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C00003 00002	lewont[s85,jmc]		Review of Lewontin's Not in our genes
C00006 00003		The most interesting animal to mankind is man, and the debate
C00007 00004	The main factor limiting the application of the methods of
C00009 00005	Points to get over.
C00011 00006	Just So Stories
C00012 00007		The liberal argument concerning race and
C00013 00008		Current studies of adoption indicate that racial differences
C00015 00009		What attracted me to this book in the Printer's Inc. bookstore
C00017 00010		Scientific study of the contributions of heredity and
C00033 ENDMK
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lewont[s85,jmc]		Review of Lewontin's Not in our genes

	Darwin's 1859 {\it Origin of the Species} met an immediate
positive response from the political left.  They were already
enthusiastic about science and also took evolution as another
scientific ally in their battle with religion.  Marx and Engels
in particular were enthusiastic Darwinians as applied to biology,
even that of humans.  While their ideas of the evolution of
society did not take a Darwinian form, they didn't consider
this a matter of disagreement.

	Ever since about the 1920s there has been an ideological
battle about the applicability of the concepts of biology to
human beings.

	Reading all this makes one feel a bit sad and inclined
to say with Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay, ``Don't cheer boys, the
poor devils are dying".

Edward O. Wilson, The Sociogenesis of Insect Colonies, Science 1985 June 28

``The study of social insects is by necessity both a reductionistic
and holistic enterprise.  The behavior of the colony can be understood
only of the programs and positional effects of the individual members
can be teased apart, ultimately at the physiological level.  But this
information makes full sense only when the patterns of colonial  behavior
of each species are examined as potential idiosyncratic adaptations to the
natural environment in which the species lives.''
	The most interesting animal to mankind is man, and the debate
about the relative importance of heredity and environment long
predates science.

reductionism
Human heredity
pre-Darwin
Darwin
eugenics
Marxism and the left
equality of opportunity and equality of result
The present authors are unsure of what they believe, but their ideas
of who the bad guys are are entirely firm.
Just So Stories
half assed Marxism
their own just so story
The main factor limiting the application of the methods of
sociobiology to man is that long ago human biology reached te
point that made social evolution possible, and social evolution
seems to proceed 1,000 times as fast as biological evolution.
However, raising this point leaves one in danger of violating
the tabu against ``social Darwinism''.

At least since Rousseau, it has been taken as an argument in favor
of some practice that it was ``natural''.  This doesn't follow at
all.  We humans, both as individuals and in different societies,
may well prefer to run our lives in a way that isn't ``natural''.
Indeed the idea coming from religion that man is naturally sinful
and has to correct himself by effort may be closer to the truth.

It is also important to note that humans are capable (with frequent
lapses) of objective scientific thought and disinterested moral
argument.
Points to get over.

1. the decay of Marxism

2. Just So stories

3. It would be interesting to know to what extent all the controversy
has held up progress.

4. Leftist tact

This is an angry book, and I don't use {\it angry} as a term of praise.

5. Whether the criticism of specific studies is correct is a matter
for specialists in these fields to fight out.  Of course, when a
policy decision that depends on a scientific issue is to be made,
laymen in the specific field may have to decide who are the experts
and which of them to believe.  However, we have a further obligation
to help keep the scientific atmosphere free of intimidation.

In this field there has recently certainly been intimidation aimed at
discouraging reaching hereditarian conclusions.  As a result only
relatively thick skinned, even heroic, people dare pursue hereditarian
hypotheses.  Others find something else to work on.

6. But what if the eugenicists were right?
In my position I don't see the world as overwhelmed by stupid people.
Rather I see an acute shortage of people smart enough to do a first
class job in the positions they hold.  And this is even with America
benefiting from the brain drain.
Just So Stories

	Theorists of evolution accuse each other of telling ``Just So
Stories'', after Kipling.  
	The liberal argument concerning race and
intelligence amounts to the following.  The studies purporting
to show that intelligence corresponds to measured IQ and that
this is inherited are flawed.  Therefore, we must assume that
there is no correlation between race and intelligence.  Therefore,
any difference in prosperity must be due to discrimination.
Therefore, quotas and other forms of affirmative action are
warranted to counter the discrimination.
	Current studies of adoption indicate that racial differences
are small.  However, one can worry that the objectivity of these
studies might be affected by the wishful thinking of people who
know what kind of results are most acceptable to the present
intellectual and scientific establishment.

