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The Case for Eugenics in a Nutshell – Future Generations
| The Case for Eugenics in a Nutshell by Marian Van Court
This article appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of The Occidental Quarterly
[English - pdf] | [Swedish - pdf] | [Dutch - pdf] | [Romanian - pdf] The eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica defines eugenics as "the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity." Most people draw a blank when they hear the word, or it conjures up images of swastikas and jack-booted Nazis. But eugenics has had a long history, extending back to ancient Rome and beyond. Eugenics is concerned with the current direction of human evolution. Thousands of articles have been published in scholarly journals, tons of dirt have been sifted through with tiny brushes in search for skulls, vast amounts of grant money awarded to researchers, and many entire careers spent trying to discover how we evolved larger brains and greater intelligence up to the point of Homo sapiens, and this is a fascinating and worthwhile endeavor. But what is urgent, what is arguably the most important question facing our species, is where human beings are evolving right now. Are we evolving in a favorable direction, or an unfavorable one? It's true that natural selection has virtually ceased to operate in many parts of the world today, but evolution continues because human reproduction is far from random. Just as history marches on indefinitely into the future, both in war and in peace, so, too, does evolution. Reproductive patterns of each generation shape the innate character of successive generations, whether for better, or for worse. Most of us want to give our children as much as our parents gave us, preferably more. We want them to have the best possible education, and every advantage we can afford. We also hope to leave them a better world than the one we were born into. However, the most important legacy we can bequeath to our children is their own biological integrity: good health, high intelligence, and noble character. These traits go a long ways towards insuring their personal happiness and well-being. Taken collectively, these traits constitute the ability of a population to maintain and advance civilization - the most precious of human gifts - for without civilization, chaos reigns, "might makes right," and suffering abounds. The focus of this paper will be on intelligence. Here's the argument, in a nutshell: 1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary. 2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. Without innate intelligence, civilization would never have been created. When intelligence declines, so does civilization. 3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. Civilization is not an either-or proposition. Rather, it's a matter of degree, and each degree, up or down, affects the well-being of every citizen. 4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. Why is this happening? Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children. 5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. Any decline in civilization produces a commensurate increase in the collective "misery quotient." Logic and scientific evidence stand behind each statement listed above. 1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary. Scientists have found that identical twins separated at birth and raised apart are almost identical in IQ, despite the fact that they had totally different environments. Remarkably, twins reared apart are as similar as identical twins reared together by the time they're adults. They also resemble one another strikingly in their mannerisms, the way they laugh, their likes and dislikes, phobias, temperament, sexual preference, educational achievement, income, conscientiousness, musical ability, sense of humor, whether they're criminals or law-abiding, and pretty much everything else that's ever been tested, even traits as peculiar as which vegetables they refuse to eat (Bouchard, 1993). The extent of their similarity amazes even the researchers and the twins themselves. The primacy of genes is likewise demonstrated by adoption studies. Adopted children's IQs resemble those of their biological parents far more closely than they resemble those of their adoptive parents, who essentially provided them with their environments from the time of birth onwards. When adopted children are grown, there's no virtually resemblance between their IQs and those of their adoptive parents (Loehlin, Willerman, and Horn, 1987). The dominant role of heredity in determining IQ is not a theory, it's an established fact, the consensus of hundreds of studies conducted in different times and places by many different researchers. But the public is largely unaware of this fact because the liberal media have told them repeatedly that most experts in IQ testing believe IQ is largely environmental. In reality, the majority of researchers in the field of intelligence testing believes heredity is the more important factor (Snyderman and Rothman, 1988). 2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. This assertion is pretty much self-evident. Lions, wild dogs, bees, ants, chimpanzees, and many other animals live in social groups. They may cooperate in various ways, yet they have nothing that could be called civilization. Why not? Because they're not nearly smart enough! Obviously, if civilization depended entirely upon exposure to an "enriched" environment, we'd all still be skulking about in caves. If human beings first existed in primitive conditions, and the environment counted for everything and genetics nothing (as some assert), how could any progress ever have occurred? It's obvious there's an inborn streak of genius that drives the creation of technology and civilization. One way to look at the relationship between intelligence and civilization is to investigate ancient civilizations, studying why they rose, and why they fell. But a far more straightforward approach would be to simply look around us, and to survey the various countries of the world. Today, in 2004, there are countless gradations of civilization all over the globe. Japan has an average IQ of 104, compared to the U.S. average of 100. Japan is an economic powerhouse, despite being a tiny country with virtually no resources. It's also a peaceful and predictable place in which to live. In Tokyo, a bag of money left on a park bench may sit there for a while until someone eventually turns it in to the authorities. Japan has a higher average IQ than America, Mexico has a lower one, and the black African nations have the lowest. The very same hierarchy of nations replicates itself in America, both in IQ scores and in socioeconomic status (SES). For example, Americans of Japanese ancestry score higher on IQ tests, and are more successful, than average Americans. Blacks in America score lowest and are least successful. The fact that people of Japanese ancestry - both in Japan and in the U.S. - score above average neatly disposes of the common objection that IQ tests are "culturally biased" in favor of Caucasians. Interestingly, SES among individuals within one family is influenced by innate intelligence. One U.S. stud 3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. To say, "The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population" is axiomatic, much like saying, "It's better to be healthy than to have a disease." It's plain for everyone to see that people who live in countries with a high level of civilization have more of everything which is universally considered good, and less of everything which is universally considered bad. For example, they have more money, more fun, better food, nicer clothes, bigger and better houses, better educations, longer lives, less pain and disease, less uncertainty in their lives, less crime, better medical and dental care, more personal power, more happiness and fulfillment, less anguish and despair. Question: "Why do large numbers of people from countries with low levels of civilization risk their lives every year to get to countries with high levels of civilization, while the reverse never occurs?" Economic prosperity makes up a large part of this picture. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) gathered data from 185 countries and found that the average IQ of a nation correlates .7 with its per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and that IQ is the single most important factor in the wealth of a nation. (Free market economy and presence of natural resources were second and third, respectively.) 4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. For hundreds of years, until the early1800s in England and America, there was natural fertility, i.e., no efforts to limit the number of births. Married couples tended to have many children, but not everyone could marry. Men who didn't earn enough to support a family remained single and childless, and the net result was a small positive relationship between fertility and intelligence. Then several books on contraception were published which naturally affected those who could read disproportionately. Condoms and diaphragms became available, and the birth rate of the middle and upper classes declined. By the middle of the century it had become apparent that educated people were having fewer children than the uneducated. This caused considerable alarm, and a number of studies were undertaken both in England and America in the early decades of the 20th century. Schoolchildren's IQs were found to correlate negatively with their number of siblings, which seemed to confirm fears of dysgenic fertility, but this conclusion was questioned because there was no way to know the IQs of the childless. Later, some U.S. studies of adult IQ and number of offspring reported negative correlations, but other similar studies found no correlation. However, the samples used in all these studies were not representative of the U.S. population as a whole - they were restricted either in terms of race, birth cohort, or geographical area. So by mid-to-late 20th century, there was still no definitive answer to the question of dysgenic fertility. Then in 1984, Frank Bean and I had the good fortune to discover an excellent data set, the General Social Survey (GSS), to test the hypothesis. It included a short vocabulary test devised by Thorndike to provide a rough grading of mental ability which was ideal for our study. The GSS had interviewed a large, representative sample of the U.S. population whose reproductive years fell between 1912 and 1982, yielding data which provided the unique opportunity of an overview of the relationship between fertility and IQ for most of the 20th century. In all 15 of the 5-year cohorts, correlations between test scores and number of offspring were negative, and 12 of 15 were statistically significant (Van Court and Bean, 1985). Recently, Richard Lynn and I did a follow-up study which included new data collected in the 1990s by the GSS, and we got very similar results. We calculated that .9 IQ points were being lost per generation (Lynn and Van Court, 2003). To find out how much has been lost during the 20th century, we can simply multiply .9 x 4 generations = 3.6 IQ points. There are no precise data for the latter part of the 19th century, but there's every indication that the period of 1875-1900 was seriously dysgenic. So as a rough (but conservative) estimate of the total 125-year loss, we can multiply .9 x 5 generations = 4.4 IQ points lost from 1875 to the present. A loss of this magnitude would approximately halve those with IQs over 130, and double those with IQs below 70. In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Richard Lynn (1996) found that dysgenic fertility is the rule rather than the exception around the world. There haven't been as many studies done in Europe, but it appears to be about on a par with the U.S. in terms of the severity of the dysgenic trend. The only place dysgenic fertility is not found is sub-Saharan Africa where birth control is not used. As the reader may have begun to suspect, the main reason for dysgenic fertility is that intelligent women use birth control more successfully than unintelligent women do. This seems to be the case regardless of which method is used. Women of high, average, and low-IQ all want, on average, the same number of children, but low-IQ women have far more accidental pregnancies, and thus more children. If all women had the exact number of children they desired, there would be virtually no dysgenic fertility (Van Court, 1984). A second factor is that very intelligent and successful women (doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, and women working at high levels in business) often end up having far fewer children than they would like to have. A recent study found that 33% of high-achieving women are childless by age 40, and only 14% of this group are childless by choice (Hewlett, 2002). 5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. This conclusion follows logically from premises 1 - 4. The concept of civilization is abstract, but here's one easy way to conceptualize what, precisely, it means when "civilization declines": North Americans, Europeans, and Japanese can simply imagine living their entire lives in Mexico. Mexicans can imagine living their entire lives in Africa. That's what a decline in civilization means, and few would attempt to argue that it's a good thing. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) reported that all social problems were exacerbated when they moved the average IQ down statistically in their sample by just 3 points, from 100 to 97. The number of women chronically dependent on welfare increased by almost 15%, illegitimacy increased by 8%, men who were incarcerated increased by 13%, and number of permanent high school dropouts increased by 15%. With an actual 3-point drop, these percentages would represen Egalitarianism: Politically Correct, Scientifically Wrong Clearly, dysgenic fertility is an enormous threat to the human species. So why is absolutely nothing being done about it? In a word, egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is simply the belief that all people are born equal in intelligence, character, talents, and every other way, except for trivial differences in hair color, eye color, and so on. If everyone is born exactly equal, what difference would dysgenic fertility make? Egalitarianism is the ideology the Western world has embraced since the end of World War II. Immediately the question arises, "If we're all born equal on everything, how did we end up so different?" Differences are said to be caused by various environmental factors, and any kind of social problem or pathology is said to be the result of "cultural deprivation," "traumatic experiences," "sub-standard housing," or that ubiquitous arch-villain, "society." Egalitarianism is so fundamentally implausible that it's hard to believe that millions of people actually believe it. Anyone who has had more than one child understands that they have different personalities from the day they're born. Yet a recent poll found that fewer than 1 in 5 Americans believes genes play a major role in human behavior. Most people thought drug addiction, mental illness, and homosexuality were influenced by heredity to a small degree, but about 40% thought genes play no role whatsoever (U.S. News and World Report, April 21, 1997, p. 72-80). There's not one shred of scientific evidence to support egalitarianism, and there's a mountain of evidence that disproves it, but that doesn't deter egalitarians in the media and academia, who give the pretense of scientific legitimacy by pointing to studies that report associations between one social pathology and another. For example: "Children who grow up in poor neighborhoods tend to become criminals." On this basis, efforts are made to build nicer housing projects and spruce up the slums, with (big surprise) no impact on crime. It's obvious to any casual observer that correlations exist between poor environments and pathologies of various sorts. But correlation does not prove causation! Roosters crow at sunrise. Does this mean roosters cause the sun to rise? If poverty actually causes crime, shouldn't the crime rate have increased astronomically during The Great Depression? Well, it didn't. Programs designed to solve social problems based on egalitarian propaganda-disguised-as-science are universally ballyhooed at the beginning. Despite high hopes, lofty rhetoric, and truly enormous expenditures, demonstrable benefits have been tiny, transient, artifactual, or non-existent. Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), the main welfare program in the U.S., was intended to eliminate poverty and ameliorate the host of social problems associated with it. A major study of its effects reported that it has actually made the problems it was intended to solve worse, while costing taxpayers billions (Murray, 1986). Head Start was begun in order to raise the IQs of disadvantaged ghetto children by providing them with an "enriched" early environment, yet there have been no lasting IQ gains. Somehow its original purpose has been forgotten, it's lauded as a great "success," and it grows ever larger and more expensive. "Superstition Ain't the Way" We often feel a smug, self-satisfied superiority when we read about follies of the past, such as the Salem witch trials, the Inquisition, bizarre medical practices, such as letting blood or applying leeches to cure disease. Old films of man's early attempts at flight are guaranteed to get a laugh. But how do we know that we ourselves are not, at this very moment, in the grips of one staggeringly-stupid delusion which will make us look like fools to people in the future? How embarrassing! It wouldn't be far-fetched to say egalitarianism is the most prevalent "superstition" of the 20th and 21st centuries - probably of all times - given that it is a belief about causality which millions of people accept, for which there is no scientific evidence, which science has, in fact, disproved. Does egalitarianism qualify as superstition? Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary defines superstition as: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation . . . a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary A popular song by Stevie Wonder entitled "Superstition" contains lyrics that go like this: "When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way!" This sums up our situation quite nicely. The Western world has accepted uncritically a huge amount of misinformation about human nature, and as a result of our "mega- superstition," we're causing ourselves, and all our descendants, "mega-suffering." We squander vast amounts of time, effort, and money on misguided programs when all the while our innate intelligence, the very foundation for our civilization and well-being, is silently and steadily slipping away. Three Factors Why is the Western world in the grips of such a vast illusion? For thousands of years everyone took it for granted that some people are born smarter than others simply because it's so obviously true. Even in the early decades of the 20th century, egalitarianism would have been laughed at, and eugenics was widely accepted by prominent people whose views spanned the entire political spectrum. To list just a few proponents: George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Francis Galton (who coined the term "eugenics"), Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Lindbergh, and Winston Churchill. Julian Huxley described eugenics as "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive and of longest range." Yet today, eugenics is considered the ultimate form of cruelty! Why ideas go in and out of fashion is something I don't fully understand. However, below are 3 factors which probably enter into this particular about-face in public opinion: (1) After World War II, the salient beliefs of the vanquished countries were universally rejected. Hitler strongly advocated eugenics, though not in the same way eugenicists do today. (Hitler opposed IQ tests on the grounds that they were "Jewish.") Genetics, behavior, and race came to be regarded as unsavory topics. The eugenics movement originated in Britain and the United States, and 27 other countries besides Germany enacted eugenics legislation during the same period and neither genocide nor anything else dreadful happened in those countries, so no remotely reasonable case can be made that eugenics causes genocide. The Communists took the opposite view - that the environment is all-important and genetics counts for nothing - yet they murdered far more people than the Nazis. Nevertheless, no matter how unfair, eugenics has become stigmatized because it's associated in the minds of many with Hitler. (2) Public opinion in the Western world is largely shaped by journalists (who, it should be pointed out, bear much of the blame for promoting this unfair association with Hitler). Countless studies have found that journalists tend to be far more liberal politically than the general population. Among university students, business and hard-science majors tend to be the most conservative politically, and literature and journalism students the most liberal, suggesting a self-selection among students who enter the field of journalism. In other words, people who are attracted to journalism, for whatever reason, tend to be liberal by temperament. Along with the liberal journalists, Marxist academics with a Snyderman and Rothman (1988) compared what was reported about IQ - on TV, in newspapers, and in magazines - to what scientists doing research on IQ actually said about it. They found that the media consistently gave extremely biased accounts, suggesting that IQ didn't really measure anything important, that it was "culturally biased," and that most experts on IQ agreed with such assertions, when, in fact, most experts disagreed with these assertions. On the issue of race, the media have failed utterly in their responsibility to report scientific findings to the public. Actually, it's far worse than "failing in their responsibility to report the facts," because that would imply that they were a bit lackadaisical, or that they just didn't do all they should have done. In reality, the media have blatantly lied to the public, and this has been going on for decades. To some, "blatantly lied" may sound like inflammatory rhetoric, but I would respond by saying that there is proof of their deception, and I would ask "What kind of flagrant dishonesty are we reserving the term 'blatantly lied to' that's so much worse than this?" One would be hard-pressed to think of anything more egregious. Snyderman and Rothman (1988) found that the majority of scientists who do research on IQ believes part of the black-white difference in IQ is genetic. By analyzing hundreds of media reports, they also found that the media overwhelmingly portray this view as one held only by a few screwballs. This massive disinformation campaign about IQ, genetics, and race has been waged by liberal journalists and Marxist academics against the Western world since the 1950s. Like an octopus with far-reaching tentacles, it's wrecked havoc in a multitude of ways, not the least of which is that it's made it impossible even to have a serious public debate about eugenics, an obvious prerequisite to implementing a eugenics program. Such wholesale dishonesty might be expected under a Communist regime, but for this to take place in democratic societies cries out for an explanation. (3) To fully understand why egalitarianism reigns supreme and eugenics has been made into a taboo subject, this topic must be viewed as part of the larger Zeitgeist which also includes obeisance to "diversity" and "multiculturalism," reverse discrimination, attacks on Christianity, support for ruinous immigration policies, promotion of promiscuity and homosexuality, advocacy of miscegenation, and moral relativism, much of which can be subsumed under the rubric of Political Correctness. Did this pervasive belief-system just "happen," like the weather, or did people make it happen? If the latter, who, and why? When a serious crime is committed, the first question a detective is likely to ask concerns motive, i.e., "Who benefits?" Likewise, one might reasonably ask, "Who benefits from this dishonest and destructive Zeitgeist?" It's an extraordinarily interesting and important topic, but unfortunately, unraveling this issue any further is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead I will refer the reader to Kevin MacDonald's brilliant book, The Culture of Critique (1998), the source for answers about the Zeitgeist and the hidden agenda behind it. MacDonald makes a shocking case, but one which is well-documented and compelling. Conclusion The results of one large, highly-respected study of mental retardation illustrate the potential power-for-good of eugenics. Two percent of the sample were retarded, and they produced 36% of the next generation of retardates (Reed and Reed, 1965). Clearly, if that 2% had not had children, mental retardation would have been reduced by 36% in one generation in that group. With only slight modification, these figures can be applied to the general population. If the retarded were given sufficient cash or other incentives to adopt permanent birth control, mental retardation could be cut by approximately 1/3 in just one generation. This is only one among many possible eugenic measures, but this step alone would significantly alleviate all social problems, prevent a good deal of child abuse and neglect (the retarded make very poor parents), provide a big boost to the economy, and cause the "misery quotient" to plummet. Egalitarians take a circuitous route to solving social problems - they keep trying to change people by altering their environments. Despite witnessing their abysmal string of failures, our natural desire to alleviate suffering and improve the world persists. This desire finds new hope in eugenics based on science, not propaganda and wishful thinking. Eugenics takes the direct route. It holds the unique potential of actually creating a better world, of making profound, concrete, lasting improvements in "the human condition" by improving human beings themselves. I would like to thank Chris Brand for his helpful comments on the manuscript. REFERENCES Bouchard, Thomas, (1993), Twins as a Tool of Behavioral Genetics. New York: J. Wiley Flynn, J.R., (1984) The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978, Psychological Bulletin, 95, 29-51 Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2002, p. 86-87 Jencks, Christopher (1972), Inequality, New York: Basic Books Inc. Herrnstein, Richard, and Murray, Charles, (1994) The Bell Curve, p. 368, New York: New York Free Press Loehlin, J., Willerman, L., Horn, J. (1990) Heredity, environment, and personality change: evidence from the Texas Adoption Project, Journal of Personality 58:1, p.221-246 Lynn, Richard (1996), Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Westport, Conn.: Praeger Lynn, Richard (2001), Eugenics: A Reassessment, Westport, CT: Praeger Lynn, Richard, and Van Court, Marian (2003) New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States, Intelligence 32:2, March, p.193-201, http://www.eugenics.net Lynn, Richard and Vanhanen, Tatu (2002), IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Westport, Conn: Praeger MacDonald, Kevin (1998), The Culture of Critique, Westport CT: Praeger Murray, Charles (1984), Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, New York: Basic Books Reed, E.W., and Reed, S.C., (1965) Mental Retardation: A Family Study, Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, p. 78 Rushton, J.P., (1999), "Secular gains in IQ not related to the g factor and inbreeding depression unlike Black-White differences: A reply to Flynn," Personality and Individual Differences, 26, p.381-389 Snyderman, Mark, and Rothman, Stanley (1988) The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy, New Brunswick: Transaction Books Van Court, Marian (1983 ) Unwanted births and dysgenic reproduction in the United States, The Eugenics Bulletin, Spring, 1983, http://www.eugenics.net Van Court, Marian and Bean, Frank (1985), Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912 to 1982, Intelligence 9, p.23-32, http://www.eugenics.net |
IQ Will Put You In Your Place
IQ Will Put You In Your Place
From the Sunday Times, UK, May 25 1997.
A longer version of this article appears in the summer issue of The Public Interest.
A few years ago the late Richard Herrnstein and I published a controversial book about IQ, The Bell Curve, in which we said that much would depend on IQ. On average, the bright children from such families will do well in life - and the dull children will do poorly. Unemployment, poverty and illegitimacy will be almost as great among the children from even these fortunate families as they are in society at large - not quite as great, because a positive family background does have some good effect, but almost, because IQ is such an important factor.
"Nonsense!" said the critics. "Have the good luck to be born to the privileged and the doors of life will open to you - including doors that will let you get a good score in an IQ test. Have the bad luck to be born to a single mother struggling on the dole and you will be held down in many ways - including your IQ test score." The Bell Curve's purported relationships between IQ and success are spurious, they insisted: nurture trumps nature; environment matters more than upbringing.
An arcane debate about statistical methods ensued. Then several American academics began using a powerful, simple way of testing who was right: instead of comparing individual children from different households, they compared sibling pairs with different IQs. How would brothers and sisters who were nurtured by the same parents, grew up in the same household and lived in the same neighbourhood, but had markedly different IQs, get on in life?
The research bears out what parents of children with unequal abilities already know - that try as they might to make Johnny as bright as Sarah, it is difficult, and even impossible, to close the gap between them.
A very large database in the United States contains information about several thousand sibling pairs who have been followed since 1979. To make the analysis as unambiguous as possible, I have limited my sample to brothers and sisters whose parents are in the top 75 per cent of American earners, with a family income in 1978 averaging ?40,000 (in today's money).
Families living in poverty, or even close to it, have been excluded. The parents in my sample also stayed together for at least the first seven years of the younger sibling's life.
Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of 90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs.
How much difference did IQ make? Earned income is a good place to begin. In 1993, when we took our most recent look at them, members of the sample were aged 28-36. That year, the bright siblings earned almost double the average of the dull: £22,400 compared to £11,800. The normals were in the middle, averaging £16,800.
These differences are sizeable in themselves. They translate into even more drastic differences at the extremes. Suppose we take a salary of £50,000 or more as a sign that someone is an economic success. A bright sibling was six-and-a-half times more likely to have reached that level than one of the dull. Or we may turn to the other extreme, poverty: the dull sibling was five times more likely to fall below the American poverty line than one of the bright. Equality of opportunity did not result in anything like equality of outcome. Another poverty statistic should also give egalitarians food for thought: despite being blessed by an abundance of opportunity, 16.3% of the dull siblings were below the poverty line in 1993. This was slightly higher than America's national poverty rate of 15.1%.
Opportunity, clearly, isn't everything. In modern America, and also, I suspect, in modern Britain, it is better to be born smart and poor than rich and stupid. Another way of making this point is to look at education. It is often taken for granted that parents with money can make sure their children get a college education. The young people in our selected sample came from families that were overwhelmingly likely to support college enthusiastically and have the financial means to help. Yet while 56% of the bright obtained university degrees, this was achieved by only 21% of the normals and a minuscule 2% of the dulls. Parents will have been uniformly supportive, but children are not uniformly able.
The higher prevalence of college degrees partly explains why the bright siblings made so much more money, but education is only part of the story. Even when the analysis is restricted to siblings who left school without going to college, the brights ended up in the more lucrative occupations that do not require a degree, becoming technicians, skilled craftsmen, or starting their own small businesses. The dull siblings were concentrated in menial jobs.
The differences among the siblings go far beyond income. Marriage and children
offer the most vivid example. Similar proportions of siblings married, whether normal, bright or dull - but the divorce rate was markedly higher among the dull than among the normal or bright, even after taking length of marriage into account. Demographers will find it gloomily interesting that the average age at which women had their first birth was almost four years younger for the dull siblings than for the bright ones, while the number of children born to dull women averaged 1.9, half a child more than for either the normal or the bright. Most striking of all were the different illegitimacy rates. Of all the first-born children of the normals, 21% were born out of wedlock , about a third lower than the figure for the United States as a whole, presumably reflecting the advantaged backgrounds from which the sibling sample was drawn. Their bright siblings were much lower still, with less than 10% of their babies born illegitimate. Meanwhile, 45% of the first-born of the dull siblings were born outside of marriage.
The inequalities among siblings that I have described are from 1993 and are going to become much wider in the years ahead. The income trajectory for low-skill occupations usually peaks in a worker's twenties or thirties. The income trajectory for managers and professionals usually peaks in their fifties. The snapshot I have given you was taken for an age group of 28-36 when many of the brights are still near the bottom of a steep rise into wealth and almost all the dulls' incomes are stagnant or even falling. . . .
The inequalities I have presented are the kind you are used to seeing in articles that compare inner-city children with suburban ones, black with white, children of single parents with those from intact families. Yet they refer to the children of a population more advantaged in jobs, income and marital stability than even the most starry-eyed social reformer can hope to achieve.
You may be wondering whether the race, age or education of siblings affects my figures. More extended analyses exist, but the short answer is that the phenomena I have described survive such questions. Siblings who differ in IQ also differ widely in important social outcomes, no matter how anyone tries to explain away the results. Ambitious parents may be dismayed by this conclusion, but it is none the less true for all that.
A final thought: I have outlined the inequalities that result from siblings with different IQs. Add in a few other personal qualities: industry, persistence, charm, and the differences among people will inevitably produce a society of high inequalities, no matter how level the playing field has been made. Indeed, the more level the playing field, and the less that accidents of birth enter into it, the more influence personal qualities will have. I make this point as an antidote to glib thinking on both sides of the Atlantic and from both sides of the political spectrum. Inequality is too often seen as something that results from defects in society that can be fixed by a more robust economy, more active social programmes, or better schools. It is just not so.
The effects of inequality cannot be significantly reduced, let alone quelled, unless the government embarks on a compulsory redistribution of wealth that raises taxes astronomically and strictly controls personal enterprise. Some will call this social justice. Others will call it tyranny. I side with the latter, but whichever position one takes, it is time to stop pretending that, without such massive compulsion, human beings in a fair and prosperous society will ever be much more equal than they are now.
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Raymond B. Cattell and The Fourth Inquisition
Raymond B. Cattell and The Fourth Inquisition
Raymond B. Cattell and The Fourth Inquisition
By Glayde Whitney
Florida State University
This paper originally appeared in The Mankind Quarterly , vol. 38, #1 & 2, Fall/Winter 1997, p.99-124.
The events of August 1997 will assure that the already eminent scientist Raymond B. Cattell will be remembered in history as elevated to the pantheon occupied by such as Roger Bacon, William of Occam, and Galileo Galilei. The infamous events of August and the players will be summarized below, but first a context needs to be established in order to make any sense of the scurrilous attack and the craven response of the American Psychological Association (APA).
Approaches to Knowledge
The Harvard biologist, historian and philosopher of science Ernst Mayr (1982) has suggested that as human populations evolve from savagery to civilization their approach to knowledge takes one or another of two paths.
One approach leads to modern science, the other to authoritative dogma. The direction toward science, traceable back to the philosophies of ancient Greece, is unique to Western civilization. The much more common direction toward authoritative dogmas is illustrated by the revealed religions that sprang from the Middle East.
The direction toward science traces to the first recorded Western philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c.636-c.546 BC). Thales maintained that to gain knowledge and understanding one should start with naturalistic observation, that is, descriptions of events as they exist in the real world. We should then seek natural explanations for natural phenomena. Gods, supernatural beings, and forces or events that were outside the system should not be invoked as explanations for events within the system. A third major position was that it is acceptable, even encouraged, to question existing explanations, to use criticism in order to improve knowledge and theories. These three principles that trace to the beginnings of recorded Western thought capture the essence of modern science; naturalistic observation, natural explanation, and criticism as a beneficial tool to advancing knowledge.
Alas, from Thales' time through today his approach has, on a worldwide basis, been a minority position under constant attack. The road to dogma starts with assertions of knowledge based in authority. Often from a great man or leader come statements, frequently but not always based in revelation. The religious and political aspects of dogmatic systems often become commingled. The revelations leading to dogmas often claim supernatural inspiration, but this is not necessarily the case. Christian theology, Marxian sociology, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory equally well illustrate dogmatic belief systems. The systems with their statements to account for reality become codified into a set of rigid beliefs. Not only is criticism and questioning not encouraged, it is condemned. The less than complete supporter, the doubter, is shunned, outcast, outlawed, a heretic, criminal and evil sinner. Followers will believe on the basis of acceptance of authority ("on faith") and will not deviate from the established dogmas that tend to become ever more rigid. Encounters with the partially understood real world, in all its foibles, always lead to discrepancy between dogma and natural observation of real phenomena.
It is considered necessary to preserve the authoritarian dogma and the power of the authorities in the face of conflicting truths. The Path of Righteousness knows what is good for man and society. Dissenters, free thinkers, or those with new knowledge are viewed as a threat to all that is Good. Sanctions, laws, censorship, need to be imposed and enforced. This is the realm of Inquisitions. In the history of Western civilization there have been four main identifiable inquisitions. It is the fourth that we suffer today.
Inquisitions
First Inquisition. The first major inquisition was established in 1233 AD to suppress heresy. The groundwork leading up to the need for this inquisition extends back to the origins of the Christian religion in the west. The few centuries around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire were turbulent. The Roman Emperor Constantine I had his famous vision (312 AD) which led to his establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. Shortly thereafter the Empire fell; various invading Germanic tribes repeatedly sacked Rome. In the turmoil many of the writings of the ancients, Greek and Roman, were temporarily "lost" to Western civilization. Aristotle, Galen, Thales, were reintroduced only centuries later.
St. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) early systematized Christian doctrine in his monumental On the Trinity. He argued against paganism in The City of God, and provided what has been called a "classic of Christian mysticism" in his autobiographical Confessions. Augustine came to be recognized as the father of theology and over the centuries of the dark ages his approach became official dogma.
The essence of Augustinian dogma is that truth must be accepted on faith. And truth resides in the revealed word of God as represented in the Bible and interpreted by the leaders of the Church. With the "rediscovery" of the learned writings of the Ancients, often acquired from Islam and translated from Arabic back into Latin, problems arose. Here was knowledge, and approaches to knowledge such as Aristotelian deductive logic, not envisioned in the existing dogma. The age of the scholastics was upon the world as scholars tried to incorporate the new knowledge.
Robert Grosseteste (1175 - 1253), Franciscan and first chancellor of Oxford University, studied Aristotle and attempted to integrate the Greek knowledge with Christian dogma. He suggested that there were actually two routes to knowledge, observation with deductive reasoning was one route, while authority (revelation from the written word as interpreted by dogma) was another. In the direction of science, Grosseteste formulated his famous Principle of Falsification: when faced with an apparent conflict between observation and dogma, go with the observation. Experience can falsify the pronouncements of authority.
This won't do at all, hence the Papal Inquisition of 1233. Times were dicey for the scholastics. William of Occam (c.1285 - 1349) escaped capture when he fled. In the same year (1264) was published Roger Bacon's De Computo Naturali and Thomas Acquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles. For his troubles Bacon (c. 1214 - 1294) was imprisoned - 15 years - for heresy. Among the charged crimes was "suggesting novelties". Although it was touch-and-go for Acquinas (1225 -1274), he was eventually sainted and his solutions (Summa Theologica) became the new dogma. As had Grosseteste, Acquinas tried to integrate Greek natural philosophy, essentially Aristotle, with Christian dogma. In God's perfect wisdom these two approaches to knowledge will always ultimately agree. However, in our fallibility there will on occasion appear to be a conflict between rational observation (
science) and the revealed word (religion). When in doubt, go with revelation. The subsequent hardening of the new theology into dogma set the stage for the third inquisition.
Second Inquisition. The second of the major inquisitions was established in 1478 as the Spanish Inquisition. This one was primarily the result of conflicts between competing segments of society. The Spanish monarchy established the inquisition to enforce laws of conversion and to catch false converts. Over the preceding centuries members of the Jewish community had steadily amassed increasing proportions of wealth and power. They, along with Muslims, had been forced to either convert or leave the country. When it was suspected that many of the conversos were secretly retaining their Jewish values and culture, the inquisition was established to root them out. A consideration of this second recognized inquisition would lead too far astray for the present essay. MacDonald (1994) provides an in-depth consideration of the Spanish Inquisition from the point of view of the social sciences.
