Hereditarianism

Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that heredity plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetics to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems. Hereditarians adopt the view that an understanding of human evolution can extend the understanding of human nature.

Overview

Social scientist Barry Mehler defines hereditarianism as "the belief that a substantial part of both group and individual differences in human behavioral traits are caused by genetic differences".[1] Hereditarianism is sometimes used as a synonym for biological or genetic determinism, though some scholars distinguish the two terms. When distinguished, biological determinism is used to mean that heredity is the only factor. Supporters of hereditarianism reject this sense of biological determinism for most cases. However, in some cases genetic determinism is true; for example, Matt Ridley describes Huntington's disease as "pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability".[2] In other cases, hereditarians would see no role for genes; for example, the condition of "not knowing a word of Chinese" has nothing to do (directly) with genes.[3]

Hereditarians point to the heritability of cognitive ability, and the outsized influence that cognitive ability has on life outcomes, as evidence in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint.[4] According to Plomin and Van Stumm (2018), "Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait."[5] Estimates for the heritability of intelligence range from 20% in infancy to 80% in adulthood.[6][7]

History

Francis Galton is generally considered the father of hereditarianism.[1] In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton pioneered research on the heredity of intelligence. Galton continued research into the heredity of human behavior in his later works, including "The History of Twins" (1875)[8] and Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883).

The Bell Curve (1994), by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, argued that the heritability of cognitive ability, combined with a modern American society in which cognitive ability is the leading determinant of success, was leading to an increasingly rich and segregated "cognitive elite".[9][10] Herrnstein and Murray also examined how cognitive ability predicts socially desirable behavior.[9] They also discussed the debate regarding race and intelligence, concluding that the evidence to date didn't justify an estimate on the degree of influence of genetics versus environmental causes for average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[11] Today the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain such differences, and that they are rather environmental in origin.[12][13][14][15][16][17]

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate (2002), argues that biology explains much more about human nature than people generally acknowledge.[18]

Competing theories

Theories opposed to hereditarianism include behaviorism, social determinism and environmental determinism. This disagreement and controversy is part of the nature versus nurture debate. But both are based on the assumption that genes and environment have large independent effects. The dominant view outside psychology among biologists and geneticists is that both of these are gross oversimplifications and that the behavioral/psychological phenotype for human beings is determined by a function of genes and environment which cannot be decomposed into a sum of functions of the two independently. And this especially because human behavior is uniquely plastic compared to that of other animals. The commonly cited heritability, h2, is meaningful only in the context of the independent effects model. This model may be a good approximation to the real function given that the range of genomes and the range of environments is sufficiently narrow, e.g., white upper middle class Americans living in Chicago. Ronald C. Bailey argues that hereditarianism is based on five fallacious assumptions. In a 1997 paper, he also wrote that "...behavior geneticists will continue to be very limited in their ability to partition the effects of genes, the environment, and their covariance and interaction on human behavior and cognitive ability."[19]

Political implications

In 1949, Nicolas Pastore claimed that hereditarians were more likely to be conservative,[20] that they view social and economic inequality as a natural result of variation in talent and character. Consequently, they explain class and race differences as the result of partly genetic group differences. Pastore contrasted this with the claim that behaviorists were more likely to be liberals or leftists, that they believe economic disadvantage and structural problems in the social order were to blame for group differences.[20]

However, the historical correspondence between hereditarianism and conservatism has broken down at least among proponents of hereditarianism. Philosopher Peter Singer describes his vision of a new liberal political view that embraces hereditarianism in his 1999 book, A Darwinian Left.[21]

See also

References
  1. Mehler, Barry (2015), "Hereditarianism", The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, American Cancer Society, pp. 1–3, doi:10.1002/9781118663202.wberen430, ISBN 978-1-118-66320-2, retrieved 2021-04-29
  2. Ridley, Matt (1999). Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-019497-0.
  3. Dennett, Daniel (2003). Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-03186-3.
  4. "6 The Hereditarian Viewpoint". Advances in Psychology. 3: 101–125. 1980-01-01. doi:10.1016/S0166-4115(08)61731-8. ISBN 9780444854650. ISSN 0166-4115.
  5. Plomin, Robert; von Stumm, Sophie (2018-01-08). "The new genetics of intelligence". Nature Reviews. Genetics. 19 (3): 148–159. doi:10.1038/nrg.2017.104. ISSN 1471-0056. PMC 5985927. PMID 29335645.
  6. Plomin, R; Deary, I J (2014-09-16). "Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings". Molecular Psychiatry. 20 (1): 98–108. doi:10.1038/mp.2014.105. ISSN 1359-4184. PMC 4270739. PMID 25224258.
  7. "Is intelligence determined by genetics?: MedlinePlus Genetics". medlineplus.gov. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  8. ""The History of Twins, As a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture" (1875), by Francis Galton | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia". embryo.asu.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  9. "'The Bell Curve', explained: Part 1, the emergence of a cognitive elite". American Enterprise Institute - AEI. 2017-05-12. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  10. Devlin, Bernie; Fienberg, Stephen E.; Resnick, Daniel P.; Roeder, Kathryn (1997). Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-0387949864.
  11. Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles (11 May 2010). Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Simon and Schuster. pp. 22–23. ISBN 978-1-4391-3491-7.
  12. Ceci, Stephen; Williams, Wendy M. (1 February 2009). "Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued". Nature. 457 (7231): 788–789. Bibcode:2009Natur.457..788C. doi:10.1038/457788a. PMID 19212385. S2CID 205044224. There is an emerging consensus about racial and gender equality in genetic determinants of intelligence; most researchers, including ourselves, agree that genes do not explain between-group differences.
  13. Panofsky, Aaron; Dasgupta, Kushan; Iturriaga, Nicole (28 September 2020). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 175 (2): 387–398. doi:10.1002/ajpa.24150. PMC 9909835. PMID 32986847. [T]he claims that genetics defines racial groups and makes them different, that IQ and cultural differences among racial groups are caused by genes, and that racial inequalities within and between nations are the inevitable outcome of long evolutionary processes are neither new nor supported by science (either old or new).
  14. Hunt, Earl (2010). Human Intelligence. Cambridge University Press. p. 447. ISBN 978-0-521-70781-7.
  15. Mackintosh, N. J. (2011). IQ and human intelligence (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 334–338, 344. ISBN 978-0-19-958559-5. OCLC 669754008.
  16. Nisbett, Richard E.; Aronson, Joshua; Blair, Clancy; Dickens, William; Flynn, James; Halpern, Diane F.; Turkheimer, Eric (2012). "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin" (PDF). American Psychologist. 67 (6): 503–504. doi:10.1037/a0029772. ISSN 0003-066X. PMID 22963427. Archived (PDF) from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2013.
  17. Kaplan, Jonathan Michael (January 2015). "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called "X"-factors: environments, racism, and the "hereditarian hypothesis"". Biology & Philosophy. 30 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1007/s10539-014-9428-0. ISSN 0169-3867. S2CID 85351431.
  18. Menand, Louis (18 November 2002). "What Comes Naturally". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  19. Bailey, Robert C. (1997-06-01). "Hereditarian scientific fallacies". Genetica. 99 (2–3): 125–133. doi:10.1007/BF02259516. ISSN 0016-6707. PMID 9463068. S2CID 8553022.
  20. Pastore, Nicolas (1949). The Nature-Nurture Controversy. New York: King's Crown Press.
  21. Singer, Peter (1999). A Darwinian Left. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08323-1.
    • Media related to Hereditarianism at Wikimedia Commons
    • Mehler B. . in Chambliss JJ, (ed.) Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland 1996.
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