	In any case, the people who study the inheritance of mental
qualities objectively need to be defended against moralistic
bullying.  My own university, Stanford, treated William Shockley
disgracefully, and its academic senate found other reasons
for preventing him from teaching a course presenting the results
of his statistical analysis of the studies of the inheritance
of intelligence.

	Regardless of how his studies eventually are evaluated, he must be
defended against those who misrepresent his views and prevent him from
expressing them in classes.
	What attracted me to this book in the Printer's Inc. bookstore
was the statement on page 3


Aha, I thought, here's a bookful of Marxist fundamentalism, and
I haven't seen much of that since I was brought up on it as a kid.
Alas, the Marxist definition proved to be merely a defiant gesture, as is
common in 1980s leftism, and anyway
they didn't get it quite right.  According to Marx, ideology is a
function of class, and a class is characterized by its relation
to the means of production, so besides bourgeois ideology there
is also working class ideology.  Modern leftists aren't enthusiastic
about the working class, partly because it doesn't follow them, but
perhaps mainly because it's too rich.  How can a radical student
feel for the working class when a steel worker makes much more than
he does, and probably as much as his father?
	Scientific study of the contributions of heredity and
environment to human abilities and behavior began with Francis Galton in
the 1860s.  He studied ``hereditary genius'', concluded that heredity was
the more important of the two
 and initiated the eugenic movement to improve humanity.
Eugenics had the positive goal of encouraging more children
among people with good heredity and the negative goal of preventing
reproduction of bad heredity, especially the feeble-minded.  Its
influence peaked in the 1920s and then fell off for several reasons.  Some
of its supporters built in their prejudices into their ideas of what were
good genes.  Coercive social measures, including
sterilization of the institutionalized retarded, came
into public disfavor.  The Nazis used it as a rationalization for
genocide.  The left, which had favored eugenics in line with
its rationalism, became enamoured with environmental theories which
promised quicker results.  They were also disappointed that increased
equality of opportunity did not bring about complete equality of result.

	Like many other issues, the heredity of behavior heated up in
the 1960s.  Supporters of affirmative action to achieve equality of
result need the assurance that observed inequalities of accomplishment
must be the result of discrimination of some kind, even when overt
discrimination has already been eliminated.  Since the 60s, scientists
whose studies support the view that important components of human behavior
are hereditary have been attacked --- some to the extent of having
their lectures disrupted.

	Lewontin and Kamin are two leaders of American
``radical science'' aka critical science, and Rose is similarly active
in Britain.  Lewontin has a substantial scientific reputation in evolutionary
genetics.  Their book bills itself as an answer to the {\it ``New Right
ideology \ldots with its emphasis on the priority of the individual
over the collective.  That priority is seen as having both a moral
aspect, in which the rights of individuals have absolute priority
over the rights of the collectivity --- as, for example, the right
to destroy forests by clear-cutting in order to maximize immediate
profit --- and an ontological aspect, where the collectivity is nothing
more than the sum of the individuals that make it up''.}

	The authors often bow to Marxism and refer to the bourgeois
origin of various concepts.
Thus on page 3 they say ``We should make it clear that we use the
term {\it ideology} here and throughout this book with a precise
meaning.  Ideologies are the ruling ideas of a particular society
at a particular time.  They are ideas that express the ``naturalness''
of any existing social order and help maintain it''.
However, full-blooded Marxism associates an ideology with
each ``class'' defined by its ``relation to the means of production'',
and explicitly postulates ``working class ideology''.  There is
no trace of the proletariat in this book, so we have a kind of
attenuated Marxism.  Why modern Marxists ignore the ``working class'' is
too complicated for this review.  However, it seems to be mutual.

	The book accuses those who hold that intelligence,
criminality and other human behavioral characteristics have an important
hereditary component of ``determinism'' and
``reductionism''.

	Reductionism, they say, is the view that the properties of a complex
object are the properties of its parts.  Their example is the theory
that a society is ``aggressive'' if the individuals that compose it
are aggressive.  This kind of reductionism fails if the properties
of the entity depends on the interaction of its parts.  They fail
to distinguish between a universal doctrine of reductionism, which
I'll bet no-one holds, and specific reductionist hypotheses.  For
example, we believe that the color of an object is not determined by the
``colors'' of its atoms, but is usually determined by its surface
molecules --- compounds of small numbers of atoms.  Its visual texture,
however, is not determined by its molecules but by a larger scale
structure.  Thus specific reductionist hypotheses may be true or
false.  When they are true they represent important simplifications,
and therefore are often proposed early.  The theory that aggressiveness
of societies is simply related to the aggressiveness of its individuals
cannot be confirmed or refuted solely by general considerations.
The relations between the two are worth studying.

