized differences in intelligence. He therefore analyzed the results in a way that did not extract the overall correlation, but dispersed it among the differentiated primary factors. But the correlation did not disappear: Another calculation could extract it from the primary factors as a “second-order” g. Gould, however, sets out to “prove” mathematically that the primary correlation is a statistical artifact and that the second-order one is negligible.

To analyze Gould’s unconvincing argument would be irrelevant. For in the end, after claiming to have disproved the correlations, he casually accepts them as self-evident: “The fact of pervasive positive correlation between mental tests must be one of the most unsurprising major discoveries in the history of science.” This is itself a very curious judgment. In fact, the correlation is not inevitable or self-evident, for the brain might have been so constructed that a strong endowment of cells for verbal skills would have less room for cells concerned with numerical abilities, etc. Different cognitive abilities might then exhibit no correlation, or even a negative correlation, and psychologists would then have found no general intelligence to measure.

Gould’s arguments about g are irrelevant for another reason as well: Though he believes they support his aim of slaying the dragon of the heritability of intelligence, the assumed link to that problem does not exist. “The chimerical nature of g is the rotten core of Jensen’s edifice, and of the entire hereditarian school. … Spearman’s g, and its attendant claim that intelligence is a single, measurable entity, provided the only theoretical justification that hereditarian theories of IQ have ever had.” This assertion is utterly false. Whether an IQ test measures mostly general intelligence or mostly a collection of independent abilities, the heritability of whatever it measures will be precisely the same. IQ’s factor structure simply does not enter the equations for calculating its heritability.

It is unfortunate that Gould contrasts general and special intelligence with such overkill, for the differences deserve serious consideration, and the advance of behavioral genetics, focusing on units of inheritance, will force psychologists to aim for a more refined dissection of cognitive functions. But the prospect of such advances does not require us to deny that a wider, overall measurement might have had historical value, and might still have practical value for educational purposes.

Objectivity in science

In addition to moral and technical objections to mental testing, Gould offers an epistemological argument that has much broader implications: “I criticize the myth that science itself is an objective enterprise…. By what right, other than our own biases, can we identify Broca’s prejudice and hold that science now operates independently of culture and class?” On the other hand, he adds that “As a practicing scientist, I share the credo of my colleagues: I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it.” This is all very well–but throughout the rest of the book he proceeds as though objectivity is a myth and no factual reality can be discovered.

In fact, the key to the success of the scientific enterprise is its passionate dedication to objectivity: Its advance depends on accepting the conclusions dictated by verifiable observations and by logic, even when they conflict with common sense or with treasured preconceptions. To be sure, some years ago Marxist philosophers, generalizing from the influence of social and economic arrangements on many aspects of our behavior, initiated an attack on the objectivity of science. Moreover, this view has become rather widely accepted in the social sciences. But the study of the genetics of intelligence is a part of natural science, rather than of social science, even though its findings have relevance for social questions. If the science is well done it will tell us objectively what exists, without value judgments; these judgments will arise only in the social applications of that knowledge. For example, insights into the range and distribution of abilities do not tell us how much of our educational resources to devote to the gifted and how much to the intellectually handicapped; this knowledge simply improves our recognition of the reality with which we must cope.

The main source of confusion here is that the word “science” is used with three different meanings, in different contexts: science as a set of activities, as a methodology, and as a body of knowledge. The activities of a scientist certainly depend heavily on non-objective factors. These include the resources and the incentives that a society provides for pursuing particular projects, and also the personal choice of problems, hypotheses, and experimental design. The methodology of science is much more objective, but it is also influenced by fashions in the scientific community. The body of scientific knowledge, however, is a very different matter. Its observations and conclusions, after having been sufficiently verified and built upon, correspond to reality more objectively and reliably than any other form of knowledge achieved by man. To be sure, attachment to a cherished hypothesis may lead a scientist into error. Moreover, at the cutting edge of a science, contradictory results and interpretations are common. But the mistakes are eventually discarded, through a finely honed system of communal criticisms and verification. Thus Broca’s name has been immortalized by its assignment to a structure in the brain that be recognized, whereas his premature efforts to correlate gross structural variations with intelligence have left no residue in the body of scientific knowledge.

Accordingly, however much the findings in some areas of science may be relevant to our social judgments, they are obtained by a method designed to separate objective analysis of nature from subjective value judgments. Long experience has shown that when these findings are well-verified, they have an exceedingly high probability of being universal, cumulative, and value-free. Gould, however, treats the history of science like political history, with which his readers are more familiar: a history in which human motives and errors from the past will inevitably recur. He thus skillfully promotes a doubt that the biological roots of human behavior can ever be explored scientifically.

