Genes, Brains, and Human Potential

The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

Ken Richardson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780231543767
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Genetics in Medicine
• Index: Psychology

For countless generations people have been told that their potential as humans is limited and fundamentally unequal. The social order, they have been assured, is arranged by powers beyond their control. More recently the appeal has been to biology, specifically the genes, brain sciences, the concept of intelligence, and powerful new technologies. Reinforced through the authority of science and a growing belief in bio-determinism, the ordering of the many for the benefit of a few has become more entrenched.

Yet scientists are now waking up to the influence of ideology on research and its interpretation. In Genes, Brains, and Human Potential, Ken Richardson illustrates how the ideology of human intelligence has infiltrated genetics, brain sciences, and psychology, flourishing in the vagueness of basic concepts, a shallow nature-versus-nurture debate, and the overhyped claims of reductionists. He shows how ideology, more than pure science, has come to dominate our institutions, especially education, encouraging fatalism about the development of human intelligence among individuals and societies.

Genes, Brains, and Human Potential goes much further: building on work being done in molecular biology, epigenetics, dynamical systems, evolution theory, and complexity theory, it maps a fresh understanding of intelligence and the development of human potential. Concluding with an upbeat message for human possibilities, this synthesis of diverse perspectives will engender new conversations among students, researchers, and other interested readers.

1

PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL

SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

—Wikipedia

Ideology: The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, a group, a class, or a culture.

—Dictionary.com

For millennia—probably at least since the emergence of class-structured societies—scholars, philosopher-psychologists, and state authorities have told people that social inequalities are inevitable, the consequence of immutable differences in mental potential in people themselves. Those messages have always formed powerful ideologies, making inequality seem just and natural, preempting protest and coaxing compliance.

Until relatively recently, legitimation took the form of appeals to supernatural powers as a kind of ultimate authority. In ancient Greece, in Plato’s Republic, it was God that made men of Gold, Silver, or Bronze; women frivolous; and slaves subhuman. The medieval period in Europe invented the Divine Right of Kings. The poor in Victorian Britain sung in chapel of how God made them “high and lowly” and “ordered their estate.” In the Imperial colonies, subjugation of natives was excused through allusions to innate inferiority and the “white man’s burden.”

Charles Darwin changed all that, as everyone knows. He introduced a new “power”; an objective, impartial one that takes authority from material reality and transparent reason rather than from the supernatural. Darwin proved, indeed, that biological differences are an important part of the evolution of species. But Social Darwinists and psychologists ran away with aspects of a far more circumspect Darwin and used them to legitimize the wealth and power of the strong, and the poverty of the weak in the human species. Wrapped in the convincing language, concepts, and gravitas of objective science, the old message was given an even greater—and at times more deadly—effectiveness.

Over the past century or so, essentially the same message has been honed, impressed on us, and turned into an ever-stronger scientific orthodoxy. Instead of Plato’s myth of the metals, this science tells us about lucky or unlucky permutations of genes that determine levels of potential in our brains and are more or less fulfilled through child rearing and education (otherwise called the “environment”). Such science, it has been claimed, supplants the old, now redundant, ideologies. It lays the foundations for a more just, meritocratic society in which equal opportunity replaces equality of outcome.

That science of human potential has played a powerful role in human affairs over the past century or so. It has influenced policy makers and social institutions, and has reinforced class structure in so many ways. Education, employment, immigration, and related policies have been forged around it. In families, it warns that expectations for our children need to be cautious, because outcomes will be uncertain but inevitable. In individuals, it has instilled self-images of potential, thereby inducing willingness to accept inequalities in society, the limited extent to which we share the fruits of our labors, and, with that, unequal power and privilege.

Of course, this science of human potential has not developed entirely without challenge. All the while, critics have balked at its brashness, its fatalism, and the implied limits to individual possibilities. There have been constant attempts to moderate the message in an awkward nature-nurture debate: individual differences depend on environments as well as genes. Underneath, though, the hereditarians and environmentalists have really shared much of the basic conceptual furniture: the nature of genes, of environment, of development, and even the assumption that potential can be measured, as in intelligence quotient (IQ) testing. So the debate has never moved beyond questions of emphasis over what makes the most difference—genes or environments.

As a consequence, the history of the science seems to have depended more on how much of the genetic logic the social body could stomach than on fundamental scholarly challenge (of which there has been much). As is now well known, enthusiastic acceptance of the logic in the 1920s and 1930s was followed by disgust over the consequences in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. A period of benign environmentalism followed in the postwar period. But then the hereditarians came back with even more hard-hitting claims: with, they said, new methods and new data, a smart new title—behavioral genetics—but still with some skepticism to overcome. More recently, that wave has turned into a mass assault, confronting us, they have claimed, with even stronger genetic credentials; but also with kinder, even emollient, messages of benign interventionism, with benefits for all. The science of human potential has certainly never been boring.

This book suggests that now is a good time to be looking at that science afresh. New technologies and exciting visions have brought a new outpouring of scientific claims about genes and brains and human potential. The old skepticism is waning, and behavioral genetics is riding the tide of more receptive social conditions. Faced with widening social inequalities and increasing social tensions, governments are looking for biological and psychological rationales with which to appease their populations. Massive funds have become available for shedding light on causes of social inequality that will not threaten the status quo.

So every day, it seems, press releases and news headlines inform us of the latest sensational discoveries. They bombard the public mind, but really say much the same as before: inequalities are in our genes, which are in our brains, determining our level of potential as seen in our intelligence.