Third Inquisition. The third of the main inquisitions was established in 1542 to suppress heresy. As with the first inquisition, a basic problem was that the established authorities would not integrate new knowledge that was discovered after the establishment of their dogmas. Instead the new knowledge was treated as a central threat to all that was good in society. Suppression and censorship was the answer.
The synthesis of Greek wisdom and Christian theology that was rigidified as dogma after the work of St. Thomas Acquinas included the flat earth with man as the center of the universe. Clearly the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system could not be tolerated. Although widely discussed, Copernicus' theory was published only in 1543 when the author was on his deathbed, and then presented only as a speculative thought exercise. It was in 1591 that Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) was arrested for a variety of thought crimes, including that he believed the Copernican "theory" to be true.
Andrew White poignantly wrote:
But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the truth lived on. (p.125)
It has been pointed out that in the latter decades of the 20th century the fourth inquisition no longer burns its victims, although it has arranged the firing of rather many.
The story of Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) is well known to all. Only a decade after the burning of Bruno, Galileo built a telescope. By 1610 he was proclaiming on the basis of new evidence the truth of the Copernican Theory. In essence, "come look through the telescope and see for yourself the evidence for the theory". Arrested by the Inquisition in 1616, he was released only to be re-arrested in 1633. Held under house arrest, the old man was forced under threat of torture to recant.
For the physical sciences the inquisitional suppression and censorship was coming to an end. Indeed, Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727), born in the year of Galileo's death, lived to be knighted and upon death was buried in Westminster Abbey, two of the highest honors from his Church and Country.
Lagging the physical sciences by a few centuries, the psychological and social sciences are still suffering attempts at suppression and censorship, which characterize the inquisitional approach.
Fourth Inquisition. The fourth inquisition was established in the mid-twentieth century to suppress heresy. As with the first and third inquisitions, a main problem has been that the ideologues did not integrate new knowledge with their already established objectives and dogmas. Instead they viewed new discoveries as a direct threat to all that was good and important in society. As with the earlier inquisitions, the fourth attempts to suppress and censor new knowledge that is perceived to be threatening to old dogmas.
Somewhere between Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton an influential segment of the intelligentsia lurched far to the ideological and political left. Thomas Jefferson certainly did not confuse rule of law ("all men are created equal") and hereditary reality. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote,
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents .... For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son." (Jefferson, 1813).
In the face of what experience proves, and in open antagonism to much of twentieth century science, a powerful strain of modern liberalism worships radical egalitarianism. Modern liberalism is attempting to enforce Lysenkoism throughout Western civilization. The travesty that is Lysenkoism ruined the science and economy of the Soviet Union. It is well known as an example of the folly of attempting to repeal truth in the service of ideology (Berg, 1988; Medvedev, 1971; Soyfer, 1994). What is less often acknowledged is that the spirit of Lysenkoism is alive and well in the form of modern liberalism's enforcement of radical egalitarianism.
There and here the guiding theory is identical; it is socialist utopia based on egalitarianism, with what the behavioral scientists call environmental determinism. In 1948 Stalin actually outlawed genetics as being a western bourgeois construction that was incompatible with the truths of Marxist-Leninism. Like outlawing the heliocentric nature of the solar system. Hillary doesn't have quite that political clout, yet.
The theory that Stalin and Hillary share is that all those newborns, wheat plants for Uncle Joe, human babies for Mother Hillary, have identical potentials for growth and development. If some individuals don't do as well as others, it is because of their early experience. This is obviously true - everyone knows that fertilizer is important for wheat plants, and everyone knows that early nutrition and stimulation is important for humans. This is so obviously true that anyone who questions its application to the problems at hand is an idiot, an enemy of the state, and a mean-spirited hate monger. There the eminent scientist who objected, the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, died of disease and starvation in Gulag. Here eminent scientists that voice objections are subjected to vitriolic ad hominem attacks [And the end of whatever federal research support they may have had].
In addition to individual differences there are those vexatious group differences. There winter wheat and spring wheat did not produce equal crop outcomes. Here it is altogether too obvious that various ethnic/racial groups do not produce equal educational, criminal, or job performance outcomes. Although no one was actually sure of all of the reasons for the differential outcomes, if you did not acquiesce to the environmentalist socialist egalitarian explanation, you were evil, a maverick beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. There a hated Morganist-Mendelist, here a contemptuous racist. (Whitney, 1997).
Exactly where and how modern liberalism escaped the bounds of reality is a topic of widespread discussion. The seeds of radical egalitarianism may be contained in the basics of Christianity, with its teaching that all men are equal in the eyes of God (Bork, 1996; Pearson, 1996). Certainly the nineteenth century New England, largely Unitarian, social reformers were influenced not only by their religion, but also by the contemporaneous revolutionaries in Europe.
A major lurch to the left occurred with the bloo
dy French revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality, fraternity". Then there was the 1847 publication of the Communist Manifesto, followed by the 1848 wave of riots and revolutions throughout Europe. The 1867 first volume of Das Kapital was dedicated to Darwin for the notions of evolutionary materialism and progress in the world. However, it is essentially non-biological and like the rest of Marx's writing contains no appreciation of evolutionary biology.
In areas pretending to science, as late as 1934 Franz Boas was maintaining that the basis of all serious study was the work of Theodor Waitz. Waitz's major work of 1858 was the pre-Darwinian On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man. This thread was not originally anti-Darwinian; rather it was a-Darwinian or non-Darwinian, an approach to the study of man rooted in biblical creationism with a monogenesist emphasis (Mayr, 1982; Degler, 1991).
Many writers agree that a major wrenching leftward happened with the protest decade of the 1960s. In his autobiographical Radical Son, David Horowitz (1997) describes how a group of ideologically committed red-diaper babies, with support and encouragement of the underground Communist Party, engineered much of the radicalism of the 1960s. In Destructive Generation Collier and Horowitz (1995) explain that "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" (p. 246).
There is a "readiness to reshape reality to make the world correspond to an idea" (p. 37). There is a "willingness to tinker with the facts to serve a greater truth" (p.37). And so it has obviously been since the 1960s. Over recent decades, as the scientific data accumulate the stridency of the Left intensifies. Driven by ideology and not constrained by the truth, as all else fails they engage in misrepresentation and character assassination.
Raymond B. Cattell described some aspects of the workings of this inquisition which has been snarling at his heels for many decades. In A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, Cattell (1972) wrote:
The danger is not only that politicians and private institutions with axes to grind will find tame or corruptible social scientists to support their positions. The greater danger which recent experiences both here and abroad, e.g., Lysenkoism in Russia, have revealed is that partisans primarily political in interest and intention either accidentally or deliberately infiltrate the ranks of science. In the case of the Lysenko episode, and comparable events in Nazi Germany, the disturbing realization to scientists was that the exile or death of those ejected from their academic positions followed what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists, but was actually politically staged." (p. 38).
Robert Bork has commented on a recent high-profile example of "what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists" (Cattell, 1972, p.38). Bork (1996) pointed out that:
For egalitarians there is always lurking the nightmare that there may be genetic differences between ethnic groups that result in different average levels of performance in different activities. Only that fear can explain the explosive rage with which some commentators received The Bell Curve by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which, as a small part of a much larger thesis concluded that there are heritable differences in cognitive ability among the races. Some comments expressed respectful and thoughtful disagreement, some asked for careful reexamination of the data and arguments, but some did little more than shout "Nazi". Herrnstein and Murray are not racists but serious scholars. They may be right or they may not, but the episode indicates the degree to which the ideology of egalitarianism censors expression and thought in sensitive areas. (pp. 267-268).
Many contemporary events amply illustrate the truly inquisitional nature of modern liberalism in the defense of radical egalitarianism. The titles of some papers written by targets of the inquisition are informative, such as "Egalitarian fiction and collective fraud" (Gottfredson, 1994) and "Ideology and censorship in behavior genetics" (Whitney, 1995). While under criminal investigation instigated because of his research, Rushton (1994) wrote "The equalitarian dogma revisited".
It is Christopher Brand, lately of Edinburgh University, UK, who in 1997 suffered the high penalty of being fired for challenging the egalitarian fiction. Having been on the psychology department faculty for over twenty years, in 1996 Brand authored a book entitled The g Factor. Published in the UK by John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest of the international scholarly houses, the company's promotional literature contained the statement:
The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern `educationalists'. This short book provides a great deal for thought and debate.
Brand's book enjoyed brisk sales in the UK for about 6 weeks, and was scheduled for release in the US, when it was suddenly "depublished", actually withdrawn from circulation, seemingly at the command of Wiley's New York executive headquarters. Wiley told the media that the book "makes assertions that we find repellent". Branded a "racist", Christopher Brand was in due course suspended from teaching and administrative duties at Edinburgh University. A "Special Tribunal" was convened, following which Mr. Brand was sacked. At the time of this writing, and in accord with the procedures of classical Lysenkoism, the proceedings of the Special Tribunal remain secret.
The present fourth inquisition is directly analogous with the preceding first and third inquisitions. The agenda and objectives of liberalism were established first before, and then with complete disregard for, Darwin's (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The dogmatic position of modern liberalism with radical egalitarianism was established in a philosophical and political context. The positions were hardened into dogma with no regard for the discoveries of the explorations of the 19th century. Additionally, the genetics and behavior genetics that routinely attacked with religious fervor by the radical egalitarians twentieth century science, not nineteenth century political theology. Marx was writing in the 1840s and 1860s, while Mendel's epoch-setting experiments and theory were not widely appreciated until after 1900.
Unfortunately the radical egalitarianism characteristic of modern liberalism became formalized as a quasi-theological dogma just before the discovery of much new knowledge. Just as the first inquisition arose because the existing dogma did not encompass knowledge of Aristotle, and the third inquisition functioned because the dogma was inconsistent with the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, so the current fourth inquisition exists in large part because its dogma is inconsistent with the discoveries of Darwin, Galton, and Mendel.
One must never underestimate what Richard John Neuhaus called "the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intoler- ance and illiberality of liberalism." (Bork, 1996, p. 336).
The Events of August 1997
The highest honor bestowed by the American Psychological Association (APA) is the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science. As the APA prepared for its 105th annual convention to be held in August, the house organ American Psychologist (1997) for August announced the winner of the Gold Medal.
The American Psycholog
ical Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishment in 4 areas of psychology. The 1997 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science is Raymond B. Cattell.
Joseph D. Matarazzo, President of the APF, will present the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science at the 105th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association on August 16, 1997, at 5:00 p.m. in Ballroom III of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers in Chicago. (p. 797).
The 92-year-old Cattell, with a traveling companion to assist him, traveled from his retirement home in Hawaii to be at the meeting in Chicago to receive this special honor, a gold medal award for a lifetime of work. But Joseph D. Matarazzo did not present the Gold Medal on August 16. Instead:
On Aug. 13, the foundation decided to postpone the presentation of the award to Raymond B. Cattell, in the week preceeding the opening of the APA's 1997 Annual Convention, concerns that Cattell's writings were racist and advocated the separation of the races were voiced to the association. (http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep97/award.html).
Since its founding in 1892, the American Psychological Association (APA) has only once changed the statement of objectives contained in its bylaws. In 1892 the one objective was "to advance psychology as a science." From 1945 there have been three: "The object of the APA shall be to advance psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare". From 1945, political concerns, left wing, became a more prominent, and contentious, part of the APA. In the files of the historian of the Psychonomic Society are letters from prominent psychologists of the time: "All manner of interests, mostly non-scientific, sprang up"; the APA proliferated into a "chaotic monster" that "fails to discriminate between science and charlatanry". It engaged in much political lobbying for mostly liberal causes. In protest, breakaway scientists formed the Psychonomic Society in 1959. Many members of the APA drifted away over the years, often in protest of the politicization of the Association. Finally a major schism occurred. In 1987/88 psychologists who wished to separate from the increasingly professional and political APA formed the American Psychological Society. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the remnant APA was such an easy mark for the Inquisition in 1997.
The New York Times for August 15 reported an interview with Rhea Farberman, director of communications for the association:
Ms. Farberman said a committee had voted to give Cattell the award "before it knew of the information that has since come to light," adding "This new information has raised a lot of concerns, and we want to be thorough in making a judgment." (Hilts, 1997).
This excuse of new information "coming to light" is preposterous. Cattell has never been retiring about his interpretations of data and theory. Frankly outspoken throughout his long career, his views have been widely known for decades among the scientific community. Ms. Farberman appears to be impugning the competence of the leading psychologists that had in full knowledge chosen Cattell for their most prestigious award. It was not even for "new information" that Cattell is on the hit list of the Inquisition; that information has been public knowledge for years.
Poor Ms. Farberman, and the APF, should have realized that with the (as yet) uncensored Internet it is becoming almost impossible to hide the most embarrassing details of organizational snafus. From winnowing great masses of Internet traffic (and admittedly some of it second-hand or further removed, and impossible to cite confidential sources) it seems that it was not new information but failure of courage that tripped up the APF. Apparently the original and lengthly letter of nomination spelled out both Cattell's scientific strengths and specifically flagged those of his views that are deemed controversial. A committee of some six well-informed past-presidents chose Cattell as deserving the Gold Medal with full knowledge of his works. Then after the award was publicly announced, a well- experienced Inquisitor, Barry Mehler (not himself a psychologist), is reputed to have threatened to disrupt the convention if the award were given to Cattell. Shades of a `60s convention in Chicago! Against much advice, and with at least one eminent psychologist threatening to resign if he did so, Matarazzo decided to cancel the ceremony and further investigate the award.
The official citation that accompanied the Gold Medal Award is as follows:
In a remarkable 70-year career, Raymond B. Cattell has made prodigious, landmark contributions to psychology, including factor analytic mapping of the domains of personality, motivation, and abilities; exploration of three different medias of assessment; separation of fluid and crystallized intelligence; and numerous methodological innovations. Thus, Cattell became recognized in numerous substantive areas, providing a model of the complete psychologist in an age of specialization. It may be said that Cattell stands without peer in his creation of a unified theory of individual differences integrating intellectual, temperamental, and dynamic domains of personality in the context of environmental and hereditary influences. (Amer. Psychol, 1997, 797).
The fact is that it was Cattell's massive contribution to science that led to the APF decision to select him for this prestigious award, but the decision to withhold it was made on purely political grounds, i.e. that he "advocated the separation of the races." It is that substantive and theoretical domain specified in the last two words of his citation, "hereditary influences", that long ago flagged Cattell as a target of the Inquisition. In craven response to the attack on Cattell, the APA announced that the American Psychological Foundation would now appoint a special Blue Ribbon Panel, to consist of both psychologists and non-psychologists, to review the award.
The Accusers
Only two accusers have been publicly mentioned as attacking the award of the Gold Medal to Cattell. Apparently it doesn't take much to derail an organization as sensitive to the Inquisitional furies as is the APA. Neither were psychologists. The heavyweight was Abraham Foxman, identified in the New York Times as "the national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith," who has "written to the association protesting the award, saying it would give the group's `seal of approval to a man who has, whatever his other achievements, exhibited a lifelong commitment to racial supremacy theories.'" (Hilts, 1997).
Although it was probably the criticism of the influential ADL organization that caused the APA to hold up the award at the last moment, the initiative would seem to have come from the lesser accuser, one Barry Mehler, an associate professor of humanities at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Mehler has incorporated something that he calls "The Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR)".
On the Internet Mehler has provided quotes of himself: "`ISAR created this story and it's far from over,' Mehler said. `It is gratifying to see my Institute attain this level of credibility in so short a time. I will be monitoring the investigation of the blue-ribbon committee.' ... Mehler ... has made national headlines with his recent criticism of the American Psychological Foundation's (APF) choice of psychologist Raymond B. Cattell for a lifetime achievement award .... Mehler's protest has stirred up national publicity in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Mehler has been interviewed by radio giant WBAI in New York and has received numerous inquiries into the Cattell issue". Mehler has also posted a sample of his writing, a paper entitled "In Genes We Trust: When Science Bows to Racism". Mehler reports that the paper was a cover
feature in the magazine Reform Judaism for Winter 1994, and was revised and republished in four further outlets, 1, The Public Eye, 2, RaceFile, 3, Networking: A Publication of the Fight the Right Network, and 4, B'nai B'rith Messenger.
The paper is replete with passages such as: "With its legacy of Dr. Josef Mengele's twin experiments at Auschwitz and Dr. Burt's bogus science, twin studies fell into disfavor". Adjectives scattered throughout include "racist", "Hitler's race ideology", "Nazi produced", "Fascist ideologist", "notoriously anti-Semitic", "fraudulent", and it concludes, "we must beware of scientists who wish to play God".
Such loose use of similies is reprehensible. Mehler is seemingly confusing anti-liberalism with anti-Semitism. Anti-liberalism apparently is often confused with anti-Semitism. To illustrate, in the newsletter Details for July 1997, published by The Jewish Policy Center, Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote:
I would like to argue that the root cause of both anti-Semitism and intermarriage in America today is the same, namely, the Jewish community's disproportionate liberalism .... The vast majority of Americans care deeply about the value of family and religion. They recognize that these institutions have been the pillars of moral society for millennia. They realize that liberalism, which devalues these institutions, is largely responsible for the fact that life in America has become more squalid, more expensive, and more dangerous over the past 30 years .... Though virtually all Americans are too decent to let this blossom into full-fledged anti-Semitism, there is always that threat." (pp. 1-2).
Mehler has been guilty of this confusion for a long time. In the book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Pearson, 1997), author Roger Pearson provides a chapter entitled "Activist Lysenkoism: The Case of Barry Mehler". In this he points out that decades ago Mehler was a student in a "Program for Training in Research on Institutional Racism" that was headed by Jerry Hirsch, and that Hirsch had long ago attacked Cattell. For example, he quotes Hirsch as saying "`my University of Illinois squandered a career-long research professorship on [Cattell]." Likening Cattell to the "disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew," Hirsch railed against Cattell's "Hitler-like recommendations on the need for eugenic foresight" (p. 259).
Pearson continues:
Today Hirsch is retired, and we hear less from him. But his torch is being carried by someone who appears to be even more of a zealot. That someone is his erstwhile student, Barry Mehler. Let us look at this disciple of Jerry Hirsch, an excellent example of a political activist operating from the security of the academic world. Mehler has published little or no non-political material: he appears to specialize in politicized diatribes, filled with inaccuracies, for fringe publications on the Far Left, and glories in participating in non-academic TV shows such as Geraldo. His published works have targeted respected scholars with impressive research credentials who reject the aberrant theory that all individuals and peoples are equal (i.e., identical) in their inherited potential abilities. Moreover, copies of these error-filled and scandalous attacks on such scholars have often been mailed to journalists in anonymous envelopes. Recipients have ranged from well-known figures such as Jack Anderson, the syndicated columnist, to editors of student journals and to journalists working for local newspapers in towns where the scholars Mehler lambasts work and reside. (pp. 259-260).
Several qualities consistently characterize Mehler's attacks on the scholars he selects for `exposure.' He seldom attempts to present scientific evidence to contradict the findings of their research. Clearly, since they are writing within the limits of their own or related disciplines, and he has no demonstrated or academi
Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud
Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud
By Linda S. Gottfredson
This paper originally appeared in Society, March-April 1994 v31 n3 p53(7)
| Linda S. Gottfredson is professor of educational studies at the University ofDelaware 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. |
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 the reality and practical im
portance 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 Ravel characterizing daily life under communist rule n Eastern Europe. Ravel 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 Ravel'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 Ian 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 favoapplication of scientific norms when reviewers evaluate their peers' work for funding, publication, presentation, or dissemination.
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 sub specialties. 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.
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 sub field 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 sub fields 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 far 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.
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 J ames C. Sharf ( eds. ) ."Fairness in Employment Testing." Journal of Vocational Behavior, 33, December 1988.
Richard J. Hermstein. " 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.
The Consequences of Variable Intelligence – Book Review
The Consequences of Variable Intelligence - Book Review
The Consequences of Variable Intelligence By: Tatu Vanhanen
University of Helsinki, Finland
[The following article originally appeared in Mankind Quarterly, Volume XXXV, Number 4, Summer, 1995.]
BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE
Human Intelligence and National Power:
A Political Essay in Sociobiology
Seymour W. Itzkoff
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.
The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality
Seymour W. Itzkoff
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1992.
The Decline of Intelligence in America:
A Strategy for National Renewal
Seymour W. Itzkoff
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994.
Seymour W. Itzkoff argues in his three books published in 1991-94 that there are significant hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups and that as a consequence of this variation there are very large differences in educability, social status, and economic achievements of individuals and groups. According to him, intelligence is part of each individual's inheritance, as much as one's height and personality. Therefore,
"the issue of intellectual variability in humans and the consequent variability in average intelligence between groups of individuals, and their ethnic, racial, religious, and national identities, is the Copernican problem of our time" (1991, 10).
He challenges the egalitarian dream of socialists, sociologists, and liberal egalitarians, according to which intelligence is uniformly distributed in all populations and all humans were equal to any social and intellectual task if only they were not held down. Itzkoff points out and enumerates great failures of social policies based on these unrealistic views of human nature. The theme is the same in all three books, but he discusses it from different perspectives.
In Human Intelligence and National Power. A Political Essay in Sociobiology (1991), he focuses on the evolution of human intelligence and the emergence of intellectually different human groups, as well as on various consequences of the variability of human intelligence, including the European florescence, the failure of communism, the rise of Japan's power, the decline of the United Sates, and the Third World debacle. He emphasizes the significance of intellectual homogeneity in ethnically homogeneous nation-states and examines the ways to raise the level of general intelligence "g".
In The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality (1992), Itzkoff focuses on the failure of Marxists and liberal egalitarians to create an egalitarian and classless society and argues that their basic assumptions of human nature were wrong. They failed to recognize that human beings are endowed with differing quantities and qualities of intelligence and that the same concerns ethnic groups. From this perspective, he examines the hallucinations and misfortunes of our evil century, the methods to achieve classlessness and to end oppression and degradation, the ethic of intervention, the democratic quest, essential feminism, the mysterious ethnicity, and the significance of the wealthy. His message is that America's social dilemmas are in part due to hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups.
In the latest book, The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal (1994), Itzkoff analyses the problems and social pathologies of America and claims that they are related to the decline of general intelligence. His central idea is that new generations are coming from the lower end of the intellectual, and thus the social, scale. As a consequence, a population of permanently poor Third World Americans is emerging. In the second part of the book, he recommends policies intended to turn the trend. The solution proposed in this book is simple: the government should stimulate the finest to form families of the traditional sort in which children are conceived, born, raised, and educated to the highest levels for which they are capable, and the helpless should be encouraged and guided not to have children that they cannot rear and educate to functional cultural levels.
The problems analyzed in Itzkoff's books are extremely important. He has had courage to take up issues that have not been discussed because it has not been politically correct to assume that there might be intellectually different human groups and that social inequalities might in part be due to variable intelligence in humans. It has been difficult even for evolutionary biologists to accept the idea that humans vary in general intelligence (see, for example, Gould 1981; Lewontin 1982). Even more difficult it has been to accept the claim that there are hereditary intellectual differences between ethnic groups (see Vine 1994). I try in this essay to tell about Professor Itzkoff's central ideas, arguments, evidence, examples, and renewal proposals and to evaluate the practical significance of his theoretical insights and reform proposals.
The Evolutionary Roots of Intellectual Differences
Let us start from his central idea concerning hereditary differences between individuals and groups. How to explain the origin of assumed group differences?
He traces the origin of intellectual variability of human groups to the geographical dispersion of early humans and to the variation in their environmental circumstances. According to him, Homo erectus originated in Africa, but it possibly split into modern geographical races of man already one or 1,5 million years ago when some groups emigrated from Africa to the other Old World continents.
At this stage of human evolution, from about 1,5 to 0.5 million years ago, various groups of humans, whether races or ethnic groups, seem to have had similar levels of intelligence. There were not many differences in tools used by them. However, after 500,000 B.P., a revolution begins to occur in the North, in Europe and western Asia among Caucasoids during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. Intelligence helped the survival of people in harsh and variable environmental conditions. High intelligence was useful. The average brain size and intelligence increased in Caucasoid populations through natural selection. He says that
"in the challenging environment of the north, a big brain had extraordinary selective value. These humans could think deeply and analytically" ( 1992, 37).
Finally, about 35,000 B.P., Cro-Magnon appeared in Europe. His assumption is that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Europe as a consequence of adaptation to harsh and variable environmental conditions:
"the northern quadrant of humanity subject to the flow and ebb of the glaciers inhabited a far more challenging and dangerous environment than those living in the tropical south" (1991, 194).
There was not similar pressure for intellectual evolution among the human populations living in "millions-of-years-old tropical garden of Eden." Consequently, northern populations achieved a higher level of general intelligence than tropical populations.
Itzkoff assumes that the ability of large-skulled, adaptively able northern sub-species of Homo to handle this ferocious Ice-age environment and even prosper probably forced them to migrate for more space. Over the period of 150,000 years, they moved east and south and spread their genes. He further assumes that
"modern blacks originated in Western Africa after 10,000 B.P. as a result of mixtures between indigenous proto-Negroids and Pygmies, and incoming Caucasoids" (1991, 40).
[As a consequence,]
"Negroid and Caucasoid races have biologically more in commo
n with each other than they do with any of the other races" (1991, 42).
The original Mongoloid descendants of Homo erectus pekinensis along the Yellow River Valley also absorbed a steady stream of Caucasoid wanderers across the Siberian and Kazakhistan plains. The same concerns the Koreans and Japanese,
"who speak a Uralic/Altaic language related to the hybrid Siberian steppe peoples and thence to the Estonians and Finns" (1991, 42).
[In this way the Cro-Magnon people wandered from their unknown Eurasian homeland to the other parts of the world]
"hybridizing with the existing transitional erectine-sapiens humans all over the world."
[The New Guinea, Australian and Tasmanian Australid populations are possible exceptions (1991, 18, 39). Today's]
"racial divisions are the remnant memories of ancient human separations that go back several million years"
( 1992, 7).
This is a very interesting assumption on the origin of intellectual differences between human populations and of geographical races. It differs radically from interpretations, according to which the evolution of modern people took place in Africa.
C. B. Stringer, for example, claims that
"all living people are closely related and share a recent common ancestor who probably lived in Africa. From that African ancestral group, all the living peoples of the world originated. "
He continues that the ancestors of Europeans , Asians and the populations of the American and Australian continents probably share common ancestors within the past 60,000 years. This idea does not presuppose any significant intellectual differences between human populations. In fact, Stringer emphasizes their similarity:
"What is certain is that the early modern peoples of each part of the world were all similar in basic anatomy and behavior, but regional differences in physique and culture rapidly developed subsequently" (Stringer 1992, 249. See also Howells 1992; Ritter 1981, 98-101).
Stephen Jay Gould, similarly, assumes that Homo sapiens
"is tens of thousands, or at most a few hundred thousand, years old, and all modern human races probably split from a common ancestral stock only tens of thousands of years ago" (Gould 1981, 323).
Itzkoff's assumption differs from the "Out of Africa" hypothesis in two important points: (1) he claims that human populations have racially differed from each other one or 1.5 million years, although there have been new mixtures later on, and (2) he provides a plausible explanation for the origin of intellectual differences between human populations. The alternate hypothesis would be unable to provide any explanation for intellectual differences between the northern and tropical populations. The crucial question is whether such differences really exist.
General Intelligence "g"
Itzkoff's claims that individuals vary in intelligence and that such variation is principally due to hereditary factors. What kind of evidence does he provide to support this claim?
He refers to intelligence tests (I.Q.) that have been carried out in various countries since the beginning of this century. They indicate consistently that humans vary in intelligence. A heated debate has continued on the question whether such variation is more due to hereditary or environmental factors and whether there is any "general intelligence" that could be measured (see Gould 1981; Lewontin 1982; Itzkoff 1987).
Itzkoff refers to evidence of the existence of general intelligence "g" and of its hereditarian character. According to him, 50-80 percent of general intelligence seems to be due to hereditarian factors. Innumerable studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins have provided evidence on the hereditary nature of intelligence. For example, he says,
"identical twins reared apart in differing life circumstances are much more similar intellectually than fraternal twins reared under the same roof" (Itzkoff 1987, 142; cf. 1991, 27).
[ Worldwide studies of sibling adaptation, he continues,]
"regardless of the race or ethnicity involved, reveal that a sociologically uplifting environment has no long-term impact either on the personality or the intellectual profile that the children bring with them from their biological heritage" (1992, 88).
The results of these studies also imply that the genetic variation in intelligence depends on a relatively small number of genes because the possible variability between even closely related individuals seems to be enormous (see 1992, 31-32; 1994, 101). Itzkoff comes to the conclusion that it
"should be clear to all but the most ideologically and theologically devout environmentalists that human achievement and personality have a dominating biological and thus hereditary component" (1992, 31).
I think that it would be difficult to disprove his argument that human intelligence varies and that hereditary component is dominating in this variation. If we accept the argument on the hereditary intellectual differences between individuals, it becomes difficult to deny the possibility that there might be hereditary intellectual differences between ethnic groups, too.
This is a much more inflammatory proposition than the claim of individual intellectual differences. Everybody has probably made observations of great individual differences in intelligence, but it is more difficult to make observations of the average intelligence of ethnic or racial groups. Therefore, it has been easy to deny the existence of such differences and to argue that there cannot be any significant differences in the average intelligence of ethnic or racial groups. And if all human races separated from a common ancestral stock in Africa only some tens of thousand years ago, it would be difficult to find any plausible explanation for the emergence of such differences. However, Itzkoff has a plausible explanation for the origin of intellectual differences between human groups, as mentioned above, and he provides data that indicate the existence of such differences among contemporary ethnic groups His evidence is based on the consistency of the results of intelligence tests (I.Q.) carried out in many countries.
According to the results of intelligence tests given in his books, the average I.Q. for American whites is 100, for African-Americans 82-85, for Hispanics somewhere in between, and for native Americans in the low to mid-90s, whereas it is 103-107 for Japanese and probably more than 100 for Han Chinese, too. Itzkoff stresses that they are ethnic groups that differ from each other in intelligence, not racial groups, but, on the other hand, he emphasizes the difference between northern and tropical populations. In general
"the northern peoples of the world, the residue of the original Caucasoids and Mongoloids have more on average brain power" (1992, 50).
This is probably the most controversial part of his argumentation, but because his conclusions and policy recommendations are based on it, those who disagree with him should try to show that he is wrong. It is not enough to say that it is not politically correct to make such propositions. In open society, people should be prepared to discuss and examine also the ideas that contradict their own convictions and belief systems.
Itzkoff provides additional support for his thesis from empirical data on educational and economic achievements of different ethnic and national groups. According to him, it was natural that the technological civilization emerged in the North, in the area of Caucasoid Eurasians. The present great economic inequalities between the north and the south are related to intellectual differences. Therefore, it has been difficult to equalize economic conditions between the industrially developed north and the Third World countries. It has succeeded only in the parts of the world where national ethnic groups have been intellectually approximately equal with Caucasoids. This concerns particularly northern Mongo
loids, Japanese, Koreans and Han Chinese.
On the other hand, development aid from the north has not been enough to generate and maintain technological development in Africa. Itzkoff finds further evidence for his thesis from the fact that all immigrant groups have not succeeded equally in America. According to his data, more intelligent ethnic groups have succeeded much better than less intelligent groups.
Social Consequences
We come to the social consequences of variable intelligence. They are enormous. For example, Itzkoff refers to many types of social facts and problems connected with variable intelligence in humans. He argues that social inequalities are persistent because humans vary in intelligence. He accuses the ideology of egalitarianism for the genocides and holocausts of this century. Communists killed tens of millions of people of higher intelligence to further equality. The failure of communism was caused, according to his interpretation, by their erroneous assumption that intelligence is distributed homogeneously among individuals. They believed that the masses could easily be educated to fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the bourgeoisie establishment.
It was not so. Marxists had forgotten Marx's refutation of those sections of the Gotha Program (German socialist parties) that asserted the absolute uniformity of human abilities. Marx himself believed in the existence of intellectual differences in human beings.
Itzkoff further argues that Japan's economic success story has been powered by the high intelligence of the ethnically homogeneous Japanese people. Because of universally high intelligence of its ethnically homogeneous population, the Japanese state does not need to subsidize any permanently "catch-up" portions of the nation, and because there is a rich supply of talent ready to step in, the salaries of executives remain relatively low. In Japan, the average chief executive earns about eight times the average of his workers; in the United States the average chief executive earns about 160 times the worker average (1992, 152).
Itzkoff presents an extremely inflammatory and important explanation for the failure of modernization in most parts of the Third World. According to his assumption, it is due to clear differences in average intelligence between the northern and southern populations. Northeast Asia, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, are rapidly rising from war and political chaos because of the high intelligence of their populations, whereas in Africa, Central and South America, and many parts of southern Asia, the pace of modernization has been at best slack. Many hundreds of billions of dollars in loans have simply gone down the drain in corruption and incompetence. The reason for the Third World debacle is in the fact that the level of intelligence is lower in the tropical south. He supports this assumption by the experiences gathered from minority populations of the tropical south living in the north. Some members of such minorities thrive and prosper, but the majority falls into despair.
