The tests, however, were never accepted by the radical environmentalists, who saw concessions about basic cognitive abilities as validation of the hereditarian viewpoint. To them, affixing students with allegedly innate I.Q. numbers was an unfair and indelible stigma. From such categorizations, it would be a small step to assigning everyone to an economic niche within society from which they had little hope of escaping. I.Q. was seen as another device for the haves to keep down the have-nots.
The environmentalists insisted that intelligence was a product of rearing circumstances and could be improved. They had to reach far for examples of environments that had actually raised I.Q., and while they found some, it was far outweighed by evidence of an innate mental endowment that varied greatly between individuals but varied little within the lifetime of most people. The extreme opponents of I.Q. denied there was such a thing as intelligence, insisting the entire concept was an invention of reactionary scientists to place social injustice within the natural order.
Arthur Jensen was a highly respected psychologist at the University of California who had worked for years in the area of I.Q. Because of his broad knowledge of group performance on tests, he felt obliged to speak out about recent governmental programs like Head Start that were aimed at improving the scholastic performance of underprivileged children, most of whom were black. Jensen’s paper on the subject appeared in the winter 1969 issue of the Harvard Educational Review and took the position that such programs were misguided in that statistical evidence demonstrated consistently lower I.Q. among American blacks than among whites; Jensen went on to try to prove that these differences were not caused environmentally but genetically. It was therefore futile, in his view, to expect government programs to alter this fact of nature. Jensen’s essay turned out to be the little paper that launched a civil war.
For years psychologists had known that black children in America had measured on average fifteen I.Q. points lower than white children. No one argued this statistic. The fact argued passionately by everyone was why. For years the generally accepted answer, certainly the most palatable to fair-minded people, was that deprived environments caused the discrepancy. Now one of the most respected psychologists in the country, a specialist in I.Q., was offering hard evidence—test scores, factoring out cultural bias, comparisons with other culturally deprived groups, and so on—that the cause did not lie with the children’s environment but with their genes. The grim corollary was that there wasn’t much to be done about it.
The paper outraged just about everyone. Even people sympathetic to the advances of behavioral genetics and the growing interest in the biology of personality now saw ugly racist implications to this pursuit, and they withdrew their support of behavioral genetics in general, some out of a repugnance at racism, others out of fear of association with a stigmatized science. Eminent scientists in other fields who had shown little interest in the developments in ethology and behavioral genetics now came down hard on those who had. It was one thing to talk about aggression in field mice, even in humans, but quite another to talk about racial inferiorities. Some who were willing (behind closed doors) to allow a degree of validity to Jensen’s analysis were angered by what they saw as a hurtful and irrelevant digression.
The environmentalists, who had warned of the dire implications of behavioral genetics, were delighted by the furor and led the pack in denouncing Jensen with a we-told-you-so relish. Undoubtedly dismayed by the growing acceptance of genetic thinking, they saw in Jensen’s paper an opportunity to rip the mask of respectability from the behavioral geneticists and expose them as racist reactionaries. Fusillades of papers and articles appeared, the authors each striving for greater outrage than preceding writers. Even pioneer behavioral geneticists like Gerald Hirsch at the University of Illinois brought all their science to bear in attacking Jensen’s analysis of the data.
The attacks focused less on Jensen’s science than the motives behind it. Those who believed in a genetic contribution to personality were not scientists of good will who had strayed into error; they were political operatives of the far right who had concocted bogus data to further a reactionary agenda. It would not be overstating it to say that the backlash against genetic thinking reached almost hysterical proportions. At a time when thrilling advances were being made in civil rights, it was for many a nightmare to witness a reputable scientist appear to say blacks were a lost cause. Eugenics, for all the alarm it caused in its critics, was granted a thirty-year free ride compared to the instantaneous uproar caused by the Jensen paper.
In the early 1970s, Robert Plomin, who was then new to the field of behavioral genetics, attended his first major professional conference, a meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Boston. The keynote address was given by Leon Kamin, already a distinguished psychologist and Marxist who, according to Plomin, was “leading the charge against behavioral genetics.” Plomin described the scene: “Before an audience of thousands, Kamin thundered at length about the evils of behavioral genetics and brought the crowd to its feet. The address … was an ad hominen attack on behavioral geneticists and their political motives. I was shocked by what seemed emotional rabble-rousing and stunned by the welcome it received.”
Eventually this sort of furor subsided, but only when the hereditarians beat a retreat, leaving the environmentalists once again in control of, if not behavior in general, at least intelligence. With calm restored, few of the combatants doubted that Jensen had done what he thought was his responsibility as a scientist. Everyone who knew him, including most adversaries, agreed that he was a solid scientist and a decent, fair-minded individual with no ill will toward Afro-Americans. When, however, he saw public policy being based on assumptions that his years of research had told him were false, he felt he had an obligation to speak. Still, in looking back on the resulting mayhem, it is hard not to see his action as precipitous and destructive.
