CENSORING THE HEREDITARIANS

...Now in Europe we have Turks, Moroccans, Jamaicans, Algerians, Pakistanis, Surinamese, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Antilleans, South Koreans, Filipinos--moving onto the bottom rungs of a society totally different in conception and mores...

...Their invidiousness, however, lies in the fact that they will persist and imply solutions to social problems on a genetic base which cannot be tested...

...Even for the best studied single gene defect, that leading to phenylketonuria or PKU, our expectations of simple cause and effect proved unfounded...

...A UN forecast (pre-oil crisis) foresaw a total immigrant labor force of 22 million by 1980...

...From its inception, genetic knowledge was considered the vehicle to greater human control over processes which were governed by chance events...

...When substance and prejudice are so far apart and when the "culprit" is so easily identifiable and locatable, there before us is the best recipe in the book for social turbulence...

...These people have come to be cast as the villains in this modern-day Morality Play...

...When William Shockley asks "Do illegitimate slum babies have hereditary traits that contribute to urban problems and welfare costs...

...Individuals like William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, or H.J...

...burner while we bring these "heretics" to the fore...

...As we know, those American migrations produced enormous turbulence and suffering...

...The fragments JONATHAN POWER is a British economist, ]ournalist and filmmaker...

...A strikingly diverse collection of scientists, prophets and pseudo-scientists have come to call themselves "hereditarians," a term which distinguishes them from the environmentalists who believe that events external to man are the primary determinants in his development...

...But the hoped-for promise that genetics would bring a simple explanation to the labyrinthine problem of human ability and disability has escaped fulfillment...

...This revolution directly pits scientists against sociologists as agents of social change...

...We have stripped man down to his core--and found DNA...

...In it, Kuhn describes the processes by which an old scientific order is replaced by a new one...

...Linguistics is focusing on a form of genetic determination when it looks at innate patterning of language constructs...

...Since any genetic test of IQ differentials between blacks and whites ultimately depends on making mea7urements on populations where intermarriage has given varying degrees of "white admixture," testing requires some reliable genetic marker which measures this quantitatively...

...Eysenck, a British psychologist, have taken on genetic factors as determinants of racial differences in IO as their cause c~l~bre...

...The critical hypothesis of the IQ/hereditary debate --that the IQ deficit reported for blacks is to some large extent genetic in origin--is similarly difficult to resolve...

...Medicine in turn is looking to genetics for explanations of much of the unsolved problems in understanding the origins of human disease...

...Neither "illegitimacy" nor its implied effects are amenable to testing as long as the offspring of such matings continue to suffer from the environmental deprivation they now experience...

...How much more complex must be the factors underlying the expression of traits such as mental ability generally, in which undoubtedly many different genes come into play with the environment...

...It is a sign of the times that blatant and grievous social causes of inequality and unrest have been put on the back MARC LAPPE, an experimental pathologist, is Associate ]or the Biological Sciences at the Institute o] Society, Ethics and the Li[e Sciences in Hastings, N.Y...

...and "Does social legislation unwittingly encourage people with inherited irresponsibility (sic) to have large families...

...Their views are presented as being groundless and their motives are impugned as "racist" or "fascist...

...Part of the answer may be rooted in our cultural predilection to look for definitive, unitary and often technologically based solutions to problems which frustrate simple analysis and solution...

...That the outbreaks of violence so far have been localized and relatively small is probably fairly easily explained...

...Oswald Avery, the discoverer of DNA, believed that he had uncovered a means to control mutational events, not simply to understand them...

...For disability, the expectations that the early demonstrations of simple genetic mechanisms underlying metabolic defects which give rise to mental retardation would lead to a comprehensive model for mental deficiency have proven unfounded...

...The revolution which would make a person's genetic complement the prime determinant in these instances must be considered from both its scientific and moral perspectives, because as I have shown, the means which we will choose to implement corrective (or facilitative) policies will ultimately hinge on our choice of model...