On the other hand,
"ethnic Han Chinese living in either Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines achieve at levels parallel to their Chinese compatriots in the U.S. or Hong Kong, despite extensive negative discrimination." And Japanese, Germans, and Italians born in Brazil achieve as their confreres do in their respective homelands (1991, 195).
The Decline of the United States
The major problem examined by Itzkoff concerns the decline of the United States and its causes. He complains of the lack of open discussion and warns that never
"in history has a society that has blocked the open search for truth survived to prosper. "
[ In America, the intellectual leadership of the great public media institutions and the universities has effectively handcuffed the elected political representatives and prevented them from considering solutions:]
"The taboo word is, of course, race. Because so much of our internal tragedy does involve the minorities of color, the stereotyped excuse is that discussions about biological intelligence and the variable behavior that it elicits will militate against the interests of these minorities."
[He does not accept this argumentation, and he tries to show that it is in the interest of all Americans to think deeply ]
"about this reality of variable human intelligence and whether there might be a connection between this issue and the fact that our national profile is sinking so rapidly" ( 1994, 6).
What does he mean by "decline of the United States?" Itzkoff claims that this decline
"can be confirmed by any of the criteria that historians have ever used to measure the state and condition of a nation and its people" (1994, 3).
The indicators of decline used by Itzkoff include the rise of criminality in American cities, the status change from a great creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation, the enormous loss of high-wage jobs, the fact that some 50-80 percent of the workforce is not able to work and produce at an internationally competitive level, the decline in educational standards and achievements of the public schools as indicated by the quarter-century decline of SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, social disintegration, and the expanding poverty populations at the bottom of society. It seems to me that he has presented enough empirical evidence on the decline of the United States compared to Japan or to some European nations.
Itzkoff explains the economic and educational sinking of the United States by the decline of the average intelligence. The welfare policies encouraged the poorest, least capable sectors of the population, from all the races and ethnic groups to have children. However, he does not provide much statistical evidence for his claim that poor sections of the population have produced relatively more children than more wealthy and educated ones. It is not self-evident that this claim should be true.
According to sociobiological theories, wealthy and dominant sections of the population are expected to have been reproductively more successful than poor ones, at least until modern times (see Betzig 1986; Rogers 1990, Roskaft et al. 1992). Therefore, I would like to see more statistical evidence. One example, to which he refers, concerns the blacks. The proportion of black citizens in the U.S. grew from 9.8 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in the mid-1980s.
Itzkoff sharply criticizes the welfare-policies that have produced a new human zoo. He says:
"Like animals whom we now have trained to reproduce in captivity, there is a new and growing class of Homo sapiens living within the ostensibly modern societies."
[He assumes that even Marx would look at this new and classically unrecognized situation with horrified wonder:]
"What he would see would be the public welfare hospitals where they are born, the flocks of social workers who minister to their dole, the Head Start teachers, then the special education and remedial classes in the state schools, the drug clinics, probation officers, public health nurses, the police and the jails, the crime-ridden public housing projects, the food-stamps, the underground subways, bus terminals, and railway stations and the spaces over the heating vents on the public streets that serve as sleeping places, the municipal hospital emergency rooms, and then the AIDS wards and hallways where they die" (1992, 90-91).
On the other hand, the invention of "the pill" and feminist ideas decreased the birth rate among educated and more intelligent sectors of the population. Liberal equalitarians told the people that it was not important who had the babies. The children could easily be educated to high levels of social productivity, they preached. To the educated classes,
"both men and women, they urged liberation, careerism, and material consumption, heaven forbid c
onceiving, bearing, and raising large families" (1992, 91).
[As a consequence,]
"the United States mean I.Q. has dropped about five points over the last several generations, the result of this differential birth rate" ( 1991, 163-187).
Briefly stated, Itzkoff argues that the poor and intellectually lower sections of the population have been reproductively much more successful than the wealthy and more intelligent sections of the population and that it has caused the fall of national intelligence. He estimates that already by 1994, roughly half of the American population can be seen to be sinking below international levels of intellectual and educational achievement needed to maintain competitive production. And he asks, what is "to become of these individuals, and then of the formerly wealthy nation that encouraged their coming into being?" (1994, 107). He assumes that they will be pushed deeper and deeper into the culture of poverty. What to do?
Remedies Proposed
Professor Itzkoff argues that because social pathologies and other problems of the United States have been aggravated by the decline of general intelligence of its population, the best remedy would be to increase the level of general intelligence. He stresses that it is not a purely racial or ethnic issue because those at the bottom of the intellectual pyramid come from all groups, white, African-American, Latino, and others. It is clear, however, on the basis of his books that the problem focuses on African-Americans and other ethnic groups originated from the south.
The remedy proposed by Itzkoff is simple: the most intelligent and educated men and women should bear and raise many more children than those from the bottom of the economic and educational social class structure. Besides, the traditional nuclear heterosexual family should be saved. He accuses liberal egalitarians for hating monogamy and the nuclear family:
"They fear and despise men as heads of household, and thus with a woman actively raising her brood of children in the home, the kids not out in day care or with illegal aliens acting as 'foster' parents. The idea that males and females differ in any important bio-cultural manner, physical or intellectual, is anathema to their unisex ideology, and their despising of historical male and female values."
[ As a consequence of liberal policies, Itzkoff continues, we]
"have lost the children of almost two generations of our educated and liberated women. It has had almost the same effect as if it had been genocide" (1994, 126, 133).
According to his interpretation, it will depend on the policies of the government whether the reproduction trends change to the proposed direction or not. The government should pass
" social policy legislation aimed at creating inducements, as well as legal protections, that will lead to the wealthy and successful having more than their share of children and the poor limiting their procreative activity in the interest of their own individual social and economic aspirations" (1992, 160).
The prescription is clear, but it seems to me that he does not yet have any clear idea what such "social policy legislation" should include and how the government could carry out such policies. However, he makes some proposals.
- First, people should be reeducated.
- Second, job priorities should be given to married men with families.
- Third, all births should require the identification of the father.
- Fourth, men and women at the top of social scale without children should be punished through the tax system.
The government should try
"to establish a long-term social policy that will `encourage' the birth of 50 percent more children from the upper half of the social and income brackets than from the lower."
[It is not clear how it could be done, although he says that we]
"must persuade the potentially parasitic classes at the top and at the bottom of society to act appropriately. The wealthy educated will have to validate their socially acquired assets by bearing their own offspring or adopting needy children. Those at the bottom should be humanely persuaded, with generous gifts if deemed appropriate but for one generation only to refrain from conceiving and having children" (1994, 192-195).
Itzkoff makes several other interesting reform proposals. I refer to only two of them. He would like to decrease the relative number of African-Americans because their average level of general intelligence "g" is low. The discouragement of illegitimate births would serve this purpose.
On the other hand, he suggests that the "talented tenth" of the African-Americans should produce many more children than the less intelligent majority. In this way it would be possible to raise the general intelligence of the African-American minority.
Besides, the United States should change its immigration policies radically. No more illegal immigration, he says, and
"those who are here in violation of our laws, along with the children that have been born here in the interim," must return to their homelands (1994, 161).
Only talented people, irrespective of their race, should be allowed to immigrate to the country.
Itzkoff is deeply worried about the declining intelligence in America because he would like to retain his country among the first class nations in the competitive world of the twenty-first century, which is not possible without a highly intelligent population. America's crisis is a natality crisis, he says, but the leadership of the United States is indifferent to this issue. It does not care who is having the children.
Discussion
I agree with Professor Itzkoff in most points of his analysis. Evidently humans vary in intelligence, and this variation is principally due to hereditary factors. He has convinced me that ethnic groups may also vary in general intelligence "g". I agree with him that social consequences of intellectual variability are enormous and that they can be seen in all areas of human life. The origin of social inequalities is in the fact that humans are not similar in their intelligence and other capabilities. It is also quite probable that a significant part of the persistent poverty in the Third World is related to intellectual differences between ethnic groups. He is probably right in his central assumption that the level of general intelligence would increase if the upper half of social and income brackets could produce 50 percent more children than the lower half. The problem is how to get people to follow his advice.
According to the sociobiological inclusive fitness hypothesis, all organisms are programmed to further their own reproductive interests and not to concern themselves about others (see, for example Dawkins 1976; Alexander 1980). Therefore, I assume that it would be extremely difficult or impossible to persuade the members of any minority ethnic group to sacrifice their own reproductive interests for the assumed higher interests of the nation.
It might be possible to achieve some results by economic and other inducements, but it is quite possible that coercion and even force would be needed to achieve substantial results. Itzkoff has not proposed or discussed the use of coercion, although he proposes that the births should be reduced at the bottom of the social and economic scale and that all births should require the identification of the father. Is this a case in which the government might use coercion and even force to carry out its family policy?
If the father cannot be identified and made responsible for the child, the state might require the prevention of the birth by compulsory abortion. However, if coercion and force become necessary to prevent the births of unwanted children, we have to ask whether the aims are worthwhile enough to justify such policies. Is the maintenance of intelligence so important that it justifies the use of coerc
ion and force against women who break the legal rules of reproduction? I do not know, and Itzkoff has not discussed this problem. It should be discussed because I do not believe that his radical reproductive reforms could be carried out without coercion.
It is true that African-Americans are at the bottom of the social and economic scale, but I would like to point out that they have not been losers in the Darwinian struggle for existence. In fact, according to the data given by Itzkoff, they have been even more successful than the whites because their relative number has increased in the United States since the 1940s. It means that in some way they have become better adapted to their social environment than the white majority. Despite their poverty, they have borne and raised children more than their share, whereas many wealthy and educated and probably also highly intelligent whites feel themselves so poor and insecure that they cannot afford to have children.
We should remember that in the Darwinian struggle for existence reproduction is the only criterion of success, not wealth, education, or intelligence. By this criterion the American blacks have been more successful than the whites.
Itzkoff has brought into discussion the issue of variable intelligence in humans and indicated through extensive evidence and examples its crucial importance in national and international politics. I think that it is time for us to take biological factors seriously and examine their relevance from various perspectives.
As Itzkoff says, the scientific evidence for the biological roots of our social behavior continues to accumulate (1994, 5). It is becoming clear that environmental egalitarians were wrong in their traditional assumption that human behavior and social structures are principally, if not completely, shaped by our environment. Human nature matters probably more than we can imagine. Itzkoff has focused on one very important aspect of human nature, to hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups, and he has disclosed its social and political relevance in superb manner.
References
- Alexander, Richard D, 1980 Darwinism and Human Affairs. London: Pitman Publishing.
- Betzig, L. L. 1986 Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History. New York: AIdine.
- Dawkins, Richard 1979 The Selfish Gene. London: Granada Publishing.
- Gould, Stephen Jay 1981 The Mismeasure of Man. Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Penguin Books.
- Howells, W. W. 1992 "The dispersion of modern humans," in Steve Jones, Robert Martin and David Pilbeam (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. pps. 389-401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Itzkoff, Seymour W. 1987 Why Humans Vary in Intelligence. Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paideia Publishers.
- Lewontin, Richard 1982 Human Diversity. New York: Scientific American Books.
- Ritter, Horst 1981 Humangenetik: Grundlagen - Erkenntnisse - Entwicklungen. Breisgau: Herder Freiburg.
- Rogers, Alan R. 1990 "Evolutionary Economics of Human Reproduction," Ethology and Sociobiology Vol. 11 , No. 6.
- Roskaft,Eivin, Annelise Wara, and Auslaug Viken 1992 "Reproductive Success in Relation to Resource-Access and Parental Age in a Small Norwegian Farming Parish During the Period 1700-1900, " Ethology and Sociobiology Vol. 13, Numbers 5/6.
- Stringer, C. B. 1992 "Evolution of early humans," in Steve Jones et al. (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. ss. 241-251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Vine, Ian 1994 "The Political Abuse of Sociobiology - A Test Case" (a book review of Itzkoff's "Human Intelligence and National Power: A Political Essay in Sociobiology"), ESS Newsletter No. 33, January 1994, 13-31
REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY FOR A NEW EUGENICS
Glayde Whitney - Galton Conference
REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY FOR A NEW EUGENICS
Paper for The Galton Institute conference
"Man and Society in the New Millennium"
16 - 17 September 1999
at The Zoological Society of London
Regents Park, London NW1 4RY
Published as: Whitney, G. (1999). Reproduction technology for a new eugenics. The Mankind Quarterly, XL, #2, 179-192.
Introduction
The first century or two of the new millennium will almost certainly be a golden age for eugenics. Through application of new genetic knowledge and reproductive technologies the Galtonian Revolution will come to fruition. This new revolution in the new millennium, which I call the Galtonian Revolution (Whitney, 1995; 1997a) will be more momentous for the future of mankind than was the Copernican Revolution or the Darwinian Revolution. For with the Galtonian Revolution, for the first time, the major changes will not be to ideas alone, but rather the major change will be to mankind itself.
In order to briefly discuss some of the reproductive technology that will contribute to the new eugenics, I need first to define the term "eugenics". So many different people with so many different agendas have appropriated this neat word, coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, that the word by itself can stand for almost anything (Whitney, 1990). Surely to some eugenics is a route to prevention rather than mere treatment of the ills of humanity. Also a path to the greatest good for the greatest number. To others eugenics is a new blasphemy, a devil-word; a term of hate and abhorrence, a term that in word associations is supposed to be linked with Hitler, Holocaust, genocide and the murder of innocents.
For the purposes of today's talk the definition of "eugenics" is one given by Sir Francis Galton himself. In 1904 at a meeting of the Sociological Society, Sir Francis said:
"Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage."
It is interesting, and overlooked by many, that Galton's own definition included both nature and nurture approaches to the improvement of humanity.
In that same talk Galton (1904) went on to briefly address what is meant by "improvement". "What is meant by the syllable Eu in Eugenics, whose English equivalent is good?" First of all, the goodness of a trait depended upon the balance of that trait with others in appropriate proportions; thus goodness was relative to the balance of traits in the individual and also to the make-up of the population. What was good might be much influenced by education, and the goodness or badness of traits was not an absolute, but relative to the current form of civilization. Thus Galton suggested that as much as possible we should keep morals out of the discussion and avoid absolutes, to keep out of endlessly entangling philosophical distinctions. One wishes that some of our current crop of so-called "bioethicists" would heed this advice.
Galton suggested that although
"no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it is better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men."(Galton, 1904: 36).
And so with men. As we approach the new millennium we have at our call a reproductive technology that is beyond any imagined by the early eugenicists.
Reproductive Technology
The advances over the last 50 or so years in genetics, molecular genetics, and developmental biology, are placing in our hands a wide range of technology that can be applied to eugenic ends. However, not all of these applications of reproductive technology are new.
Artificial insemination with a thought toward quality of offspring has been around for a long time. Dr William Pancoast of Jefferson College of Medicine in Philadelphia used sperm donated by "the best looking medical student" in his class when he impregnated a woman whose husband was infertile. That artificial insemination took place in 1884, although it was not reported until 25 years later, out of fear of controversy (NABER, 1996).
In vitro fertilization, the making of "test tube babies", has led to much consideration of a technological revolution in the field of human reproduction. It was only on July 25th, 1978, that Louise Brown, at 5 ? lb., was born in an English hospital. She was the first test tube baby (Bayertz, 1994). In the slightly more than two decades since the birth of Louise Brown there have been thousands of instances of in vitro fertilization. About 15% of couples are sterile, and in about half of the cases the problem is with the female, often blocked Fallopian tubes. For these couples in vitro fertilization with subsequent implantation of the embryo allows them to birth their own genetic child.
However, the embryo need not be implanted in the uterus of the woman that provided the egg. The first instance of egg donation was reported in 1984 from Australia (Cohen, 1996). People wanting pregnancy can be implanted with an embryo made with someone else's egg, or surrogate mums can carry the embryo as a service for someone else. The laboratory access that is a part of in vitro fertilization makes possible a wide range of procedures that depend on access to the embryo - diagnosis, genetic manipulation -and a whole series of further techniques such as embryo preservation.
Cryopreservation, combined with artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, greatly expanded the possibilities for eugenic births. It has been suggested that the half-life of semen frozen in liquid nitrogen is more than 1,000 years. With liquid nitrogen, frozen semen, eggs, or embryos can be shipped to almost any location. The famous "Repository for Germinal Choice", founded by Robert K. Graham and Hermann J. Muller, the 1946 Nobel Prize Winner, opened for business in 1980. Originally intended as a sperm bank for Nobel Prize Winners, it was later expanded to accept material from a wider range of healthy and outstanding donors. The Los Angeles Times (Hotz, 1997) reported that as of 1997 the Repository had contributed to the birth of 218 children, in at least 5 different countries, and the children that the staff knew about were all "bright and healthy".
According to news reports, in June of 1999 China opened a government-run "Notables' Sperm Bank" that accepts donors in three categories: intellectuals with at least a master's degree; top businessmen; and successful artists, entertainers, and athletes (Holden, 1999). Clinic officials are quoted as saying that they "would seek 'select sperm with high-quality characteristics' to fulfil a popular demand for 'attractive, intelligent children'" (Pottinger, 1999). It sounds to me like a fine plan indeed.
Nuclear substitution is an even more recent innovation. For mammals the first viable offspring from the substitution into an egg of the nucleus from an adult cell, was "Dolly", the famous sheep from Edinburgh that was announced in 1997 (Wilmut, et. al., 1997). Such cloning of the adult genome has attracted tremendous interest. Of course the resulting offspring will not be a phenotypic duplicate of the adult that donated the nucleus. Often overlooked in discussions is that the clone will also not be a complete genetic duplicate of the donor. The nuclear ge
nes, those on the chromosomes, will be duplicates, but the mitochondrial DNA will be that provided by the egg. It remains to be seen how important this will be.
However, from the point of view of eugenics nuclear substitution with adult material will be extremely interesting. What is sidestepped is the genetic recombination that takes place at meiosis, the chromosomal crossing-over and the random sampling of a half-helping of genes into the haploid gametes that combine at fertilization. Instead of playing nature's roulette, the blind chance and dumb luck of sexual reproduction can be eliminated by substituting an already proven diploid genome. One of the major consequences would be a reduction in regression toward the mean for multifactorial traits. The action of Galton's "law of filial regression" could be largely eliminated. Also, as David Lykken (Lykken, et. al., 1992) has emphasized, some genetic characteristics are not normally transmitted from parent to offspring. The phenotypic traits that result from dominance and epistatic interactions among the genes in a unique genotype are lost with sexual recombination, but can be retained by cloning. He refers to such traits as "emergenic", extremes of genetic characteristics that are often not familial, but rather emerge as a consequence of a unique combination of genes in a unique genotype. Geniuses are perhaps one class of emergenic individuals. The amazing, often precocious abilities of geniuses has posed a problem for both genetic and environmental explanations; the truly extreme genius often crops up in an otherwise undistinguished family and often leaves undistinguished progeny. As Lykken puts it, "The answer is, I think, that genius consists of unique configurations of attributes that cannot be transmitted in half-helpings" (Lykken, 1999). Such emergenic individuals, where the half-helping of a haploid gamete loses the unique configuration, will have a chance at recreation through nuclear substitution.
Many authors have commented on the irony that Sir Francis Galton himself passed without progeny. With improvement of techniques for recovery of DNA from tissue samples, and nuclear substitution, I expect that Sir Francis' unique genotype will be reborn in the new millennium.
Pre-natal diagnosis has been a real possibility since the 1959 discovery that aneuploidy, specifically trisomy-21, was the cause of Down's syndrome. Initially dependent on amniocentesis, newer and less risky procedures are available for the prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal anomalies as well as a large number of single-gene disorders. Advocates of pre-natal diagnosis, combined with the possibility of therapeutic abortion, have made the strong case that these essentially negative eugenic procedures are life-enhancing and life-giving, rather than life-destroying. Instead of suffering the agony and long term problems of a defective child, the pregnancy can be terminated and replaced with a healthy baby. Now so many prospective parents benefit from testing that Down's syndrome, once the most common form of severe retardation, is becoming rare in advanced countries. So too, Tay-Sachs disease among Askenazi Jews is a well-known success story for the eugenic benefits of pre-natal diagnosis.
Pre-implantation diagnosis and modification, made possible by in vitro fertilization, provides whole new dimensions to pre-natal diagnosis. The revolutionary impact of in vitro fertilization with regard to eugenics is that it involves as a matter-of-course access to the embryo during its earliest stages of development. The cells of early embryos are totipotent stem cells, when separated each is capable of producing a complete individual.
Separation in nature gives rise to monozygous - identical - twins or triplets, sometimes even more genetically identical clones. In the laboratory, cell mass division of the early embryo was first used to produce multiple clones of a human embryo in 1993 (Harris, 1998). With multiple copies of the identical genotype, a wide range of diagnostic procedures can be conducted with some of the clones, without fear of damage to the clone that might eventually be implanted for gestational development.
Access to the egg, sperm, and early embryo facilitates a wide range of genetic manipulations. Many techniques already routine in animal research might find application in human eugenics. Knockouts are individuals in which specific genes have been rendered non-functional. Gene substitution techniques can insert functional genes to compensate for defective natural genes, or to enhance trait expression beyond the naturally occurring range. Transgenic procedures involve the insertion of functional genes, even ones from other species. In wide use for research, a recent experiment demonstrates the application of transgenic technology to primates: Monkeys are being developed that have bioluminescence from jellyfish (Lau, 1999). Personally, I have no interest in having my private parts glow in the dark; however, it would be interesting to be able to navigate like a homing pigeon.
Many additional and more sophisticated techniques are undoubtedly on the way; in June of 1999, at the meeting of the American Society of Gene Therapy, "chimeraplasty" was considered, by which single-base DNA mistakes can be corrected in cell cultures and experimental animals (Gura, 1999). It is only a matter of time until these techniques are perfected to a level permitting moral application to human problems. Many of the techniques mentioned earlier, such as nuclear substitution and genetic manipulations are not yet efficient enough to be unquestionably suitable in therapeutic and eugenic application for humans. But with the pace of research it is surely only a matter of time, and a short time at that.
Designer children is a label often disparagingly applied by critics in discussions of individual's new abilities to make personal choices and eugenic decisions about their own children. Critics of eugenics blather about invented moral and ethical issues. But as bioethecist John Harris (1998) has said,
"The best I can do here is repeat a perhaps familiar thought, namely that although this is often taken to be a difficult question and indeed the idea of parents being able to choose such things very often causes outrage, I have found difficulty in seeing this question as problematic. It seems to me to come to this: either such traits as hair colour, eye colour, gender, and the like are important or they are not. If they are not important why not let people choose? And if they are important, can it be right to leave such important matters to chance? (Harris, 1998:29).
Ideological and Political Problems
Which brings us to the issue of social attitudes toward eugenics. For at least the last half of this century there has been an unrelenting campaign to demonize eugenics. This propaganda assault has been so influential that all of the institutions and academic departments that were founded by Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to advance the study and application of eugenics, have changed their name to eliminate the term. As one example, and the longest hold-out, in 1988 at its annual meeting the Eugenics Society adopted a resolution that changed its name to eliminate the word "eugenics". This organization that had started in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, was renamed to the more innocuous "Galton Institute"(Pearson, 1991), to which I am indebted for the honor of being here today.
How is it possible that the prevention of human suffering has become identified as evil? From whence has come the unrelenting propaganda campaign to demonize eugenics, which after all is devoted to the prevention of suffering and the improvement of mankind? In a word, the answer is Marxism, including its present incarnation as Politically Correct modern liberalism.
In order to understand the campaign against eugenics, it helps to place it in the context of an on-going ideological and poli
tical war. Two general commentaries about the political scene in America, and that generalize to western civilization, catch the flavor of events with their titles. One is entitled "It's a War, Stupid!" written by David Horowitz, Peter Collier and J.P. Duberg (1997). David Horowitz is one of the more prolific writers among the crop of American "neo-conservatives"; they are radical-left activists from the 1960s who have grown up. Horowitz is a self-proclaimed "red-diaper baby", raised in the communist party atmosphere of New York City. It's a War, Stupid! Makes the point that a one-sided ideological war has been going on for much of this century, a war of socialists against traditional society. As with any war, truth is one of the first casualties. Horowitz's message is that many of the combatants on the side of the good guys don't even realize what is going on.
The other title is "America's 30 Years War: Who is winning?", written by Balint Vazsonyi(1998). Vazsonyi escaped his native Hungary during the short-lived Revolution of the 1950s. Having lived under two socialist totalitarian regimes, the Nazi and the Soviet, he is personally familiar with the tactics. His concern in the book is that socialism is slowly transforming America. While the liberal media tout the end of the cold war with the collapse of the Soviet economy, it is the socialists who are winning a worldwide ideological and political war. Vazsonyi points out the unique English, Anglo-Saxon roots of what he calls America's basic founding principles. He identifies four: rule of law; individual rights; guarantee of personal property; and a shared cultural identity. These basic principles are slowly being replaced by socialism. Today we have government-mandated group rights, government controlled redistribution of property, and divisive multiculturalism.
The basis for this late-20th century all-out war against eugenics is that the big winner from the Second-World War was Bolshevism, international socialism. As early as the 1920s, while many western progressive socialists were still also eugenicists, Stoddard was warning of Bolshevism's denial of heredity (Pearson, 1991). Two of Marxist-Leninist's bedrock ideological underpinnings became environmental determinism, and radical egalitarianism. In the socialist state, all differences between individuals or groups are said to be caused by past exploitation, and since all people are inherently the same, social engineering can transform the world. Of course genetics, recognizing both inherited and environmental causes, is inconsistent with Marxist ideology, and eugenics, the application of genetic knowledge for the benefit of humanity is anathema to socialist environmentalism.
Everyone knows of the travesty of post-war science in the Soviet Union - the 1948 purging of genetics because it was inconsistent with Politically Correct environmentalism - that became known as Lysenkoism. Under Lysenkoism the only acceptable explanation for differences, even among strains of wheat, was environmental differences, thus they practiced "vernalization", that is, early education of little plants as they allowed their seed grain to deteriorate genetically (Soyfer, 1994). Everyone knows of Lysenkoism, and rightly criticizes the absurdity of denying scientific reality in the service of an ideology.
Yet today, no one acknowledges the obvious fact that there is no substantive difference between Lysenkoism and official government policy toward education in America (Whitney, 1998).
Both of the major political parties entertain various vernalizations -ever earlier head start programs - while they demonize as "hateful" or "racist" anyone who suggests that radical egalitarianism and environmental determinism miss an important part of the real world. With Political Correctness, and though-control crimes, euphemistically called "hate crimes", western society is becoming ever more constricted. In some European countries, such as Germany, one can be imprisoned for discussing basic science. In the United Kingdom, long term university faculty can be sacked, as illustrated by Christopher Brand, lately of Edinburgh University, sacked for the high crime of telling the truth (Whitney, 1997b).
A favorite attack on eugenics is to equate it with Nazis. In various ways a slippery slope is argued: official government sanctioning of eugenic concepts leads inevitably to, racism, anti-Semitism, euthanasia, genocide, holocaust, and all the rest of it. Confounding eugenics with Nazism has been so successful a tactic since World War 2, that many people who are interested in eugenics do what they are suppose to do: hang their head in shame and shut their mouth. However, what should be shouted is that the whole argument is a sham, another falsehood.
As Marian Van Court has pointed out, in the first half of the 20th century, a total of at least 29 countries passed eugenic laws, including Germany, United States, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Greece and Spain. One of these advanced countries proceeded in time of war from euthanasia to genocide. The other 28 countries did not. One out of 29 does not establish a pattern (Van Court, 1998). The post-war propaganda linking eugenics to Nazism and a slippery slope to holocaust is just that: Horrific, continuing propaganda warfare.
Unintended consequences
The tone and content of this paper is strongly supportive of eugenics. However, there is one aspect of traditional eugenic programs that I have concerns about: That is government regulation of any sort. Voluntary personal decisions are one thing, government coercion is another. I can think of nothing as grotesque as to have the likes of Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or Tony Blair making my reproductive choices.
One problem is that we actually know so little about genetics that it is terribly premature for government regulation. Imagine what the central planners that gave us the soviet economy could do with the vastly more complex human gene pool. Although the Human Genome Project is well along toward sequencing the bases in a human genome (Whitney, 1997a), we know next to nothing about what most of the genes do. We don't even know how many there are. Just recently the human mutation rate was estimated to be considerably higher than previously thought (Crow, 1999 ). Just in mid-1999 it was reported that the functional human genome may be one-third larger than previous estimates (Wade, 1999).
Playing in the dark as we are at this time, it may be best to let people make their own decisions. We do not need totalitarian control, a set of self-chosen "anointed ones" (Sowell, 1996) controlling the reproductive behavior of a domesticated proletariat. In little understood systems we must expect to encounter what we seem to have encountered, which is unintended consequences.
For example, when effective means of contraception were introduced last century, some of the main results seem to have been dysgenic (Lynn, 1996). Sir Francis Galton spoke of ways to test and bring together promising young men and women so that they would be more likely to form eugenic matches. This desire for assortative mating was not a prime reason for the push for women's liberation including co-educational higher education, but it has been one of the consequences of young women going to college with young men. Assoritative mating extends the range of a metrical trait even if there is no change in gene frequency (Lynch & Walsh, 1998). With the characteristics of the IQ distribution, if a population raised its average by only 5 points, it would double the incidence of gifted people 3 standard deviations above the mean, and cut by half the number of retarded. Selective higher education may be genetically stratifying our society, another unintended consequence (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Weiss, 1995).
The legalization of voluntary abortions in the United States in 1973 may have had the unintended consequence of lowering the crime rate in the 1990s. This is because wom
en at higher risk of raising criminals; teenage mothers, single mums, blacks, have disproportionately higher rates of abortion (Donohue & Levitt, 1999).
As a final example of unexpected consequences, consider the effects of modern medicine on the gene pool. Many eugenicists have lamented the dysgenic effects of modern medicine that keeps alive severely affected, genetically anomalous individuals. However, the provision of supportive medicine may actually reduce the incidence of the deleterious genes. John Hartung and Peter Ellison (1977) have reported that, probably due to the psychological and physical stress of caring for a severely affected offspring, parents of such medically maintained children tend to have fewer later progeny, enough fewer to actually reduce the incidence of the responsible genes.
Although we know so little at the present time, our store of genetic knowledge and reproductive technology is vastly greater than at any time in the past. And our rate of acquisition of new knowledge and techniques is accelerating. If we can just educate the people, defeat the socialist ideologues, and keep the politician's hands off, then, with the new reproductive technology contributing to the Galtonian Revolution, a brave, and wonderful, new world awaits us in the new millennium.
Acknowledgment
I thank Marian Van Court for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. Preparation of this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Pioneer Fund.
References
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1963 – An Interesting Exchange of Ideas
1963 - An Interesting Exchange of Ideas
1963 - An Interesting Exchange of Ideas
Human talents are widely disparate; much of the disparity (no one suggests all) has a genetic basis. The facts of human reproduction are all gloomy--the stratification of fecundity by economic status, the new environmental insults to our genes, the sheltering of humanitarian medicine [of] the once-lethal defects. Even if these evils were tolerable or neutralized or mis-stated, do we not still sinfully waste a treasure of knowledge by ignoring the creative possibilities of genetic improvement?
Why bother now with somatic selection, so slow in its impact? Investing a fraction of the effort, we should soon lean how to manipulate chromosome ploidy, homozygosis, gametic selection full diagnosis of heterozygotes, to accomplish in one or two generations of eugenic practice what would now take ten or one hundred. What a clumsy job we would have done on mongolism even just five years ago, before we understood the chromosomal basis of the disease!
The following excerpts are from a discussion among the symposium participants (transcribed in the same volume) on the subject of Eugenics and Genetics. Several references were made to Muller's idea. They are referring to Hermann J. Muller, Nobel-prize winning geneticist, and his idea of a repository of germinal material obtained from superior men to be used for artificial insemination. (Muller's idea later materialized into The Repository for Germinal Choice, founded by Hermann J. Muller and Robert Klark Graham, which began operations in 1979.)
Francis Crick:
I certainly agree with what Dr. Lederberg has said about the extraordinary rate of increase in biological knowledge, particularly in some fields. What impresses me even more is the great lack of biological knowledge among ordinary people; the ordinary educated layman, and to some extent among scientists other than biologists. I also think it's deplorable the knowledge of natural selection is not taught properly in schools . . . .
Lederberg and I have arrived independently at an idea (which I hope he does not mind me quoting) that the type of solution which might become socially acceptable is simply to encourage by financial means those people who are more socially desirable to have more children (this is not the idea favoured by Muller). The obvious way to do this is to tax children. This seems dreadful to a good liberal [a conservative or libertarian in the US] because it is exactly the opposite of everything he has been brought up to believe. But at least it is logical. There are various objections; there will be people who, however much the tax is, will have many children, but they may be a minority. It is unreasonable to take money as an exact measure of social desirability, but at least they are fairly positively correlated. Of course, it is perfectly clear that you could not take such measures, as Muller very rightly said, with public opinion as it is, and with the general lack of biological knowledge.