Politicizing and publicizing science

A left-wing group called “Science for the People,” of which Gould is a member, has been particularly active in campaigning against such studies. Instead of focusing, in the earlier tradition of radical groups, on defects in our political and economic system that demand radical change, this group has aimed at politicizing science, attacking in particular any aspect of genetics that may have social implications. Their targets have included genetic engineering, research on the effects of an XYY set of chromosomes, sociobiology, and efforts to measure the heritability of intelligence. Several years ago Gould co-signed their intemperate attack on E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.5 Now, in The Mismeasure of Man, he has extended the attack to cognitive psychology and educational testing, because they may reveal genetic differences.

Gould has spelled out explicitly his ideological commitment, and also its influence on his science. As we shall see, his main scientific contribution has been the claim that evolution has occurred mainly through revolutionary jumps, rather than by small steps. Both in a “Dialectics Workshop”6 and in a scientific paper7 he supports this claim with a citation from Marx: “Darwin’s gradualism was part of the cultural context, not of nature.” He adds that “alternate [sic] conceptions of change have respectable pedigrees in philosophy. Hegel’s dialectical laws, translated into a materialist context … are explicitly punctuational, as befits a theory of revolutionary transformation in human society.” And, “it may also not be irrelevant to our personal preferences [about evolutionary mechanisms] that one of us learned his Marxism, literally at his Daddy’s knee.” To most scientists (other than those tethered to a party line) such a claim of support from (or for) Hegel is silly, and such an insertion of an ideological preference, whether from the left or the right, is a corruption of science.

These quotations may help us to understand why The Mismeasure of Man ends up as a sophisticated piece of political propaganda, rather than as a balanced scientific analysis. Gould is entitled, of course, to whatever political views he wishes. But the reader is also entitled to be aware of his agenda.

It may also be pertinent to comment briefly on Gould’s scientific writing. His claim to have disproved the widely-accepted, “gradualist” view of evolution has had great appeal for science reporters, but it has been subject to intense criticism by his professional colleagues. Of course, controversies in science are not rare, and it would not be appropriate here to try to judge Gould’s stature as a scientist. It is pertinent, however, to note features of his professional writing remarkably similar to those that I have criticized in The Mismeasure of Man. In both contexts be focuses primarily on older approaches to problems in which genetics is now central; he picks his history; and he handles key concepts in an ambiguous manner. Moreover, he is fond of artificial dichotomies that oversimplify complex issues: evolution by leaps versus evolution by gradual steps; biological determinists versus environmentalists; general intelligence versus specialized intelligence.

While Gould has made a valuable scientific contribution in providing evidence that marked fluctuations in rate are common in evolution, the most general professional criticism is that in dramatizing this contribution he has set up a non-existent conflict with the prevailing gradualist view. For he proceeds as though gradualism implies a relatively constant rate as well as small steps. But even Darwin recognized that the rate of evolution might vary widely, and modem investigators have demonstrated many mechanisms that contribute to such fluctuation.

Neo-Lysenkoism

In The Mismeasure of Man Gould fails to live up to the trust engendered by his credentials. His historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers. Moreover, while he is admired as a clear writer, in the sense of effective communication, he is not clear in the deeper sense of analyzing ideas sharply and with logical rigor, as we have a right to expect of a disciplined scientist.

It has been uncomfortable to dissect a colleague’s book and his background so critically. But I have felt obliged to do so because Gould’s public influence, well-earned for his popular writing on less political questions, is being put to mischievous political use in this book. Moreover, its success undermines the ideal of objectivity in scientific expositions, and also reflects a chronic problem of literary publications. My task has been all the more unpleasant because I do not doubt Gould’s sincerity in seeking a more just and generous world, and I thoroughly share his conviction that racism remains one of the greatest obstacles.

Unfortunately, the approach that Gould has used to combat racism has serious defects. Instead of recognizing the value of eliminating bias, his answer is to press for equal and opposite bias, in a virtuous direction–not recognizing the irony and the danger of thus subordinating science to fashions of the day. Moreover, as a student of evolution he might have been expected to build on a profound insight of modem genetics and evolutionary biology: that the human species, and each race within it, possesses a wide range of genetic diversity. But instead of emphasizing the importance of recognizing that diversity, Gould remains locked in combat with a prescientific typological view of heredity, and this position leads him to oppose studies of behavioral genetics altogether. As the reviewer for Nature stated, The Mismeasure of Man is “a book which exemplifies its own thesis. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, researched in the service of a point of view rather than written from a fund of knowledge.”

