Newspaper reports and TV programs, for example, inform us almost daily that scientists have uncovered evidence for the genetic basis of one human characteristic or another. Sometimes the characteristic in question is a disease, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease. But just as often the reports are about psychological characteristics and patterns of behavior, such as violence and criminality, or sexual orientation. A Time magazine cover story asked "Why Are Men and Women Different? It Isn’t Just Upbringing. New Studies Show They Are Born That Way." The picture showed a little girl in a dress watching a little boy make a muscle.² The following month, a Newsweek cover story was headlined "Is This Child Gay? Born or Bred: The Origins of Homosexuality."³ Another Time cover pictured a cracked wedding ring and proclaimed "Infidelity: It May be in Our Genes."⁴ And U.S. News and World Report ran an article titled "Sex: It’s All in Your Brain," claiming that men and women think differently and that "Every social explanation has been exhausted. It is innate."⁵

Leading U.S. scientists have made similar claims. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and former head of the Human Genome Project) says, "We used to think that our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large part, that our fate is in our genes."⁶ Daniel Koshland, former editor of Science, the most prestigious scientific journal in the country, has claimed that genetic research can help to eliminate key social problems. According to Koshland, "the homeless are impaired…. Indeed, no group will benefit more from the application of human genetics."⁷

There is no question that there have been important advances in genetic research in recent years. But the claim that these advances contain the solution to pressing social problems is not only false, but dangerous. Such claims are deeply ideological. They are, in effect, an attempt to use the prestige of science to defend the status quo, which is why they are given prominent coverage in the media.

The attempt to explain important features of society in evolutionary or genetic terms—biological determinism—has two goals. First, it tries to convince us that the social order is a consequence of unchanging human biology, so that inequality and injustice cannot be eliminated. Second, in the case of problems that are impossible to ignore, it tells us to look for the solution at the level of the individual and not at the level of social institutions. The problems lie not in the structure of society, but in some of the individuals who make up society. The solution is thus to change—or even eliminate—the individuals, not to challenge existing social structures.

The claim that biology holds the key to solving social problems and the related claim that biology demonstrates the limits of social reform and the impossibility of radical change, both have a long history, going back even before the birth of modern genetics. In 1865, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published an article called "Hereditary Talent and Character"⁸ in which he claimed that talent is biologically determined and proposed improving society "through better breeding." A few years later he introduced the term "eugenics"—meaning "good birth"—to describe his proposal.⁹

In his most famous book, Hereditary Genius,¹⁰ Galton attempted to demonstrate that intelligence is inherited by tracing the genealogies of well-known English families and showing that, generation after generation, the members of such families tended to acquire prestigious social positions. The alternative explanation, that what is inherited is not intelligence but access to social power and influence, seems not to have occurred to him. Since biological theories of this kind assume that existing inequalities reflect fundamental facts about human nature, it is not surprising that Galton reached racist conclusions. He claimed that "[T]he average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own,"¹¹ and that "the Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations."¹²

Despite the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever for the underlying assumptions of eugenics, organizations promoting "better breeding" gained numerous supporters by the early part of the twentieth century. Eugenics was adopted most enthusiastically in the U.S., where it was used by the nativist movement as part of its attack on immigration.

One of the principle advocates was the biologist Charles Davenport, who was the founder of the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and the Eugenics Record Office. The latter—which was financed by the widow of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman—gathered information on thousands of American families for genetic research. Davenport was a serious scientist. He demonstrated the heritability of eye, skin, and hair color. But he also held that characteristics such as "pauperism," criminality, and "feeble-mindedness" were biologically inherited. Davenport even claimed that the capacity to be a naval officer is an inherited trait, composed of two subtraits: thalassophilia (love of the sea) and hyperkineticism (or wanderlust). Because there were no women in the navy, Davenport concluded that the trait is unique to males.¹³

Davenport’s tendency to postulate a genetic basis for nearly everything would be amusing if the consequences had not been so tragic. Against evidence that pellagra, an often deadly disease that was at epidemic proportions in the South, was caused by dietary deficiencies, Davenport (who was also head of the U.S. Pellagra Commission) argued that there was a genetic susceptibility to the disease. Successive administrations used Davenport’s false claims to avoid spending money on nutritional programs. As a result, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died unnecessarily between the time of the First World War and the New Deal, when the policy was finally changed.