Now to come to Muller's ideas. Is it possible that his scheme is the best way to give this type of biological education to the public at large? If some individuals were allowed to choose the father in the way he suggests, this might make the population as a whole reflect on the social responsibilities of parenthood . . . . . [I]t might happen that one particular country would initiate a larger-scale programme than any of the others, and after 20, 25, or 30 years the results might be rather startling, if, for example, all Nobel Prizes began to go to, say, Finland because they had gone in for improvement of their population on an extensive scale! If there are advantages in these techniques, and one society or nation does adopt them with marked success, this will accelerate adoption elsewhere.
Pirie:
Taking up Crick's point about the humanist argument on whether one has a right to have children, I would say that in a society in which the community is responsible for peoples welfare--health, hospitals, unemployment insurance, etc.-- the answer is No. . . . What has always seemed to me the ideal contraceptive technique would be a situation in which people would normally be infertile, and should do something if on any particular occasion they wished to become fertile. If such a method were available, how much trouble would it cause in a community once the idea had penetrated?
Francis Crick:
I believe that basically society has the right to decide, but what techniques can our society use to impose this to a reasonable extent (not necessarily 100%), without incurring some other costs? The proposal of licensing that I somewhat playfully suggested might, or might not, be acceptable in our present social system . . . .
Joshua Lederberg:,
In answer to Dr. Bronowski's question about our motivation, I think that most of us here believe that the present population of the world is not intelligent enough to keep itself from being blown up, and we would like to make some provision for the future so that it will have a slightly better chance of avoiding this particular contingency. I am not saying that our measures will be effective, but I think that is our motivation; it is not the negative but the positive aspects of genetic control that we are dealing with here.
On the other hand, I have serious doubts about the proposals for controlling reproduction that have been presented to us. The aspects of social control that seem to be necessary to make these proposals technically effective are I think extremely offensive and extremely dangerous. But leaving the matter to individual choice, which from a social standpoint is the most ideal, is certainly not going to be technically effective . . . .
Sir Julian Huxley:
. . .[T]he main thing is to aim at positive improvement. Much is possible and there are methods to do it. You need not start with drastic methods; nobody is going to solve the population problem by saying that a certain number of people are not going to be allowed to have any children. But you can make a start. At the moment many governments are encouraging people to have more children than they otherwise would by means of family allowances . . . . At the moment the population certainly wouldn't tolerate compulsory eugenic or sterilization measures, but if you start some experiments, including some voluntary ones, and see that they work and if you make a massive attempt at educating people and making them understand what is at issue, you might be able, within a generation, to have an effect on the general population. After all, our moral values evolve like everything else, and they evolve largely on the basis of the knowledge we have and share.
Trowell:
. . . . I have never understood how the human race got over the biological hurdle of moving from polygamy to monogamy. Under the polygamous system the favoured and cultured person, the king or chief, sires a large number of people in the community, and under those conditions we ought to have intelligence building up more rapidly than under the conditions of monogamy. As far as I understand, the human race was polygamous f
or the best part of a million years, whereas it has been monogamous in varying degrees of stability for a very short time . . . .
Francis Crick:
. . . [T]hose of us who are humanists have a great difficulty in that we are unable to formulate our ends as clearly as is possible for those of us who are Christians. Nevertheless there are some ends that we can all share, even though we have these differences. In is surely clear that good health, high intelligence, and general benevolence--the qualities Muller listed--are desirable qualities which we would all agree on. We would agree also that these qualities are not evenly distributed. There are people who are deficient in intelligence (I mention intelligence because this is something we can to some extent measure). Surely it is a very reasonable aim for us to try to increase that. Some of the arguments that nature is doing it all right may possibly be correct but they seem to me only to reflect conservatism and to have no real basis in fact . . .
Are the methods for improvement which we have at our disposal effective? Now there are difficult technical questions here, but my point, which Huxley made rather strongly, is that we are likely to achieve a considerable improvement--not perhaps as fast as we could do by other methods or even as fast as may turn out to be necessary--by using a very primitive knowledge of genetics; that is, by simply taking people with the qualities we like, and letting them have more children . . .
Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run
Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run
Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run By Edward M. Miller, PhD
This paper originally appeared in Research in Biopolitics, Vol. 5, Steven A. Peterson
and Al Somit, Eds., Greenwich, Connecticut; JAI Press, 1997, p. 391-416.
Paper requested for Recent Explorations in Biology and Politics.
Al Somit & Steven A. Peterson, Ed. JAI Press
Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run
by Edward M. Miller, PhD
Department of Economics and Finance
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, La. 70148
April 8, 1997
There is a simple economic argument for eugenics. Eugenics is defined as efforts to improve the gene pool in a particular population. Standard micro-economic theories of wages hold that a worker's wage equals the marginal product of his working time. Much textbook discussion of his marginal product focus on the quantities of cooperating factors: capital, land, and natural resources which labor has to work with. However, another important determinant is the worker's attributes and abilities. There is evidence that these are strongly affect by his genes (see below). It follows that efforts to maximize a nation's standard of living should try to improve its citizens' genetic quality, especially with regard to intelligence and other economically important traits. Improving the genetic quality of citizens calls for having those carrying the genes for desirable traits (as evidenced by their possession of the traits themselves) producing more than their proportionate share of that nation's children.
A secondary economic goal is to minimize the externalities in the economy resulting from the activities of one citizen affecting another citizen. An example would be minimizing the amounts that must be expended on welfare for those unable to earn the socially established minimum standard of living. Such people may be on welfare because of disease and handicaps, because low intelligence or personality problems make it hard to find and retain jobs, or because of drug addiction and alcoholism. Many of these conditions have an important genetic component.
Another important externality is criminal activity. Again it is known that from adoption studies and other sources that criminality has a significant genetic component (Rowe & Osgood, 1984; Lynn, 1996). As a result, an eugenics program can hope to reduce crime rates.
Notice the above arguments hold regardless of whether the intelligence of the population is believed to rising, falling, or remaining constant. If the intelligence is falling and expected to continue falling, it does follow that eventually something must be done or the maintenance of a modern industrial civilization will prove impossible. The available evidence is that those of higher IQ (who typically have genes that make for higher IQs) are having smaller families than those of lower IQ's (Herrenstein & Murray, 1994; Lynn, 1996; Miller, 1997a).
If a program of eugenics is to be introduced into modern countries, it will most likely be as a byproduct of births being restricted to restrain population growth. Thus, it will be argued below that in the long run society is faced with a choice between having the population restrained by misery, and having it restrained by conscious restrictions of births. Once the idea of preventing some births is accepted, it will then be natural to discuss the question of which births. It is then very likely that decisions will be based at least partially on preventing the births that are most likely to result in what that society regards as low quality citizens. This will be a eugenics program, although as will be pointed out some of the gains may arise from insuring that those children born are born into the families that provide better environments.
To introduce the case for eugenics consider Diagram 1. [Not available. Ed.] There is a simple income distribution on it with income increasing from left to right. Also shown is a certain level of income below which people fail to reproduce themselves. This is shown as a straight line. However, in practice it is probably a band, with women slightly below the line having only slightly less than two children surviving to adulthood. Women far below the line have relatively few children surviving to adulthood. Above the line the differences in survival to adulthood probabilities are probably small. But in the interests of simplicity, these complexities can not be shown.
What are the conditions for long run equilibrium? The first condition is that the population be stable. Obviously a continually growing population eventually exceeds the resources of the earth, or of the home country. This is not the place to get into debates about just what these limits are, or exactly when the world as a whole or particular country will come up against these limits. The purpose here is to show how societies will differ depending on how the state of zero population growth is achieved, and whether it is done by misery of the Malthusian type, or by eugenics.
It is important that the world is asymmetric, such that being far above the line probably does less for childhood survival than being below it. The diagram shows how with unrestrained fertility, the more unequal the income distribution, the higher the average income. The reason is that for population growth to be constrained by poverty to zero, there must be many below the poverty line. A given level of misery among those whose reproduction is being restrained by poverty is consistent with many different standards of living for those above the line. A more unequal distribution of income permits the average to be further above the line, consistent with any given amount of poverty, including that amount of poverty needed to keep the population stable.
If the distribution of income is to be completely equal, the average woman has to be at the poverty line, such that poverty prevents her from raising only slightly more than a single female offspring to reproductive age. It takes extreme poverty to achieve this outcome. Even in many poor third world countries the population is growing, and the typical woman much more than reproduces herself.
If income becomes more unequal, it becomes possible for most of the population to be far above the poverty line, while still allowing a high enough fraction of the population to be far enough below the poverty line to prevent population growth. This leads to the very unpleasant conclusion that for a nation to enjoy a high average income is consistent with that nation having a stable population only if that income is unevenly distributed. Only with high inequality will enough of the population be far enough below the poverty line to prevent population growth.
Without birth control, any attempt to raise the poor's living standard merely increases their children's survival rates, increases the population, and pulls the average standard of living back down. If income is redistributed from the rich to the poor, one predictable effect is that the rich live less well. Another is that the poor increase in number until rising misery returns the population growth rate to zero. This rather unpleasant vision is the standard Malthusian one.
Unfortunately, in the long run, without population control, attempts to eliminate poverty merely increase the population and reintroduce poverty. The obvious solution is to replace misery as a device for controlling population growth with some other program for limiting the birth rate and stabilizing population. While there is certainly something very intrusive about the government acting to limit birth
s, it seems preferable to allowing population growth to be limited by poverty.
If there is to be some family size limitation, at least among certain families, perhaps we should be asking what criteria should be used to decide who should have children, and who should be prevented or discouraged from having children?
This may be a good point to refer to the evidence that many humans traits are strongly influenced by genes (Rowe 1994; Lynn 1996; Miller, 1997a). This evidence come from the science of behavior genetics. The first testable predication of a theory that variability in a trait is genetically influenced is that the trait will run in families. However, traits can also run in families because they are environmentally influenced, and each generation creates for their children an environment similar to the one they themselves were raised in. Thus, it is necessary to look for situations where environmental theories and genetic theories make different predictions.
One such situation is in adoptions, where the environment is created by the family of adoption, and the genes come from the biological parents. If there is no genetic influence, there will be zero correlation between the children's traits and those of the biological parents. To the extent the environment of rearing is influential, the adoptee's traits will be correlated with the family of rearing, while to the extent that genes are influential (or prenatal conditions) it will be correlated with the family of genetic origin.
Another method is twin studies. Here findings that monozygotic twins are more alike than dizygotic twins provides evidence of genetic effects. This is an example of a more general effect, in which, by examining the extent to which those who differ in genetic relationships resemble reach other, one can model the role of genetic factors. Especially impressive are the studies of separated twins that were raised apart. These frequently grow up to be quite similar in personality and intelligence (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990; Pederson, Plomin, McClearn, & Friberg, 1988).
Due to space limitations, this is not the place to present all the evidence for the importance of genetic factors in intelligence and personality. However, there is strong evidence that most traits are genetically influenced (see for instance Rowe 1994 for summary evidence on the large number of traits for which genetic influences have been shown). Even what appear to be social attitudes have been shown to be affected by genes (Eaves, Eysenck, & Martin, 1989).
In general, the evidence for the role of genes in so many factors raises the possibility of controlling who bears children to influence the traits found in succeeding generations. This makes it useful to begin to discuss how eugenic policies might be carried out
In the short run, population growth can be restrained by encouraging smaller families by various voluntary means. By lecturing about the dangers of population growth and the environmental problems of a large population, some people may be persuaded to choose smaller families. However, these are likely to be the most responsible people. With each generation, the fraction of such responsible people is likely to decline. There is evidence that altruism (Rushton, 1980) is affected by genes. A voluntary program selects against such genes. Eventually this method will fail.
Because women that have many opportunities for high prestige jobs (professors etc.) frequently take them and choose to have few children, a common proposal for reducing the birth rate is to increase women's access to such jobs (Hoffman, 1975). Rhetorically this makes it easy to be both feminist and concerned about population growth.
For instance, in America the number of children per women 35-44 (when women have virtually completed their child bearing) is 1.6 for women with 16 years or more of education (college graduates usually), while it is 2.6 for those with 0-11 years of education (usually non-high school graduates), with those with in-between levels having 1.9 children for some college, and 2.0 children for high school graduates (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Presumably the college graduates delay the start of childbearing to complete their education (which may continue into graduate and professional school), and then frequently choose an interesting career over staying at home for child rearing. If these effects are caused by the education (rather than a common cause, such as a desire for a career causing the education), it would follow that providing more education for females would reduce population growth. If the whole population of the world had the US pattern of female education and birthrates, overpopulation would not be a threat.
Observations like the above lead many to argue that the solution (or at least a major part of it) for excessive population growth is to educate women, and to increase their opportunity to play high prestige roles in society. Women will then choose these roles over child bearing and rearing.
However, there are problems with this policy proposal (besides the obvious ones of whether the education is really causing the low birth rates, and how poor countries could afford to educate their women so well).
Unfortunately, the evidence is that much of what determines whether women will have access to high paying, high prestige jobs is genetic, notably the genes for intelligence (Jensen 1981; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Seligman, 1992, Storfer, 1990). Educating women and encouraging them to take up jobs that reduce their childbearing will work for the first few generations, but it will gradually lower the intelligence level of the population.
Herrnstein & Murray (1994) show that the average IQ of female college graduates was 111, versus 81 for the women who did not finish high school. The others were in between (103 for those with some college, and 95 for high school graduates). If we try to control population growth by encouraging the more intelligent women to choose careers over childbearing, in the long run the average intelligence must decline. This occurs because of the high heritability for intelligence. Because the intelligent women usually marry intelligent men, discouraging reproduction by intelligent women also reduces reproduction by intelligent men. Thus, this apparently desirable method for controlling population growth, so consistent with modern feminism, lacks long run viability.
However, there are other problems with any voluntary method for controlling population growth. It is likely that the drives for fatherhood or motherhood run in families for either cultural or genetic reasons. Those with weaker drives to be parents will be more readily persuaded to forgo parenthood. However, efforts to persuade people to voluntarily forgo parenthood merely assure that in the next generation will come disproportionately from those with stronger drives for parenthood. Thus, a voluntary program will eventually eliminate those who are easily persuaded to forgo parenthood. Those left will, for either genetic or cultural reasons (including religious ones), be unwilling to forgo parenthood. This is similar to the argument made above for appealing to the citizen's altruism to limit population growth. After the altruistic have been persuaded to limit their reproduction, and to gradually eliminate themselves, who is left that can voluntarily be persuaded to limit their births?
It is also true that some ethnic groups have higher birth rates than other (most likely for cultural reasons). If these differences persist, the mathematics insure that eventually the nation's growth rate will equal the growth rate of its fastest growing ethnic components. To use an extreme example, Hutterites (a sect that does not believe in birth control) may be the fastest growing group in a nation. If other groups can be persuaded to restrict
their birth rates, given enough time the Hutterites will become any nation's dominant group. Then that nation's population growth rate will be that of the Hutterites.
Thus, eventually, population must stabilize and the alternatives are:
1. That this is done by restricting births by government coercion
2. This is done by poverty.
For the type of society that can result from poverty see Scheper-Hughes (1992) description of everyday life in Northeastern Brazil. She paints a disturbing picture in which most families live in poverty and infant mortality is very high, high enough so that parents become reconciled to losing children. Indeed, it appears as if they are subconsciously deciding to let some children die of malnutrition. Yet as bad as the situation described is, the population is still growing. The typical poor women still manages to more than reproduce herself. A even higher degree of misery would be required to limit population growth.
Besides limiting population growth rates, there is one other advantage to limiting family size. Right now the poorest families are the largest (Lynn 1996: Herrenstein & Murray, 1994). Mathematically, this implies that the percentage of the nation's children that are raised in poverty exceeds the percentage of the adults that are poor. In the US, child advocacy groups regularly point out the high fraction of the nation's children who are being raised in poverty. They consistently fail to point out how restricting the birth rates among the poor would help to solve this problem. The effect would be partially by lowering the percentage of children who are born into poor families. If this resulted in lowering family size among the poor, the low income families could spread their resources out more among their children.
Spreading the family's resources among fewer children would increase the per child amounts not only for economic resources such as money, but also of non-economic resources. It also permits (but does not guarantee) more parental time per child, and more supervision, which is usually believed to be good. For instance, it is know that children raised in large families more often grow up to be criminals, and in mainstream criminology this is attributed to such children receiving less parental supervision (Lynn, 1996)
If the government is to decide who is to have children, they may wish to decide on some rational criteria, so as to improve the gene pool or to accomplish other goals.
Admittedly, some might try to restrict population growth by an across the board restriction, thus apparently avoiding hard decisions about who should be allowed to reproduce. For instance, families might be somehow limited to two or three children (China now has a limit of one). However, for a stable population, two is too few, and three too many. In theory, one might alternate restriction of two with those of three for different generations (two children per family in several generations, and then a generation permitting three children per couple to rebuild the population). Likewise, if the number required for a stable population was 2.2, one might randomly assign certain families to the three child category, thus avoiding having to make choices on a rational basis. However, either of these procedures for avoiding making hard choices seems to forgo the advantages of selectivity for little reason.
If parental time for child rearing is very important, or if most adults want strongly to be parents, the goal might be families approximately equal in size. Any limits would then be to two or three children per family, and the selectivity would be limited to deciding on some basis which families would be allowed to have three children rather than two.
If the emphasis is more on insuring that children are born with the best possible genes, a greater degree of variability in family size might be considered desirable. Each family might be allowed a minimum of one child to give them the pleasures of parenthood, and possibly to provide society with whatever benefits may result from adults being parents (more conservative behavior among males for instance). The desired average of a little more than two children per family could then be achieved by having the selected parents have at least three children, and possibly more.
While different policies have implications for the percentages of the children that have occupied different birth orders, there is not now strong evidence that would justify preferring children of any particular birth order (Ernst & Angst, 1983). Clearly different strategies could change the percentage of middle children relative to first and last borns. Sulloway (1995, 1996) has presented evidence that first born are more conservative and later born more likely to be rebels, but it is not obvious which society should pick when it can choose.
Of course, if the goal is to provide an even more rapid genetic improvement while still retaining traditional family structures, those couples with the worse genetic endowment would be prevented from reproducing. The deficit would be made up for by much larger families among the couples with the better genes (however defined). This would require that many of these families have four or more children. Since there is no real evidence that large families are bad for children, this would seem to be an acceptable alternative.
Of course, if one is willing to explore unconventional family structures such as making more use of artificial impregnation, even where the wife has a husband who could father her children, or where the potential mother lacks a husband (as with single women or lesbian couples), there is scope for more rapidly spreading desirable genes. One might even consider cloning now that this has been shown to be possible in mammals (Specter, 1997).
Anything that slows the reproduction of those with genetic traits society does not want to perpetuate may be an eugenic policy. These aspects are not always discussed.
For instance, prison visits of wives for sexual purposes may encourage births by those carrying genes for criminality. Yet the discussions of this typically consist of the opponents saying that prison should be as unpleasant as practical, and that it is inconsistent with punishment to provide sexual access. On the other side, those in favor of conjugal visits typically argue they help to hold marriages together, prevent the spouse from being penalized, and perhaps help in managing the prisoners. Mention of any genetic effect seems to be missing.
It is sometimes proposed that rapists be castrated. This is generally proposed merely as punishment, but yet it should reduce the births of those with personality traits (possibly poor impulse control) that lead to rape and other crimes (for a discussion of the role of genes in rape see Ellis, 1989)..
Castration seems to work. Recidivism rates have been found to be 0 to 7.4% in a study of 2,055 European rapists (Bradford, 1990), which is far lower than the US recidivism rates, which have been reported to be as high as 40%. Given that castration is likely to be far cheaper than years of imprisonment, it might be used.
Perhaps even more effective in reducing rapes might be surgery that prevented erections by cutting relevant nerves. This would eliminate the reinforcing effects of fantasies accompanied by masturbation, probably reducing the motivation for rape and other sex crimes. This is purely a speculative proposal at this stage, but one that should be the subject of some discussion.
In principle, castration might be used for other violent crimes also. It has the attraction of being relatively low cost. If there is a substantial genetic basis for most crimes, and the evidence is that there is (Lynn, 1996), castration would reduce the number of offspring left by such criminals. If it is desirable to reduce the rate of population growth for other reas
ons, as was argued above, criminals would seem to be good ones to deprive of the benefits of fatherhood.
Of course, castration of criminals might deprive their wives or girl friends of parenthood. It is likely in many case they would become pregnant even without artificial insemination. However, with the availability of artificial insemination, they would be expected to frequently choose artificial insemination rather than remaining childless. The result would be replacing the sperm of a criminal with what could be a very high quality sperm. Obviously that would tend to reduce the frequency of the genes most closely related to criminal activity.
One side benefit of such a program would probably be selection against low intelligence. It is known that arrested criminals tend to have below average intelligence. For instance, Herrenstein & Murray (1994, p 248) found that 12% of the male whites in the very dull category were in a correctional facility when interviewed versus 3% for the whole sample.
There are a number of ways people might be induced to limit births that would not involved coercion (other than to pay the taxes to finance the programs). Most such programs would probably have an eugenic effect since those with lower incomes or shorter time horizons would probably find any given incentive program more attractive.
Payments for sterilization might be offered, say $5,000 or $10,000. These sums would be attractive to those who have a weak desire to leave descendants. Very likely such programs would select for other desirable traits such as a tendency to weight income in the distant future less than in the present. Banfield (1974) has argued that a greater desire for current pleasure (related to the economist's concept of time preference) lies behind many of the inner city problems. For instance, if one needs $20 for a date tonight the easiest way to obtain it is to snatch someone's purse. Admittedly, repeated purse snatching is likely to end in a jail sentence, but that is sometime in the distant future. At a high enough interest rate, stealing the purse becomes rational.
Likewise, drug taking brings immediate pleasure even if at the cost of future addiction. Sex brings immediate pleasure even if the cost is unwed motherhood, or for the father, financial responsibility for children. Watching TV is more pleasant than studying, but studying has long run returns in higher income. Maintaining real estate takes time, but over the long run it makes for a more comfortable home. Saving (and forgoing use of credit) reduces current consumption, but increases future consumption. Creating a small business often means putting in long hours and doing without many pleasures. However, eventually, the small business may succeed. One can imagine many such examples.
There is very little solid research on whether time preference has a genetic basis. It is known to vary with ethnic background. For instance, in Trinidad children of Indian descent (ancestors from India) are less willing to accept a small piece of candy now rather than a larger piece of candy in the future than those of African descent (Mischel & Metzer, 1962). However, since most personality traits are strongly affected by genes with a substantial heritability, it is very likely that the ability to defer gratification is a trait with a genetic component.
If a desire for immediate gratification plays a role in criminality, as it appears to (Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985), it is to be expected that restraining the reproduction of convicted criminals would also tend to restrict the reproduction of those with a short time preference.
It is very likely that many modern methods of birth control select for a desire for immediate gratification. Consider for instance the simple condom. Using this for birth control requires stopping the sequence of events (often seduction) that lead to impregnation to put a condom on. Those who have a strong desire for immediate gratification are much less likely to do this. The same argument applies to inserting a diaphragm, coitus interruptus, or using sponges. Even using birth control pills requires obtaining the pills in advance, and remembering to take them at the right time.
A significant fraction of births represent failures of birth control (Van Court, 1983). For the United States, the Kost & Forrest (1995) analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth reported that 36% of births were unplanned. For those with less than twelve years of education, 58% of the births were unplanned versus only 27% among college graduates. Besides the obvious dysgenetic effect on intelligence, these probably have a dysgenic effect in that the families that who have children through birth control failure are probably less willing to defer gratification, and have a lower ability to plan ahead. Also, it is very likely that inability to defer gratification goes with a lower intelligence. Incidentally, the high fraction of births that are unplanned suggests that improved methods of birth control that are easier may have a significant eugenic effect.
One other trait that may go with accidental pregnancies is drinking alcohol. Many people are inhibited about sex and loosen up with alcohol (or are plied with alcohol by their potential sex partners). Alcohol in general lowers inhibitions. These lower inhibitions are both towards having sex, and towards having unprotected sex. In the modern world, where most children born are raised to sexual maturity, the fact that birth control methods are readily available to most everyone to be used or not, may act as a selective agent for alcohol consumption. The reason is that people who are drunk, or merely under the influence of alcohol are less likely to use birth control, and are therefore more leave offspring with the same propensity for alcohol consumption. However, this desire for alcohol also goes along with alcoholism, and this makes a mate less desirable (and intoxication can make the sex act harder for males).
Boulding (1969) has proposed transferable licenses for child bearing, each couple to get 2.2 licenses. They could then be bought or sold. Those who valued children most would have the larger families (probably a good in itself). In practice, many poor people and those with short time horizons would sell their licenses for the money. This would have a desirable eugenic effect.
Barry (1969) has proposed payments for potential parents who have no more than two children, such payments to be proportional to income. He bases the proposal to make the payments proportional to income on a desire to have the upper and middle classes restrict their fertility as much as the lower classes. His rationale for trying to restrict fertility as much in the upper and middle classes is to maintain the opportunity for upward mobility for the poor. Interestingly, this paper, although appearing in a journal stating on the cover that is was formerly the Eugenics Quarterly, displays no awareness that restriction of fertility among the lower classes would increase the genetic quality of the population. However, his explicit rationale for trying to avoid disproportionate fertility restriction among the lower classes does point out a possible disadvantage to eugenics programs. If fertility is disproportionately restricted among the lower classes as a successful eugenics program would do, there is likely to be more social downward mobility, with more of the population feeling they were ranked lower than their parents (and they will be correct). If moving downwards in the social hierarchy makes people feel bad (and it does), this is a disadvantage to an eugenics program.
Any plan that offers large sums of cash for sterilization, or for restricting child bearing, would reduce the birth rates most among those with a strong desire for current consumption. Such large cash payments would be especially attractive to drug addicts who often need money to purchase drugs. There could
be expected to be effects on future rates of drug abuse from such an eugenics program.
If it were politically possible, one might even trade drugs for sterilization or implantation of a birth control device, or at least provide enough drugs so that there would not be withdrawal problems around the time of the sterilization.
Since crack, alcohol, (and probably other drugs) affect the fetus, there would be strong social savings if these addicted women could be prevented from having children. It could also slow down the spread of AIDS, which is frequently transmitted from mother to child. Notice that such benefits are environmental in nature.
An obvious idea is to tie the receipt of welfare to using a drug which prevents having additional children while on welfare, such as Norplant. Given the correlation of being on welfare with low intelligence, and probably with other undesirable genetic traits, such a proposal would improve the nation's genetic stock. Given the difficulty of knowing whether promises to use birth control are being observed, tying receipt of welfare to using most methods of birth control is probably infeasible. Penalizing mothers for having babies after they promised not to would either end up penalizing the children, or force the mothers into having abortions.
It is to be expected that any measure that reduces the pool of low IQ, uneducated individuals would reduce the competition for the jobs such people can do. Such a program should reduce the unemployment rate, and raise incomes among the low IQ part of the population.
The final outcome of such birth control would be to reduce inequalities by two mechanisms.
1 Reducing the number of those with traits leading to low income (low IQ, short time preference, etc.) in the society. This raises the weighted average skill level.
2. By raising the wages rates for unskilled labor. It is a standard prediction of economic models that reducing the supply raising the price. It follows that reducing the supply of low wage labor would raise the wage rates for such services.
Although the word eugenics is very unpopular among intellectuals, there may not be as much opposition among the ordinary voters.
One Texas legislator in an informal poll found 3,533 to 2,604 in favor of sterilization for welfare moms with 3 or more children. (Reilly, 1991, p.161). The Boston Globe found, in a call in telephone poll, that 49% supported sterilization of the mentally ill.
China has apparently adopted a sterilization law targeting mentally retarded parents in one province (Reilly, 1994, p. 164). While China is politically quite different from the United States, this still shows that such actions may be possible
Singapore has announced eugenic programs aimed at promoting births by the better educated (Chan, 1987), and in particular by graduate women. There was also announced a program to reward low income families under 30 with less than two children for being sterilized with US$4,000 as a down payment for a government low cost apartment.
Of course, there are arguments against eugenics programs. Government power over private citizen's lives is always subject to abuse. So history teaches. US state run programs seem to have had problems with some sterilizations that were not for good eugenic reasons (Reilly, 1991). Any government program is going to make numerous mistakes and possibly suffer from some corruption. Certainly it has not always been known which traits were genetically influenced, and there were some sterilizations done under the various laws that probably do not contribute to improving the genetic stock. For instance, there is a case of a woman who was the offspring of incest, but apparently otherwise unhandicapped, being sterilized.
Currently, we are far from having much knowledge of which genes influence particular traits, or from knowing all the traits that are subject to genetic influences. If we were given complete copies of the genetic sequences for two individuals we could not tell which one we preferred. That is true. However, such a high level of knowledge is not needed for a useful eugenics program.
It is generally known that many traits are genetically influenced (see above) and people generally agree on which direction is good. For instance:
1. High intelligence is good.
2. Self control is good.
3. Criminality and rape are bad.
4. Most diseases are bad.
The above provides a basis for deciding whose reproduction to encourage. At this point we could proceed with a start on programs, hoping to improve knowledge in the future.
One theoretical concern is that many traits may be influenced by pleitropic genes such that selec
The Mismeasures of Gould
(Originally published in The National Review, September 15, 1997)
Mr. Rushton is professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in London. This article is adapted from his review in the referred academic journal Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 23, pp. 169-180.
``[Steven Jay] Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.''
YEP, that's the Steven Jay Gould -- Harvard paleontologist, best-selling science popularizer, Natural History magazine columnist, and media superstar -- in the opinion of John Maynard Smith, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory. Smith's skepticism about Gould is pervasive among his peers. Daniel Dennett's brilliant 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, was largely devoted to dispelling Gouldian misinformation. John Alcock, author of standard animal-behavior textbooks, recently described Gould as ``consistently employing the same limited set of debating techniques and stylistic devices . . . while simply ignoring evidence to the contrary.''
This civil war among evolutionists has now burst into the open. Gould struck back, with his trademark deceptive elegance, in The New York Review of Books (June 12, June 26, August 14), house organ of the New York intelligentsia that has long been his real constituency.
The point at issue between the evolutionists and Gould seems arcane. Does evolution proceed gradually or through ``punctuated equilibrium'' -- immobility interrupted by transforming upheaval? Gould's preference for the latter reflects his left-wing politics -- for evolutionary upheavals, read social revolutions. Yet it may also be traced to his refusal to admit that systematic differences, probably evolutionary in origin, exist among human beings.
That same refusal regularly distorts Gould's 1981 The Mismeasure of Man, now reissued in a ``revised and expanded'' edition (Norton, $13.95). The Mismeasure of Man (which in its first version sold 250,000 copies, was translated into ten languages, and became required reading for undergraduate and even graduate classes) dealt with questions that are delicate, controversial, and (to the scientific layman) even discomfiting: IQ, brain size, sex, and race. It did so by unscrupulously mishandling the evidence. The new version -- described by the publisher as ``an acclaimed classic that refutes the conclusions of The Bell Curve'' -- is expanded but hardly revised. It regurgitates character assassinations of deceased scientists, misrepresents their work despite published refutation, and studiously withholds 15 years of new research that contradicts every major scientific argument Gould puts forth.
Perhaps the single most devastating development for Gould: new research on brain size. Was he asleep throughout the 1990s -- called, with good reason, ``The Decade of the Brain''?
Gould originally charged nineteenth-century scientists with ``juggling'' and ``finagling'' brain-size data in order to place Northern Europeans at the apex of civilization. Implausibly, he argued that Paul Broca, Francis Galton, and Samuel George Morton, all ``finagled'' in the same direction and by similar magnitudes using different methods. Gould asks us to believe that Broca ``leaned'' on his autopsy scales when measuring wet brains by just enough to produce the same differences that Morton caused by ``over-packing'' empty skulls and that Galton caused with his ``extra loose'' grip on calipers while measuring heads! Yet even before Mismeasure's first edition, new research was confirming the work of nineteenth-century pioneers. Gould neglected to mention that Leigh Van Valen had already established a positive correlation between brain size and intelligence in 1974.
Subsequently, of course, discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (0.44) between brain size and intelligence. And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Study, as reported by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter measured at birth significantly predicts head perim-eter at 7 years -- and head perimeter at both ages predicts IQ. Recent studies also show that head size and IQ vary with social class. It is now clear that the nineteenth-century pioneers were right.
The first of the MRI studies were published in the late 1980s/early 1990s in leading, mainstream refereed journals like Intelligence and the American Journal of Psychiatry. My colleagues and I routinely sent Gould copies and asked him what he thought. He never replied. Now he has chosen to withhold all these data from his readers.
Indeed, in the 1996 edition he deletes the very section of his own 1981 book that discussed the brain-size/IQ relation. In 1981, he had pooh-poohed Arthur Jensen's report (in Bias in Mental Testing) of a 0.30 correlation between brain-size and IQ -- but he omits this dismissal, without explanation, from the revised version. I can only infer that when Gould read Jensen's review of his book (which he mentions), he realized that Jensen's correlation was based on Van Valen's 1974 review and so could no longer be dismissed as ``just Jensen.'' And, given the weight of the new evidence, simply repeating this section verbatim would have destroyed his entire thesis. He therefore left it out.