In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma. To be sure, the new version is more limited in scope, and it does not use the punitive powers of a totalitarian state, as Trofim Lysenko did in the Soviet Union to suppress all of genetics between 1935 and 1965. But that is not necessary in our system: A chilling atmosphere is quite sufficient to prevent funding agencies, investigators, and graduate students from exploring a taboo area. And such Neo-Lysenkoist politicization of science, from both the left and the right, is likely to grow, as biology increasingly affects our lives–probing the secrets of our genes and our brain, reshaping our image of our origins and our nature, and adding new dimensions to our understanding of social behavior. When ideologically committed scientists try to suppress this knowledge they jeopardize a great deal, for without the ideal of objectivity science loses its strength.

Because this feature of science is such a precious asset, the crucial lesson to be drawn from the case of Stephen Jay Gould is the danger of propagating political views under the guise of science. Moreover, this end was furthered, wittingly or not, by the many reviewers whose evaluations were virtually projective tests of their political convictions. For these reviews reflected enormous relief: A voice of scientific authority now assures us that biological diversity does not set serious limits to the goal of equality, and so we will not have to wrestle with the painful problem of refining what we mean by equality.

In scientific journals editors take pains to seek reviewers who can bring true expertise to the evaluation of a book. It is all the more important for editors of literary publications to do likewise, for when a book speaks with scientific authority on a controversial social issue, the innocent lay reader particularly needs protection from propaganda. Science can make a great contribution toward solving our social problems by helping us to base our policies and judgments upon reality, rather than upon wish or conjecture. Because this influence is so powerful it is essential for such contributions to be judged critically, by the standards of science.

FOOTNOTES

1 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).

2 H. H. Goddard, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” Journal of Delinquency 2 (1917): 243.

3 Gould’s reference to “enhancing potential” is revealing, for it confuses genotype (an inborn range of potential) and phenotype (the actual ability developed within that range). He should have spoken instead of enhancing performance, or of enhancing the development of potential. This is not a trivial semantic distinction: It is essential for any clear analysis of the interaction of genes and environment. Gould’s language suggests that he either does not fully understand, or feels compelled to ignore, this key concept of genetics.

4 Gould’s broad generalization ignores the fact that the disadvantaged Chinese and Japanese in this country have consistently scored even higher than Caucasians. Moreover, in including sex discrimination in the IQ controversy, he is straying far from reality. In fact, females average the same as males on standard IQ tests: They perform slightly better on verbal tests, and slightly worse on spatial tests, but the tests are constructed to balance these differences.

5 E. Allen et al., Letter, New York Review of Books (November 13, 1975): 43. See also Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People in Bioscience 26 (1976): 182. This article includes the remarkable statement that “We know of no relevant constraint placed on social processes by human biology.”

6 S. J. Gould, “The Episodic Nature of Change versus the Dogma of Gradualism,” Science and Nature 2 (1979): 5.

7 S. J. Gould and N. Eldridge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115.

New York Times Corrects Scientist’s Obit
Constance Holden, 18 February 1994, Science, 263, p. 922.

Harvard molecular biologist Bernard Davis only died once, on 14 January, but has been accorded two obituaries in the New York Times. Why? The first obit managed to ignore almost all of Davis’ career, igniting a storm of protest from former colleagues who badgered the newspaper until it agreed to do the story over.

The first obituary, published on 17 January, was a short item that highlighted a 1976 controversy in which Davis expressed worries that affirmative action efforts were lowering the academic standards at some medical schools. It made no mention of his scientific accomplishments, including pioneering work in bacterial genetics, his involvement in issues relating to science and society, and his numerous honors and publications.

Davis’ former colleagues were appalled. “Inadequate and mean and distorted,” is what Stanford Nobelist Arthur Kornberg called the obit; an example of the press zeroing in on “a trivial political incident at the expense of one of the finest scientific careers in America,” said rheumatologist Gerald Weissman of New York University Medical Center.

In response to a storm of letters from scientists, the newspaper quickly capitulated, and on 3 February it ran a longer story with a note observing that the first one was “incomplete.” Davis’ friends are happy. “We were so pleased we got a retraction, as it were,” says Weissman, who authored one of the letters along with 12 colleagues.


Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud

Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud
Linda S. Gottfredson
Society, March-April 1994

Brief Summary: Social Science researchers have contributed to the myth that there is no difference in intelligence levels among different racial and ethnic groups. Some researchers ignored significant data because it did not fit into the accepted belief of genetic equality.

Introduction
The Egalitarian Fiction
Misrepresentation of Expert Opinion
Living Within a Lie
Covert and Overt Censorship
Suggested Readings

Social science today condones and perpetuates a great falsehood – one that undergirds much current social policy. This falsehood, or “egalitarian fiction,” holds that racial-ethnic groups never differ in average developed intelligence (or, in technical terms, g, the general mental ability factor). While scientists have not yet determined their source, the existence of sometimes large group differences in intelligence is as well-established as any fact in the social sciences. How and why then is this falsehood perpetrated on the public? What part do social scientists themselves play, deliberately or inadvertently, in creating and maintaining it? Are some of them involved in what might be termed “collective fraud?” Intellectual dishonesty among scientists and scholars is, of course, nothing new. But watchdogs of scientific integrity have traditionally focused on dishonesty of individual scientists, while giving little attention to the ways in which collectivities of scientists, each knowingly shaving or shading the truth in small but similar ways, have perpetuated frauds on the scientific community and the public at large. Perhaps none of the individuals involved in the egalitarian fiction could be accused of fraud in the usual sense of the term. Indeed, I would be the first to say that, like other scientists, most of these scholars are generally honest. Yet, their seemingly minor distortions, untruths, evasions, and biases collectively produce and maintain a witting falsehood. Accordingly, my concern here is to explore the social process by which many otherwise honest scholars facilitate, or feel compelled to endorse, a scientific lie.

The Egalitarian Fiction

It is impossible here to review the voluminous evidence showing that racial-ethnic differences in intelligence are the rule rather than the exception (some groups performing better than whites and others worse), and that the well-documented black-white gap is especially striking. All groups span the continuum of intelligence, but some groups contain greater proportions of individuals that are either gifted or dull than others. Three facts regarding these group differences are of particular importance here for together they contradict the claim that there are no meaningful group differences. Racial-ethnic differences in intelligence are real. The large average group differences in mental test scores in the United States do not result from test bias, which is minuscule overall, as even a National Academy of Science panel concluded in 1982. Moreover, intelligence and aptitude tests measure general mental abilities, such as reasoning and problem solving, not merely accumulated bits of knowledge – and thus tap what experts and laymen alike view as “intelligence.”

Regardless of how we choose to construe them, differences in intelligence are of great practical importance. Overall they predict performance in school and on the job better than any other single attribute or condition we have been able to measure. Intelligence certainly is not the only factor that affects performance, but higher levels of intelligence greatly increase people’s odds of success in many life settings. Group disparities in intelligence are stubborn. Although individuals fluctuate somewhat in intelligence during their lives, differences among groups seem quite stable. The average black-white difference, for example, which appears by age six, has remained at about 18 Stanford-Binet IQ points since it was first measured in large national samples over seventy years ago. It is not clear yet why the disparities among groups are so stubborn – the reasons could be environmental, genetic, or a combination of both – but so far they have resisted attempts to narrow them. Although these facts may seem surprising, most experts on intelligence believe them to be true but few will acknowledge their truth publicly.

Misrepresentation of Expert Opinion

The 1988 book The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy by psychologist-lawyer Mark Snyderman and political scientist Stanley Rothman provides strong evidence that the general public receives a highly distorted view of opinion among “IQ experts.” In essence, say Snyderman and Rothman, accounts in major national newspapers, newsmagazines, and television reports have painted a portrait of expert opinion that leaves the impression that “the majority of experts in the field believe it is impossible to adequately define intelligence, that intelligence tests do not measure anything that is relevant to life performance, and that they are biased against minorities, primarily blacks and Hispanics, as well as against the poor.” However, say the authors, the survey of experts revealed quite the opposite: On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing … share a common view of [what constitute] the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that [intelligence] can be measured with some degree of accuracy. An overwhelming majority also believe that individual genetic inheritance contributes to variations in IQ within the white community, and a smaller majority express the same view about the black-white and SES [socioeconomic] differences in IQ.

Unfortunately, such wholesale misrepresentation of expert opinion is not limited to the field of intelligence, as Rothman has shown in parallel studies of other policy-related fields such as nuclear energy or environmental cancer research. However, the study of IQ experts revealed something quite surprising. Most experts’ private opinions mirrored the conclusions of psychologist Arthur Jensen, whom the media have consistently painted as extreme and marginal for holding precisely those views. As Snyderman and Rothman point out, the experts disclosed their agreement with this “controversial” and putatively marginal position only under cover of anonymity. No one, not even Jensen himself, had any inkling that his views now defined the mainstream of expert belief. Although Jensen regularly received private expressions of agreement, he and others had been, as Snyderman and Rothman note, widely castigated by the expert community for expressing some of those views.