Eugenicists such as Davenport encouraged nearly thirty states to enact laws permitting the forced sterilization of thousands of people in prisons and mental hospitals who were judged to be feeble-minded or defective in some other way. The first sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907. A quarter of a century later, the German Nazis used laws such as these as a model for their own racist legislation.

Eugenicists in the U.S. also urged the federal government to restrict the immigration of "undesirable" races and played an important role in helping to pass the viciously racist federal immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. Their arguments dovetailed with those of psychologists like H.H. Goddard and Lewis M. Terman, who developed the first standardized intelligence tests, which unsurprisingly reflected the racist and cultural biases of their designers. Even when testing led to the conclusion that half the U.S. population—including most Blacks and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe—were of substandard intelligence, the results were taken seriously. Terman advocated vocational training and placement for such unfortunates, warning that they could "drift easily into the ranks of the anti-social or join the army of Bolshevik discontents." Carl Brigham of Princeton University (who later developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT) warned that "[t]he average intelligence of succeeding waves of immigration has become progressively lower" and that the situation was made worse "owing to the presence here of the negro." Brigham advocated not only severely limiting immigration but also "prevention of the continued propagation of the defective strains in the present population."¹⁴

The passage of immigration restrictions also didn’t satisfy Davenport, who complained in 1925 that

This was not mere hyperbole. Earlier he had written that

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that a few years later, leading U.S. eugenicists were praising Nazi race laws in Germany. The Eugenical News called the Nazi sterilization law of 1933 "clean-cut, direct and ‘model.’" In 1935 the American Eugenics Society argued that "crime and dependency keep on increasing because new defectives are born, just as new cancer cells remorselessly penetrate into sound tissue," and it reminded its members that "we treat cancer by means of the surgeon’s knife." Frederick Osborn, secretary of the American Eugenics Society, wrote in 1937: "The German sterilization program is apparently an excellent one. Taken altogether, recent developments in Germany constitute perhaps the most important social experiment which has ever been tried." And Charles R. Stockard, president of the board of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, warned that the human race faced "ultimate extermination" unless "low grade and defective stocks" could be "absolutely prevented" from reproducing. Eugenicists in the U.S. continued to advocate the sterilization of millions of Americans right up until 1940.¹⁷

Thus the idea that society’s problems are due to defective individuals played an important role in paving the way for the Nazi Holocaust. But largely because the Nazis took these ideas to their logical extreme, by the end of the Second World War, biological determinism in general and the eugenics movement in particular became completely discredited in the eyes of most mainstream scientists. Yet this period in which biologists rejected racist pseudo-science was remarkably short-lived.

Biological determinism first began to make a comeback in the late 1960s as part of the ruling-class response to the movements for social change in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 1969 Arthur Jensen, a professor at Stanford, published a paper arguing that Blacks are innately less intelligent than whites, based on the fact that the average African American IQ score is consistently lower than the average score for whites and the claim that IQ has a high degree of heritability.¹⁸ Soon afterwards, the Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein defended the view that socioeconomic status is a direct function of inherited intelligence. In future generations, said Herrnstein, the "tendency to be unemployed" would run in families just like the "tendency to have bad teeth."¹⁹

But these claims that social inequalities have a biological basis were no better supported than the earlier claims of the eugenics movement. Jensen claimed that IQ is 80 percent heritable, citing as evidence research done on identical twins by the British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt. According to Burt, the IQs of identical twins who were separated and raised in distinct environments are much more closely correlated than the IQs of other individuals from the two environments. But Burt’s data seemed suspicious to the Marxist psychologist Leon Kamin, and a careful examination of Burt’s "research" revealed that it really was too good to be true. For example, Kamin discovered that even though Burt’s sample sizes got bigger, some of the correlation coefficients he claimed to have calculated stayed identical to three decimal places.²⁰ It soon emerged that Burt’s work had been perhaps the biggest scientific fraud of the twentieth century. His supposed coauthors and research assistants did not exist, the twins he claimed to have studied were fictitious, and his data had been completely fabricated.²¹