Most people in behavioral genetics know what a minefield lurks in the entire subject of group differences. Not just racial differences, but gender differences and ethnic differences—even age differences—can infuriate many. Most behavioral geneticists stress that group differences are a subject quite separate and distinct from their area of interest, which is individual differences. They frequently point out that within any group there is more variation among individual members of that group than there is between any two groups. Even Jensen had pointed out the average I.Q. variation within raised-together siblings is as great as the average difference between whites and blacks. This makes thinking along group lines when confronting an individual highly risky; in fact, it makes it altogether irrelevant to a fair assessment. A clear understanding of behavioral genetics, they say, should make a person less racist or sexist rather than more.
In addition, as a human designator, race is an imprecise, unscientific concept—as it increasingly appears that gender is as well, if to a lesser degree. Not only are Afro-Americans invariably mixtures of races; they are also mixtures of different strains of Afro-Americans. And race itself, it is known, results from a complex combination of genes and not always the same complex within such vague race designators as Afro-American. Also, as evidence mounts for the degree to which performance can be affected by self-esteem, lower I.Q. scores can be self-perpetuating statistics, especially in disdained groups.
For all the explosiveness of the subject of race differences, and for all the importance any differences might have for social policy, it is, scientifically speaking, a relatively small point in the context of the vast subject of human personality and behavior. For a field that promises to reveal causes of depression, alcoholism, violence, homosexuality, mental retardation—in addition to one day answering such venerable questions as the extent to which environments can alter behaviors—for this exciting, hope-offering field to become mired in excoriating arguments over whether group A is smarter than group B can only be termed a tragedy for our culture’s intellectual life.
For this reason I fee
l strongly that aside from whatever scientific weaknesses existed in Jensen’s analysis, the subject should have been avoided because of the damage it did to a new field of valid, highly promising research. In the late 1960s, behavioral genetics was an infant science. Years of domination by an opposing theory had stifled it; but thanks to research in such related fields as ethology, as well as the accumulation of failures in behaviorism, behavioral genetics was beginning to move into the intellectual mainstream. Almost immediately an eminent scientist made sweeping claims, claims that were extremely wounding to a portion of the population, about a trait that was not fully understood, perhaps of marginal importance, and any mention of which was inevitably explosive.
FOR ALL THE DAMAGE inflicted by Jensen’s paper, behavioral genetics projects quietly got under way at the universities of Colorado, Minnesota, and Louisville, as well as at a number of smaller institutions. Such major research initiatives, however, remained all but out of sight and were happy to be little noticed. In most conduits of ideas—the media, college courses, new books—there were few allusions to a genetic contribution to personality and behavior. Serious discussions of behavioral traits reverted to the purely environmental theories of the 1950s and 1960s. Once again the subject of genetic influence was driven underground; the stench of racism was too strong.
Gradually, the furor subsided. The environmentalists appeared to have recaptured their invaded realms, an impression that owed more to the embarrassed silence of geneticists than to a decisive intellectual victory. Not everyone was silent, however. In the July 1972 issue of the American Pyschologist a curious document appeared. It was a manifesto of sorts, signed by fifty top psychologists and other scientists, including four Nobel laureates, deploring the “suppression, censure, punishment, and defamation … against scientists who emphasize the role of heredity in human behavior.” It proclaimed the importance of the new information about this role and the determination of the undersigned that research into the hereditary influences on behavior should proceed. The defiant cri de coeur, however, had only slight impact and did little to disrupt the regained hegemony of the environmentalists. (A historic curiosity, the letter is reprinted in appendix A.)
A far bigger threat to the environmentalists’ peace of mind was the publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson’s landmark book Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, which reopened the genes versus environment debate at a level of acrimony that suggested the wounds inflicted by Jensen were far from healed. Wilson, an esteemed professor of zoology at Harvard, had produced a six-hundred-page summary of the wealth of ethological research that had been accumulating over the past twenty years, particularly the influential ideas of W. D. Hamilton on kin selection and R. L. Trivers on parental investment—theories that went far toward answering questions about natural selection that had been left unanswered by Darwin. The book was densely technical, with pages of charts and statistics documenting the elaborate social behavior of various species.
Few social scientists had difficulty accepting the 95 percent of the book that dealt with animal behavior, and the meticulous presentation of research data would have made attacks difficult. In the last chapter, however, Wilson reviewed existing knowledge about early Homo sapiens, but then spoke of the mission of sociobiology “to reconstruct the history of the machinery” (by which he meant the evolution of the human brain) and “to identify the adaptive significance of each of its functions.” Sociobiology, he wrote, must also “monitor the genetic basis of social behavior.” He did not feel it necessary for future socio-biologists to prove there was a genetic basis to human behavior, simply to monitor it. What to Wilson appeared self-evident, or rendered unavoidable by his book’s previous 574 pages, was still hotly contested by the environmentalists, as he would quickly discover.