Several decades ago, most experts, among them even Jensen, believed many of the views that the media now wrongly describe as mainstream – for example, that cultural bias accounts for the large black-white differences in mental test scores. While the private consensus among IQ experts has shifted to meet Jensen’s “controversial” views, the public impression of their views has not moved at all. Indeed, the now-refuted claim that tests are hopelessly biased is treated as a truism in public life today. The shift in private, if not public, beliefs among IQ experts is undoubtedly a response to the overwhelming weight of evidence which has accumulated in recent decades on die reality and practical importance of racial-ethnic differences in intelligence. This shift is by all indications a begrudging one, and certainly no flight into “racism.”

Snyderman and Rothman found that as many IQ experts as journalists and science editors (two out of three) agreed with the statement that “strong affirmative action measures should be used in hiring to assure black representation.” Fully 63 percent of the IQ experts described themselves as liberal politically, 17 percent as middle of the road, and 20 percent as conservative – not much different than the results for journalists (respectively, 64, 21, and 16 percent). Moreover, as Snyderman and Rothman suggest (and as is consistent with personal accounts by Jensen and others), many of the surveyed experts, while agreeing with Jensen’s conclusions, may disapprove of his expressing these conclusions openly. Consistent with this, when queried about their respect for the work of fourteen individuals who have written about intelligence or intelligence testing, the IQ experts rated Jensen only above the widely but apparently unjustly) vilified Cyril Burt. Despite the fact that most agreed with Jensen, they rated him far lower than often like-minded psychometricians who had generally stayed clear of the fray. Jensen even received significantly lower ratings than his vocal critics, such as psychologist Leon Kamin, whose scientific views are marginal by the experts’ own conclusions. By contrast, the experts in environmental cancer research behaved as one would expect; they gave higher reputational ratings to peers who are closer to the mainstream than to high-profile critics. Snyderman’s and Rothman’s findings therefore suggest that a high proportion of experts are misrepresenting their beliefs or are keeping silent in the face of a public falsehood. It is no wonder that the public remains misinformed on this issue.

Living Within a Lie

IQ experts feel enormous pressure to “live within a lie,” to use a phrase by Czech writer and leader Vaclav Havel characterizing daily life under communist rule n Eastern Europe. Havel argued, in The Power of the Powerless, that, by living a lie, ordinary citizens were complicit in their own tyranny. Every greengrocer, every clerk who agreed to display official slogans not reflecting his own beliefs, or who voted in elections known to be farcical, or who feigned agreement at political meetings, normalized falsification and tightened the regime’s grip on thought. Each individual who lived the lie, who capitulated to “ideological pseudo-reality,” became a petty instrument of the regime. As many commentators have noted, Americans may not speak certain truths about racial matters today. To adapt a phrase, there is a “structured silence.”

Social scientists had already begun subordinating scientific norms to political preferences and creating much of our current pseudo-reality on race by the mid-1960s. Sociologist Eleanor Wolf, in a 1972 article in Race, for example, detailed her distress at how fellow social scientists were misusing research data to support particular positions on civil rights policy: presenting inconclusive data as if it were decisive; lacking candor about “touchy” subjects (such as the undesirable behavior of lower-class students); blurring or shaping definitions (segregation, discrimination, racism) to suit “propagandistic” purposes; making exaggerated claims about the success of favored policies (compensatory education and school integration) while minimizing or ignoring contrary evidence. As a result, social science and social policy are now dominated by the theory that discrimination accounts for all racial disparities in achievements and well-being. This theory collapses, however, if deprived of the egalitarian fiction, as does the credibility of much current social policy. Neither could survive intact if their central premise were scrutinized.

No wonder, then, that IQ researchers find themselves under great professional and institutional pressure to avoid not only engaging in such scrutiny but even appearing to countenance it. The scrutiny itself must be discredited; the egalitarian fiction must be raised above serious scientific question. Scientists must at least appear to believe the dogma. As was the case in Havel’s communist-dominated Eastern Europe, in American academe feigned belief in the official version of reality is maintained largely by routine obeisance of academics as they pursue their own ambitions.

