Racial equality can no longer be defended.

Four books that I have read in the last month highlight the dilemma that the nature/nurture debate faces. I’ll discuss each one to show how politicized and confused the issue becomes when science clashes with universal egalitarianism.

Wrestling with Behavior Genetics: Science, Ethics, and Public Conversation, edited by Parens, Chapman & Press. 2006. This book has chapters written from different perspectives by different authors. Only one, Kenneth F. Schaffner, contributes without hesitation what is involved in genetic/environmental studies. He states, “As I mentioned a little earlier, some researchers think a good heritability-of-IQ estimate for ‘the’ general, contemporary U.S. population is closer to 0.8 and others think it’s closer to 0.3 or 0.4. Matt McGue and colleagues, for example, examine much of the data collected during the twentieth century and conclude that by the time we are adults, about 80 percent of the variation with respect to IQ is due to genetic variation.”

The other contributors to the book write as if they did not read Schaffner’s writings—they are committed to an egalitarian stance, dancing around the nature/nurture debate.

In Genes and Behavior: Nature–Nurture Interplay Explained by Michael Rutter, 2006, the subject of behavior genetics or gene/environment interaction is handled in a purely scientific manner, without bias. I wish he had spent more time on the issue of genetic differences between races, especially with intelligence. But one comes away with an understanding of the complexity of genetic/environmental studies on human behavior—especially where new methods of statistical analyses are important in understanding how genes and the environment impact individuals.

In Genes, Behavior, and the Social Environment: Moving Beyond the Nature/Nurture Debate, published by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 2006, there are no authors that wrote the chapters, but a consensus of where the science of genetic contributions to disease should be headed. And yet, when it comes to race the volume is inconsistent. For example, “In the search for a better understanding of genetic and environmental interactions as determinants of health, certain fundamental aspects of human identity (i.e., sex/gender and race/ethnicity) pose both a challenge and an opportunity for clarification. However because sex/gender and race/ethnicity are more complicated than they appear, they need to be considered and analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including social, cultural, psychological, historical, political, genetic, and geographic/ancestral.”

Then later it is stated, “Unlike sex, race is not firmly biologically based but rather is a ‘construct of human variability based on perceived differences in biology, physical appearance, and behavior’ (IOM, 1999). According to Shields and colleagues (2005), ’with the exception of the health disparities context, in which self-identified race remains a socially important metric, race should be avoided or used with caution and clarification, as its meaning encompasses both ancestry . . . and ethnicity . . .‘“

This was typical when it came to trying to mix together race, geography, ethnicity, etc. It is very difficult for them to state clearly what race is—genetic variance based on one’s ancestry. It is just too taboo of a subject, but it is breaking down quickly now because to deny race and genetic variance is to stop the progress that is being made to develop drugs and medical procedures based on a persons genome.

In Making Sense of Heritability by Neven Sesardic, 2005, the title is not inclusive. He covers heritability very clearly, but then goes on to attack the egalitarians and Marxists like Gould, Kamin, Rose, et al., along with other philosophers of science who have been attacking Jensenism (the difference in races in intelligence is primarily genetic). This book covers thirty years of sophistry by those who deny Jensenism, and focuses on the attempt to refute Jensenism on methodological grounds rather than empirical experimentation. In short, the anti-Jensenists have no data so they rely on convoluted philosophical arguments. Samplings of articles are available by Sesardic on the Internet in PDF format. Unlike those he attacks, he has actually read all the articles available.

What does all this mean? For the past few decades, it was possible to argue against racial differences in intelligence because aside from behavior genetics, it could only use certain tools to collect the data. Now with the advent of the Human Genome Project and all of its off-shoots, genes can no longer be so easily ignored. Understanding the gene/environment interactions has important implications for reproductive choice (eugenics), education (what really is the cause of failing schools), pharmacogenomics (What drugs will work with different human genome types, including clustering by race), What types of personality profiles are best suited for certain occupations (a yet to be fully implemented tool by employers), What type of people are you dealing with in international politics (Iraq and Iran), etc.

It is going to become more difficult in the future to ignore differences in intelligence and behavioral traits due to genes when genes are seen to impact so many other areas of what it means to be human, and what it means to have taxonomies of genomic profiles.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 03:27 PM in IQ and Heredity
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