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Volume 1 Issue 2 EDITORIAL
Joseph Schwartz
On Genetic Fundamentalism
“The believer will not let his belief
be torn from him, either by arguments or prohibitions”
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Modern Christian fundamentalism began in the US in the Deep
South in the early 1900s. A reaction to modernism, the Fundamentals
of the Bible was widely circulated in a response to the increasing
impoverishment of the US agricultural South relative to the
industrial North. Central to US Christian fundamentalism was
its famous opposition to the modern materialist story of creation
- Darwin’s descent of the species through natural selection
operating on the genes.
The conventional representations of modernism include only
its successes wrapped in the myth of progress. But modernism
includes unspeakable cruelties in its history from slavery,
child labour and genocide in the 19th century to industrialised
murder in the 20th to Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq
in the 21st. Modernism can be as profoundly threatening as
it can be profoundly liberating.
Fundamentalism has arisen in response to modernism in its
cruel and malign incarnation. Fundamentalists fear annihilation.
Annihilation anxiety is perhaps the most terrifying of all
affects known to the human psyche. With their backs to the
wall, fundamentalists reject modernism including its science
replacing its undoubted efficacy with their own. This is why
creation science has arisen in the US with its bid for equal
time in US school science curricula in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
But modernism as a global phenomenon has generated similar
feelings of hope and fear in every section of every society.
Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish
is one response. Ironically there is another response to modernism,
one that utilises science itself as a myth to give meaning
and solace in the face of the present limitations and inequities
of modernism. Genetic fundamentalism is a myth created within
the culture of science originating at the same time as Christian
fundamentalism. Genetic fundamentalism provides its meaning
and solace by a direct appeal to science itself.
In the US, in the 1880s Francis Amasa Walker the third president
of MIT, whose death in 1897 produced obituaries in 150 US
newspapers, argued for rejection of the “immigrant hordes”
from southern and Eastern Europe calling them “beaten
men from beaten races”. Walker was a leading ideologue
of the social grouping called by Eric Hobsbawm the nouveau
couche social. These men were the sons of fathers who had
lost out in the late 19th century race for ownership of the
emerging corporate monopolies and became instead journalists,
lawyers, and scientists. For them, instead of ownership of
property they had their skills for hire called by Walker “the
rent of ability”. The rent of ability morphed into the
myth of inherited intelligence measured by Binet’s IQ
test introduced in 1905. There was then in the minds of the
members of the nouveau couche social a new kind of ownership,
inherited intelligence, which was surprisingly like money.
Like money, it could be counted, like money, some people had
more of it than others and like money, it could be passed
from father to son.
The myth of inherited differences in intelligence has been
with us ever since. Like all myths it is impervious to evidence
and argument because it provides meaning and solace. And indeed
we are all genetic fundamentalists because there will very
few indeed who will agree that the concept of inherited differences
in intelligence is a myth. Quite the opposite. It seems self
evident that differences in intelligence are inherited. Questioning
this belief is like questioning the existence of God a century
ago.
And this is the property of all powerful myths. They are
self evident because they make sense of the world. We only
give them up, if at all, when there is a better way to give
meaning to the world around us. In the case of natural science,
the better way was to hand if one wanted bridges and airplanes
to work. In the case of educational ability, there was a question..In
the 1960s the threat of a level playing field for all applicants
for education prompted the same kind of fear as did the threat
of the immigrant hordes 80 years ago. And it generated the
same kind of fundamentalist response on the part of academics
who recycled the myth of inherited differences in intelligence
clothed in the language and formulae of biometrical genetics.
As Arthur Jensen put it in his Harvard Educational Review
article of 1969: “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic
Achievement?"
What was profound about the race and IQ debate of the late
1960s was that the mythic character of a belief in inherited
differences in intelligence became revealed for the first
time. It did not matter either to the researchers themselves
or to readers of the newspaper accounts of this in-house dispute
what the data said or didn’t say. Ordinarily the egregious
errors and outright fraudulence of this research would be
enough to disqualify it from serious consideration. But this
was not an ordinary case. This was a myth, in Freud’s
terms an illusion, whose future was impervious to evidence
and argument precisely because it was a myth. No matter how
much evidence is piled up against the existence of inherited
differences in intelligence we continue to believe. In fact
it borders on lunacy that one could suggest otherwise. The
myth of inherited differences in intelligence has to be literally
true in order for it to be an effective story about the inequalities
of modern life. If it is “just” a myth it won’t
work.
Beliefs such as this are, as the Jungians have successfully
analysed, numinous. We believe them whether we want to or
not. Even this writer, having analysed the myth of intelligence
in great detail over the past 30 years quavers when putting
it forward as a myth.
Once we can recognise the depths of our own genetic fundamentalism
we can begin to understand the strength of feeling that accompanies
the A to Z of social life to which this myth of modern life
is put: in the area of psychotherapy alone there is genetics
and addiction, anxiety, autism, bi-polar, hyperactivity, mental
illness, promiscuity, rape, and schizophrenia. (see below).The
case of schizophrenia as Brett Kahr shows is particularly
vulnerable to mythic rather than real understanding because
the reality of this mental pain and its aetiology is too difficult
to witness and bear.