Scholars realize their scholarly ambitions primarily through other scholars. Peer recognition is the currency of academic and scientific life. It is crucial to a scholarly reputation and all the steps toward status and success – publications, professional invitations and awards, promotion, tenure, grants, fellowships, election to professional office, appointment to prestigious panels. One’s ability even to carry out certain kinds of research, funded or not, may be contingent upon peer recognition and respect – for instance, getting collaborators, subjects, or cooperation from potential research sites. Just as in personal life, a high professional reputation depends upon a sustained history of “appropriate” behavior, and it may be irreparably damaged by hints of scandal or impropriety. Similarly, the reputations of scientists and their organizations are enhanced or degraded by those for whom they show regard and approval. Associating oneself with highly regarded individuals or ideas enhances, even if slightly, one’s own status.

Awarding an honor to a luminary can enhance the reputation of one’s own organization, especially if the recipient accepts the honor with genuine appreciation. By the same token, one risks “staining” one’s reputation by associating with, honoring, defending, or even failing to condemn the “wrong” sort of individual or idea. In short, how one gives or withholds one’s regard is important for one’s professional reputation because it affects the regard one receives. Such a social system enhances the integrity of science and is furthered by personal ambition when the members of the community base their regard on scholarly norms, such as competence, creativity, and intellectual rigor. However, such a system breeds intellectual corruption when members systematically subordinate scientific norms to other considerations – money, politics, religion, fear. This is what appears to be happening today in the social sciences on matters of race and intelligence. As sociologist Robert Gordon argues, social science has become “one-party science.”

Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, virtually all American intellectuals publicly adhere to, if not espouse, the egalitarian fiction. And many demonstrate their party loyalty by enforcing the fiction in myriad small ways in their academic routine, say, by off-handedly dismissing racial differences in intelligence as “a racist claim, of course,” criticizing authors for “blaming the victim,” or discouraging students and colleagues from doing “sensitive” research. One can feel the gradient of collective alarm and disapproval like a deepening chill as one approaches the forbidden area. Researchers who cross the line occasionally face overt censorship, or calls for it. For example, one prominent (neoconservative) editor rejected an author’s paper, despite finding it scientifically sound, because there are social “considerations” which “overweigh the claims of social science.” Another eminent editor, after asking an author to soften the discussion in his article, recently published the revised paper with an editorial postscript admonishing scientists in the field to find a “balance” between the need for free exchange of research results on intelligence and the (presumably comparable) “need” that “no segment of our society. . .feel threatened” by it.

Covert and Overt Censorship

Whether motivated by a sincere concern over supposedly “dangerous” ideas or by a desire to distance themselves publicly from unpopular ideas, editors who use such non-academic standards discourage candor and stifle debate. They deaden social science by choking off one source of the genuine differences of opinion that are its lifeblood. Overt censorship of research is uncommon, probably because it is an obvious affront to academic norms. Less striking forms of censorship directly affect many more academics, however, and so may be more important. Easier to practice without detection and to disguise as “academic judgment,” they serve to keep scholars from pursuing ideas that might undermine the egalitarian dogma.

A less obvious form of censorship, which has become somewhat common recently, is indirect censorship. It is accomplished when academic or scientific organizations approve some views but repudiate or burden others on ideological grounds. Sometimes the ideological grounds are explicit Campus speech codes are a well-known example which, had they been upheld in the courts, would have made repudiation of the egalitarian fiction a punishable offense on some campuses. The earlier (unsuccessful) attempt to include possible “offense to minority communities” as grounds for refusing human subjects approval is another example.

Gordon reports yet others, including the National Institutes of Health’s new extra layer of review for politically “sensitive” grant proposals and the University of Delaware’s recent policy (reversed by a national arbitrator) of banning a particular funding source because, so the university claimed, it supports research on race which “conflicts with the university’s mission to promote racial and cultural diversity.” Gordon also outlines in detail – as political scientist Jan Blits has done – the covert application of ideological standards to facilitate expression of some views but burden others. This form of indirect censorship, also falling under the rubric of “political correctness,” occurs when university administrators, faculty, or officers of professional associations disguise as “professional judgment” an ideological bias in their enforcing of organizational rules, extending faculty privileges, protecting faculty rights, and weighing evidence in faculty promotions and grievances.

Recently, some American universities have invoked “professional judgment” as a pretext for reclassifying “controversial” scholarly publications in their annual merit reviews as “non-research,” to misrepresent outside peer reviews in evaluating controversial professionals up for promotion, and to limit student access to these professors. Such thinly veiled bias publicly demonstrates the officials’ own adherence to the prescribed institutional attitudes and their willingness to enforce them, not only protecting those officials from protest but also encouraging fellow members of the institution to toe the line.