...Strangeness, antagonism, withdrawal, hostility, reaction are feeding on each other...

...Sometimes, as in the physical sciences, this intolerance has been put to good effect--witness the felt need to resolve the indeterminate nature of light ("sometimes a particle, sometimes a wave") which led to quantum mechanics...

...What is at stake in almost every instance is a fundamental assault on traditional views of the roots of human potential and disability: How we define the causal factors which shape human behavior, whether it be for "intelligence" or "heterosexuality," and more importantly, how we deal with deviancy from that norm...

...Indeed, as molecular biologists are fond of pointing out, human DNA is virtually the same as the DNA found in the lowest micro-organisms...

...For most Europeans they are there to take advantage of their wealth-creating system, to compete for their scarce housing and to partake of their social services...

...It is no accident of history that major political groups on the left see these developments as threatening the basic fabric of society...

...Proponents of what I shall call the new genetic determinism claim (in keeping with Kuhn's model) that their paradigm can solve virtually all of the problems which the previous paradigm--environmentalism--failed to solve...

...Commonweal: 185...

...As evidence, one could start by citing demographic statistics (circa 1964-68) which show that "illegitimate" black newborns weighed more than 1/2 pound less on the average than did white newborns--and more than onetenth of the black newborns weighed less than 51/2 pounds at birth...

...he is proposing hypotheses which leapfrog the normal sequence of proposals (from most heuristic and parsimonious to least) to ones which already assume genetic knowledge about social causation which we do not have...

...A whole field of behavioral genetics has sprung up in the last ten years, with genetic determination of aspects of sexual behavior just part of the genetic repertoire...

...Psychology is but one of many fields in which increasing attention is being given to genes as candidates for explaining biosocial phenomena...

...Indeed, to use these hypotheses as interim explanations for the failure of social programs in the absence of remedial environmental action may be immoral...

...But relative to what is happening today, it was a homogeneous migration...

...If this proves to be so, and similar hypotheses prove similarly untestable, then to continue to propose genetic explanations of black disadvantage is highly suspect...

...The two most relevant sciences, human genetics and behavioral psychology are in their infancy...

...Arthur Jensen, for example, has asserted that most of the environmentalist theories have been inadequate...

...If intelligence is predominantly inherited, then remedial environmental programs would indeed be contraindicated in favor of genetic programs---if one accepts the desirability of "improving IO" as a social goal...

...Commonweal: 183 The IQ/heredity issue must therefore be seen as the vanguard of a scientific revolution which portends the replacement of environmental models of social causation with genetic ones...

...To fully understand the revolutionary significance of what is taking place, we would do well to re-examine Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions...

...Hereditarians would have us believe that this latter group is a dying species, which in its last agonal throws is attempting to cast the hereditarians as mechanical soulless beings who would displace a humanistic view of our destiny with one of inviolable determinism...

...If gathered together, they would be a nation the size of the Netherlands...

...In the absence of an equalization of environmental opportunities, these are not meaningful hypoth26 April 1974:184 eses simply because they are unanswerable...

...This preoccupation with persons rather than ideas threatens to deflect attention from the larger reality of the role of genetics in science today...

...He points out that scientific systems of thought usually form coherent models or paradigms for explaining the natural world...

...and hence, for the foreseeable future the satisfactory resolution of the controversy will be impossible...

...Why don't all people get diabetes at the same time...

...Since single genes have been identified which can determine the behavioral regimen of lowly organisms like the fruit fly (Drosophila), and since fruit flies are made of the same stuff as we are, should it come as any surprise that many students of human biology today are looking to genes for explanations of human behavior...

...To understand the particular power of genetics, we might do well to trace briefly its origins...

...To the extent that replacement of environmentalist models with genetic ones requires destroying social policies like compensatory education or suspending welfare payments, this revolution may be one with a high social price indeed...

...CENSORING THE HEREDITARIANS MARC LAPPE A The turn to genetics in quest for human understanding Our understanding of human biology has now seemingly reached the same bedrock of determinism that physics did in the pre-Heisenberg era of the 1920's...