Not only is the claim that IQ is highly heritable unsupported, it is also irrelevant to Jensen’s main conclusion, which was that compensatory education programs are doomed to fail. Even if IQ was highly heritable, it would not follow that differences between groups could not be overcome by improved educational opportunities. Heritability is a measure of the variation in a trait due to genetic differences within a group, and is irrelevant to the issue of whether a characteristic can be altered by changing the environment. The same genotype (or collection of genes) may be expressed differently in different environments, so heritability estimates apply only to a specific population in a specific range of environments. Hereditarians such as Jensen simply assume that we have already done all we can to alter the environment—a laughable assumption when it comes to education.

More generally, the idea that IQ tests measure an individual’s innate and fixed degree of intelligence, or that intelligence can be measured on a single scale, are equally dubious.²²

"Who knows what IQ measures?" asked the biologist Stephen Jay Gould. "It is a good predictor of ‘success’ in school, but is such success a result of intelligence, apple polishing, or the assimilation of values that the leaders of society prefer?"²³ Historically, IQ tests have been used to justify existing social hierarchies. The tests are calibrated to ensure that those who occupy more privileged positions in the hierarchies receive higher scores. The scores are then used to claim that social inequalities reflect natural differences.

The philosopher of science Hilary Putnam has argued that the notion of IQ is built on the assumption "that there are a few ‘superior’ people who have this one mysterious factor—‘intelligence’—and who are good at everything, and a lot of slobs who are not much good at anything." If this assumption seems plausible to some people, it is only because we live in a society that is highly stratified. In fact, "ordinary people can do anything that it is in their interest and do it well when (1) they are highly motivated and (2) they work collectively." As Putnam points out:

The claims of Jensen, Herrnstein, and other biological determinists, were simply an attempt to rationalize race and class inequalities as more or less inevitable. As genuine science, they lacked all merit.²⁵

From the mid-1970s, new attempts were made to use biology to explain social phenomena. In his widely read book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,²⁶ the Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson attempted to extend evolutionary explanations of social behavior in non-human animals to explain human behavior as well. Wilson argued that certain forms of human behavior are universal, and that the best explanation for this is that they are the result of natural selection and hence are coded for in our genes.

Like the eugenicists of the early twentieth century, Wilson postulated genes for a wide variety of traits, including entrepreneurship, creativity, spite, conformity ("human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate—they seek it"), xenophobia, and homosexuality.²⁷ Again, like the earlier eugenicists, Wilson claimed that these supposed biological facts made certain aspects of society, such as male domination of public life, all but inevitable. "My own guess is the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies," he wrote shortly after Sociobiology was published. "Thus, even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to play a disproportionate role in political life, business, and science." If we attempt to create a more egalitarian society, Wilson continued, we will "place some personal freedoms in jeopardy."²⁸ Concerning Marxism in particular, Wilson reportedly joked later, "Wonderful theory. Wrong species."²⁹

Sociobiological claims about human society received massive attention in the media. A Time magazine cover story was headlined "Why You Do What You Do." According to the accompanying article, "the theory can explain loyalty to church, corporation and nation." 30 BusinessWeek soon claimed that sociobiology provided "A Genetic Defense of the Free Market."

Even Playboy got into the act: "Do Men Need to Cheat on Their Women? A New Science Says Yes." Inside, the magazine’s readers were told that

Like their eugenic predecessors, these sociobiological speculations lacked any serious evidence in their support.³³ Consider for instance the claim that supposed human universals have a genetic basis. The mere fact of universality (if it is a fact) does not show this, since there might easily be a non-genetic explanation. German speaking is nearly universal in Germany, but the explanation is not that inhabitants of the country are genetically predisposed to speak a particular language. Often sociobiologists claimed that non-human animals share the characteristic in question—aggression, for instance—and that this shows that it probably has a genetic basis. But this kind of reasoning is quite unpersuasive, as Wilson’s Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin has pointed out:

Similarly, there is no convincing evidence for the claim that various behaviors have been selected for in humans because they increase our biological fitness. Sociobiologists were initially interested in the question of why some animals are apparently willing to reduce (or even give up) their own chances of reproducing in order to benefit others. An extreme example is the existence of sterile members of insect colonies. How could such traits have evolved? One possible explanation is that an individual might give up its own prospects of reproducing in order to increase the chances of its relatives reproducing, thus passing on some of its genes to the next generation indirectly. These are known as cases of kin selection, in contrast to cases of individual selection, in which the organism attempts to pass on its genes directly by having offspring. Another possible explanation in cases in which the sacrifice is temporary is that the individual that benefits is likely to reciprocate in the future. This is known as reciprocal altruism. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism are important ideas in evolutionary biology, but whether or not they are the correct explanation for any particular trait has to be demonstrated. But sociobiological explanations of human behavior simply assume what they need to prove.

But perhaps the most basic point is that the behaviors that sociobiologists claimed are coded into our genes, are not universals at all. Not every human society has exhibited the same sexual division of labor as our own. And not every human society has been capitalist or even competitive. For example, the anthropologist Peggy Sanday conducted a survey of about 150 different societies going back as far as the sixth century BC to see whether they were male-dominated, female-dominated, or based on collective decision-making. She found a huge diversity of sex roles in these societies, showing that such roles derive not from human nature, but from specific historical and political circumstances.36 More generally, there has been tremendous cultural evolution in the past few thousand years that cannot be explained in biological terms because there simply hasn’t been enough time for natural selection to operate.³⁷

Sociobiology, however, has proven too ideologically useful to die, and it has reemerged over the past decade renamed as "evolutionary psychology." Books by New Republic editor Robert Wright,³⁸ science writer Matt Ridley³⁹ and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker⁴⁰ have popularized the ideas of evolutionary psychology for a general audience. Pinker is particularly pugnacious. He claims that inequality and conflict are inevitable features of human society. He attacks "Marxists, academic feminists and cafe intellectuals" and says "The standard Marxist theory of human nature has probably been refuted by many sources of evidence, including the anthropological record and Darwinian theory."⁴¹

Evolutionary psychology claims to be an advance of old-style sociobiology in at least two respects. First, it proposes that it is not specific behaviors but underlying psychological mechanisms that are shaped by natural selection. This leads evolutionary psychologists to adopt a "modular" theory of the human mind, which sees it as consisting of a large number of distinct informational processing devices (or modules), each with a specialized task—in other words a "Swiss army knife" model of the mind. There is considerable evidence that at least some aspects of the mind—such as language abilities and the visual system—are independently functioning modules, but evolutionary psychologists take this idea to absurd extremes, proposing such modules as a "cheater detector" (able to tell you when someone is deceiving you) and a "sexual attraction module" (which supposedly leads human males to be attracted to young females, and females to be attracted to high-status males). Even more modest versions of the modularity thesis leave us with a picture of the mind that is atomized and relatively inflexible.⁴²

Second, the more technical work in evolutionary psychology makes use of sophisticated mathematical models in order to determine what kinds of psychological mechanisms would have been optimal for our ancient ancestors to evolve in the supposed "environment of evolutionary adaptation" that they had to face. The underlying assumption is that the human mind evolved to solve the problems faced by hunter-gatherers hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Pleistocene era and that its basic psychology has remained unchanged ever since. Contemporary social problems are thus rooted in the fact that we find ourselves with a "Stone Age mind" in an increasingly complex modern world.⁴³

But this whole approach is highly problematic. First, we have very little detailed knowledge of the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" faced by our early ancestors, so anything we say about this is highly speculative. Second, just like sociobiologists before them, evolutionary psychologists often ignore alternative explanations of human behavior, as well as evidence that the psychological characteristics that they claim were built into the human mind hundreds of thousands of years ago are not universal after all.