Covert censorship is far more common than overt or indirect censorship. It consists of bias in the application of scientific norms when reviewers evaluate their peers’ work for funding, publication, presentation, or dissemination. Individual ideological biases are found in all fields, of course, but the hope is that such biases remain small and will cancel each other out over the long run-hence the importance of a free and open exchange of data, theories, and results. What I have in mind is systematic bias and a pervasive double standard which impedes one line of research and accords another undeserved hegemony. In one-party science, the disfavored line of work is subjected to intense scrutiny and nearly impossible standards, while the favored line of work is held to lax standards in which flaws are overlooked (called “oversight bias” in the psychological literature). Similarly, the disfavored idea is rejected unless it is “balanced” by including proponents of the favored view (even if that view is the equivalent of “flat-earth theory”), where the favored line of work is readily accepted for publication or presentation, even when it totally ignores the opposing literature. Getting a controversial paper accepted under such circumstances often becomes a test of endurance between the editor and reviewers (in coming up with criticisms) and the author (in rebutting them). Submitting IQ research or grant proposals outside the narrowest professional confines exposes intelligence researchers to yet other biases, usually of the kind to which reviewers of the proposals will accept no rebuttal.

The broader circle of critics in the social sciences often implicitly dismisses the legitimacy of research on intelligence itself by arguing that “intelligence” is undefinable or unmeasurable – as if the critics’ own favored constructs (social class, culture, self-concept, anxiety, and so on) were as well validated and operationalized. Others now also seek to deny IQ researchers (but not themselves) use of the concept “race” because, they assert, race is not a biological condition, but is socially constructed. The double standards can even ricochet back and forth, depending on the particular question being considered. Gordon recalls how sociologists failed to criticize sociologist James Coleman for omitting student ability from his analyses of school integration (which led to overstating the impact of integrated schools on black achievement-for sociologists a favorable outcome), but how they criticized him roundly for the very same omission in analyses of private versus public schools,(which led to overstating the impact of private schools on black achievement – an unfavorable outcome). In short, in one-party science, scientific regard flows like political patronage to loyal and active party members, who can demonstrate their loyalty by being alert to hints of dissidence. Like all one-party political systems, one-party science becomes intellectually corrupt and arrogant as it gains confidence in its power.

The most insidious corruption to which one-party science leads is pervasive self-censorship, what involved researchers generally prefer to regard as “prudence” or “avoiding unnecessary trouble.” Coleman has drawn particular attention to the problem of “self-suppression “the impulse not to ask the crucial question” – in research on race. In an example from his own research for the influential “Coleman Report,” he describes his failure to conduct important analyses that might have produced embarrassing findings about the abilities of black teachers. Another way of avoiding unwanted results is to ignore certain data, subjects, or variables. Or unwanted results can be omitted, buried in footnotes, explained away, or simply ignored in one’s conclusions. The most subtle form of self-censorship is deliberate avoidance of making crucial connections, or denying them. Psychologist Richard Herrnstein has noted that it was his drawing out the implications of one such connection, namely, that some portion of (white) social class differences in intelligence is genetic, that sparked his public excoriation in the 1970s.

Normally, scholars are eager to explicate illuminating connections between subspecialties. They are reluctant to do so, however, when these connections put in question the egalitarian dogma on race. Virtually all sociologists and economists ignore the literature on intelligence despite its central importance to core issues in their disciplines, such as inequalities in occupation and income. Researchers in the various subfields of intelligence obviously cannot ignore the literature with impunity. Yet they, too, often prefer to stay strictly within the confines of their specialties rather than making crucial, but unpopular, connections, or they use language that obscures what otherwise would be quite obvious.

Many psychometricians, especially those working for large testing organizations, avoid referring to “intelligence” and often seem reluctant to say much about the practical or theoretical meaning of the racial differences they observe on unbiased tests. But even remaining within one’s subfield is often not enough, for the field of intelligence itself is widely suspect. Hence some scholars explicitly disavow unpopular connections that critics might attribute to them. For example, they will argue in favor of the importance of intelligence for scholastic performance but then assure their readers, over-optimistically, that the racial gap “seems to be closing rapidly.” The tenor of these preemptive disclaimers is clear. While researchers in any field may lightly dismiss the credibility of key connections regarding race and intelligence, no one ever lightly endorses their credibility with impunity. Even those of us committed to candor are exceedingly cautious when expressing informed opinions on certain topics, especially the genetics of race. Thus, publicly stated opinions of researchers about matters outside their subfields tend in one direction – to dispute or undercut the facts necessary for toppling the egalitarian fiction. What may be tolerable behavior at the individual level becomes intolerable bias at the aggregate level. Censorship – even self-censorship – requires justification, or at least apparent justification.

