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{\it Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature}, R.C. Lewontin,
Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin, Pantheon Books.

	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
more important than environment
 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 moved to 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.  Proposers 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 \dots 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 {\it ``We should make it clear that we use the
term {\rm 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 and perhaps less virulent 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 important
hereditary components of ``reductionism'' and
``determinism''.

	Reductionism, they say, is the view that the properties of a complex
object are the properties of its parts.  Their strawman is the idea
that a society is ``aggressive'' if the individuals that compose it
are aggressive.  This kind of reductionism fails if the properties
of the entity depend 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.

	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
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. genetic 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 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 late 40s
when Lysenko with Stalin's help succeeded in destroying Soviet
genetics by getting his opponents fired and sending some of them to die in
the Gulag.  Even 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 the eugenicists was right and the 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.

	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.

\end