Is it reasonable, however, to expect brain size and cognitive ability to be related? Yes. H. Haug in 1987 found a correlation of 0.479 between the number of cortical neurons and brain size in humans. Gould dismisses differences in brain size as ``trivial.'' But a difference of one cubic inch in brain size translates into a very nontrivial millions of cortical neurons and hundreds of millions of synapses -- a significant difference in mental activity and potential.
It is, of course, relationships between brain size/IQ and sex and race which, understandably, arouse the most anxiety. Some critics have even suggested a social taboo on discussion and research in these fields. That would run counter to the entire tradition of scientific inquiry. Be that as it may, it is surely indisputable that if such research is to be conducted, it must be done accurately and scrupulously. And here Gould fails again.
An absolute difference in brain size between men and women has not been disputed since at least the time of Broca (1861). Gould, however, claims that the sex difference disappears when appropriate statistical corrections are made for body size or age of people sampled. But when he used multiple regression to remove the simultaneous influence of height and age, he succeeded in reducing the sex difference by only one-third. He then invoked additional unspecified age and body parameters, claiming that if these could be controlled the entire difference would disappear.
David Ankney in 1992 questioned Gould's methodology. He re-examined autopsy data on 1,261 American adults and found that at any given body surface area or height, men's brains are heavier than women's. His research -- since confirmed by my own 1992 survey of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel -- attributes only about 30 per cent of the sex difference in brain size to differences in body size.
Admittedly, the brain-size studies present a paradox. Women have proportionately smaller brains than men but, apparently, the same intelligence scores. Ankney suggests that the difference in brain size may relate to those intellectual abilities at which men excel -- namely, spatial and mathematic
al ability -- which may require more ``brain power'' than do verbal abilities. Other theories are that men average slightly higher in general intelligence than do women, and finally that these particular differences in brain size have nothing to do with cognitive ability at all, but reflect greater male muscle mass and physical coordination in tasks like throwing and catching.
Similarly, Gould denies that brain weight varies with race. He repeats verbatim his 1981 claim that Samuel George Morton -- a giant of nineteenth-century American science -- ``unconsciously'' doctored his results on cranial capacity to prove Caucasian racial superiority. Yet he must know that John S. Michael reported in Current Anthropology in 1988 that he had checked Morton's work and found very few errors -- and these not in the direction that Gould asserted. Instead, Michael found errors in Gould's work.
In my own published work, uncited by Gould, I have shown that brain sizes vary systematically by race -- but not to the benefit of Caucasians. For what it is worth, Mongoloids average about a cubic inch more than Caucasoids and over three cubic inches more than Negroids. This result has been corroborated many times since 1980, and by every available technique. And these findings are in line with the (by now) accepted IQ results: the average IQ scores for ``African,'' ``Latino,'' ``White,'' ``Asian,'' and ``Jewish'' Americans are 85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively. Of course, whether these differences are the result of genetic or environmental influences, and whether (or to what extent) they are remediable by purposeful action -- these remain matters of dispute.
GOULD'S faults extend well beyond sins of omission to include sins of commission. His ``new'' edition repeats the same false accusations about individuals that have been thoroughly refuted since 1981. Thus, Gould leaves unmodified his denigration of Sir Francis Galton as ``a dotty Victorian eccentric.'' This was rightly described by Cambridge statistician A. W. F. Edwards in the London Review of Books (1983), as ``a thoroughly tendentious portrait.'' Edwards pointed out that Gould, in a book full of references to correlation, multiple regression, principal-components analysis, and factor analysis, totally failed to inform his students that this whole statistical methodology was pioneered by Galton -- and to measure human intelligence.
He also repeats his trashing of Sir Cyril Burt, the eminent British educational psychologist, who reported a heritability for IQ of 77 per cent for identical twins reared apart. After his death in 1971, Burt was widely accused of fabricating his data. However, five separate studies of identical twins raised apart have now corroborated his findings. Two meticulously researched books, by Robert B. Joynson and Ronald Fletcher, have vindicated Burt, describing how he was railroaded by anti-hereditarian zealots. Gould ignores them.
Gould's most inflammatory allegation is to blame IQ testers for increasing the toll of the Holocaust. His thesis is that early IQ testers claimed Jews as a group scored low on their tests. This finding was then allegedly used to support passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, under which Jewish refugees were denied entry in the 1930s. Gould even claims that Henry H. Goddard in 1917 and Carl C. Brigham in 1923 labeled four-fifths of Jewish immigrants as ``feeble-minded . . . morons.''
In both cases, this has repeatedly been shown to be untrue. For example, Goddard was testing to see if the standard Binet test identified what were then called ``high-grade defectives'' as well among immigrants as it did among native-born Americans. (It did.) He explicitly did not assert that 80 per cent of Russians, Jews, or any immigrant group in general were feeble-minded.
Gould repeats his account despite widely disseminated refutations. Historian of psychology Franz Samelson began setting the record straight in the journal Social Forces as early as 1975. Mark Snyderman and the late Richard Herrnstein, writing in The American Psychologist in 1983, corroborated Samelson's conclusions and showed that the testing community in general did not view its findings as favoring immigration restriction, and that Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing in framing the legislation.
The eminent historian Carl N. Degler, in his 1991 book In Search of Human Nature, took Gould to task for ignoring contradictory information. He points out, for example, that the high scores of Orientals did not prevent them from being excluded from immigrating -- and that their scores would have embarrassed any attempt to make IQ the basis of immigration policy. Daniel Seligman debunked Gould's anti-testing propaganda in his book A Question of Intelligence. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their book, The Bell Curve, also highlighted the issue in a special boxed section. Gould reviewed The Bell Curve (twice!). Yet he ignores all these counter-arguments in his ``revision.''
Indeed, in his account of The Bell Curve, Gould charges Herrnstein and Murray with ``disingenuousness.'' He then withholds from readers the fact that their book was principally an empirical analysis of social stratification drawn from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Most high-IQ 17-year-olds, blacks as well as whites, went on to occupational success in their late twenties and early thirties. Many of those with low IQs, both black and white, went on to welfare dependency. Thus IQ tests are predictive.
Gould's attack on The Bell Curve focuses on its use of the ``general factor of intelligence,'' or g, which psychometricians hypothesize underlies tests of mental ability. Gould likes to leave his readers chanting the mantra, ``g is nothing more than an artifact of the mathematical procedure used to calculate it.'' But every major study shows that different IQ tests tend to be significantly intercorrelated, suggesting an underlying commonality. Thus Nathan Brody, Arthur Jensen, and John Carroll have all provided detailed empirical and analytical demonstrations of the reality of g (including, incidentally, a strong correlation with brain size). Gould ignores them all.
Gould employs another technical trick as well as attacking g: he continues to argue that findings about IQ differences within groups cannot be applied to differences between groups. (Curiously, he does not object when environmentalists use nutrition as an explanation of both within-group and between-group differences.) Research has found that racial differences are more pronounced on subtests that are highly heritable than on less heritable tests. This clearly supports the genetic hypothesis. Gould ignores it.
And most transracial adoption studies provide evidence for the heritability of racial differences in IQ. For instance, Korean and Vietnamese children adopted into white American and white Belgian homes were examined by E. A. Clark and J. Hanisee, by M. Frydman and R. Lynn, and by M. Winck et al. Many had been hospitalized for malnutrition. But they went on to develop IQs ten or more points higher than their adoptive national norms.
Gould does refer to adoption studies -- but only to a German finding of ``no difference'' between pre-puberty mixed-race children fathered by black soldiers and those fathered by white soldiers. He also mentions a similar result in Minnesota which seems to refer to an early report of the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. That study has subsequently found, however, that marked black/white differences emerged by age 17. (Environmental influences typically wash out by adolescence.)
FINALLY, Gould continues to ridicule the ``ape in some of us'' hypothesis proposed by Cesare Lombroso (1836 - 1909), the founder of criminology. Lombroso argued that many criminals were throwbacks to man's ancestral past, and that ``natural-born criminals'' could be identified by anatomical signs of primitiveness. (Contrary to Gould, however, Lombroso also believed that criminal behavior could
arise in ``normal'' men.)
The reader of Mismeasure will search in vain, however, for even a dismissive reference to recent evidence that criminal behavior does indeed have a biological basis. Adrian Raine has reviewed several studies using MRI, Computerized Tomography, and Positron Emission Tomography to inspect the brains of violent and sexual offenders. He tentatively concluded that frontal-lobe dysfunction was associated with violent behavior, including rape. Further, it has been long established that criminals tend to have lower IQs than non-criminals. So, given the relation between brain size and IQ, Lombroso's finding of a smaller brain in criminals is probably correct.
Nor does Gould feel compelled to let his readers know that Lombroso's ideas have now received considerable support from behavioral genetics. Studies reported by Raine, David Rowe, and myself show that criminality is substantially more likely to be shared by identical twins than by fraternal twins. This clearly suggests a genetic factor, since both sets of twins share environments, but only identical twins have identical genes. Similarly, American, Danish, and Swedish studies of children adopted in infancy show that adopted children were more likely to be criminals if their biological parents -- rather than their adoptive parents -- were also criminals.
Even Lombroso's theory of bodily markers is not as far out as Gould would have you believe. It is now understood that drugs in pregnancy or other ``insults'' to the fetus may disturb its brain development and simultaneously produce a minor physical anomaly (MPA). For example, fetal ears start low on the neck and gradually drift upward. An insult to development can stop this and result in low-set ears -- an observable MPA. Thus, the number of MPAs is a rough index of (perhaps hidden) central-nervous-system anomalies.
For children raised in unstable families, Raine found that the number of MPAs at age 12 was related to violent behaviors at age 21. More generally, Raine even found that antisocial children often had more facial deformities, as judged by expert plastic surgeons.
In suppressing the hypothesis that genetics matter in crime by sneering at the long-dead Lombroso and ignoring the latest research, Gould is actively obstructing scientists from finding ways to spare both future victims and delinquents -- who, in their own fashion, are also victims. It is thus Gould who is -- in Lombroso's words -- the delinquent man.
Gould tells us that he originally considered titling his book Great Is Our Sin, from Charles Darwin's remark: ``If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.'' He avers that the scientific study of human differences in mental ability is nothing but an apology for elitist European enslavement and oppression of the rest of the world. This has become the apostle's creed of the adversary culture. However, even the most deeply held views cannot justify withholding evidence, engaging in character assassination, and repeating unfounded charges despite refutations.
``May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil's mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth,'' swears Gould on page 39 of his new introduction. By his own standard, Gould has consigned himself to the innermost circle of hell. But science, fortunately, is neither religion nor politics. Gould can save himself by owning up to the facts and ending his career of relentless special pleading.
(From the pages of National Review)
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The Concept of Heredity in the History of Western Culture, Part I
The Concept of Heredity in the History of Western Culture, Part I
The Concept of Heredity
in the History of Western Culture, Part I by Roger Pearson
Institute for the Study of Man
This paper originally appeared in The Mankind Quarterly, vol. 35, #3, Spring 1995, p. 229-265.
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.
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 (IV, 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 the even well-born individuals had to be schooled and trained to develop their inborn qualities to the maximum, but basic potential was inborn. In Homeric Greece, even truthfulness a revered value was deemed to be an inherited virtue, and to call a eupatrid, or "person of good ancestry," a liar was tantamount to calling him a bastard, a man of impure, inferior descent. Even as late as Classical Athens, Aristotle defined the physical and moral characteristics that were deemed to constitute nobility as "an inherited virtue" (Pol. IV. 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" (Il. 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, 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. The desirability of breeding from proven stock had become a cultural requirement, and only children born of legitimate wives (i.e., of quality ancestry) could inherit the social status of the father. Indeed, in ancient Athens and other Greek city-states, the eupatrids were men descended from no less than nine generations of untainted noble stock on both sides of the family tree.
Plato's interest in eugenics is well known, and he praises the Spartan interest in eugenic breeding (Laws, 630). Aristotle is equally impressed by the need to breed good stock. Theognis of Megara constantly praises the importance of heredity, complaining that well-born men and women will sometimes take inferior marriage partners in pursuit of riches, laments that "We seek well-bred rams and sheep and horses and one wishes 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 being 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, lxxxviii, 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, Fr. 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 multi- ethnic 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 Balts, 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.
Yet even while the myth of biological egalitarianism was gaining ground in the Western world, the momentum of scientific enquiry, 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.(5)
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 eugnes ("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," 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 ma
nufactured 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)
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. 4647, 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.
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, credit
ed 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 desirably 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,(9) 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 l
Whatever Happened to Eugenics?
Glayde Whitney - Book Review
Glayde Whitney's review of
Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics, and Modern Science
By Roger Pearson
This paper originally appeared in The Mankind Quarterly , vol. 37, p. 203-215.
Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington DC., 1996
ISBN 1-878365-15-S 162 pps.
Whatever happened to Eugenics? How is it that the prevention of human suffering came to be considered as the greater evil? In this delightful little book Roger Pearson takes us on an excursion through history, science and ideologies.
In so doing he illuminates the origins of great concepts and names the heroes and the villains in a saga that is not yet complete. In recommending this book to a Seminar in Evolutionary Psychology I told the graduate students that it is "an anti-PC, anti-egalitarian, historical polemic, well referenced and worth reading- this is not the story you got in cultural anthropology class." This is a story well-told that needs wide telling, and serious pondering by all who are concerned for the welfare of our civilization.
The opening chapter (The Concept of Heredity in the Ancient World) serves to remind the reader that heredity has been considered important since before the beginning of recorded history, and at least until earlier in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, these observations will be new to many students who have suffered a modern deconstructed education. Pearson announces his agenda in that the opening chapter
...illustrates the deeply held belief in the importance of heredity and race which prevailed from the earliest times until roughly the end of the nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters document the rise of political&-motivated egalitarian ideology which, heavily supported by the media, eventually succeeded in making the idea of biological inequality taboo. Despite the fact that there is today a rapidly developing body of scientific research which validates the age-old comprehension of the role of heredity in shaping human abilities, too many people are unaware of the mechanics behind the swing toward the notion of the biological equality of mankind (p. 9). The mechanics of the swing will be well understood by the readers of this book. Pearson reasonably speculates that an appreciation of heredity probably existed at least as early as the Neolithic origins of agriculture and animal husbandry. It is well documented with ample quotes (Plato, the Odyssey, Theognis, etc.) that the ancient Greeks had a keen appreciation of hereditary contributions to both physical and mental traits. Unlike the matrilineal and patrilineal clan systems of many other peoples, the ancient Germanic "kindred" acknowledged the actual degrees of genetic relatedness on both paternal and maternal sides. This Germanic kindred is the basic traditional approach to family shared today by most North Americans of European descent.
Multicultural egalitarianism reared its civilization- destroying head in the ancient world. Early on, freeborn Romans could only marry among certain stocks under the system of connubium. But with military and bureaucratic successes the empire grew to become a "multicultural giant", "ripe for the rise of egalitarian political ideologies" (p.13)
The coming of Christianity plunged logic and classical philosophy into centuries of near-oblivion and clashed with the established and ancient European belief in the inequalities 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 into Europe 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. . . . . Christianity carried the anti-intellectualism of the Middle Eastern prophets to its extreme (p. 14). And the weakened, multicultural egalitarian Roman Empire soon fell "before the onslaught of the smaller, more homogeneous, Germanic nations, which still retained a sense of group identity" (p.13).
Across the centuries of church domination the notions of hereditary differences among men were discouraged in the service of Church Power. The "divine right" to rule, given by God, became quite different from the earlier concept of hereditarily noble ruling lineages. Stripped by the Church of belief in the importance of human heredity and of the notion of the state as a kinship unit - "a family writ large" (p.16), believing instead in the essential equality of all God's children, the stage was set for the development of egalitarian-espousing secular political movements:
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. In recent times, calls for political revolution have frequently invoked attacks on 'genetic determinism' in favor of the alternate, wildly illogical, philosophy of 'biological egalitarianism'.... The suggestion that one individual might be inherently more creative or productive than another was unlikely to fuel the feelings of resentment necessary to incite the masses to revolutionary action (p. 17).
After more than a thousand years of intellectual suppression, there eventually was a renaissance. By the eighteenth century thinking people were well aware of inherited differences among individuals and races. Thomas Jefferson certainly did not confuse rule of law [ . . . . all men are created equal . . ..] and hereditary reality. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson states that
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . . For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son. (Jefferson, at Monticello, October 28, 1813).
Jefferson's view concerning the profound inherited differences between the black and white races are well known, and are documented in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" and elsewhere throughout his writings.
In the chapter "The Discovery of Evolution: Eugenics and the Pioneers of Modern Science" Roger Pearson presents the scientific heroes of early eugenics. The topmost trinity are Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson. By all accounts a kind and gentle man, Charles Darwin delayed over twenty years between formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection and its publication (Desmond & Moore, 1991). His feeling for his wife's religious sensitivities, and a reluctance to be excoriated by correct society, contribute
d to the delay.
Were it not for Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin may well have traveled the road of such luminaries as Copernicus and Descartes and not published until beyond the reach of disapprobation. However, Darwin received instant acclaim among important scientists when appeared in 1859 his masterpiece The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Among those profoundly influenced was Darwin's half-cousin (same grandfather - Erasmus Darwin - different grandmother) Francis Galton. Already an eminent scientist, explorer, and inventor in his own right, Galton later wrote to Darwin:
I always think of you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of their superstition. . . ..the appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought. (from Karl Pearson, 1924).
It was Galton who immediately took up the scientific study of human diversity, human ability, and the evolution of civilizational capacity. By 1865 Galton published two important articles which shared the title "Hereditary Talent and Character", in 1869 he published Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. From the beginning Galton's work on heredity combined science (which later developed as human genetics) with notions of applications for the benefit of humanity. Galton founded, and then in 1883 named, the new science, eugenics. The term was from the Greek eugenes ("well born"), and Roger Pearson tells us: 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." (p. 19).
The humanitarian goal of eugenics was summarized by Galton in 1908:
Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. . . . . Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock. (Galton, 1908, p.3233).
Heartened by Galton's applications of evolution to humanity, by his investigations into the laws of heredity, Darwin was encouraged to prepare his own notes and thoughts concerning human evolution, and, in 1871 published The Descent of Man. In light of what came after it is important to emphasize that neither Galton nor Darwin, nor I dare say any competent scientist, doubted that the races differed profoundly in hereditary characteristics. As illustration Roger Pearson provides the following excerpt from chapter seven of The Descent of Man:
. . . . 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 (p. 20).
In order to study heredity Galton revolutionized methods, becoming "The Father" of modem statistics. The younger applied mathematician and social activist Karl Pearson [later to be Galton's major biographer] became an important colleague. Karl Pearson generalized the mathematical foundations of Galtonian statistical concepts, and further developed statistics in his quest of eugenical science. He was one of the most influential scientists at the turn-of-the-century, and emphasized eugenics in books with titles such as National Life From the Standpoint of Science , and Nature and Nurture: The Problem of the Future (1910). Karl Pearson had deep concerns for the welfare of the British Empire, he feared that current conditions were having dysgenic consequences such that the quantity of qualified persons would be insufficient to maintain the Empire.
Judging from the changes to the British Empire over the century from 1896 to 1930, there is certainly nothing apparent that contradicts his concerns. At one point he lamented "We have placed our money on environment, when heredity wins in a canter".
Roger Pearson makes abundantly clear with extensive documentation and fascinating text that the period up until approximately 1930 saw the flowering of eugenics in science, society and law. Many humanitarians of both the left and the right were united in an enthusiasm to improve human stock and prevent human suffering, rather than to only treat suffering after the fact. Eugenic ideals were embraced by such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, A. J. Balfour and Winston Churchill, to list but a few in Britain. In the United States such influential people as Henry Ford, Madison Grant, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt were enthusiastic. The Carnegie Institute of Washington established, with Harriman family funds, the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office under the leadership of the geneticist Charles Davenport.
Organizations such as The Galton Society and The Race Betterment Foundation were founded with ample scientific and social support. Writing for a majority (only one justice dissented) of the United States Supreme Court in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., noted:
It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough (Buck v. Bell, 1927).
With such widespread support eugenics might have continued to develop as a major component of progressive society. Alas, such was not to be. Within the movement, R. Pearson points out, there developed schisms between those interested in race betterment and those more interested in prevention of specific genetic diseases - a breach between positive and negative eugenics. At the same time the "eugenic ideal - the desire to engineer a healthy genetic heritage for future generations - came under increasing attack from those who were ideologically committed to egalitarianism. The latter refused to see the eugenic ideal in any light other than as an hierarchical concept implying superiority and inferiority - the precise pattern of thought they sought to eliminate from social consciousness. They, too, sought to engage in social engineering, though engineering of a political nature which would have unanticipated dysgenic consequences, and the stage was set for the intense emotional struggle which today dominates both academia and the media, about the political correctness of permitting research into behavioral genetics, as well as the right to propagate information about the role of heredity in shaping the limits of human abilities and behavior." (pp. 52 - 53).
The arch villain on the academic front, instrumental in supplanting and then demonizing eugenics was Franz Boas, aided by a large entourage of students and fellow-travelers. One of the main take-home messages is that honest empirical science does not fare well, at least in the short run, when up against ideologically inspired polemics in which almost anything goes in the service of a greater good [the end justifies the means]. In Chapter V (Radical Egalitarianism Penetrates Academe), and the following few
chapters, Roger Pearson exposes the players and the agenda promoting the egalitarian fallacy. It is a fascinating expose of names, dates, and events, too rich to be dealt with adequately in even a lengthy review.
The reader is reminded of the Verona files, recently released documentation of the extensive infiltration of American government and society by communist agents. In very important respects Joe McCarthy was neither paranoid nor mistaken. Roger Pearson here makes clear that the academic and anthropological/psychobiological scientific fronts were not immune from the same intellectual infestations.
Born of a pair of politically radical socialists who were active in the 1870-71 wave of revolutionary movements across Europe, Franz Boas emigrated to the United States in 1886. In coming to America he was following Abraham Jacobi, an uncle by marriage, who came after being released from prison for armed violence in the Cologne revolution of 1848. Jacobi was active in the revolutionary socialist movement in the United States, and was in a good position to provide influential contacts for his kinsman. Boas "became the head of a department of anthropology established at Columbia University, where he trained and awarded doctoral degrees to numerous selected 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 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 [books] were devoted to downplaying the concept of heredity and undermining the eugenic ideal. . . . . 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 diverse subspecies of mankind as members of a single, international gene pool. This . . . . was an ethical concept not shared by the non-western nations, who adhered to more functional, self-promoting, competitive patterns of behavior. . . . . the desire that biological egalitarianism be true gained strength as human altruism was redirected away from the immediate group ..[to].. 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 his 1938 edition . . . . . Those to whom Boas awarded doctoral degrees in anthropology generally shared his ideologies and became prime disciples of 'egalitarian universalism'. (pp. 57 - 59).
Among his many students were Margaret Mead, the "mother of American anthropology", eventually exposed as a hoaxster and communist propagandist, and Israel Ehrenburg (A.K.A. Ashley Montagu) whose "entire career was built around a bitter crusade against the work of respected scholars such as Carleton Coon, who recognized race as a vital product of human evolution" (p. 62). Others too numerous to even list are exposed in their infamy.
Many world events contributed to the growth of anti-eugenic egalitarianism, not least among which was the suffering associated with the world-wide depression which followed World War I. The growth of Nazism and the outcome of W.W. II provided an unfortunate boost to anti-eugenic sentiment. It was a propaganda coup of tremendous proportions to be able to paint eugenics with the tar brush of Nazi anti-Semitism. Never mind that it makes no more sense than to condemn all of pharmaceutical science or medical surgery because German science and applications were well developed in those fields. The propaganda damage was done, and it became unacceptable to even mention the possibility of race differences in behavior at the same time that Lysenkoism, condemning all genetics, was taking hold in the Soviet Union.
Biological egalitarianism became the only 'politically correct' doctrine among Marxists throughout the world, and . . . . permeated Western [universities] through the teachings of faculty members who were ideologically attracted to egalitarianism but were balefully ignorant of even elementary biology." (p. 71).
The Science for the People movement sprang up as part of the counter-culture protests in the era of the Vietnam War; "The political left-wing had now achieved ascendancy in the universities of the Western world. Indeed, many contemporary evolutionary scientists still seem to wish to be perceived as believing in equality, . . . . in a degree of malleability of human nature that does not exist. . . [Pee-Cee evolutionists focus] their writings on the 'panhuman' traits shared by all living hominids" (p. 73). They attempt to deny any genetic diversity among living races. Indeed, some even deny the existence of races. A sickly accurate joke has it that "It takes a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard to not be able to discern any difference between an Eskimo and a Hottentot"!'
"On the one hand, DNA fingerprinting can now establish, from a drop of saliva or dried blood, the race of origin to a probability of error of less than one-in-a-hundred-million."
The second half of the book deals in fascinating depth with essentially current happenings, both in eugenical science [genetics], and in ideological countermoves to empirical science. On the one hand, DNA fingerprinting can now establish, from a drop of saliva or dried blood, the race of origin to a probability of error of less than one-in-a-hundred-million. Incredibly, at the same time popular media and scientific publications stridently proclaim that biological [genetic] races do not exist. We are now in critical times, a race is occurring around us between humanitarian applications of modern genetic science (eugenics, that is) and the suppression of knowledge by PeeCee ideologues. The media, by-and-large trained by egalitarians, know no better than to attack as "racist", "repellent", or "repugnant" almost any admission of information concerning behavior and genetic diversity among human races. Yet at the same time the human genome project in combination with a wide variety of research in the neurosciences [brain science] and behavioral medicine and genetics in general, is quickly taking us beyond the point where race differences can be obfuscated or denied. So? It is ominous that there is a proliferation of 'hate crime' and 'hate speech' laws being considered or already in existence in various European countries, Australia, and Canada. While in the United States, under the umbrella of first amendment freedom-of-speech protection, academic tenure is under wide-spread attack and previously respectable academic publishers are censuring authors and censoring their book lists, even withdrawing from publication a title deemed "repellent" for including mention of race differences.
Whatever happened to eugenics? In China it is alive and well. The "Maternal and Infantile Health Care Law" went into effect on 1 June 1995. A media mention states "The official Xinhua News Agency reported that China currently has more than 10 mill
ion disabled people whose births could have been prevented if such a law had been in effect" (Tallahassee Democrat, 1994).
Meanwhile, in the West, eugenics continues to encounter politically motivated attempts to suppress. As the scientific advances continue at an accelerating pace, it remains to be seen if rational humanitarian applications of sound genetic knowledge can be implemented for the benefit of mankind, or if we will slip into another era of anti-intellectual totalitarianism. Anyone concerned for the future of mankind should carefully read this book. It is not the story you were told in cultural anthropology class.
. . . there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but . . . . eugenics . . . . . can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations (p. 136).
* ' On April 17, 1996, at the order of President and C.E.O. Charles R. Ellis, the New York headquarters of academic publisher John Wiley &Sons, Inc. took the unprecedented action of depublishing -withdrawing from publication and circulation -a book which they had released just six weeks earlier in the United Kingdom. The reason given for depubliihing Christopher Brand's The g Factor: General Intelligence and its ImpIications was that "The management of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., does not want to support these views by disseminating them or be associated with a book that makes assertions that we find repellent." [letter, 9 May 1996 from Susan Spilka, Wiley Manager, Corporate Communications, to G. Whitney]
(Editors note: If you would like to order obtain a copy of this book, check the Links section on this site for Mankind Quarterly.]
Buck v. Bell, 1927, 274 U.S., pp 201-208.
Desmond, A., & J. Moore, 1991 Dali, London: Penguin Books
Galton, F., 1908 Memories of My Life, London: Methuen (3rd. ed., April 1909).
Galton, F., 1996 Essays in Eugenics With biographical introduction by Roger Pearson. Washington D.C.: Scott-Townsend.
Jefferson, T., 1813, Letter to John Adams, October 28,1813. Reprinted in: Peterson. M.D. (ed.) 1975 The Portable Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Books, pp 533-539.
Pearson, K., 1924, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. Vol.1, London: Cambridge University Press
Pearson, R., 1991, Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe. Washington DC.: Scott-Townsend
Rushton, J. P., 1995, Race, Evolution, and Behavior. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction
Tallahassee Democrat, 1994, China: Lawmakers approve eugenics law, 28 October, Volume XYXMI Number 2, Bitier 1996
As the Bell Curves
Bell Curve
(Originally published in The National Review, December 8, 1997)
Is The Bell Curve the stealth public-policy book of the 1990s?
Mr. Seligman is the author of A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. Mr. Murray is co-author of The Bell Curve.
DS: Three years after publication of The Bell Curve, I find myself endlessly reading news stories about great national controversies in which all the participants do their best to ignore the data you and Dick Herrnstein laid on the table. Three recent examples:
1) the row over school vouchers, whose advocates (e.g., Bill Bennett in the Wall Street Journal) endlessly take it for granted that poor performance by students reflects only inadequacies by the teaching profession -- inadequacies among the learners being a huge unmentionable;
2) the President's astounding proposal (never characterized as such) that all American youngsters, including those with IQs at the left tail, should have at least two years of college;
3) the expressions of surprise and rage when it turned out that, in the absence of affirmative action, prestigious law schools would be admitting hardly any black students. The participants in these controversies were in no sense talking back to The Bell Curve. They were pretending its data do not exist. What's your perspective?
CM: I read the same stories you do and ask the same question: Do these guys know but pretend not to? Or are they still truly oblivious? In the case of education vouchers, there is a sensible reason to ignore The Bell Curve: inner-city schools are overwhelmingly lousy. Bill Bennett has read the book, understands it, and (rare indeed) has defended it on national television. But his battle cry is, and should be, ``These kids are getting a raw deal'' -- not a lot of qualifications about the difficulties in raising IQ.
Bill Clinton and his pandering on college education is another story altogether. Vouchers for elementary school can be a good policy idea, no matter what our book says about IQ. But universal college education cannot be. Most people are not smart enough to profit from an authentic college education. But who among Republicans has had the courage to call Clinton on this one? A lot of silence about The Bell Curve can be put down to political cowardice.
Affirmative action was still politically sacrosanct when The Bell Curve came out in October 1994. Within a year, the tide had swung decisively. Did the book play any role? Damned if I know. Dick and I were the first to publish a comprehensive account of the huge gaps in SAT scores at elite colleges, but I have found not a single citation of the book during the affirmative-action debate.
My best guess -- and the broad answer to your question -- is that The Bell Curve is the stealth public-policy book of the 1990s. It has created a subtext on a range of issues. Everybody knows what the subtext is. Nobody says it out loud.
DS: I am reading with fascination your ``afterword'' in the paperback edition, and I have an argumentative question about the passage where you speculate on long-term responses to the book. You postulate a three-stage process. In stage one, the book and its authors take endless rounds of invective from critics who simply want to suppress the message that human beings differ in mental ability. These critics turn to thought control because they look at your findings and conclude, in Michael Novak's words, that ``they destroy hope'' -- a hope which Novak sees as a this-worldly eschatological phenomenon. [eschatalogical = relating to the end of the world. MVC] In stage two, the invective attracts the interest of scholars not previously involved in these disputes. They look over the empirical record, deciding in the end that your case is supportable and may indeed have been understated in some areas. In stage three, these scholars build on your work, and in the end do more than The Bell Curve itself to demolish those eschatological hopes. In the long run, the thought control shoots itself in the foot.
This process seems entirely plausible. But I wonder: Will the truth ever break out of the academic world? Remember, the basic message (including even a genetic factor in the black - white gap) was already pretty well accepted by scholars in the mid Eighties as the Snyderman - Rothman book documented. What I never see is acceptance of any part of this message in the public-policy world, where the term ``IQ'' is seldom uttered without the speaker's sensing a need to dissociate himself from it.
Among many horror stories is the current row over Lino Graglia, the University of Texas law professor now in trouble for having stated an obvious truth: that black and Mexican-American students are ``not academically competitive'' with white students. Graglia gave the most benign possible explanation for this educational gap: minority students were not genetically or intellectually inferior but were suffering from a cultural background in which scholarship was not exalted. But that explanation got him nowhere. He has been attacked by every editorial page in Nexis that has weighed in on the matter. (He did better in the letters columns.)
NOW, I can see the process you envision going forward -- with some scholars and maybe even some journalists looking at actual academic performance at Texas and other universities. What I cannot imagine is defenders of Graglia surfacing in any institutional setting -- at least not in the realms of politics and education, nor in major media. Meanwhile, what with Texas campus demonstrations and Jesse Jackson's call for Graglia to be made a social pariah (cheered at the demonstrations), scholars have got the crucial message: Stay under cover if you hold beliefs challenging to those eschatological hopes.
CM: Graglia said ``culture.'' What everybody heard was ``genes.'' As soon as anyone argues that racial differences in intelligence are authentic, not an artifact of biased tests, everyone decodes that as saying the differences are grounded in genes. It is a non-sequitur, but an invariable one in my experience. America's intellectual elites are hysterical about the possibility of black - white genetic differences in IQ.