	This use of the term reductionism is somewhat non-standard.
Many people use it to mean that the properties of a complex
aggregate is determined by the laws of interaction of its
elementary parts, where these laws often take the form of
giving the forces between pairs of the elementary parts.
Theories of this kind have far greater scope; most
present physics takes this form.  Such reductionism has many
supporters, but they have
opponents called holists, who hold that many important
systems, e.g. living beings, are not determined by the
elementary interactions of their parts.  The holists have
so far not been successful in establishing laws that
cannot be reduced.  The general controversy has
turned out to be rather sterile; actual scientific
discoveries don't seem to depend on what view a scientist
takes of the reductionist-holist controversy.

	Determinism, as they use it, seems to require an
adjective, e.g. hereditarian or environmental, to make it
definite.  Then it is the hypothesis that some properties
of an object, e.g. the intelligence of a person, are entirely
or mainly determined by one thing, e.g. heredity.  Again specific
determistic hypotheses are simple, and some of them turn out
to be true.

	The authors cite many determinist and reductionist
hypotheses with which they disagree.  These include hereditary
determination of IQ, the theory that IQ determines success
in academic study, and theories of the biological determination
of sex differences in human behavior.  One is suspicious of
the accuracy with which they cite the views of many of the
people they attack.  Perhaps many of them admit more interaction
than is ascribed to them.

	When attacking a theory such as the one that IQ is
about 80 percent hereditary, they demand very high standards
of proof.  For example, they find all the studies of separated
twins to be flawed.  (This is apart the fictitious studies
of Cyril Burt that Kamin played an important role in exposing).

	There is one determinist hypothesis which they accept
without applying strict criteria, and that is the hypothesis
that their opponents hold their views because they support
capitalist society or the oppression of women etc.  No criteria
are given that would have to be met in order to warrant a
conclusion of why someone holds certain views.
{\it In my opinion, a hypothesis about why someone holds certain
views requires just as precise a statement and just as
convincing evidence as a biological hypothesis.}

	The book had considerable critical success.  All eleven
reviews the Stanford librarians found for me were substantially
favorable.  (It helped that no less than three of
the reviewers were among the fifteen people whose help was
acknowledged in the preface as participants in the Dialectics
of Biology Group and the Campaign Against Racism, IQ and the
Class Society).  The reviewers took on the role of a cheering
section, applauding blows against the enemy, rather than
discussing the plausibility of the positions taken.  In this
they were somewhat less rational than the authors.

	The genetics of human behavior is a difficult scientific
subject, and we laymen cannot hope to play an influential role
in solving its problems.  There are two issues that concern us
and that we can influence.

	First if scientists are to serve as our representatives in
discovering the truth about some important aspect of the world, then we
must prevent ideologies from limiting the hypotheses they can consider.
Such intimidation reached its extreme in the Soviet Union in the late 40s
when Lysenko with Stalin's help succeeded in destroying the science of
genetics by getting his opponents fired and sending some of them to die in
the Gulag.  However, the American academic campaign of intimidation
which this book serves, has probably succeeded in keeping many young
scientists who don't want to be thought reactionary from studying certain
hypotheses for fear of liberal disapproval.
Thus no-one mentions the grimmest hypothesis
about the cause of the decline of college entrance examination scores in
recent years.  Maybe lower fertility of
educated people for 100 years did reduce the number of young people
capable of high college entrance examination scores.

	The second proper concern of laymen arises when controversies
among scientists impinge on public policy.  Then we cannot avoid
choosing among the rival proposals.  However, even without detailed
scientific study, we can tell when intimidation is being attempted.
Leftist intimidation
has substantially succeeded in its campaign against IQ tests
and testing in general and in beating down objections to affirmative
action.

	As a computer scientist concerned with artificial intelligence,
e.g. making computer programs solve difficult problems, I offer one
comment out of my own speciality.  Computers differ only in speed
and memory capacity; what one can do, another can also be programmed
to do --- perhaps more slowly.  Human non-intellectual capacities
vary by factors of two or three; one man can train to lift twice
or three times the weight of another.  Therefore, if intelligence
were like strength, we would expect that an ordinary person could
learn to do physics like Einstein or chess like Fischer, only taking
several times as long for the same result.  Since this obviously
doesn't happen, the qualitatively superior intellectual performance
of some people over others constitutes a puzzle for the future to solve.
Solving it will require an open mind.