On the whole, those who would squelch open inquiry of the egalitarian fiction base their justification on two assertions: 1) Research on racial differences in intelligence has already been scientifically “discredited.” 2) Inquiry into racial differences is immoral.

Point one asserts that the egalitarian premise is absolute truth and hence beyond scientific scrutiny. Point two is indifferent to its truth. Both counsel outrage at the very thought of the research. The claim that the research has been discredited rests largely on extensive misrepresentation that is often embarrassingly crude or casual – for example, contradicting arguments an author never made, while ignoring what was actually stated; attributing policy preferences to an author which are opposite of what the author actually expressed; or simply alleging fraud or gross incompetence without any substantiation whatsoever. The claim that the research is immoral rests squarely on the view that, regardless of the truth, the study itself can only be harmful. In fact, some critics assert (mostly privately) that the greater the truth, the greater the danger it poses to lower-scoring groups, and thus the greater the need to suppress it.

Despite their differences, both justifications for censorship often take the form of demonizing open inquiry by labeling it (and the people who practice it) as “dangerous,” “fascist,” “ideological,” or “racist.” The study of race and intelligence is something, they tell us, that no decent person – let alone a serious scientist – would ever do and that every decent person and serious researcher would oppose. Thus, in a kind of Orwellian inversion, marked by what Gordon calls “high talk and low blows,” the suppression of science presents itself as science itself. Intellectual dishonesty becomes the handmaiden of social conscience, and ideology is declared knowledge while knowledge is dismissed as mere ideology. Neither social policy, nor science, nor society itself is served well by scientific silence on racial differences in intelligence.

Enforcement of the egalitarian fiction has tragic consequences, especially for blacks. The outcomes are even worse than researchers of intelligence predicted two decades ago. The falsehood, because it tries to defy a reality that has conspicuous repercussions in daily life, is doing precisely what it was meant to avoid: producing pejorative racial stereotypes, fostering racial tensions, stripping members of lower-scoring groups of their dignity and incentives to achieve, and creating permanent social inequalities between the races. Enforcement of the lie is gradually distorting and degrading all institutions and processes where intelligence is at least somewhat important (which is practically everywhere) but especially where it is most important (in public schools, higher education, the professions, and high-level executive work). The falsehood requires that there be racial preferences and that their use be disguised, wherever intelligence has at least moderate importance. Society is thus being shaped to meet the dictates of a collective fraud. The fiction is aiding and abetting bigots to a fat greater degree than any truth ever could, because its specific side-effects – racial preferences, official mendacity, free-wielding accusations of racism, and falling standards – are creating deep cynicism and broad resentment against minorities, blacks in particular, among the citizenry.

Enforcement of the egalitarian fiction is not a moral or scientific imperative; it is merely political. It is terribly short-sighted, for it corrupts both science and society. However, just as the fiction is sustained by small untruths, so can it be broken down by many small acts of scientific integrity. This requires no particular heroism. All that is required is for scientists to act like scientists-to demand, clearly and consistently, respect for truth and for free inquiry in their own settings, and to resist the temptation to win easy approval by endorsing a comfortable lie.

Linda S. Gottfredson is professor of educational studies at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She has published widely on fairness in testing and racial inequality, focusing most recently on race-norming and the dilemmas in managing workforce diversity. Her current work examines social policy based on the egalitarian fiction.

READINGS SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR

Jan H. Blits and Linda S. Gottfredson. “Equality or Lasting Inequality?” Society, 27 (3) March/April 1990.

Robert A. Gordon. The Battle to Establish a Sociology of Intelligence: A Case Study in the Sociology of Politicized Disciplines. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkin University, Department of Sociology, 1993.

Linda S. Gottfredson. “Dilemmas in Developing Diversity Programs.” In Diversity in the Workplace: Human Resources Initiatives, Susan Jackson (ed.). New York: The Guilford Press, 1992.

Linda S. Gottfredson and James C. Sharf (eds.). “Fairness in Employment Testing.” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 33, December 1988.

Richard J. Herrnstein. “A True Tale from the Annals of Orthodoxy.” Preface to IQ in the Meritocracy. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1973.

Daniel Seligman. A Question of intelligence. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992.


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