The genetic theory of human nature is a fundamentalist belief
that gives modern life meaning and solace for the unfulfilled
promises of the modernist project. Instead of a science meant
to provide a world of justice and plenty for all, we have
a scientific myth that affords resigned comfort in the face
of the suffering caused by the cruelties of modern social
arrangements.
References
Genetics and :
Aggression
Science Research News (1993). Evidence Found of a Possible
‘Aggression Gene’.
Science v. 260, pp.1722-1723.
Alcoholism
Noble, E.P. &Blum, K (1991). The Dopamine D2 Receptor
Gene and Alcoholism.
JAMA v.265, p. 2667.
Anti-semitism
MacDonald, Kevin (1998). Towards an Evolutionary Theory of
Anti-Semitism.
New York: Praeger.
Anxiety
Lesch, Kalus-Peter; Bengel, Dietmar; Heils Armin; Sabol, Sue
Z.;
Greenberg, Benjamin D.; Petri, Susanne; Benjamin, Jonathon;
Müller, Clemens R.;
Hamer, Dean H.; & Murphy, Dennis L.(1996), Association
of Anxiety-Related
Traits with a Polymorphism in the Serotonin Transporter Gene
Regulatory Region.
Science v. 274, pp.1527-1531 &p.1483.
Autism
Science Random Samples (1997), A Gene Is Linked to Autism.
Science v. 276,
p.905.
Science News Focus (2001), New Hints Into the Biological Basis
of Autism.
Science v. 294, pp.34-37.
Bi-Polar
Egleland, J.A.,Gerhard, D.S., Pauls, D.L. et al, Bipolar Affective
Disorder Linked to Chromosome Markers on Chromosome 11. Nature
v.325, pp.783-877.
Black athletes.
Entine, Jon (2000), Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports
and Why We’re
Afraid to Talk About It. New York: Public Affairs
Criminal behaviour
ScienceNew and Comment (1994). Violence Study Hits a Nerve
in Germany. Science
v. 264, p.653.
Felsenthal, E.(1994). “Man’s genes made him kill,
his lawyers claim”. Wall Street
Journal, November 1, pp.B1-B5.
Genius
McCrone, John (1993). Is there a gene for genius? Independent
on Sunday,
2 May pp. 52-53
Homosexuality
Hamer, Dean H.; Hu, Stella; Magnuson, Victorian L.; Hu, Nan;
Pattatucci,
Angela M.L. (1993), A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X
Chromosome
And Male Sexual Orientation. Science v. 261, pp.321-327 &
p.291.
Science Research News (1992), Twin Study Links Genes to Homosexuality.
Science v.255, p.33.
Hyperactivity
Science Random Samples (1993), Hyperactivity Tied to Gene
Defect.
Science v. 260, p.295.
“It’s not bad parenting, overcrowded schools or
unmotivated kids. ADHD is a
neuropsychiatric problem based on brain physiology.”
Even though the suspected
gene, a thyroid receptor, affects “no more than 5% of
ADHD cases”.
Intelligence
Plomin, Robert (1999), Genetics and general cognitive ability.
Nature v.402, pp.c25-c29.
Science Briefings(1991). On the Trail of Genes for IQ. Science
v. 253, p.1352.
Male and female brains
Baron-Cohen, Simon (2003), Essential Difference:Men, Women
and the Extreme
Male Brain/ Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male
and Female Brain.
London: Allen Lane.
Mental illness
Science Features (2003). Decoding mental illness.Science v.302,
p.2039.
Promiscuity
Barash, David P. & Lipton, Judith Eve (2001), The Myth
of Monogamy: Fidelity and
Infidelity in Animals and People. San Francisco: Freeman.
Vedantam, Shankar (2003), Desire and DNA: Is Promiscuity Innate?
Washington Post
August 1, 2003, p.A01.
Rape
Thornhill, Randy & Palmer Craig T.(2000), A Natural History
of Rape: Biological
Bases of Sexual Coercion. Cambridge:MIT Press.
Burn, Jerome (2000). Is the unspeakable truth about rape that
it is natural?
Times, January 23, 2000.
Schizophrenia
DeLisi, Lynn E. & Felischmaker, Wolfgang (2007, Schozophrenia
research in the era of the
Genmome, 2007. In, Jeffey A. Liberman, T.Scott Tropu &
Diana O. Perkins eds.
The Ameriican Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Schizophrenia.
Washinton DC & London:
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., pp.109-110.
Sullivan, Patrick F., Owen, MIchael J,. O’Donovan, Michael
C., & Freedman, Robert (2007,
Genetics [and Schizoprenia]. In, Jeffey A. Liberman, T.Scott
Tropu & Diana O. Perkins eds.
The Ameriican Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Schizophrenia.
Washinton DC & London:
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., pp. 39-53.
Sex crimes
Nature news (2001), “Y-chromosome analysis urged for
sex crimes”. Nature v.413, p.6
Spite
Reynolds, James (2004). Spite? It’s all down to nasty
genes. Scotsman, 3 September.
A study of bacteria and insects!
Xenophobia
Hamilton, W.D. (1975), Innate social aptitudes of man: an
approach from evolutionary genetics, in R. Fox (ed.), Biosocial
Anthropology, Malaby Press, London, pp. 133-53.
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