The success of drugs was by no means limited to minor problems but was working wonders with the most wrenching mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and autism. Mounting evidence indicated such severe mental conditions resulted from genetically caused chemical imbalances that pills could correct. Since the Freudians had long claimed that these illnesses were environmentally induced, they had some explaining to do. Instead, they quietly withdrew their environmental explanations—such as the refrigerator mother, castration fears, and other Freudian standbys—and quietly yielded these illnesses to the biological side of the fence. Each year more and more mental and behavioral problems joined the migration out of psychoanalysis and into biochemistry.
The embattled Freudians were further debilitated by squabbles within their own ranks. The endless disagreements among psychoanalysts about even such fundamental matters as diagnostic categories, the frequent public courtroom battles of psychoanalytic experts on opposing sides offering prolix analyses that “proved” contradictory points, ever more strained and improbable nursery scenarios for one ailment or another—all provided outsiders with an impression of a science in disarray. The analysts’ lack of success with cures didn’t help much either.
Books denouncing psychoanalysis appeared. Standout among them was Jeffrey Masson’s account of his training as an analyst; his success in the field, followed by angry disillusionment, left readers with an impression of a profession teeming with, among lesser failings, a charlatanry that frequently reached wholesale fraudulence. Also typical of the negative testimonies, Martin Duberman’s Cures was a wrenching account of fruitless decades with Park Avenue psychoanalysts who, instead of curing his homosexuality, made him feel worse about it, instilling painful negative feelings for which he paid handsomely with an assistant professor’s salary. People like me, who had no such first-hand grievances against the profession, increasingly came to wonder what fifty years of Freudianism had given the world but Woody Allen.
The coup de grâce came in a lengthy piece in the New York Review of Books by Frederick Crews in which he systematically demolished not only claims of therapeutic success but claims of psychoanalysis being a science at all. The article was seen by many as an obituary for Freudianism’s dazzling career. With the death of this giant the neurological and genetic models of mental illness had all but recaptured the psychiatric profession. Talk therapy was not dead, however. Many people still claimed to have been helped in their emotional problems by various forms of counseling (44 percent of those polled in a 1995 Consumer Reports survey), but pharmacology had clearly taken over the therapeutic action. After two thousand years of evil spirits, demons, witches, devils, Oedipus complexes, and castration fears, the world has circled back to the ancient Greeks’ view of mental illness’s cause: Something was physically wrong with the brain.
BY THE TIME Thomas Bouchard began his study of separated identical twins in 1979, the intellectual climate had decidedly shifted toward an evolutionary, biological perspective on all aspects of human behavior, normal as well as abnormal. In universities across the country, courses specifically on behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology were appearing on curricula, and few courses of any sort, if they touched on human behavior, now ignored the possibility of a genetic influence.
Faced with this avalanche of setbacks, the radical environmentalists were not ready to admit defeat and clung to the hope that the emergence of biological theories was cyclical. The mounting acceptance of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology was written off as an unfortunate fad that owed its reappearance to the conservative zeitgeist, nothing to solid science, and would pass when the political mood changed. It looked like events would bring on this backlash sooner than they hoped.
In 1994 a new call to arms went up to the opponents of genetic applications to human behavior. It was the publication of a book that revived the furor created a quarter century earlier by Arthur Jensen. The book was The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, which in eight hundred data-packed pages sought to establish (1) the importance of intelligence to success in contemporary life, (2) the genetic basis of intelligence, (3) racial differences in mean I.Q., and (4) the dire implications for our society of these facts and our failure to address them.
Not surprisingly, the book provoked an explosion, in many ways a replay of the 1969 Jensen debacle but perhaps with a shade less vitriol (fewer accusations of Nazism, for instance). As the usual defenders of environmental determinism sprang into action, they seemed to do so with less vigor than they had twenty-five years earlier. Most interesting, however, was the enormous attention given The Bell Curve by the mainstream media. The New York Times ran a cover story in its Sunday magazine section, then the following Sunday gave the book a lead review in its book review section. Newsweek also gave the book a cover story and The New Republic ran an article by the two authors outlining the book’s main points. In the same issue, however, the magazine took the unusual step of prefacing the article with no less than nineteen brief essays deploring and attacking Murray and Herrnstein’s positions, a negative chorus that in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s David Brooks conveyed the atmosphere of “an Orwellian ritual-denunciation session.”
