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).
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The Concept of Heredity in Western thought: Part Three
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