As you know, The Bell Curve actually took a mild, agnostic stand on the subject. Dick Herrnstein and I said that nobody yet knows what the mix between environmental and genetic causes might be, and it makes no practical difference anyway. The only policy implication of the black - white difference, whatever its sources, is that the U.S. should return forthwith to its old ideal of treating people as individuals.
But how many people know this? No one who hasn't read the book. Everyone went nuts about genes, so much so that most people now believe that race and genes is the main topic of our book.
Why? The topic of race and genes is like the topic of sex in Victorian England. The intellectual elites are horrified if anyone talks about it, but behind the scenes they are fascinated. I will say it more baldly than Dick and I did in the book: In their heart of hearts, intellectual elites, especially liberal ones, have two nasty secrets regarding IQ. First, they really believe that IQ is the be-all and end-all of human excellence and that someone with a low IQ is inferior. Second, they are already sure that the black - white IQ difference is predominantly genetic and that this is a calamity -- such a calamity indeed that it must not be spoken about, even to oneself. To raise these issues holds a mirror up to the elites' most desperately denied inner thoughts. The result is the kind of reaction we saw to Lino Graglia.
But when people say one thing and believe another, as intellectual elites have been doing about race, sooner or later the cognitive dissonance must be resolved. It usually happens with a bang. When the wall of denial gives way, not onl
y will the received wisdom on race and IQ change, the change will happen very rapidly and probably go much too far. The fervor of the newly converted is going to be a problem. I fully expect, if I live another twenty years, to be in a situation where I am standing on the ramparts shouting: ``Genetic differences weren't a big deal when we wrote The Bell Curve and they still aren't a big deal.''
DS: Watching Clinton perform in Little Rock the other day, and picking up especially on his lament about the extent and persistence of discrimination (including employment discrimination) in American life, I went back for one more look at that table on page 324 of The Bell Curve -- the one showing that job discrimination is essentially nonexistent in the United States today. At least it is nonexistent among the younger workers in that huge sample from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
Your argument begins by noting that when you control for age, education, and socioeconomic status (SES), black earnings are still only 84 per cent of white earnings, which implies continuing discrimination. As the table shows, however, when you bring IQ into the picture, everything changes. Even if you forget about education and SES and control only for age and IQ, the black - white earnings gap essentially disappears. To be precise: when you average the results for many different occupational categories, blacks of similar age and IQ make 98 per cent as much as whites. When you control for gender as well, the figure goes to 101 per cent.
These findings seem stunning to me, on several counts. First, they show that employers are astonishingly good at seeing through the imperfect credentials represented by educational levels and family background, and at figuring out which job prospects have the most ability. Second, the findings are surely big news -- and good news. They imply that much, or most, or essentially all (depending on the extent to which NLSY data can be generalized to the labor force as a whole) of what is routinely identified as invidious discrimination is nothing of the sort. It is rational behavior by employers and it shows them to be amazingly color-blind. So why is this news not on the front pages?
CM: Think about how that front-page story would have to be headlined. It would have to convey the thought, BLACKS WITH EQUAL IQS GET EQUAL PAY. You see the problem. No matter how reasonable the explanation, it is not intellectually permissible at this moment in history for blacks or women to have different outcomes from white males. If you really want egregious examples of that attitude, don't bother with IQ and blacks. Look at the military performance of women. A military officer came into my office some months ago, almost with tears in his eyes. ``We're killing people,'' he said, referring to the degradation of entrance requirements and training standards for combat pilots -- a degradation carried out so that enough women could get through. How many journalists in major U.S. papers have been willing to write that story straightforwardly? When the problem of female combat performance is mentioned at all, it is with an ``on the one hand, on the other hand'' presentation, even though one side has all the data and the other side is only an attitude.
DS: Let me ask you to weigh in more heavily on an issue we touched on earlier -- the ``average child'' fallacy. This is the notion that any normal child can learn anything if only he gets the right teaching. Your data make plain that this view is nonsense. Indeed, you add: ``Critics of American education must come to terms with the reality that in a universal education system many students will not reach the level of education that most people view as basic.''
That thought was so important that you put it in italics. In our current debate on national standards and educational reform, however, no one is paying attention to it -- certainly not Bill Clinton, but also not many conservatives. I recently caught Jeanne Allen of the pro-voucher Center for Educational Reform in a debate on CNN. She was complaining about education bureaucrats ``that don't believe, or don't necessarily think, all children are capable of learning to the highest level. I think that's scary.''
Isn't it about time to scold conservative fans of education reform for persistently dodging reality when they're out there selling vouchers?
CM: I propose a new term: ``suspension of belief,'' defined as ``basing a public-policy stance on an assumption about human beings that one knows to be untrue of oneself.'' Do you suppose Jeanne Allen believes herself capable of learning to the highest level if we're talking, say, about quantum mechanics? Of course not. Only a few silly people who have never tested themselves are under the illusion that they have no educational limits.
Putting that last sentence on the screen, however, makes me pause. Many bright liberal-arts graduates have not tested themselves. In the liberal arts and some of the soft sciences it is possible to get a PhD without having to confront that awful moment: ``My God, studying hard won't be enough. It is beyond the power of my intellect to understand this.'' With me, it came halfway through a graduate course on the theory of matrices, and it was an invaluable lesson. Isaac Asimov once gave a rule of thumb for knowing when you've hit the wall: when you hear yourself saying to the professor, ``I think I understand.''
Another factor may also be operating here: the isolation of the cognitive elite. If you have never had a close acquaintance with an IQ below 100, then you have no idea what ``dumb'' really means.
Should we scold our conservative allies for this kind of na?ivet�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������©? Chide, I guess. But I am uncomfortably aware of a sentence in a well-known conservative tome that reads, ``I suggest that when we give such parents [who are actively engaged in their child's education] vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation.'' The book is Losing Ground, page 224. So I have a first-stone problem here.
DS: One last question: Have you had second thoughts about formulations in The Bell Curve?
CM: If Dick and I were writing it again, I suppose we would go over the section on race and put in a few more italics, and otherwise try to grab readers by the shoulders and shake them out of their hysteria. But it probably wouldn't do any good. We would certainly incorporate an analysis of siblings into the chapters of Part II that deal with IQ and social problems -- the kind of analysis I did in that Public Interest article you mentioned earlier. And there's a highly technical error we made that had the effect of understating the statistical power of our results; I would like to fix that. But that's about all. The book's main themes will endure just fine.
The reality of a cognitive elite is becoming so obvious that I wonder if even critics of the book really doubt it. The relationship of low IQ to the underclass? Ditto. Welfare reform is helping the argument along, by the way, as journalistic accounts reveal how many welfare mothers are not just uneducated, but of conspicuously low intelligence. The intractability of IQ? Dick and I said that IQ was 40 to 80 per cent heritable. The identical-twin studies continue to suggest that the ultimate figure will turn out to be in the upper half of that range. More importantly, the literature on ``nonshared environment'' has developed dramatically since Dick and I were researching The Bell Curve.
Its core finding is that, whatever the role of environment may be in determining IQ, only a small portion of that role consists of influences that can be manipulated (through better child-rearing, better schools, etc.). For practical purposes, the ability of public policy to affect IQ is probably smaller than Dick and I concluded.
With regard to race differences, nothing has happened to change our conclusions about the cultural fairness of the tests, the equal predictive validity of the tests, or the persistence of the 15-point gap. Recent data from the NLSY indicate that in the next generation not only is the black - white gap failing to shrink, but it may be growing.
So I do not expect any major finding in The Bell Curve to be overturned. I realize that attacking the book has become a cottage industry. The New York Times recently used one such attack to announce that our ``noxious'' conclusions have been definitively refuted. But in the same month that this most recent definitive refutation was published, the journal Intelligence had a special issue devoted to IQ and social policy. The articles in it are not written as defenses of The Bell Curve; they just happen to make our case on a wide variety of points. And that's the way the debate will eventually be resolved -- not as a judgment about a book that has been almost buried by controversy, but by continuing research on the same issues. As that happens, it is not just that Dick and I will be proved right. We will be proved to have been -- if you will pardon the expression -- conservative.
(From the pages of the National Review.)
Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982
Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982
By MARIAN VAN COURT
Department of Psychology
The University of Texas at Austin
By FRANK D. BEAN
Department of Sociology and Population Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin
The following article first appeared in Intelligence 9 (1985), pp. 23-32.
| Results are presented for the first analysis of the relationship between IQ and completed fertility using a large, representative sample of the U.S. population. Correlations are predominantly negative for cohorts born between 1894 and 1964 but are significantly more positive for cohorts whose fertility was concentrated in the "baby boom" years. Previous studies reporting slightly positive correlations appear to have been biased in their restriction of samples to atypical cohorts. |
In the advanced industrialized nations, the rate of change in fertility and mortality - the two major forms of selection acting upon intelligence?began rapidly accelerating with the onset of the "demographic transition." In the United States, fertility began to decline in the late 1700s, moving from an average number of live births per woman of around 8.0 before the Revolutionary War to one Of less than 2.0 during the 1970s (Grabill, Kiser, & Whelpton, 1958; Rindfuss & Sweet, 1977). Although the evidence on mortality is more limited, it appears that steep declines in mortality also occurred during this period (Kitagawa & Hauser, 1973). Whereas most observers would agree that differential mortality operated prior to the demographic transition to increase intelligence, it is not certain whether differential fertility or differential mortality was the dominant selective agent in the latter stages of the transition. Nevertheless, the possibility of the former led many theorists at the beginning of this century to forecast a lowering of average levels of intelligence.
Studies conducted in the early 1900s seemed to bear out the more pessimistic prognostications. The relationship between family size and intelligence was measured by correlating the IQ scores of school children with their number of siblings. Negative correlations were consistently reported in a large number of studies conducted in the United States and England (Cattell, 1936; Lentz, 1927; Mailer, 1933; Roberts, 1939; Roberts, Norman, & Griffiths, 1937; Sutherland, 1929; Sutherland & Thomson, 1926). Naturally, these findings were met with considerable alarm. It was predicted that a loss of 1.0 to 1.5 mean IQ points would occur per decade (Cattell, 1937, 1936).
Large-scale investigations were launched in an attempt to measure predicted losses in population IQ over time. In the Scottish survey, the entire 1 l-year-old population was tested in 1932. Again in 1947, all 1 l-year-olds were given the same group verbal-intelligence test. Contrary to expectations, there was an average increase of 2.3 points (Maxwell, 1954). Cattell conducted an equally ambitious cross-decade study of 10-year-olds' performance on a nonverbal test in England, and found a 1.2-point increase in the mean IQ of children tested in 1950 over those tested in 1936 (Cattell, 1951). Intelligence test performance of US high school students showed small gains over a 20-year period (Finch, 1946), and American soldiers from World War II were reported to have significantly higher verbal-ability scores than their counterparts from World War I (Tuddenham, 1948).
Clearly, results of the family-size-IQ studies and cross-decade studies of populations yielded contradictory results. If people with lower IQ scores had larger families, why was there no discernible loss of IQ over time? Investigators adduced a variety of explanations attempting to resolve the paradox. Predicted losses might have been masked by rather substantial improvements in education, nutrition, and other facets of the environment. Tuddenham (1948) stressed the importance of better education and improved mass communication. Cattell (1951) discussed the possibility of increased test sophistication and noted that the relationship between intelligence and marriage rates had not been investigated. Reed (1965) suggested that such small gains as those reported in the cross-decade studies could easily have been caused by sampling error, testing errors, or some other unknown source of error. Osborn's (1940) "Eugenic Hypothesis", had predicted that a eugenic trend would naturally emerge in a modern democratic society, because parenthood would become wholly voluntary when there was free access to birth control (Osborn, 1940, pp. 193-198). At the opposite extreme, Cook (1951) adopted perhaps the bleakest outlook in the controversy when he characterized a decline in intelligence as "inevitable" and wrote that "(I)f this trend continues for less than a century, England and America will be well on the way to becoming nations of near half-wits" (p. 6). Still others expressed skepticism that real changes in either direction were taking place. Penrose (1950a, 1950b) believed a genetic equilibrium existed. Dobzhansky (1962, 316) concurred, suggesting a balanced polymorphism for intelligence in which both extremes failed to produce their quota of offspring.
In 1962, Higgins, Reed, and Reed provided what has come to be regarded as the definitive answer in their landmark article, "Intelligence and Family Size: A Paradox Resolved." They studied the completed fertility of a large Minnesota sample. Although they found the usual sizable negative correlation between IQ and number of siblings, they found a tiny positive correlation between IQ and completed fertility. The latter correlation was dependent upon the inclusion of individuals who had never married?apparently, their automatic exclusion in previous family-size-IQ studies using school children had biased earlier result because the unmarried were disproportionately found at the lowest IQ levels Higgins, Reed, and Reed reported that 30% of those with IQ's less than 70 were, unmarried, in contrast to 10% with IQ's between 100 and 110, and 3-4% with IQs over 110.
Several more studies of IQ and completed fertility reported similar result (Bajema, 1963, 1971; Olneck & Wolfe, 1980; Spuhler, 1962; Waller, 1970). In Bajema's Michigan sample, the higher rate of childlessness among those with very low IQs was due more to their childless marriages than to their lower marriage rates, but the net result was the same. With direct evidence such as this the dire predictions of the early 1900s were rejected as totally unfounded (Falek 1971; Osborn & Bajema, 1972). In a 1971 review article, Falek wrote
There is no evidence of a decrease in intelligence from generation to generation .... (B)ehavioral scientists concerned with the problem have resolved, in approximately a quarter of a century, all the contradictions which plagued the understanding of the direction of human intelligence. In doing so, most investigators have turned around 180 degrees, and are now confident that, with regard to intelligence, evolution is on a positive track. (p. 14)
Despite the wide acceptance these studies received, they contained two potentially serious sources of bias. First, the samples were not random, because they were composed principally of white, native-born Americans living in either the Great Lakes states or New England (Cattell, 1974; Jensen, 1969; Osborne, 1975; Weyl, 1973). Second, they were largely restricted to a narrow range of birth cohorts (Vining, 1982). In a pathbreaking recent analysis, Vining (1982) cast doubt on conclusions derived from previous fertilit
y-IQ studies, suggesting that the absence of a negative correlation may well have been peculiar to the cohorts studied. Previous samples were largely confined to cohorts which had their main reproductive years during the "baby boom," a period of rising fertility, unprecedented; since such records began to be kept. Vining hypothesized that during periods of rising fertility, there will be a zero or slightly positive relationship between fertility and intelligence, but during periods of falling fertility which characterize the entire modern era, with the one exception of the baby boom years of the late 1940s and the 1950s—there will be a negative relationship. He correlated intelligence test scores with number of children, using a large, national probability sample of men and women aged 25 to 34 as of the late 1970s. For each category of age, sex and race examined, correlations were negative, ranging from -.104 to -.221.
One acknowledged limitation of Vining's sample is that many of the respondents had not yet completed their fertility. In addition, the information it provides is confined to a restricted age cohort. The purpose of this paper is to report the results of research on the relationship between IQ and completed fertility (as well as partly completed fertility) which extends the range of cohorts to encompass those born between 1894 and 1964, whose major reproductive years span 1912 to 1982. In so doing, we may also be able to reconcile results of previous research on this issue and to discern whether a positive or negative relationship in fact emerges during periods of rising or declining fertility.
DATA SET: THE NORC GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, conducted the General Social Survey (GSS) in the United States each year from 1972 to 1982, except for 1979 (Davis, 1982). A combination of block quota and full probability sampling was employed. Hour-long interviews were completed with a total of 12,120 respondents, who were English-speaking, noninstitutionalized adults (18 years or older) living within the continental United States. Such questions as age, place of birth, income, and occupation were asked in each interview. Other questions about attitudes on various social, political, and moral issues were rotated in different years.
Variables of relevance to the present investigation include total number of liveborn children, number of siblings, and scores on a steeply graded, untimed vocabulary test given in 1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982 (total N = 6,021). The vocabulary test is made up of 10 questions selected from a test originally devised by Thorndike for use in large demographic surveys in which a full-scale IQ test would not be feasible (Thorndike, 1942; Thorndike & Gallup, 1944). The two forms of the original version were standardized against the Otis Test (Miner, 1957) and included 20 multiple-choice questions each (one item taken from every level of the I.E.R. Intelligence Scale CAVD).
Although no attempt has been made (to our knowledge) to standardize the GSS version against another test of mental ability, there is good evidence that brief vocabulary tests such as this perform quite well as measures of general intelligence. Miner (1957, pp. 28-29) found a median correlation of .83 between scores on several dozen similar short-vocabulary tests and scores on standard IQ tests. Vocabulary correlates more highly (r = .75) than any other subtest with total score on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (Wechsler, 1958, p. 98). Furthermore, preliminary analyses of the GSS test showed internal characteristics and relationships with other variables which accord well with those reported for traditional, full-scale IQ tests. Scores are normally distributed with a Mof 6.0 and a SD of 2.2. The internal reliability (Cronbach's Alpha) is .79. Test scores correlate 0.5 with highest educational level obtained. As with other measures of crystallized intelligence, there is a very gradual improvement in performance until old age and then a gradual decline. Blacks average 0.70 SDs below the mean for whites, and there is a negligible sex difference (0.06 SDs) favoring women. A previous study found the GSS vocabulary test to be the most powerful predictor of adult white men's income (r = 0.29), better than both educational level and family background (Peterson & Karplus, 1981). Another study reported it to be strongly negatively correlated with "anomie" (r = .42) (Segilman, 1981).
The test was designed to provide only a rough grading of mental ability. In the "ideal world," the test might have been nonverbal and longer, though unreliability could only vitiate relationships between intelligence and other variables, and correlations to be presented could hardly result from random errors. The unique opportunity this data set affords is an overview of the relationship between intelligence and fertility for a nationally representative sample of Americans whose major reproductive years fell between 1912 and 1982.
COHORT ANALYSIS
Data were consolidated from the four surveys in which the vocabulary test was given (1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982). Respondents were divided into 15 birth cohorts of 5-year intervals ranging from before 1894 to 1964. Cohorts 1-9 can be considered to have completed their fertility (because the youngest would be 40 years old), whereas cohorts 10-15 would have completed their fertility to varying degrees. Correlations between vocabulary test scores and total number of children ever born for all 15 cohorts are presented in Table 1. Correlations
TABLE 1
Number of Offspring and Vocabulary Scores, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort
M (SD) | ||||||
Cohort | Date of Birth | N | r | Corrected r | Score | Children |
1 | low-1894 | 102 | -.05 | (-.06) | 5.2 (2.5) | 2.3 (2.4) |
2 | 1895-1899 | 127 | -.21** | (-.24) | 5.5 (2.4) | 2.6 (2.3) |
3 | 1900-1904 | 210 | -.23*** | (-.26) | 5.7 (2.3) | 2.5 (2.1) |
4 | 1905-1909 | 302 | -.17*** | (-.19) | 5.4 (2.5)div> | 2.4 (2.0) |
5 | 1910-1914 | 336 | -.06 | (-.07) | 6.2 (2.2) | 2.3 (2.0) |
6 | 1915-1919 | 389 | -.12** | (-.14) | 6.2 (2.4) | 2.6 (1.9) |
7 | 1920-1924 | 463 | -.11** | (-.13) | 6.1(2.1) | 2.8 (2.0) |
8 | 1925-1929 | 402 | -.10* | (-.11) | 6.2 (2.1) | 3.1 (2.0) |
9 | 1930-1934 | 387 | -.08 | (-.09) | 6.2 (2.2) | 3.3 (2.0) |
10 | 1935-1939 | 487 | -.16*** | (-.18) | 6.2 (2.2) | 2.8 (1.8) |
11 | 1940-1944 | 566 | -.14*** | (-.16) | 6.3 (2.1) | 2.3 (1.6) |
12 | 1945-1949 | 681 | -.24*** | (-.27) | 6.3 (2.1) | 1.5 (1.3) |
13 | 1950-1954 | 734 | -.22*** | (-.24) | 5.8 (2.1) | 0.9 (1.1) |
14 | 1955-1959 | 473 | -.22*** | (-.23) | 5.4 (2.0) | 0.5 (0.8) |
15 | 1960-1964 | 118 | -.20* | (-.23) | 5.1 (1.8) | 0.2 (0.4) |
Note. Tests are one-tailed. | ||||||
corrected for attentuation (divided by the square root of 0.79, the coefficient of test reliability) are also presented in parentheses. It is clear that the relationship is predominantly negative, with 12 of 15 correlations statistically significant.
It is of particular interest to see whether the correlations of cohorts 8 and 9 are typical or atypical. Cohorts 8 and 9, whose fertility occurred squarely within the baby boom years, are the cohorts which largely comprised the samples of previous studies which reported small positive correlations. Although the correlations for both are negative, they are less negative than the other correlations. Vining's hypothesis of zero or slightly positive correlations during periods of rising fertility might thus be considered partly substantiated, and his hypothesis of a negative relationship during declines in fertility is more fully substantiated. But it appears that other factors, in addition to cohort effects, will be required to account fully for the differences between Vining's results and those of previous studies. To determine whether exclusion of nonwhites may have also constituted a source of bias in previous studies, a separate analysis of whites was performed for all 15 cohorts (see Table 2). Comparing the correlations in Tables I and 2, it can be seen that overall, the effect of exclusion of nonwhites is negligible.
TABLE 2
Number of Offspring and Vocabulary Scores for Whites, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort
M (SD) | ||||||
Cohort | Date of Birth | N | r | Corrected r | Score | Children |
1 | low-1894 | 91 | -.04 | (-.04) | 5.5 (2.5) | 2.3 (2.3) |
2 | 1895-1899 | 120 | -.17* | (-.20) | 5.6 (2.4) | 2.6 (2.3) |
3 | 1900-1904 | 195 | -.23*** | (-.26) | 5.8 (2.3) | 2.5 (2.0)v> |
4 | 1905-1909 | 273 | -.17** | (-.19) | 5.6 (2.5) | 2.4 (2.0) |
5 | 1910-1914 | 307 | -.08 | (-.09) | 6.3 (2.2) | 2.3 (2.0) |
6 | 1915-1919 | 363 | -.13** | (-.14) | 6.4 (2.3) | 2.6 (1.9) |
7 | 1920-1924 | 424 | -.12** | (-.14) | 6.4 (2.3) | 2.3 (2.0) |
8 | 1925-1929 | 364 | .00 | ( .00) | 6.4 (2.1) | 2.9 (1.9) |
9 | 1930-1934 | 358 | -.03 | (-.04) | 6.4 (2.2) | 3.2 (1.9) |
10 | 1935-1939 | 429 | -.16*** | (-.18) | 6.4 (2.2) | 2.8 (1.7) |
11 | 1940-1944 | 488 | -.17*** | (-.19) | 6.5 (2.1) | 2.3 (1.5) |
12 | 1945-1949 | 604 | -.24*** | (-.27) | 6.0 (2.0) | 1.4 (1.3) |
13 | 1950-1954 | 632 | -.22*** | (-.24) | 6.0 (2.0) | 0.8 (1.0) |
14 | 1955-1959 | 408 | -.21*** | (-.23) | 5.6 (2.0) | 0.4 (0.8) |
15 | 1960-1964 | 99 | -.22** | (-.25) | 6.3 (1.7) | 0.2 (0.4) |
Note. Tests are one-tailed. | ||||||
Although nonwhites average more children and lower test scores, they comprise only 11% of the sample. However, with nonwhites excluded, cohorts 8 and 9 exhibit a more positive relationship than the other cohorts (t = 2.04, p < 0.025, one-tailed test. It should be added that nonwhites were not over-sampled in the General Social Survey (as are blacks in some large surveys), so the total number of nonwhites (N = 622) does not permit separate analysis by cohort.
Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of siblings are presented in Table 3. They are markedly negative across all 15 cohorts, in agreement with the numerous family-size IQ studies of the early 1900s. Vocabulary-sibling correlations are more negative in every cohort than vocabulary-offspring correlations. If the childless had disproportionately low scores in this sample as in previous ones, this would weaken the negative relationship between vocabulary and offspring, but it would not affect the correlations between vocabulary and siblings, and thus it might reconcile the two sets of correlations. In actuality, the opposite turned out to be the case—the childless were found to score higher than those with one or more children in nearly every cohort. It should be noted, with regard to the difference in magnitude between the two sets of correlations, that the variability is considerably greater for number of siblings (M = 4.3, SD = 3.3) than it is for number of offspring (M = 2.1, SD = 1.9).
TABLE 3
Number of Siblings and Vocabulary Scores, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort
M (SD) | ||||||
Cohort | Date of Birth | N | r | Corrected r | Score | Children |
1 | low-1894 | 101 | -.11 | (-.12) | 5.2(2.5) | 5.6(3.4) |
2 | 1895-1899 | 127 | -.33*** | (-.37) | ||
New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States
New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence
in the United States By Richard Lynn
University of Ulster
Coleraine
County Londonderry
Northern Ireland
By Marian Van Court
Future Generations
Marlborough, MA 01752
The following article originally appeared in Intelligence 32 (2004), pp. 193-201.
| Data from the General Social Survey (GSS) collected in the years 1990?1996 are examined for the relationship between fertility and intelligence as measured by vocabulary. The results show that the relation between fertility and intelligence has been consistently negative for successive birth cohorts from to 1900 to 1979, indicating the presence of dysgenic fertility for all of the 20th century studied thus far. The most recent cohort for which fertility can be regarded as complete is that born in the years 1940?1949. In this cohort, the decline of genotypic intelligence arising from the negative association between intelligence and fertility is estimated at .90 IQ points per generation. The decline of genotypic intelligence of Whites is estimated at 0.75 IQ points a generation. |
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Glayde Whitney – Book Review
Special Book Review by
J. Philippe Rushton,
Department of Psychology,
University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, N6A 5C2 Canada
In press, 22 October 2001, in Elsevier Science journal
Personality and Individual Differences
The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global
Economy
IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Westport,
CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S. $64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X
This is a book that social scientists, policy experts, and global investment analysts cannot afford to ignore. It is one of the most brilliantly clarifying books this reviewer has ever read. IQ and the Wealth of Nations does for the study of human diversity and achievement among nations what The Bell Curve did for IQ and achievement in the USA. The central thesis is that the IQs of populations play a decisive role in the economic destinies of nations. With concise logic, Richard Lynn (professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland), and Tatu Vanhanen (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Tampere in Finland), systematically document their stunningly straightforward and yet greatly overlooked hypothesis.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations analyses the relation between national IQ scores and measures of economic performance. In one analysis of 81 countries for which direct evidence on national IQs is available, mean national IQ correlates 0.71 with per capita Gross National Product (GNP) for 1998, and 0.76 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 1998. Other analyses consistently demonstrate national IQs predict both long term (1820-1922) and short term (1950-90; 1976-1998) economic growth rates measured variously by per capita GNP and GDP (mean rs ~ 0.60). Regression analyses of the 81 countries, and then of 185 countries, including 104 whose national IQs are estimated by averaging those from adjoining countries, shows the national differences in wealth are explained first, by the intelligence levels of the populations; second, by whether the countries have market or socialist economies; and finally, by unique circumstances such as, in the case of Qatar, by the possession of valuable natural resources like oil.
The book has a lucid, expository style. Chapter 1 reviews the various theories advanced over the last 250 years to explain why some countries are rich while others are poor. These include climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best), geographic theories (an East-West Axis is said to be best), modernization theories (urbanization and division of labor are said to be good), dependency theories (exploitation and peripheralization of poor nations are said to be bad), neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good), and psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant Ethic, and motivation for achievement are said to be good). While some of these theories almost certainly account for some of the disparities between countries, IQ scores turn out to be the single best predictor.
Chapters 2 to 4 discuss the nature of general intelligence, defined as a single unitary construct underlying performance on many specific cognitive tasks. A review of the literature shows that an individual's intelligence is an important determinant of his or her educational attainment, earnings, economic success, and other significant life outcomes. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ and earnings is approximately 0.35, an association the authors argue is causal because: IQs predate earnings, are moderately heritable, are stable from 5 years of age onwards, and predict not only the earnings obtained in adulthood, but educational level and many other positive outcomes along the way. It makes sense that intelligence determines earnings because more intelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively, can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more productively and efficiently. Nations whose populations have high IQ levels also have high educational attainment and relatively large numbers of individuals who make significant contributions to national life, including the social infrastructure conducive to economic development. Conversely, nations with low levels of intelligence have low levels of educational attainment and relatively few individuals who make significant positive contributions to the social infrastructure. Low intelligence leads to a number of unfavorable social outcomes including crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single motherhood.
Chapter 5, the "Sociology of Intelligence," provides the first analyses of IQ at the group level, analyzing sub-divisions within nations such as those of cities, districts within cities, and regions. For example, studies carried out using the 310 administrative districts of New York City in the 1930s, found correlations of 0.40 to 0.70 between average IQ scores (gained from tests administered to children in schools) and measures of per capita income, educational attainment, welfare dependency, juvenile delinquency, mortality, and infant mortality. Similar studies carried out in regions of the British Isles, France, and Spain in the 1970s corroborate these relationships.
Chapters 6 to 8 (and their appendices) provide the critical core of the authors' analyses. These chapters describe in detail the variables and procedures by which the very testable hypotheses are tested and confirmed. The main IQ data are those published from 81 countries in the scientific literature over the previous 70 years. These are standardized to a British mean IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, along with adjustments made for the secular increases in IQ which average 2.5 points a decade since the 1930s. The IQ data turn out to be highly reliable and valid. For example, in 45 countries for which there are two or more IQ measures, the inter-correlation is 0.94; in 38 countries for which there are data from international studies of achievement in mathematics and science, the correlation with IQ scores is 0.87.
The widespread though rarely stated assumption of economists and political scientists that the peoples of all nations have the same average level of intelligence turns out to be seriously incorrect. To the contrary, the evidence clearly reveals that there are considerable national differences in average intelligence level. The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental nations of North East Asia (IQ = 104), followed in descending order by the European nations of Europe (IQ = 98), the nations of North America and Australasia (IQ = 98), the nations of South and Southwest Asia from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (IQ = 87), the nations of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (IQ = 86), the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85), and finally by the nations of Africa (IQ = 70).
One of the most surprising aspects of these data is how few nations have IQs as high as the British average of 100 (only 15 out of the 81, or less than 20%) and how many nations have IQs of 90 or less (40 out of the 81, almost 50%). The mean IQ of the 81 nations based on averaging the 7 regional IQs listed above is 90, a serious problem if the book's conclusion is correct that IQ = 90 is the threshold for having a technological economy. However, even if all the IQs turn out to be underestimates, it is likely that the rank-order among the nations will remain highly simila
r.
The range of IQs can be considerable within a geographic or political boundary. For example, in Latin America and the Caribbean, IQs range from 72 in Jamaica to 96 in Argentina and Uruguay and appear to be determined by the racial and ethnic make-up of the populations. Some racially mixed countries were assigned IQs proportionate to the IQs known for the various groups that make up the country. Thus, the national IQ for South Africa is given as 72 based on the weighted average for Whites, Blacks, Coloreds, and Indians (e.g., Owen, 1992).
For some (not all) analyses, 104 of the countries had their IQs estimated by averaging those from the most appropriate neighboring countries. For example, Afghanistan's IQ was estimated by averaging those from neighboring India (IQ = 81) and Iran (IQ = 84) to give an IQ of 83. The tables provided in IQ and the Wealth of Nations will be invaluable for researchers wishing to analyze subsets of the data or to extend them with additional data. Of course, the authors are aware that their data on both national IQs and economic indicators are only estimates and will contain errors. Their stunning results, however, leave little doubt that the margins of error were small enough to make the exercise meaningful. Error variance is typically randomly distributed and so works to diminish the strength of the associations between variables.
Although the correlations between IQs and economic performance are high, some countries had higher or lower per capita incomes than expected from their national IQs. These results are also informative. An analysis of those countries that deviate most from a regression line shows that a major additional factor for economic success consists of whether countries have market or socialist economies. A third contribution to wealth is the unique circumstances a country finds itself in.
Some of the countries with a large positive residual, and therefore a higher per capita income than would be predicted from their IQs, are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S. With the exception of Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados all of these are technologically highly developed market economies and their higher than predicted incomes could be attributed principally to this form of economic organization. Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income is principally due to its revenue from oil exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by corporations and people from European and North American countries. South Africa's much higher than expected per capita income derives from the high performance of the industries established and managed by the country's European minority. Similarly, Barbados's high positive residual can be traced to its well-established tourist industry and financial services, which are owned, controlled and managed by American and European countries.
Some of the countries with a large negative residual are Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Some of these are present or former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The Philippines have had a large amount of ethnic conflict, which other studies show results in decreased growth (across countries, a 1 SD increase in ethnic conflict is associated with a 0.30 SD decrease in growth rate; Easterly & Levine, 1997).
Chapter 9 contrasts IQ theory with its competitors, explains anomalies, and provides historical accounts of particular nations and regions. For example, two significant exceptions to the view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singapore and Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are among the richest countries in the world. Two exceptions to the view that a temperate climate is beneficial are Lesotho and Swaziland, which lie slightly south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but are among the poorest countries in the world. The explanation for these differences can be understood in terms of intelligence theory: the people of Singapore and Hong Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest IQs, while the people of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest IQs. Historical vignettes are presented to explain how geographical isolation in central Asia (e.g., Tajikistan) may hinder economic development, and how economic fluctuations in Britain, Germany, and India have coincided with their governments' commitments to a market economy.