In the twenty-five years since Jensen’s paper, however, a shift in public sentiment brought about a more dispassionate hearing for The Bell Curve’s unpretty ideas than Jensen had received. In general, possible genetic explanations appeared far less preposterous. If the book’s genetic explanations persuaded anyone, it would be sadly ironic timing in that geneticists were just beginning to discover mysterious ways in which repeated environmental stress can bring on permanent alterations in body chemistry, even changes in gene action. When decriers of the Murray-Herrnstein book spoke of the lingering effects of 250 years of slavery and oppression, it smacked of Lamarckism, but, as an explanation of the fifteen-point I.Q. gap, they may have been on firmer scientific ground—thanks to new research—than could have been believed a year earlier.
As with the Jensen paper, The Bell Curve’s critics, instead of focusing on the highly specific charges of unalterable I.Q. differences between the races, felt it necessary to wage war on the entire concept of genetic influence on behavior. They saw offshoots of behavioral genetics such as The Bell Curve as exposing the field’s sinister political agenda. While some behavioral geneticists like Sandra Scarr said publicly that it was a good thing to have these sensitive matters aired, others, like me, deplored the book, knowing the critics would seize on this one racial application of gene-behavior theory as a club to beat the entire discipline back into shamed silence.
THE FINDINGS ALLUDED to above are bringing about a new understanding of the environment’s subtle power to alter genetic expression and go well beyond such simple concepts as fertile or arid soil. In the functioning of an intricate, brainy organism like the human, a broad array of environmental elements are now seen to have important effects, sometimes lasting ones. A highly evocative example of the newly perceived genes-environment complexities involves I.Q., which most psychologists have finally come to agree has a high degree of genetic influence.
In Japan there is an ethnic group called the Burakumin that is shunned and disdained by other Japanese in much the same way as India’s untouchables. Contributing to this opprobrium, the Burakumin consistently score lower on measures of intelligence and are widely considered a genetically inferior breed, although they look like other Japanese. This pat explanation turns out to be inaccurate. When members of the group move to California, where no one knows a Burakumin from an Osaka aristocrat, their children perform as well as other Japanese. This phenomenon carries the strong implication that assumptions of low I.Q. are, in some mysterious way, self-fulfilling appraisals, genetic makeup notwithstanding. Possible parallels with America’s black population are unavoidable and may turn out to explain fully the consistently lower black I.Q. scores.
Research along these line
s is currently being done by a prominent black psychologist, Claude Steele, who has found that black students do much better on tests if told the test’s purpose is not to measure anything but to try out a new test format, or a new electronic pencil, or some other nonthreatening tactic. In subsequent runs, if the students were told that the test was to determine their intelligence, scores dropped dramatically. It appeared that the students’ anxieties and mind-sets played a big part in their performance.
With the Burakumin, living as disdained “inferiors” placed them, in all likelihood, outside a normal range for proper function, perhaps for proper development. The black students’ pretest briefings appeared to have the effect of either relaxing them so they could achieve maximum performance or crippling them with anxiety. While there is nothing particularly complex about these mechanisms, everyone knows that if you are nervous you generally perform less well. Until now, however, no one has thought of a large segment of the population being “nervous” for three or four generations. But that is what the Bukarumin evidence suggests.
In the two thousand years of swings between environmental and inheritance explanations of human behavior, we have arrived at a period when the genetic contributions are dominating public attention. At the same time, psychologists are discovering intricate, and hitherto unknown, ways in which the environment affects genetic expression. It would be an irony and a misfortune if, in our new enthusiasm for behavior’s biological underpinnings, these new insights were overlooked, as the genetic contributions were for so many decades.
FIFTEEN
OH SO POLITICAL SCIENCE
WHEN THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS dominated American thought, their criticisms of the small band who clung to a biological perspective were based on scientific convictions. Although energized by their theory’s compatibility with political progressivism, they were convinced that their researches proved them right. No one doubted that their science came first, the political ramifications second. The behaviorists felt they had discovered what made humans behave as they do; believers in instincts and genes were simply wrong.
As counterresearch began to erode the scientific underpinnings of its theories, cultural determinism was forced to yield more and more of its turf to sociobiology and behaviorism to behavioral genetics. With the two mainstays of environmentalism in retreat, a new breed of critics emerged to take up the fight against the biological perspective. These scientists wasted little energy defending behaviorism, which increasingly appeared a lost cause, and they offered no alternative theory of human nature, as had Watson and Skinner. Still, they were so alarmed by what they saw as the right-wing political consequences of the biological perspective that they dedicated themselves to attacking its every advance. The result has been an apples-and-oranges war of science versus ideology that smacks less of the nature-nurture debates of the 1920s and 1930s and more of the church-versus-science struggles of earlier centuries.