I’ll consider just one example—violence. It is certainly true that human history is characterized by high levels of violence—including war, blood feuds, and murder—much of which seem on the face of it highly irrational. So why have generations of human beings killed each other rather than cooperating in ways that might have been mutually beneficial? Here is one possible explanation. Our distant ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, found themselves in an environment in which violence was necessary to survive. Those individuals who developed a psychology that distinguished between members of their own group and strangers, and who were psychologically prepared to use deadly violence against the latter, were better adapted to this environment than those less inclined to use violence, and so these psychological characteristics were selected for in early humans. This tendency to violence continues to exist in modern humans even when it is no longer beneficial and the only way to keep it under control is to set up a strong central state that can, at least to some extent, hold these tendencies in check. That, in a nutshell, is the story that Steven Pinker tells about violence in his most recent book The Blank Slate, where he argues that human beings have "a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years" and that "violence in humans is…part of our design."⁴⁴

Unfortunately for Pinker, and fortunately for the rest of us, this view of human prehistory is quite simply a myth. In support of the claim that "long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending,"⁴⁵ Pinker cites the work of the University of Illinois archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, who claims that humans have always made war.⁴⁶ In fact, Keeley demonstrates nothing of the kind. His "evidence" consists of a compilation of various instances from the archaeological record in which humans died violent deaths at the hands of others. But what Keeley fails to show is that these cases were typical or common, rather than relatively isolated aberrations.

According to the Rutgers anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, probably the leading expert on the early history of war, "the global archaeological record contradicts the idea that war was always a feature of human existence; instead, the record shows that warfare is largely a development of the past 10,000 years."⁴⁷ In a continuing global survey of all the available archaeological evidence, Ferguson has so far discovered no evidence of systematic violence in pre-historic human societies in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, or North America.

Ferguson argues that warfare became a feature of human society only as a consequence of specific historical developments, including the establishment of permanent settlements with accumulated wealth and the emergence of "social hierarchy, an elite, perhaps with its own interests and rivalries." The fact that for most of human existence there is no evidence of systematic large-scale violence, totally undercuts Pinker’s theory, which is really just a restatement of one of the oldest elements of ruling-class ideology—that states exist to protect us from ourselves, not to protect the interests of the elite and to keep the mass of the population in its place.

But the problem is not just what Pinker says about violence. The whole idea that human psychology is relatively rigid and unchanging—one of the central claims of evolutionary psychology—is incompatible with what we actually do know about human evolution. The first modern humans are believed to have evolved in southern Africa about 120,000 years ago. According to Marta Lahr, Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University, these creatures had "the potential of invention that we have. And I think that’s actually what makes them modern—they [could] invent solutions to new problems."⁴⁸

Around 50,000 years ago groups of modern humans began to migrate from Africa and disperse around the world, coming into contact with other hominid species that had left Africa about a million and a half years earlier. Modern humans arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago, where they lived side by side with Neanderthals, a closely related but distinct human species.

Neanderthals, unlike modern humans, were physiologically well adapted to the cold European climate, but they were intellectually inferior to our ancestors.

According to the archaeologist Paul Mellars,

It was this creativity and ingenuity of our ancestors—also exhibited in their elaborate ornaments, art, and burial rituals, and the complex networks of trade and exchange they established—that explains why they survived and the Neanderthals did not.

When temperatures in Europe began to plummet with the onset of a new ice age, Neanderthals were unable to adjust to the new conditions. But modern humans continued to thrive, even in mountainous areas. By 28,000 years ago the last remaining Neanderthals had disappeared. Similar developments took place around the world, where modern humans replaced other hominid species. Thus the key to our ancestors’ success was their enormous flexibility and ability to learn, not patterns of behavior hardwired into their brains.⁵⁰

Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists distort Darwin by adopting an ultra-adaptationist view that tries to explain every significant aspect of human behavior or psychology as a biological adaptation, shaped by natural selection. But while human intelligence was surely the subject of natural selection, it is highly implausible to think that specific behaviors or psychological characteristics are hardwired into our brains. As Stephen Jay Gould once put it:

The evidence for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is just as weak as for earlier versions of biological determinism.

Next issue: The New Eugenics

Phil Gasper is a member of the ISR editorial board. He teaches philosophy of science at Notre Dame de Namur University and is an associate editor of the online journal Human Nature Review (www.human-nature.com).