Modernization theories, according to which all nations would evolve from subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and industrialization, have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa). IQ and the Wealth of Nations proposes that modernization theories worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim because these nations have appreciably the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States but they did not work for the other four groups of nations because these have lower IQs than those in the United States.
One of the most perplexing problems for the general theory is why the peoples of East Asia with their high IQs lagged behind the European peoples in economic growth and development until the second half of the 20th Century. China's science and technology were generally more advanced than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. In engineering, for example, China had canal systems, including canal locks, centuries ahead of Europe. In agricultural technology, the Chinese were the first to invent the collar and harness for horses (250 B.C.), and the chain pump for lifting water for irrigation (80 A.D.). They also invented the wheel barrow (240 B.C.), which did not appear in Europe until 1250 A.D. In printing and paper making, the Chinese invented making paper from bark (105 A.D.), printing from engraved wooden blocks (650 A.D.), printing with movable type (1040 A.D.), and color printing for paper money (1100 A.D.). In military technology, the Chinese invented the stirrup (475 A.D.) enabling soldiers on horseback to sit securely in the saddle and attack enemies with swords and lances, gunpowder (1044 A.D.), rockets (1200 A.D.), bombs producing shrapnel (1230 A.D.), small firearms shooting bullets from bamboo and metal tubes (1260 A.D.), and cannons (1280 A.D.). In Europe, gunpowder wasn't used until the 1300s. In marine technology, the Chinese built ships with rudders (2000 B.C.), and the magnetic compass for navigation at sea (1100 A.D.). Still other Chinese inventions included: cast iron (300 B.C.), iron chain supported suspension bridges (580 A.D.), spinning wheels (1035 A.D.), water powered mechanical clocks (1080 A.D.), and porcelain (840 A.D.). In mathematics, the Chinese invented the decimal point (1350 B.C.), and negative numbers (100 B.C.). In the 15th century Chinese inventiveness in science and technology came to an end and from that time on virtually all the important advances were made by Europeans, first in Europe and later in the U.S., perhaps because while Europeans developed the market economy, the Chinese stagnated through authoritarian bureaucracy and central planning.
The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology, and by freeing up the economy by transforming state monopolies into private corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics industries. Although it is so
metimes asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant scientific and technological innovations of their own, this underestimates their technological achievements. Philip's Science and Technology Encyclopedia (1998) lists a number of important discoveries and technological innovations made by the Japanese: the fiber-tipped pen (1960), "bullet" trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video home systems (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display (1979), video discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial cables and optical fibers (1988).
African nations are at the other extreme to China and Japan in levels of national IQ and this may explain why they are such a major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of economic growth of African countries following their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the major problems in developmental economics. During the years 1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41 nations of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are available is much lower than in the rest of the world. Many of the African countries even suffered negative per capita growth rate since 1960 (see also Easterly & Levine, 1997). Several economists have quantified all possible factors such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement, unemployment and the like and compared the situation to elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and have concluded that these factors do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some "missing element." Some have identified the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread corruption and lack of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable telephones and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria. IQ and the Wealth of Nations suggests that the missing link is IQ, and that some of the factors identified by economists as contributing to the low economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa are themselves attributable to a low level of intelligence in the populations. For example, the poor telephone services and electricity supplies, the low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government advisory boards are themselves due to the low average levels of IQ. With a cognitive capacity of IQ = 70, the populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic growth achieved elsewhere in the world.
In chapter 10, the final chapter, various predictions are made. One clear prediction is that future growth is most likely in those countries with the largest negative residuals, that is, whose national IQ scores are high but whose present economic performance is weak. The countries of the former Communist Blocs -- such as Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam -- are obvious possibilities. This chapter also lists some of the factors (both environmental and genetic) that might raise IQ scores, and so alleviate the problem. These include better nutrition, education, and health, and also ending the dysgenic fertility wherein the lowest IQ people produce the most children. For example, fertility figures from countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua show that among parents with secondary education in the late 1990s, the average number of children produced lies between 1.8 and 2.2, while among women with the least education, it lies between 5.0 and 6.1. Thus the least educated are having two to three times the number of children of the most educated. Since educational levels in these countries are to some degree correlated with intelligence, their demographic trend is strongly dysgenic.
The final conclusion of IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that national differences in IQ are here to stay, as is the gap between rich and poor nations. Hitherto, theories of economic development have been based on the presumption that the gaps between rich and poor countries are only temporary, and that they are due to various environmental conditions that could be changed by aid from rich countries to poor countries, and by poor countries adopting appropriate institutions and policies. It has been assumed that all human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic development. The authors call for the recognition of the existence of the evolved diversity of human populations.
References
Easterly, W. & Levine, R. (1997). Africa's growth tragedy: policies and ethnic divisions. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 1203-1250.
Owen, K. (1992). The suitability of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices for various groups in South Africa. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 149-159.
Philip's Science and Technology Encyclopedia (1998). London: Philip.
The Attack on The Bell Curve
Special Review
The Attack on The Bell Curve
By Richard Lynn
This paper originally appeared in Personality and Individual Differences 26,
(1999), pp. 761-765
B. DevUn, S.E. Fienberg, D.P. Resnick and K. Roeder (Eds). Intelligence, Genes and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, Springer-Yerlag, New York (1997), ISBN 0-387-94986-0, 376 pp.
C.S. Fischer, M. Hoot, M.S. Jankowski, S.R. Locas, A. Swidler and K. Yoss (Eds), Inequality by Design: Cracking The Bell Curve Myth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (1996). ISBN 0-691-02899-0, 318 pp.
It is doubtful whether any book in the entire history of psychology has been so extensively attacked as The Bell Curve
by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994). The book has been the subject of several hundred critical reviews, a number of which have been collected in edited volumes, some of whose very titles such as Measured Lies (Kincheloe, Steinberg and Gresson, 1996) betray the emotional strength of the hostility the book has evoked. However, many of the initial attacks on The Bell Curve fell wide of the mark. Now we have two more serious books, both of which examine the arguments of The Bell Curve and find then deficient. They contain contributions from geneticists, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians, and they attempt to refute all the essential arguments made in The Bell Curve.
Before considering how well they succeed, it will be useful to summarise H and M's major points. These are (1) the social structure of the United States is to some degree genetically stratified by intelligence and has at its apex a 'cognitive elite' of professionals and senior executives who are genetically superior to the rest of the population; this situation has come about relatively recently through social mobility, by which those with high IQs have risen in the social hierarchy and those with low IQs have fallen; (2) this social stratification by IQ has increased in recent decades as a result of greater equality of opportunity through which those with high IQs are increasingly securing entry to elite universities and occupations, where they are meeting and marrying people like themselves and having elite children; this has been producing a widening intelligence gap between the social classes and this is likely to continue, leading to a caste society with increasingly genetically differentiated social classes; (3) for this to be taking place, intelligence must have a reasonably high heritability, which H and M estimate as lying between 40-80 percent; (4) intelligence is socially important and is a significant determinant of educational attainment, social status and incomes; (5) low intelligence is a significant determinant of a variety of social pathologies including poor educational attainment, chronic unemployment, long term welfare dependency, crime, single motherhood and poverty; (6) these social evils would be reduced if the intelligence of the population could be increased and it would be desirable if this could be accomplished; (7) there is little chance of being able to do this because the things that have been tried as improving education and headstart programs have little or no impact on intelligence; (8) the situation is getting worse because the genetic component of intelligence is deteriorating through the process of dysgenesis or dysgenics resulting from the tendency of the intelligent to have fewer children than the unintelligent, for the generation length to be shorter for the less intelligent, and through the large scale immigration of those with low intelligence; (9) blacks have on average lower intelligence than whites and Asians and this contributes to the over-representation of blacks in respect of the social pathologies of poor educational attainment, single motherhood, crime, etc.; the low average IQ of blacks probably has some genetic basis; the social condition of blacks is likely to deteriorate in the future because dysgenics is greater among blacks than among whites and this will lead to a widening of the intelligence gap between blacks and whites; (10) nothing much can be done about any of this; the United States will become increasingly like South America, with high IQ whites and Asians living in fortified enclaves protected by high fences and armed guards from 'the menace of the slums below' (p. 518); (11) the future is consequently pretty bleak and the best that can be done is to try to return to a simpler small town America of yore in which the unintelligent could be usefully employed doing cognitively undemanding jobs and the local cognitive elite could exercise stronger social controls over those who step out of line by punishing them more swiftly and effectively than is done in the megalopises of the contemporary world..
Nearly all of these propositions are challenged in the two books under review. In the first of these, Daniels, Fienberg, Devlin and Rhoeder dispute the genetics of H and M. They argue that the heritability of IQ is much lower than that proposed by H and M, that dysgenesis/dysgenics is not taking place and that there is no persuasive evidence for a genetic component to the black-white IQ difference. On the heritability issue, they argue that H and M should have distinguished between narrow and broad heritability (the heritability due to additive genes only, and that due to additive genes plus dominants and recessives). They say that only additive genes are transmitted reliably from parents to children and could become stratified by social class, that hence only narrow heritability should be considered in the emergence of the genetic congitive elite thesis; that the narrow heritability of IQ is only 0.34; and that this is too low to produce agenetic cognitive elite.
There are several errors in this argument. First, contrary to the authors' statements, dominant and recessive genes are transmitted reliably from parents to children and are frequently disproportionately represented in certain populations. For instance, the dominant gene for myotonic dystrophy has an exceptionally high prevalence in the population of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, where it is more than 100 times more frequent than is typical for Caucasian populations (Veillette et al., 1992). Similarly, recessive genes for sickle cell anaemia are almost entirely confined to black populations and the recessives for Tay-Sacks disease are carried with much greater frequency among Ashkenazi Jews than among gentiles. There is no reason whatever why the dominant and recessive genes for high intelligence should not have become disproportionately represented among the cognitive elite and those for low intelligence disproportionately represented in the underclass and it is virtually certain that this has in fact occurred.
Second, in estimating the narrow heritability of intelligence at 0.34, Devlin et al. make the mistakes of (a) using the data for all age groups; it has become well known since Bouchard (1993) analysed the data that the heritability of intelligence is quite low among young children, becomes progressively greater among older children and reaches its peak among adults. Probably the explanation for this is that the environment provided by parents exerts effects on young children which wash out by the time they become adult, or that there are genes for intelligence which do not become active until adolescence. Whatever the explanation, the important figure for heritability is that derived from adults and this, according to recent estimates, is around 0.80 (Finkel et
al., 1995; Petrill et al., 1998); (b) a second error made by Devlin et al. is that they fail to correct the familial correlations for IQ for measurement error; this should have been done and the effect is to increase the heritability by around 12%. These two mistakes put the heritability estimates made by Devlin et al. way off target. If any criticism is to be made of H and M on their heritability estimate it is that they erred on the side of caution in placing it between 40-80%. The correct figure for adults is around 80%.
Devlin et al. also criticise H and M's conclusion that genetic deterioration for intelligence is taking place through the process of dysgenics. H and M demonstrated an inverse association between intelligence and numbers of children from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data, from which they inferred the presence of dysgenics. Devlin et al. object that the data are for 25-33 year olds who have not completed their fertility, that higher IQ women tend to have their children later, that only data for completed fertility can be used to establish the existence of dysgenics and that 'insofar as we are aware, there is nothing but anecdotal evidence for dysgenics' (p.61). The extent of their awareness of the evidence on this issue is seriously deficient. It is true that completed fertility needs to be assessed to establish the presence , of dysgenics but they fail to note that three studies carried out in the 1980's and 1990's fulfilled this condition on large representative samples of Americans and all three found completed fertility is dysgenic (Vining, 1995; Van Court and Bean, 1985; Retherford and Sewell, 1988). H and M summarise these three studies, but Devlin et. al. have failed to notice this. There is in addition a large amount of evidence from censuses and other surveys showing an inverse association between completed fertility and educational level (a proxy for intelligence), and between socio-economic status and intelligence (another proxy for intelligence), summarised in Lynn (1996). The evidence for dysgenic fertility is far from anecdotal. It is securely established. Furthermore, Devlin et al. do not address the dysgenic impact of shorter generation length among the less intelligent, nor that of immigration, for both of which H and M provide evidence.
Devlin et al. turn next to the possibility of a genetic component to the back-white difference in IQ. They reject this by citing three studies showing that the IQs of black-white hybrids are not related to their amount of Caucasian ancestry. They fail to cite the 18 studies of the relation of skin colour to IQ summarised by Shuey ( 1966), of which 16 found that light skin colour, a measure of the amount of Caucasian ancestry, is positively related to IQ. They assert that adoption studies show the malleability of IQ but fail to note that the leading study of this question by Waldman, Scarr and Weinberg (1992) showed that as young adults blacks adopted by white families showed no IQ gains (Lynn, 1994) and that the authors of this study have conceded that their evidence indicates a genetic component to the low black IQ (Waldman, Weinberg and Scarr, 1994). Finally, Devlin et al. write that 'it is not clear to us why IQ would be positively selected in Caucasians but not in Africans' (p.62). They are apparently unaware of the theory that Caucasians were subjected to the cognitively demanding selection pressures of survival in cold winter environments for around 100,000 years, to which Africans were not exposed, a theory which also explains the high IQs of East Asians, and which now commands wide assent as the evolutionary explanation for the genetically based high mean IQ of Caucasians and East Asians (Lynn, 1991; Miller, 1995; Rushton, 1995; Levin, 1997; Jensen, 1998).
Two later chapters discuss the nature of intelligence and the issue of whether H and M were justified in treating intelligence as a single entity called Spearman's g. Carroll is generally supportive of H and M and says that the scores on tests of various abilities (reasoning, verbal, spatial, etc.) can legitimately be summed to give a single measure which can be called general intelligence. Hunt opposes the concept of general intelligence and prefers the multiple intelligences model. However, he agrees that these are positively intercorrelated and can for practical purposes be summed to give a measure of general intelligence, and concludes that H and M's general intelligence is 'not exactly inaccurate but is simplified in an important way'. This conclusion is not seriously damaging to H and M's case. Everyone from Spearman onwards has accepted that g is a simplification and that there is more to intelligence than g. Simplification of the real world is precisely what science is about.
The book turns next to the importance of intelligence for earnings and other social phenomena. Cawley, Conneely, Heckman and Vytlacil examine the NLSY data for the relation between intelligence and earnings. They calculate that in different subsamples of males and females and of blacks, whites and Hispanics, IQ accounts, for between 0.12 and 0.17 of the variance in earnings, implying correlations of between 0.34 and 0.41. They conclude that H and M were wrong in their contention that IQ is an important determinant of earnings. There are two defects in their analysis. First, they omitted both the unemployed, who have low IQs and no earnings, and college students, who have high IQs and will in time have high earnings. These omissions reduce the correlations between IQs and earnings and adjustments should have been made for them. Second, corrections should have been made for the unreliability of the measures of both IQ and earnings. If these adjustments had been made they would have increased the contribution of IQ to earnings and the authors would have reached a different conclusion.
Cavallo, EI-Abbadi and Heeb consider sex and race differences in the contribution of IQ to earnings. They find that the black-white difference in earnings is largely due to IQ differences and that controlling for IQ, black males earn 96% of the earnings of whites, while black females earn 15% more than white females. They do not attempt to explain the reasons for these differences but fault H and M for not breaking down their analysis by sex. The sex difference they reveal is interesting, but it hardly dents H and M's case that the earnings of blacks and whites are pretty much the same once IQ is controlled. In fact, black females earn more than would be predicted from their IQs, possibly because they benefit more than black males from affirmative action.
Winship and Korenman discuss the effects of education on intelligence and argue that it is greater than H and M allow. They analyse the NLSY data and calculate that each year ofeducation increases the IQ by 2.5 IQ points. Wahlsten also argues that education raises IQ. They fault H and M for being too pessimistic about the scope for raising IQs by improving and increasing education. The weakness of this argument is that many intelligence tests consist of cognitive tasks taught in schools, such as arithmetic and language problems, and this is particularly true of the AFQT used in the NLSY. Scores on such tests do improve with education but this is not necessarily the same thing as increasing intelligence, which consists of many thousands of cognitive skills not taught in schools. The scope for raising intelligence by increasing education is much less securely established than these critics argue.
The relation between intelligence, crime and race is considered by Manolakes. She accepts H and M's contention that among whites IQ is negatively associated with crime. H and M did not consider this relationship among blacks. Manolakes faults them for this and finds that among blacks in the NLSY sample IQ is positively associated with crime. She criticises Hand M for not discovering this themselves, failing to note that Hand M were not primarily concerned with race differences. She has certainly made a remarkable discovery considering
the large research literature showing that crime is predominantly committed by the less intelligent. Before taking this result too seriously it should be noted that the data consist of self-reported crime and people do not invariably report their crimes truthfully. Nevertheless her apparent discovery that IQ is positively related to crime among blacks certainly deserves further research.
The remainder of the book consists of chapters by Glymour, a philosopher who asserts that The Bell Curve is pseudoscience; Zigler and Styfco, who agree that head start programs do not raise IQs but believe they may have other useful effects; and Lemann, a journalist who doubts whether there is a cognitive elite in America except in the professions of law, medicine and business consultancy. The book ends with a summary by Resnick and Fienberg, respectively a historian and statistician, who endorse the generally tendentious and frequently erroneous arguments of the contributors. The academic disciplines of these authors belie the book's subtitle Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve. Of the twenty five writers in this book, there is scarcely one who could properly be called a scientist.
Poor as Intelligence, Genes and Success is, it is no-where near so bad as Inequality by Design. This is a joint effort produced by six members of the sociology department at Berkeley. Their basic argument is that intelligence, earnings and socio-economic status are wholly environmentally determined. Their model (p.74) is that the family and neighborhood environment determine schooling and the cognitive skills of intelligence and educational attainment, that these determine inequality of earnings, which in turn determine the social problems of chronic unemployment, welfare dependency, single motherhood, crime, etc. Since intelligence is determined by the environment and by schooling, it could be increased by providing better environments and better schooling and this would reduce poverty and its associated ills. This should be done by raising the taxation of those with high and middle incomes and distributing the proceeds to the poor.
In order to establish their case that IQ is solely determined environmentally, the authors would have to show that all the twin and adoption studies indicating that intelligence has a moderate" to high heritability are flawed, but they make no attempt to do this. They should have considered Taubman's (1976) work on the similarity of the incomes of twins showing that income has a heritability of around 50%. They should also have considered the evidence that intelligence measured in young children remains fairly stable over subsequent years and predicts later educational attainment. For instance, it has been shown that the IQ of 5 year olds predicts their performance in an examination in mathematics taken at the age of 16 at a correlation of.72 (Yule, Gold and Busch, 1982). All this evidence is ignored. The authors of this deplorable book stand squarely in the tradition of sociological ostriches who have for so long averted their eyes from evidence they prefer not to see.
In the early and middle decades of the century sociologists largely ignored the role of genetics and intelligence as determinants of earnings, socioeconomic status, poverty and other social conditions. In the early 1970's a valiant attempt was made by the sociologist Christopher Jencks (1972) to remedy this blindness of sociological analysis. Jencks presented a path model linking genes to intelligence to social outcomes which was a forerunner of the analysis presented in The Bell Curve. Jencks seriously underestimated the strength of these causal links because he understated the heritability of intelligence and failed to correct for measurement unreliability but he made a major contribution by formulating the right model. It appears that, so far as the faculty of the sociology department at Berkeley is concerned, he wasted his time.
There is nothing in either of these two books that makes any serious case against the conclusions of The Bell Curve. With the exceptions of the chapters by Carroll and Hunt in the first book, the authors systematically distort the data and ignore the relevant evidence. Just what mix of ideology and sheer ignorance is responsible for the positions the authors of these two books adopt is difficult to assess. Whatever the explanation, these two books represent the benighted environmentalist timewarp in which much of contemporary social science is still enmeshed.
Richard Lynn
University of Ulster
Department of Psychology
Coleraine
Co Londonderry, N Ireland BT52 1 SA
UK
References
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Finkel, D., Pedersen, N. L., McGue, M. and McClearn, G. E. (1995). Heritability of cognitive abilities in adult twins:
Comparison of the Minnesota and Swedish data. Behavior Genetics, 25, 421-431
Herrnstein, R. J and Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve. New York; Free Press.
Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality. New York: Basic Books.
Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g Factor. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Kincheloe, J, Steinberg, S. and Gresson, A. (1996). Measured Lies. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Levin, M. (1997). Race Matters. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Lynn, R. (1991). The evolution of race differences in intelligence. Mankind Quarterly, 31, 255-296.
Lynn, R. (1994). Some reinterpretations of the Minnesota transracial adoption study. Intelligence, 19,21-28.
Lynn, R. (1996). Dysgenics. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Miller, E. M. (1995). Environmental variability selects for large families only in special circumstances: another objection
to differential K theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 19,903-918.
Petrill, S. A., Plomin, R., Berg, S., Johansson, B., Pedersen, N. L., Ahern, F. and McClearn, G. E. (1998). The genetic
and environmental relationship between general and specific cognitive abilities in twins age 80 and over. Psycholgical
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Retherford, R. D. and Sewell, W. H. (1988). Intelligence and family size reconsidered. Social Biology, 35, 1-40
Rushton, J. P. (1995). Race, Evolution and Behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Shuey,A. (1966). The Testing of Negro Intelligence. New York: Social Science Press.
Taubman, P. (1976). The determinants of earnings: genetics, family and other environments; a study of male twins.
American Economic Review, 66, 858-870.
Veillette, S., Perron, M., Mathieu, J., Prevost, C. and Hebert, G. (1992). Sociocultural factors influencing the spread of
myotonic dystrophy in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of the province of Quebec. In A.H. Bit ties and D.F.
Roberts (Eds) Minority Populations; Genetics, Demography and Health. London: Macmillan.
Vining, D. R. (1995). on the possibility of the re-emergence of a dysgenic trend: an update. Personality and Individual
Differences, 19, 259-265.
Waldman, I. D., Scarr, S., and Weinberg, R. A. (1992). The Minnesota transracial adoption study: a follow-up of IQ
test performance at adolescence. Intelligence, 16, 117-135.
Waldman, I. D., Weinberg, R. A. and Scarr, S. (1994). Racial-group differences in IQ in the Minnesota transracial
adoption study: a reply to Levin and Lynn. Intelligence, 19,29--44.
Yule, W., Gold, R. D. and Busch, C. (1982). Long term predictive validity of the WPPSI: an 11 year follow-up study.
Personality and Individual Differences, 3,65-71.
Van Court, M. and Bean, F. D. (1985). Intelligence and fertility in the United States 1912-1982. Intelligence, 9,23-32.
The New Enemies of Evolutionary Science
The New Enemies
of Evolutionary Science By J. Philippe Rushton
(Note: The following report by J. Philippe Rushton was originally published
in Liberty, March, 1998, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 31-35)
On January 19, 1989, in the Sausalito Room of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, my life changed forever. I stood before a lectern speaking to a symposium of scientists belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The title of the brief paper I proceeded to present to the meeting was "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)."
I reviewed the international literature recently published in academic peer-reviewed journals. I summarized data about traits like brain size, temperament, speed of maturation, family structure, and reproductive variables. I tentatively concluded, roughly speaking, that East Asians, on average, were slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, with larger brains and higher IQ scores than Africans, who tended to the opposite in each of these areas. Whites, I found, fell between the other two groups.
I further contended that this orderly tri-level hierarchy of races in average tendency had its roots not only in economic, cultural, familial, and other environmental forces but also, to a far greater extent than mainstream social science would suggest, in ancient, gene-mediated evolutionary ones. Heredity, or nature - to use the term popularized by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's younger cousin - was every bit as important as environment or nurture, often more so.
To account for the racial pattern in brain size and the other "life-history variables," I proposed a gene-based life-history theory familiar to evolutionary biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy. At one end of this scale are r strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates, and, at the other K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment. This scale is generally used to compare the life histories of widely disparate species but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species. I hypothesized that Mongoloid people are, on average, more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids.
I also mapped this theory onto human evolution. Molecular genetic evidence shows that modern humans evolved in Africa sometime after 200,000 years ago, with an African/non-African split occurring about 110,000 years ago, and a Mongoloid/Caucasoid split about 41,000 years ago. The farther north the populations migrated, "out of Africa," the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters. As these populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, they did so by shifting toward larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and lower levels of sex hormone with concomitant reductions in sexual potency and aggression and increases in family stability and longevity.
I did not claim to have established the truth of these hypotheses. They may never by established in their entirety. But if they, or any part of them, or even any parallel hypotheses were eventually confirmed, we would have an explanation of why the measured traits are statistically distributed among racial groups in the distinct patterns evident in the data I had examined. The theories provided testable hypotheses and consequently complied with two fundamental goals of any science: the search to provide causal explanations of phenomena, and the search to unify separate fields of thought. These powerful incentives pulled me forward.
I emphasized two caveats in my presentation before the AAAS. First, because there is enormous variability within each population and because the population distributions overlap, it is always problematic to generalize from a group average to any particular individual. Secondly, because genetic efforts are necessarily mediated by neurohormonal and psychosocial mechanisms, many opportunities exist for intervention and the alleviation of suffering.
My hypothesis so stunned AAAS organizers that they quickly called a press conference to publicly dissociate themselves from my remarks. At the press conference, the president of the AAAS, Dr. Walter Massey, vice-president for research at the University of Chicago, told reporters that my credentials as a psychologist were good and that scholars participating in the conference were free to draw any conclusions they choose. Massey affirmed that the AAAS would never consider muzzling any scholar because the free expression of views was the essence of academic discussion. He went on to say that I had made "quite a leap of faith from the data to the conclusions" and that he found the paper "personally disturbing" and its conclusions "highly suspect." The scene was eerily reminiscent of the closing sequence of the film Rosemary's Baby with the media setting up to take pictures of the newborn devil, cloven hoofs and slit eyes, ready to raise hell on earth. I was about to become an academic pariah.
By the time I returned from the conference to my home in London, Ontario, and my job as professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, the uproar was in full swing. "Canadian Professor Provokes Uproar With Racial Theories," proclaimed Canada's national newspaper, the venerable Globe and Mail. "Theory Racist: Prof Has Scholars Boiling," declared the influential Toronto Star. "UWO Professor Denies Study Was Racist," trumpeted the local London Free Press.
Newspapers took my views to hostile social activist groups and got their predictably hostile opinion. They said I should be fired for promoting hatred. The press then took this idea to the president of the university who upheld the principle of academic freedom. The ongoing conflict was serialized for weeks. Student activist groups soon entered the fray, demanding that I meet with them in a public forum.
TV coverage of my theories juxtaposed photos of me with footage of Nazi storm troops. Editing and voiceovers removed any mention of my qualification that the race differences I had identified were often quite small and could not be generalized to individuals and didn't mention that like any decent human being I abhor Nazi racial policies. Newspapers caricatured me as wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood or talking on the telephone to a delighted Adolf Hitler. The Toronto Star began a campaign to get me fired from my position, chastising my university and stating "This protection of a charlatan on grounds of academic freedom is preposterous." Later, the same paper linked me to the Holocaust saying, "[Thus] there emerged the perverted 'master race' psychology of the 20th century, and the horror of the Holocaust. Oddly, the discredited theories of eugenic racism still are heard, most recently from an academic at an Ontario university." I had no choice but to hire a prestigious law firm and issue notices under the Libel and Slander Act against the newspaper. This brought the media campaign against me to a halt.
Hate Crime Laws
In the U.S. there is a First Amendment to protect the right of every citizen to free speech and there is not much the government can do to silence unpopular ideas. In Canada and many Western European countries, however, there are laws against free speech, ostensibly enac
ted to inhibit "hate" and the spreading of "false news."
Two weeks after my AAAS presentation, the premier of Ontario denounced my theories. My work was "highly questionable and destructive" and "morally offensive to the way Ontario thinks," he said. It "destroys the kind of work we are trying to do, to bring together a society based on equality of opportunity." The premier told reporters he had telephoned the university president and found him in a dilemma about how to handle the case. The premier said that he understood and supported the concept of academic freedom, but in this particular case dismissal should occur "to send a signal" to society that such views are "highly offensive."
When the university failed to fire me, the premier asked the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate whether I had violated the federal Criminal Code of Canada, Chapter 46, Section 319, Paragraph 2, which specifies: "Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of an indictable offense and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years."
The police questioned my colleagues and members of the administration and professors at other universities, demanded tapes of media interviews, and sent a questionnaire to my attorney to which I was obliged to reply in detail. (There's no Fifth Amendment in Canada either). After harassing me and dragging my name through the dirt for six months, the Attorney General of Ontario declined to prosectue me and dismissed my research as "loony, but not criminal."
This did not halt the legal action. Eighteen students, including seven Black students, lodged a formal complaint against me to the Ontario Human Rights Commission claiming that I had violated Sections, 1, 8, and 10 of the 1981 Ontario Human Rights Code guaranteeing equality of treatment to all citizens of the province. In particular, I was charged with "infecting the learning environment with academic racism." As remedy, the complainants requested that my employment at the university be terminated and that an order be made requiring the university to "examine its curriculum so as to eliminate academic racism."
I was outraged. A more flagrant attack on the right to freedom of expression was difficult to imagine in a supposedly free country. "Human rights" tribunals were becoming a menace - a direct threat to the very human rights and fundamental freedoms they were supposed to protect. The Ontario Human Rights Commission could no more change the truth about human races than could the Christian Inquistion about the solar system or the KGB about the genetics of wheat. I found it difficult to accept the increasingly obvious fact that in the post-Soviet world, an academic was freer to say what he believed about some things in Russia, than in Canada.
Four long years after the complaint was lodged, the Ontario Human Rights Commission abandoned its case against me claiming it could no longer find the complainants to testify.
Events at the University
In its relations with the outside world the university administration stood firmly for academic freedom. The president gave a press conference to state categorically that there would be no investigation of me, that I would not be suspended, and that I was free to pursue any line of research I chose.
Behind the scenes, however, I became the target of a witch hunt by some of the administrators. Dismayingly, my dean, a physical anthropologist, publicly declared that I had lost my scientific credibility and spearheaded an attack on me in the newspapers. She issued a series of preemptive statements making plain her negative opinion of me and my work. "What evidence is there for this ranked ordering of the evolution of the human races?" she wrote. "None." Claiming that her views represented only her academic opinion she emphasized that she was not speaking in any administrative capacity. Her letter was nonetheless widely interpreted in the media as a refutation by my "boss." Henceforth, in order to support me, a person would now have to go up against the dean in addition to prevailing opinion. Next, the chair of my department gave me an annual performance rating of "unsatisfactory" citing my "insensitivity." This was a remarkable turnaround because it occurred for the same year in which I had been made a Fellow of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. My previous twelve years of annual ratings had been "good" or "excellent." Indeed, my earlier non-controversial work had made me on of the most cited scholars in my university.
Because unsatisfactory ratings can lead to dismissal, even for a tenured professor like me, I contested the rating through various levels of grievance, wasting an enormous amount of time and emotional energy. The proceedings that followed were Kafkaesque, terrifying when they weren't simply funny. For example, the grievance procedures required that I first appeal the Chairman's negative assessment to the Dean. The Dean had already spoken out against me, so I asked the Dean to recuse herself from hearing the case. She refused. So I had to appear before her.
At my hearing, the Dean's folded arms and glowers of fury made her decision obvious, and six weeks later, she upheld the Department Chair's decision. In a seven-page letter justifying her decision, she cast aspersions at my "sensitivity," and my sense of "responsibility," and questioned whether ther were, in fact, "any" papers that had ever been published that had supported my perspective other than those I had written myself.
I decided on a more drastic defense. I wrote to colleagues around the world and received over 50 strong letters of support, many endorsing the evidence I had presented. When the Dean found out about this she went absolutely ballistic, on one occasion screaming and spitting at me in fury.
I eventually won my appeal against the Dean and the Chair and two separate grievance committeess chastised them for their actions against me. My annual performance ratings are back to receiving grades of "good" and "excellent."
Some radical and Black students mobilized and held rallies, even bringing in a member of the African National Congress to denounce me. In one demonstration, a mob of 40 people stormed through the psychology department, banging on walls and doors, bellowing slogans through bull horns, drawing swastikas on the walls, and writing on my door "Racist Pig Live Here."
The administration responded by barring me from the classroom and ordering me to lecture by videotape on the pretext that they could not protect me from the lawlessness of students. Again I launched formal grievances. After a term of enforced teaching by videotape, I won the right to resume teaching in person, though then I was required to run a gauntlet of demonstrators shouting protests and threats. Only after several forced cancellations of my classes did the administration warn the demonstrators that further action would lead to suspension and legal action. That brought the protests to a halt.