Being scientists themselves, these critics sought out potential flaws in their opponents’ science—the assumptions, methodology, analyses, and so on—which is never difficult to do with any study of the complex human. In short order, however, they invariably moved to ad hominem attacks on what they were convinced were their opponents’ hidden conservative agendas. For proof of their charge, they could not have asked for anything better than Jensen’s paper on race differences. A few years later, Richard Herrnstein supplied more ammunition in an Atlantic Monthly article by escalating the bad genetic news from the blacks to the entire lower class (the poor more often than not have lower I.Q.s). The conservative swing of the Nixon administration, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescription of “benign neglect” for the underclasses, gave the critics further reason to unmask the new genetic perspective as reflecting a conservative swing and nothing less than a return to the Social Darwinism of the last century. They saw a direct connection between the adoption and twin studies then in progress and the policy chambers of the later Nixon White House.
By the early 1980s, the furor provoked by Jensen had subsided and research results continued to mount in favor of a genes-behavior link. Word was emerging from Minneapolis of startling results from a separated-twins study, and the reports were not confined to obscure scientific journals but appeared in the New York Times, Science, and other influential publications. For the critics the time had clearly arrived for a forceful counterattack.
Three of the leading opponents of behavioral genetics collaborated on a book that set out to deconstruct the new science and reverse the biological tide. The book was Not in Our Genes, and the authors were three of the most vigilant critics of the genetic view: Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard; the indefatigable Leon Kamin, who was then at Princeton’s psychology department; and Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at England’s Open University. Although the book had slight impact, it is worth examining as a compendium of the arguments and methods of the opponents of behavioral genetics, arguments that these critics, and their shrinking band of allies, continue to make despite repeated refutations.
Throughout the text the authors, with admirable candor, proclaim their Marxist perspective and their “commitment to … a more socially just—a socialist—society.” Few pages go by without references to “dialectics,” “bourgeois society,” and “capitalist values.” The authors’ apparently feel their clean breast about their politics permitted wholesale assumptions about those of their opponents. We are leftists is their implicit claim; but you on the other side of the scientific fence are reactionaries. Liberals, they appeared to be saying, can have only one scientific view, theirs; any other must be right-wing and antiliberal.
“Biological determinist ideas,” they say, “are part of the attempt to preserve the inequalities of our society and to shape human nature in its own image.” It must surely have come as unpleasant news to Sandra Scarr, Jerome Kagan, and other liberal psychologists to learn that they were striving to preserve society’s inequalities. In addition, the authors’ nasty assumptions of their opponents’ motives must have been an eye-opener to the hundreds of microbiologists, lab technicians, DNA scanners, rat-runners, statistical analysts, and all the others engaged in behavioral genetics research who learned from the book that they were going to work each day “to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race.”
But the falsity of the authors’ premise goes well beyond slandering a few individuals. Throughout the text, the writers deny the possibility that scientists could exist who place their curiosity about the world ahead of their political agendas. Lewontin, Kamin, and Rose deny as well the possibility of any man or woman, including themselves, separating science from politics. (“Science is not and cannot be above ‘mere’ politics.”) They leave no room for the scientist who is so intrigued by new information, in this case gene-behavior discoveries, that he or she is oblivious to alleged political consequences. For the authors, all scientists who seek out biological influences on behavior, from Darwin to Robert Plomin, are willing servants of the status quo, if not promoters of a return to feudalism.
Fundamental to this accusation is their assumption that belief in a gene-behavior connection leads unavoidably to a position of political conservatism. To make this second tour jeté of logic, they prepare a soft landing by altering slightly the vocabulary of the behavioral geneticists, revising moderate expressions like “genetic influence” and “genetic component” into the far more alarming “genetic governance” and “biological determinism.” By escalating the language in this way, they neatly push their opponents into indefensible positions that are held by no one. Not only does this altered language render the geneticists far easier to shoot down, but it also perpetuates the outdated fear that genes equal immutability. In fact, the straw man of immutability pops up on every page of Not in Our Genes and carries most of their argument.
For all the horror the authors have of genetic claims, they are not, they insist, of the school that believes in a zero biological component to be
havior. In one of their most prolix sentences, they put forth what they do believe: “We must insist that a full understanding of the human condition demands an integration of the biological and the social in which neither is given primacy or ontological priority over the other but in which they are seen as being related in a dialectical manner, a manner that distinguishes epistemologically between levels of explanation relating to the individual and levels relating to the social without collapsing one onto the other or denying the existence of either.”
Except for the “ontological priority” business, few behavioral geneticists would dispute the statement, assuming they went to the trouble to unravel it. The authors are claiming for themselves the same position of gene-environment interaction to which virtually all behavioral geneticists subscribe. In order to create a scientific difference to justify their combat, they saddle their opponents with an extreme belief in total genetic governance. The text soon makes clear, however, that the real difference is their belief that in our corrupt capitalist society, genetic differences between individuals are irrelevant when held up against the virulent environmental injustices.
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