...At other times, it may be distinctly inappropriate, as in the attempted resolution of genetic/environment interactions as explanations for behavioral phenomena in favor of a more purely genetic determination...

...Unlike the Thomas Kuhn's depiction of scientific revolutions, the revolution of genetic determinism threatens people first and ideas second...

...One of these facts is the discrepancy bettween IQ scores of blacks and whites...

...The critical events of a revolution in science are hallmarked by a period of great flux and indeterminacy in society in which the old paradigms fail to explain adequately either social or physical phenomena...

...There are at least two reasons for greeting this manifesto with some skepticism: the first is the dearth of definitive tests which might have caused us to question the utility of the environmental model...

...Of course here only the environment can be responsible...

...We might well ask, if knowledge in human genetics is indeed so rudimentary, why some have been so eager to apply it to problem-solving in the social sciences...

...The anti-Turkish riots in Rotterdam in 1972 shook to the very roots a society that thought--because of its successful experience in integrating 300,000 Indonesians in the fifties--that it knew how to conquer racism...

...Why then the rush to apply a new model when the old one, as Kuhn says of scientific paradigms, is still warm...

...Similarly, if gradations of sexual behavior are regarded as both deviant and genetic in nature, then entirely different courses of action are indicated than if such behavior were acceptable and seen to be culturally determined...

...By far and away the overwhelming majority were of European stock and Judeo-Christian culture...

...Opinion polls in all the European countries confirm the mounting displeasure with the foreigners in their midst...

...Some researchers may wish to pursue genetic hypotheses, however unlikely or apparently untestable concerning such matters as black/white differentials in IQ: but for these hypotheses to be promulgated or accepted as serious candidates for a new approach to solving social problems speaks not at all of our high devotion to science but of the low state of our public morality...

...of violence proliferate...

...Others like Arthur Jensen, a Harvard educational psychologist, have asked us to look at genetic substrata as the possible ultimate causes of educability...

...To what extent does the environment have to impinge on others before they manifest a latent predisposition to hypertension---or to musical genius...

...That they are there to do the jobs Europeans no longer want to do is an article of faith held by detached intellectuals and company personnel officers...

...The most recent example of this kind of treatment was the agitation accompanying the widely reported appearance of William Shockley at Staten Island Community College and Princeton University in November and December of last year...

...This deficit alone is sufficient to account for a reduction in IQ of from 6 to 9 points, based on monozygotic twin studies which have shown that a disparity of more than 1/2 pound between genetically identical twins is associated with long-lasting mental impairment...

...And the jagged holocaust in Marseilles last year laid to rest the myth that France was the civilized non-racist society of Europe where Africans became cabinet ministers and no one noticed...

...We have a culturally determined intolerance for ambiguity and multiple causation...

...Some individuals with the genes for PKU in fact never develop the mental symptoms of the condition, for as yet unknown reasons of environmental interaction or genetic compensation...

...the second, the incompleteness of our knowledge of the relevant science (and statistics) needed to describe the genetic model...

...That would be nearly half as many as emigrated from Europe to the New World in the great 19th and early 20th century migrations...

...In spite of earlier studies which purportedly identified a "caucasian" blood group, there is now a growing consensus in the scientific literature that available blood group markers are inapplicable...

...Because of the unique interlocking of scientific and social forces, this revolution would be different from other revolutions in science which also had society-wide reverberations...

...Not only have they given us no new leads for problemsolving, but he claims that they have even failed to account for the very facts they were originally designed to account for...

...Psychiatry is also turning attention to genetics in its quest to understand the origins of mental disease, most notably, bipolar manic depressive psychosis...

...ON EUROPE'S BOTTOM RUNG JONATHAN POWER Immigrants do jobs native Europeans would rather be unemployed than do There are 10 million immigrants in Common Market Europe, not including intra-EEC migrants...

...Why does not everyone who has the genes which predispose for diabetes develop the disease...