De Facto Censorship and the Corruption of Scholarship
As a graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1973, I witnessed a physical assault on Hans Eysenck, who was studying the biological basis of intelligence and had recently published his book Race, Intelligence, and Education (1971). The slogan of that day was "Fascists Have No Right To Speak," and Eysenck became a target for attack. No legal charges were brought for the widely witnesses assault because another popular slogan of the 1960's , for those who approved the message but disapproved the tactic, was "There are no Enemies on the Left." Stories of harassment and intimidation could be told by many others who have had the temerity to research topics that touch on the genetic or distributional basis of race differences.
Today, many campus radicals from the 1960's are the tenured radicals of the 1990's. Th
ey have become the chairs of departments, the deans, and the chancellors of the universities: senior political administrators in Congress and Houses of Parliament, and even the presidents and prime mimisters of countries. The 1960's mentality of peace, love, and above all, equality, now constitutes the intellectual dogma of the Western academic world. There are laws to prohibit platforms for those denounced as "fascists" and others deemed to be not politically correct.
In his book, Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch showed that even in the U.S. with the First Amendment in place, many colleges and universities have set up "anti-harassment" rules prohibiting - and establishing punishments for - "speech or other expression" that is intended to "insult or stigmatize an individual or a small number of individuals in the basis of their sex, race, color, hankicap, religion, sexual orientation or national and ethnic origin." (This is quoted from Stanford's policy, and is more or less typical.) One case at the University of Michigan became well known because it led a federal court to strike down the rule in question. A student claimed, in a classroom discussion, that he thought homosexuality was a disease treatable with therapy. He was formally disciplined by the university for violating the school's policy and victimizing people on the basis of sexual orientation.
In Canada and Western Europe, governments can and do prohibit speech on topics they consider obnoxious. In Denmark, a woman wrote a letter to a newspaper calling national domestic partner laws "ungodly" and homosexuality "the ugliest kind of adultery." She and the editor who published her letter were targeted for prosectution. In Great Britain, the Race Relations Act forbids speech that expresses racial hatred, "not only when it is likely to lead to violence, but generally, on the grounds that members of the minority races should be protected from racial insults." In some parts of the world you can be jailed, exiled, or even executed for expressing forbidden opinions.
Irrespective of religious background, or political affiliation, virtually all American intellectuals adhere to what has been called 'one-party science.' For example, only politically correct hypotheses centering on cultural disadvantage are postulated to explain the differential representation of minorities in science. Analyses of aptitude test scores and behavioral genetics are taboo. Cheap moralizing is so fierce that most people respect the taboo. This intellectual cowardice only encourages viscious attacks by activist groups on those who are engaged in legitimate scientific research showing that there is a genetic basis underlying individual and group differences.
The high-placed pervasiveness of the egalitarian orthodoxy is scary. Even more frightening than what happened to me is the experience of Christopher Brand, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University. On February 29, 1996, Brand's book on intelligence, The g Factor, was published in the United Kingdom by the British subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. On April 14, newspaper reports of interviews with him began to appear saying that he thought black people had a lower IQ than did whites and that these were probably partly genetic. On April 17, Wiley's company in New York denounced Brand's views as "repellent" and withdrew the book from bookstores. A blizzard of "refutations" of Brand appeared in the U.K. media under outraged headlines. Protests from members of Parliament, student boycotts of his lectures, and calls for his resignation by faculty at the University of Edinburgh all predictably ensued. Brand's refusal to be silenced and his defense of free speech led him to be fired (on August 8, 1997) for bringing his university into disrepute. There but for the grace God, go I.
In 1995, my monograph Race, Evolution, and Behavior was published by Transaction Publishers. Subsequently, the book was translated into Japanese (1996) and released as a softcover edition (1997) with an Afterword updating the science since the hardback went to press.
The book garnered a lead review in the New York Times Book Review (October 16, 1994) where Malcolm Browne, the Times science writer, discussed it along with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and Seymour Itzkoff's The Decline of Intelligence in America. Browne concluded his analysis with the statement that "the government or society that persists in sweeping this topic under the rug will do so at its peril." Dozens of other journals, including the National Review, Nature,andThe Nation, also reviewed it.
Its publication by an important academic press touched off a new round of hysteria. A lurid article screaming "Professors of HATE" (in five-inch letters!) appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (October 20, 1994). Taking up the entire next page was a photograph of my face, hideously darkened, twisted into a ghoulish image, and superimposed on a Gothic university tower. In another long propaganda piece entitled "The Mentality Bunker" which appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly (November 1994), I was misrepresented as an outmoded eugenicist and pseudoscientific racist. A photograph of me was published in brown tint reminiscent of vintage photos from the Hitler era.
Incredibly, Canada Customs seized and witheld copies of one shipment of the book for nine months while they tried to decide whether to condemn the book as "hate literature" and ban it from entering Canada. The fact that an academic book was even the subject of an investigation stunned my publisher: "I've never heard of such a thing," said Mary Curtis, Chairman of the Board of Transaction. "This is not supposed to happen in Canada. The last time the company had trouble shipping scholarly works was in the mid-1980's, when some books shipped to the Moscow Fair didn't make it."
Michel Cléroux, a spokesman for Canada Customs, said Customs were just following orders by investigating possible hate propaganda. A departmental policy prohibiting hate propaganda includes this definition: "Goods alleging that an identifiable group is racially inferior and/or weakens other segments of society to the detriment of society as a whole." After an "investigation" lasting nine months, Canada Customs relented.
Harassment continued at another meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS routinely allows the militantly disruptive International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to have official "Exhibitor" status, along with a booth, at its annual meeting. At the February 1996 meeting in Baltimore, INCAR and PLP festooned their booth with posters of Karl Marx and signs taking credit for interfering with the University of Maryland conference on "Genes and Crime" in September 1995.
At the AAAS meeting, INCAR targeted my poster presenting a review of the literature on brain size and cognitive ability. When INCAR encountered me the day before the poster presentation, they yelled so many death threats that the AAAS called the Baltimore police, who dispatched an armed officer to stand by the presentation. Despite the guard, INCAR continued to utter threats. One demonstrator took photographs of me saying they were for a "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster. "You won't be living much longer," he said. Incredibly, instead of cancelling the Exhibitor Status of organizations that threaten violencee, the program director of the AAAS's annual meeting said, in an interview published in The Scientist (March 4, 1996), that AAAS would tighten up the screening process to make it more difficult for presentations like mine to get on the program!
As Charles Murray has observed in the aftermath to The Bell Curve, social science is corrupt on the topic of race. Yet, the genetic hypothesis for the pervasiveness of the three-way racial pattern across so many traits, and which calls into question simple explanations based only on social factors like discrimination and poverty, needs to be discussed.
In his commencement address to the graduatin
g class of 1997 at the University of California (San Diego), U.S. President Bill Clinton called for a new dialogue on race and for "deepening our understanding of human nature and human differences." But apparently there are some aspects of human nature and human differences he'd rather leave unexplored.
I've learned a great deal since that day in 1989 when I stood before that meeting of scientists and presented a summary of my research, thereby making myself the target of harassment by the politically correct and the object of intimidation by the government of Canada. Despite the viscious campaign against investigation of the possible genetic basis of group differences, my interest never wavered. Work on other topics seemed shallow by comparison. Spurred by attacks and aided by colleagues, I have sought out more definitive tests of the genetic hypothesis and continue to publish my research.
I've also learned how important freedom of inquiry is to science, which must always remain to pursue truth without regard for where that pursuit leads. I've learned to treasure such remnants of freedom of speech as I enjoy as a citizen of Canada, and remain more committed than ever to the search for truth. As Benjamin Franklin observed more than two centuries ago, "Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech."
Department of Psychology
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 5C2
Evolution, Eugenics, and God’s Will
Evolution, Eugenics, and God's Will by Marian Van Court
This painting provides a wonderful artistic illustration for the subject of this paper. If one understands the large genetic component to our very souls -- not only our intelligence, but our honesty, our kindness, our courage, our creativity, and our unique personalities -- then one can immediately grasp the potential of eugenics for evolving ourselves into better people, more fully in the image of God. Francis Galton envisioned eugenics as a large-scale humanitarian endeavor, firmly grounded in science, which also contained the seed of a new religion:
The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor to further evolution, especially that of the human race.
Those who enjoy a sense of communion with God can dwell on the undoubted fact that there exists a solidarity between themselves and what surrounds them, through the endless reaction of physical laws among which the hereditary influences are to be included. They know that they are descended from an endless past, that they have a brotherhood with all that is, and have each his own share of responsibility in parentage of an endless future ( Blacker, 1952).
Evolution is the Crown Jewel of Creation
Evolution by natural selection fashioned creatures with conscious awareness from one-celled animals over vast expanses of time. The consciousness of human beings has evolved to such a degree that we are able to love one another, to experience joy at the beauty of nature, to create, to explore, to struggle to comprehend the nature of God, and even to manifest glimmerings of divinity ourselves. If Creation can be said to have anything resembling a purpose or destiny in a spiritual sense, the evolution of conscious beings has got to be at the very heart of it. For this reason, evolution by natural selection can legitimately be regarded as the "crown jewel" of Creation.
And isn't "the crown jewel of Creation" a far cry from how Darwin's theory was first greeted by the public in the late 1800s?! Christianity's vehement rejection of the theory of evolution was understandable since it contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible. Although it was a painful process, fraught with bitterness, in the long run this conflict was healthy. Now we think of the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory, and a lovely one at that. We have sufficient understanding to welcome Darwin's message because we recognize evolution as a vitally important key to life, to our consciousness, and ultimately to God.
All major religions say, in one way or another, that we are created in God's image. In Genesis it is written, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." An Indian proverb (East Indian) elegantly expresses a similar notion:
breathes in plants,
dreams in animals,
and awakens in human beings.
Consider the fact that we were created in God's image through the process of evolution--this can hardly be an insignificant fact. The creation story in the Bible may be lovely, but isn't the way we actually evolved into ourselves more awesome and more overwhelmingly beautiful than God merely dictating by fiat the existence of the first man and woman? Science has established conclusively that evolution is true, and this is not in doubt. But perhaps evolution could also be said to surpass the story of the Garden of Eden as being more probably true purely on aesthetic grounds (just as in physics sometimes the more beautiful of two theories is given more credence).
Dysgenics: A Cosmic Sacrilege?
Un-natural Selection
How did dysgenics come about? Simple. By a process that might well be called "un-natural selection," because it is a reversal of natural selection resulting from society's corrupting influence. In a nutshell:
(1) Modern societies quite understandably take care of sickly people who previously would have died, but then these people go on to have children with a high incidence of the same illnesses, and
(2) although contraception is available to everyone, it's more consistently and effectively used by all of the "best" and the most admirable people, i.e., the smartest, most responsible, hard-working people who make a positive contribution to the larger society.
A high percentage of the "worst" and least-admirable people either don't know, or don't care, that unprotected sex brings babies into the world, so they have sex with little or no thought of contraception. They include: psychopaths; sociopaths; criminals; psychologically disturbed people of all varieties; alcoholics; drug addicts; irresponsible, short-sighted, and selfish people; the mentally retarded; just-plain-dumb people; and people who are too lazy to take a trip to the corner drugstore. Because of their negligence, they contribute a disproportionate share of their least- admirable genes to future generations.
Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster conducted a study in which he found that despite lengthy sojourns in prison, London criminals still managed to produce more children on average than ordinary, law-abiding citizens (Lynn, 1995). Lynn calculated the increase in crime that would be expected
, given the degree to which criminal behavior is a function of heredity, and estimated the increase in crime which should result (other factors being equal) by the excess fertility of criminals. His excellent book, Dysgenics (see review on this website) is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the issue of eugenics and dysgenics to date.
Instead of implementing a eugenics program of incentives and disincentives in order to rectify the problem of dysgenics, most governments are making it worse by subsidizing the reproduction of the least-productive segment of society, and taxing heavily the most productive segment.
Farmers and breeders have utilized the principle of "select the best" for their crops, livestock, and pets, and this has given us bountiful crops of every variety, high-yield milk cows, fast, beautiful, and gentle horses. Yet we take far less care when it comes to human beings, and in effect, we "select the worst." It would be unconscionable to breed stupid, sickly, and vicious dogs -- surely it's at least as cruel to do this to human beings.
Eugenics
It's not necessary, nor even possible, to do away with contraception entirely because the technologies and information for preventing conception are "out," and only a severely repressive government could keep them from the people, and then only partially. However, we can reverse dysgenics and continue the process of improving the human species by implementing a eugenics program. We can once again evolve in a positive direction with self-directed evolution. From a spiritual point of view, when we take on the mantle of eugenics, we insure that our evolution will be guided more directly by God, who lives and breathes within us.
The word "eugenics" conjures up draconian images of Nazis and death camps, but even a cursory examination of the issues shows that this association is unwarranted. Eugenics has been practiced since ancient times, and in the 20th century Sweden had a eugenics program that lasted for 40 years (Broberg and Roll- Hansen, 1996). In fact, a total of 28 countries practiced eugenics in the 20th century, and one country, Germany, committed genocide, so despite Marxist propaganda to the contrary, it's apparent that no causal association can be drawn between eugenics and mass murder. (For a more detailed discussion of these important issues, see the review of Dysgenics on this website.)
Critics of eugenics often argue that we will never agree upon which traits we want, so therefore, the entire enterprise is hopeless. But this argument is utterly without merit. It's perfectly predictable that we will choose health, beauty, intelligence, talent, courage, kindness, and honesty for our children because these are universally valued traits. All over the world parents value them today, just as parents valued them a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago.
Is Dysgenics God's Will? Three Fundamental Truths
Scientists entering the realm of theology for the first time suddenly find themselves on very shaky ground, indeed. How does one know this or that is true? Where's the evidence? In this paper, I have assumed only that many readers believe in God. Now, given this assumption, at least it becomes possible to say, "If one accepts this statement about God, then such-and-such logically follows."
Is the current genetic deterioration of the human species "God's will?" I hope to address this question in a such a way that it will be applicable to Christians and devotees of other religions, as well as to most people who believe in God but don't adhere to any particular religious creed. First I'll state three fundamental truths about the nature of God upon which all major religions agree. Then I'll attempt to draw inferences from them about dysgenics.
(1) God loves us. All major religions hold that this is so.
(2) God wants us to be kind to one another. Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself." The current Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists) says, "Be kind to one another." Kindness to others is one of the most important -- if not the most important -- teaching of all religions.
(3) God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. All major religions believe that human beings are the pinnacle of God's creation. In Genesis, God said, "[L]et [man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepith upon the earth." In Hindu writings about reincarnation, people are considered the highest and most spiritually advanced creatures. No major religion teaches that we are indistinguishable from lower animals.
Now we get to the heart of the matter--namely, what inferences can we draw from these three fundamental truths? Is dysgenics God's will? Is dysgenics contrary to God's will? Or, is dysgenics simply irrelevant to God?
Let's take the first statement, that God loves us. If God loves us, then he doesn't want us to suffer unnecessarily. That certainly follows, doesn't it? Dysgenics means that our children's generation will be less well-endowed genetically than our generation is, and it's inescapable that they will suffer as a result. To be sickly, to be retarded, to suffer psychiatric illness -- these are all things we definitely do NOT want for our children, nor for anyone else we love. It hardly requires a giant leap of faith to conclude that if God loves us, he doesn't want us to suffer needlessly.
With regard to the second point, that God wants us to be kind to one another -- is it kind for us to leave the next generation genetically stupider, more sickly mentally and physically, and worse people morally? Inflicting pain and suffering on enormous numbers of innocent beings is hardly the definition of kindness. I challenge the reader: can you think of anything that is more cruel, on such a vast scale? Communism certainly comes to mind as a possible contender, but I would argue it ranks second to dysgenics. At any rate, we know what our health means to us--it means everything. And we know how much our intelligence means. Imagine what life would be like if you had been born mentally retarded -- you wouldn't even be you! These traits are profoundly important to everyone, past, present and future.
In addition to leaving our children's generation a poorer genetic legacy, if we do nothing about dysgenics, we will also bequeath to them the same cultural taboo against eugenics which we have inherited -- the taboo which has paralyzed the Western world for the past 50 years on the vitally important issue of our own biological evolution. Until dysgenics is reversed, each generation will become successively less and less capable of solving the problem of dysgenics -- or any problem, for that matter.
Third, God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. Could our "distinct destiny" possibly be to evolve closer and closer in the image of God for hundreds of thousands of years -- more intelligent, more loving and kind, healthier and more civilized -- and then suddenly to reverse direction, to squander all the hard-won gains, and evolve backwards, less in the image of God, more like lower animals? How could this be God's will? It's inconceivable.
By examining three fundamental truths upon which all major religions agree, a very short and sure step of reasoning leads us, in each case, to the conclusion that dysgenics must be against God's will.
Conclusion
Our biology and our spirituality are inextricably linked, and they evolve (or de-volve) hand in hand. From the standpoint of Christianity, it's fascinating to realize that as we de-volve to become more criminal, more stupid, and more primitive, there will inevitably be (1)
a large increase in the total amount of sin, and therefore (2) a higher percentage of people condemned to Hell!! Amazing though it may seem, science has proven that Good and Evil have roots in biology, and we ignore this fact at our peril.
In conclusion, the most capable of our small, ape-like ancestors survived and reproduced in greater numbers so that our species gradually evolved larger brains, higher intelligence, and greater human-ness, and the result of this extraordinary Creation is us. However, "we" aren't the end of the story!! "Creation" is still in motion, and now we are participants in it, whether for good or for ill. We can, and we must, reverse the current process of dysgenics if we are to carry out God's will, and if we feel any love or compassion for all those who come after us.
REFERENCES
Blacker, C. P., 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After, Gerald Duckworth & Co, London
Broberg, Gunnar, & Nills Roll-Hansen, 1996, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Michigan University Press, East Lansing
Comings, David, 1996, The Gene Bomb, Hope Press, Duarte, CA
Meshberger, Frank L., 1990, "An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy," JAMA, Oct. 10, 1990, vol. 264, No. 14
Lynn, Richard, 1996, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut
Lynn, Richard, 1995, "Dysgenic fertility for crime," Journal of Biosocial Science, 27, p. 405-408
Van Court, Marian, and Frank Bean, 1985, "Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982," Intelligence, vol. 8, p. 23-32
Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations
Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations
by Richard Lynn (Praeger, 1996)
reviewed by Marian Van Court
[This review first appeared in the Journal of Social, Political,
and Economic Studies, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 1998.]
| Countless volumes have been written about the past evolution of the human species, yet hardly any attention has been paid to the crucial question, "Where are we evolving now?" Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, courageously addresses this question in his controversial book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Professor Lynn presents compelling evidence that much of the world is deteriorating in its genetic potential for intelligence, health, and conscientiousness (or good character). The word for this is "dysgenics," the opposite of "eugenics."
The Bell Curve devoted one chapter to the question of where we are evolving with regard to IQ (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994). Dysgenics picks up where The Bell Curve left off. Professor Lynn surveys studies from all over the world, and everywhere finds the least intelligent people having the most children. The only exception is sub-Saharan Africa where contraception is rarely used. Our genetic potential for intelligence has been declining in Europe and North America since the mid- 1800s, with a total loss of about 5-8 IQ points. Currently, we are losing almost one IQ point each generation. The decline in genotypic intelligence coincided with the dissemination of information about contraception. For several centuries prior to 1800, married couples had natural fertility, essentially uninfluenced by efforts to limit it. During this period, there was a strong taboo against sex outside of marriage, and many people never had children because they were too poor to marry. Illegitimacy was rare. Infant mortality was high, especially among the lower classes. Harsh though it may have been, natural selection operated to maintain a healthy population, and to keep intelligence gradually increasing. Then in the early 1800s, several books on contraception were published. These ideas naturally affected the reading classes disproportionately. Goodyear perfected the vulcanization of rubber, making it an ideal material for the mass production of condoms and diaphragms. By the middle of the century, it was becoming apparent that educated people were having fewer children than the uneducated. Charles Darwin worried about the fact that "the scum" of society were so prolific, and expressed deep concern about the future of civilization because natural selection had ceased to operate. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term "eugenics," and was its main proponent: The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty . . . is an endeavour to further evolution, especially that of the human race. Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of eugenics. (Blacker, 1952). In the early decades of the 1900s, eugenics societies were being formed in Great Britain and the United States, and eugenics was advocated by leading thinkers along all points of the political spectrum. H.G. Wells summed up its common-sense appeal: "It seemed to me that to discourage the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. I think that still." Julian Huxley described eugenics as "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range" (Van Court, 1982). Eugenics made sense because few doubted that heredity was important. Life was more closely tied to the land, and farmers knew from experience that plants and animals vary widely depending on their inborn qualities. Common sense dictated that human beings, like all the rest of nature, are strongly influenced by heredity. In addition, most people had larger families back then. If a couple had many children, all of whom turned out good except one, it was perfectly reasonable to think that what accounted for the difference was inborn, especially if there were signs from early childhood. Since all the children grew up in the same house, with the same parents, eating the same food, it was just a matter of common sense. Common Sense Confirmed by Science Professor Lynn's major thesis in Dysgenics is that scientific evidence has proven the eugenicists were absolutely right in their concerns about genetic deterioration, and that we, as a society, have made a serious mistake by discounting them. Twin studies and adoption studies have established beyond any doubt the important role of heredity in determining IQ. Identical twins separated at birth have quite similar IQ's. When adopted children grow up, they resemble their biological parents more closely than their adoptive parents in IQ. Just as the eugenicists assumed, social mobility over centuries has produced a social class gradient for intelligence, and social class is determined partly by innate intelligence. One U.S. study found that in families with 2 or more brothers, the boys with higher IQ's tended to move up the SES ladder when they grew up, whereas those with lower IQ's tended to move down. Finally, the evidence shows we are deteriorating genetically because the most intelligent people are having the fewest children. A number of recent studies point to contraceptive practices as the key to understanding dysgenics today. People with low IQ's, whether married or unmarried, are less likely to use any form of birth control. Among women using the same birth control methods, those with low IQ's have much higher failure rates. After an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, low IQ couples are less likely to obtain abortions. Thus each factor selects against intelligence. One minor contribution to dysgenics is the fact that high IQ women often end up not having as many children as they would have liked to have had. By the time a baby is "convenient," it may be too late. However, the major reason for the decline in our genetic potential for intelligence is greater birth control failure on the part of low IQ women. In the United States, women of all IQ levels report that they would like, on average, about 2.3 children. But low IQ women frequently have more children, often far more children, than they would ideally like to have. If all women had exactly the number of children they desired, there would be no dysgenics, and we would at least break even in our genetic potential for intelligence (Van Court, 1983). The loss of a 5-8 IQ points may not be a tragedy for an individual, but when applied to a population, it has profound consequences. As readers of The Bell Curve may remember, small shifts in the average of a bell-shaped distribution produce large effects on the tails--in this case, the retarded and the gifted. For example, a decrease in the average IQ of just under 5 points doubles the number of retardates (IQ less than 70), and cuts in half the number of gifted (IQ over 130). Furthermore, Herrnstein and Murray found that when they moved the average IQ down statistically by just 3 points, from 100 to 97, all social problems were exacerbated: the nu One anomalous finding known as 'the Flynn effect' adds an element of mystery to this picture. James Flynn, political scientist from New Zealand, has reported "massive gains" in IQ in the U.S. and elsewhere. When IQ tests are standardized, people consistently find earlier versions of the tests easier, and score higher, than did the original test-takers. There's no consensus on whether this is due to actual increases in intelligence, or some sort of artifact. Certainly, enormous gains are difficult to reconcile with casual observation and declining SAT scores. Many people dismiss 'the Flynn effect' on the grounds that if the population had actually gained 3 points per decade since 1932 as claimed, "Our ancestors would have been morons." Flynn himself is not unsympathetic to this view. Christopher Brand makes a convincing case that people have merely become more savvy test-takers over the years (Brand, 1996). Professor Lynn believes the gains are real, and probably due to better nutrition, which is thought to be the cause of comparable increases in stature. He likens the situation to poorer quality seeds given ever greater quantities of fertilizer. But even if his optimistic view proves to be correct, there should soon be a limit to how much more benefit can be derived from nutrition, if the limit hasn't been reached already. Decline in Health and Conscientiousness Throughout our evolution, the weak and diseased died young and didn't pass on their genes. Now, because of modern medicine, people with numerous genetic diseases live long enough to reproduce and transmit defective genes to their children. (Examples: cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, diabetes, pyloric stenosis, various heart defects, thalassemia, phenylketonuria, and sickle cell anemia.) The incidence of many of these disorders is doubling or tripling each generation. No one would deny sufferers treatment, but it's important to realize that, as a result of it, our genetic potential for robust good health is declining. Life-long care will require ever-increasing expenditures. Furthermore, while sufferers are grateful for medical advances, most would nevertheless be quick to point out that the quality of their lives would be far better if they'd never inherited a disease in the first place. Conscientiousness, traditionally known as "good character," consists of honesty, a strong work ethic, and concern for others. Since IQ is positively correlated to a number of desirable traits (such as altruism, anti-authoritarian attitudes, and middle-class values of hard work, thrift, and sacrifice), when IQ declines, so do these traits. People with low IQ's are far more likely to become criminals, so the fact that our genetic potential for intelligence is declining means our genetic potential for crime is increasing. Moreover, some evidence suggests that despite lengthy sojourns in jail, criminals still manage to procreate at a faster rate than the rest of us. Professor Lynn's research on London criminals found they had nearly twice as many offspring as non-criminals, and those figures are almost certainly underestimates. In demographic studies of fertility, the entire category of underclass males is frequently omitted because reliable data on their offspring simply can't be obtained – their sexual behavior is often promiscuous, and their relationships transient. Since twin studies and adoption studies have established that there is a substantial genetic component to criminality, the higher fertility of criminals significantly increases the genetic potential for criminality in the population. What to do? The solution to genetic deterioration in intelligence, health, and conscientiousness is not a matter of know-how or resources. Rather, it's a matter of overcoming the pernicious association of eugenics with Nazi genocide. This association has made eugenics a taboo subject, and prevented most rational discussion of it for at least the past few decades. Previously I have addressed this issue: An almost primitive fatalism and superstition underlie the assumption that as a society, we are utterly powerless to alter our course, however disastrous a legacy we may be leaving to future generations through our negligence, and the irrational fear that if we dare attempt to guide [our evolution] . . . . we run a grave risk of being suddenly forced against our wills through some mysterious, outrageously implausible yet inexorable sequence of events culminating in genocide and World War III (Van Court, 1983). The public has witnessed numerous grim and frightening stories about the Holocaust, along with Nazi propaganda on the creation of "a master race," so quite understandably, it has come to associate eugenics with Nazis and genocide. Who could ever forget the sight of bulldozers shoving mountains of emaciated bodies into mass graves? It's not surprising that the Nazi's strong and vocal support for eugenics has utterly destroyed it as a social movement, because nothing, no matter how inherently benevolent, could survive an association with such nightmarish images. But Germany is just one example of a country with a eugenics program – one very, very conspicuous example. In the first half of the 20th century, a total of 29 countries passed eugenics laws, including Germany, The United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Estonia, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Italy, Greece, and Spain. History tells us that in one country, Germany, there was genocide; in the other 28, there was not (Saetz, 1985). Furthermore, numerous cases of genocide have been committed without so much as a mention of eugenics. Communism – far and away history's biggest mass murderer – never advocated eugenics, and, in fact, held the opposite beliefs from the Nazis, that the environment causes everything, and heredity counts for nothing. So how can there possibly be a causal connection between eugenics and genocide? In order to prove causation, it's necessary minimally to show a true association. Put simply, one case out of 29 does not an association make. Consider the following analogy: Imagine that the most salient historical event of all times was the Crusades, instead of the Holocaust, and that for the past 50 years, the Crusades had been the subject of highly sensational movies, documentaries, commemorative ceremonies, newspaper and magazine articles, books, lectures, museum exhibits, and so on. If we didn't know much about Christianity, it would be easy to conclude that it was a war-like religion, and quite reasonably, we'd be concerned that if we should ever convert to Christianity, we might wind up fighting and dying in some Crusade. The emotionally-charged association between "Christianity" and "war" would become indelibly imprinted in our consciousness after being paired thousands of times. It wouldn't be a true association, with predictive value – whenever there's Christianity, there's likely to be war (and vice versa), as would be the case if Christians had actually engaged in a disproportionate share of the wars throughout history – but in fact, it would be a false association, because it's based on just one single event which is replayed again and again and again. Ghost of Adolf Hitler To say, "The Nazis believed in eugenics, and they did terrible things" just isn't good enough as a reason to reject eugenics forevermore. Before rejecting the only solution to dysgenics – a serious problem which isn't 'could be' or 'might be' but rather is – it must be firmly established that a eugenics program would actually cause more harm than genetic deterioration of the population. In order to do that, it would have to be shown that genocide (or some other clearly-specified catastr Draconian practices would be wholly unacceptable and unnecessary in a modern-day eugenics program. Professor Lynn offers no recommendations in Dysgenics, leaving that for his promised sequel, to be entitled Eugenics. But in light of the problems touched upon in this review, several possible eugenic measures come to mind. Since low-IQ women are much more likely to have unwanted children due to birth control failure, a reasonable first step might be to offer them free long-term and permanent contraception. (Prevention of unwanted births would be a worth-while humanitarian goal in itself, aside from eugenic benefits, because unwanted children are far more likely to be neglected and abused.) A second step might be to provide incentives to criminals (such as reduced sentences) to have vasectomies or tubal ligations. A third step might be to implement various measures to ease the burden of parenthood for college students. Such a program could go a long way toward halting dysgenics, or possibly even reversing it. Professor Lynn concludes Dysgenics with a word to his critics: [W]e have considered the criticisms of the view that the genetic quality of modern populations is deteriorating. These are that there is no genetic determination of intelligence, conscientiousness, crime, educational attainment or socioeconomic status; that there can be an inverse association between intelligence and fertility without genetic deterioration occurring; that there are no genetic differences between the social classes; that there are no such things as bad genes; that the genes for genetic diseases should be preserved, especially in other people, because they make a positive contribution to creative achievement; and that all human types, including the mentally retarded, criminals and psychopaths, are equally valuable. All these arguments have been examined and found wanting. Only one verdict is possible concerning the critics of eugenics who have advanced these arguments, and that is that they have not taken the trouble to examine the research evidence. The eugenicists believed that modern populations were deteriorating genetically. The evidence set out in this book shows they were correct. Perhaps Professor Lynn is being charitable to his critics by suggesting that they are merely ignorant. A decidedly less charitable view would be that – at least with regard to the high percentage of Marxists and nihilists among them – his critics have read the research, and know perfectly well that it's true, but publicly they insist it's utterly false (in a tone of moral indignation, no less) because it threatens their thinly-veiled political agenda. Like all important works on genetics and IQ of the past few decades, Dysgenics is bound to send Marxists/ nihilists into apoplexies of agitation and rage. They respond to scientific facts which don't fit their egalitarian ideology by attempting to suppress them, branding scientists who report them "Nazis" and "racists," and publishing devoid-of-substance, pseudo-scientific "rebuttals," which – unlike the scholarly, substantive, straightforward works they line up en masse to rebut – are welcomed with open arms by the politically-correct media. They can do all of these things, and they can pitch a fit 'till they rupture an artery in their collective brain. But they cannot make these facts go away. We are deteriorating genetically, and the only alternative to leaving future generations an increasingly chaotic, violent, degraded society is called "eugenics." What a dilemma! Have we no other choice than to bequeath to our children a poorer genetic legacy than the one we ourselves inherited? And what if they too live in terror of the ghost of Adolph Hitler? Where will it end? From every imaginable perspective – the economy, education, literacy, crime, welfare, government, the "misery quotient," advancing civilization, and science, to name just a few – human genetic deterioration in intelligence, conscientiousness, and health is a disaster. For the believers among us, add to these the religious implications of dysgenics: How could it be God's will for us to behave irresponsibly and cruelly to people who come after us? Would it not be a sacrilege to thoughtlessly squander God's most precious gifts--in fact, the very ones used to create us in His image? In retrospect, it seems inevitable that at some point, the widespread knowledge and use of contraception would bring about dysgenics. Many people feel it's wrong for society to attempt to influence reproduction in any way. But it should be borne in mind that dysgenics came about as a result of society's “meddling” with the natural order of things by introducing contraception, and it's clear some sort of “compensatory meddling” will be required if we are ever going to set our evolution back on a healthy course. REFERENCES Blacker, C.P., (1952) Eugenics Galton and After, London: Duckworth Brand, Christopher (1996) The 'g' Factor, New York: Wiley & Sons Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray (1994) The Bell Curve, New York: Free Press Saetz, Stephen B. (1985) "Eugenics and the Third Reich," The Eugenics Bulletin, reprinted on Future Generations website at http://www.ziplink.net/~bright/ Van Court, Marian (1982) "Eugenics Revisited," Mensa Bulletin, #254 Van Court, Marian (1983), "Unwanted births and dysgenic fertility in the United States," The Eugenics Bulletin, reprinted on Future Generations website at http://www.ziplink.net/~bright/ Van Court, Marian, and Frank Bean (1985) "Intelligence and fertility in the United States: 1912-1982," Intelligence 9, 23-32 |