The outrage was immediate and vehement. Harvard’s Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould were among fifteen prominent academics who signed a letter in the New York Review of Books that denounced Sociobiology and drew parallels with racism and Nazism. Wilson’s lectures were picketed, and students heckled him as he tried to speak. At a scientific symposium, he was physically attacked. At the 1976 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, a motion nearly carried to censure Wilson’s book. (Among those present was Margaret Mead, who also evoked Nazism, but in Wilson’s defense, when she accused her fellow anthropologists of “book-burning.”) Looking back at this tempest, it should be remembered that Wilson’s crime was nothing more than suggesting that aspects of human social and cultural institutions may have evolved through genes. For that heresy he was not to be disproved or disagreed with, but censured. Galileo must have chuckled.
To the environmentalists, rats, mice, and other animals were okay as long as they could learn tricks, but once they evinced stubborn, instinctive behavior they became dumb animals, irrelevant to the human condition. The animals of Wilson’s studies were riddled with instincts that propelled them into an array of complex actions and social arrangements disturbingly close to those of humans. Once again the antihereditarians hit the alarm button. The group had remained relatively quiet when the ex-screenwriter Ardrey had proclaimed man’s behavioral links to feisty chimps and apes; they were even able to tolerate Lorenz and Timbergen as Europeans who had perhaps spent too much time among their geese and honeybees. As for the brilliant and well-received Imperial Animal, how seriously would anyone take a book on animal behavior written by professors Tiger and Fox? (Many did.)
Wilson was a different matter. He was a respected naturalist who spoke from Harvard’s zoology department. His credentials were unassailable, and he had laid out in exhaustive detail the research upon which he drew. His conjectural conclusions about humans, however, provided the critics with the Achilles’ heel they needed, and they attacked it as if the book’s other twenty-six chapters didn’t exist. One hundred and four years after Darwin’s The Descent of Man, leaders in the social sciences were still angrily rejecting the proposition that human behavior, like that of other species, was influenced by a genetic heritage. Now, Alfred Wallace must have chuckled.
Despite the attacks, the new field of sociobiology took hold and began turning up a series of fresh insights about human behavior. Psychologists who subscribed to its genes-based view could be seen as returning to concepts that had once flourished in their discipline but had lain dormant for years. A new development was that scholars from other fields, such as economics and political science, were for the first time contemplating their disciplines from an evolutionary perspective.
By the late 1970s, the academic air was braced by a sense of a new and penetrating paradigm, one that promised a more reality-based conception of human behavior than had been possible with earlier all-or-nothing models. Because of the spreading excitement over the “new synthesis” that Wilson had forged, it is odd that his term sociobiology fell into disfavor. In the eyes of well-wishers, this was a result of the excesses of early sociobiologists, who, stimulated by their newfound truth, set to explaining everything from car wrecks to stock-market dips in terms of Pleistocene exigencies. The term sociobiology fell from use—but only the term, not the discipline. Like felons who have served the time for early mistakes, the field changed its name before going straight. It continues to flourish under a number of terms, but the one that seems to be winning out—there are fashions in these things—is evolutionary psychology.
Whatever they called the line of thought initiated by the ethologists and Wilson, it changed forever the concept of culture as something man-made, or as Boas believed sui generis. It was now seen increasingly as having originated in our genes. Although this simplistic formulation was immediately made complex by Wilson himself, who said in 1983 (in a paper written with Charles Lumsden), that “culture is created and shaped by biological processes while the biological processes are altered in response to cultural change.” They were exchanging the old circularity (culture creates culture) for a more plausible model: Culture, which originates in the human genome, edits
culture.
I welcomed this analysis of culture’s origins. If we can quickly allow that animal “cultures” are genetic, why was it so out of the question to think ours, at least in part, might be similarly rooted? I had long been bothered by the assumption of human cultures as entities that had always been there and whose origins were out of reach. When, for example, people discussed our tradition of monogamy as “cultural,” what exactly were they saying? Did they envision a committee of gray-bearded rabbis somewhere in the Sinai around 3000 B.C. saying, “How about we allow each man one wife? Does that fly with all of you?” It’s one thing to shrink from such imponderables as the universe’s first bang, or the origins of life, but to duck the origins of culture—with all we now know about the complicated living arrangements of other species—is to me intellectually flaccid and serves only to avoid the most plausible conclusion: Human cultures have been shaped and altered by historical contingencies but originally grew out of genetic dispositions. Like penguins but unlike walruses, we favor one mate.
BY THE LATE 1970s the old anthropological view of purely man-made cultures was gone forever. It took somewhat longer to kill off the other great twentieth-century flowering of environmentalism: Freudianism. This monument of modern thought did not exit gracefully but required an array of forces to dislodge its truths so embedded in the century’s wisdom. One of these forces was the discovery in the 1950s of mood-altering drugs that opened people’s eyes to the chemical basis of mental problems long considered the result of childhood disruptions and the domain of talk therapists. The spectacle of a tiny pill wrenching a person from chronic depression into rosy good cheer was not lost on people who were, at the same time, learning about the nonstop chemical factory within the human body. Reinforcing a chemical view of behavior were the repeated failures of lengthy and costly psychotherapies to cure lingering conditions like depression. Therapists’ appeals to reason were getting nowhere, while pills were performing miracles.
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