However, now something else is also going on; the message is rebounding with unpleasant dissonance. It is as if the very intensity, scale, and exuberance of output are revealing a science overstretched. Inconsistencies are coming to light, exposing deeper fault lines in the science itself. Put simply, the more we get, the less reliable the science seems to be: the stronger the claims, the more patently improbable the results. It suggests, what many have long suspected, that something is—and has been—going on other than pure science. Many human scientists are now speaking of a rising crisis in this and related domains.

They started to become concerned at least ten years ago. In 2005, John Ioannidis, in PLoS Medicine, summarized the “increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.” Ten years later, an editorial in the journal BioMed Central (September 2, 2015) states: “In recent decades, the reproducibility of a shocking number of scientific studies has been called into question … with the increasing number of studies revealing that much of science cannot be reproduced or replicated.” A paper in BMC Neuroscience (July 23, 2015), concurs that “hallmark papers … have been flagged as largely unreproducible.”

More sensational has been a “Reproducibility Project” in psychology, in which investigators asked scientists to attempt to replicate published results of a hundred key projects. They found that only 39 percent of them were successful.1 Some dispute these findings,2 but it is now generally accepted that many, if not most, findings about genes and brains are not as strong as originally thought. I will have much more to say about this later in this and other chapters. The point is that we are now being asked to take a harder look at this science, and its deeper, social, preconceptions. It is dawning on critics that, although claiming to supplant the old ideological authority, the new science of human potential may have simply become another tool of that ideology.

Some readers may be surprised that such a thing is even possible in science. So I want to be clear about what I mean. We now know that ideology is not just the bombastic roar or blatant self-interest of the ideologue; it can also arise in the more quiet output of the scholar. In science generally, it tends to flow in more subtle, usually unconscious, currents, shaped by the social and political landscape from which it springs. Like everyone else, scientists tend to absorb and reflect the prejudices, social structures, and institutions of their time. They build models that, like the pre-Copernican model of the sun and planets circling the earth, fit everyday social experience and what seems obvious. So the ideology gets wrapped up in the paraphernalia of science and all its trimmings.

That, at least, is the gist of an article in the science journal Nature (September 9, 2015).3 It first reminds us of the “fuzzy boundaries between science and ideology.” Regarding recent trends, it warns us that “a culture of science focused on rewarding eye-catching and positive findings may have resulted in major bodies of knowledge that cannot be reproduced.” Expressing concern that more and more research is tackling questions that are relevant to society and politics, it urges scientists “to recognize and openly acknowledge the relationship.”

So that is one of the things I invite you to do in this book. But there is another reason this is a good time for a fresh look. The fault lines now being exposed also suggest something wrong with fundamental preconceptions in the science. The perpetuation of the nature-nurture debate is continuing evidence of that. The history of science suggests that, when scientists are locked in such disputes, it usually takes a radically new conceptual framework to break out of the deadlock. “The important thing in science,” said William Bragg, Nobel laureate in physics, “is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”

It so happens that just such a new way of thinking about human potential is now emerging from work in many allied sciences: in genetics and molecular biology, in evolutionary theory, in brain sciences, in a deeper understanding of the environment, in new revelations about development, and (at last) in a genuine theory of intelligence. Nature and nurture in the nature-nurture debate have simply been opposite sides of the same coin, when what is really needed is a change of currency. Moreover, it is a new way of thinking that is also being galvanized by masses of new facts and findings. What I offer in this book is such an alternative.

It seems appropriate to start showing how the fuzziness of the boundaries between science and ideology, in the area of human potential, really lies in the haziness of its key underlying concepts. So I illustrate that in what immediately follows. Then in the rest of the chapter, I show how that haziness is being fatally glossed over in the contemporary exhuberance, pointing the way as I do so to aspects to be picked up in later chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 attempt to lift the fog around those (incredibly pervasive) ideas. The rest of the book will present the steps to the new way of thinking.

THE USEFULNESS OF OBSCURITY

The popular concept of human potential is, in fact, the perfect vehicle for turning ideology into science. The terminology that abounds today—such as “genes for” or “brain networks related to”—can make conclusions about potential sound quite convincing. But the scientific definitions of “potential” are no clearer than those of a standard dictionary: a “something” capable of becoming “something else,” a “capacity” for developing into something, the “possibility” of being or becoming, a “latent” quality, and so on.

It is precisely that ambiguity that makes the concept of human potential so prone to ideological infill and political rhetoric. It subtly weaves hope and fatalism into our unequal societies. It suggests that each of us might become more than we are now; but also that nature—the luck of the genetic dice—ensures there will be strict limits to it. The concept, in other words, is an ideological convenience that perfectly maintains the notion of innate differences and limits while framing the contemporary rhetoric about “equal opportunities” and “fulfilling our children’s potential.” This is reflected in the very concepts of intelligence, of the gene, and of the brain. A quick look should illustrate the point.

THE “g” PHANTOM

The contemporary scientific concept of intelligence is an offspring of that convenient vagueness: a hunch—something “obvious”—clothed in the precise language of science but with a murkier history.

Although Charles Darwin considered himself to be “rather below the common intelligence” (and had an undistinguished school and university career), he revealed to us the role of biological variation in heredity and evolution. His cousin, Francis Galton, who had inherited a fortune, and his place in the British upper class, seized on the idea to scientifically vindicate what, to him, was already quite obvious: that the class system so favoring him was a reflection of inherited natural ability. His interpretation of Darwin’s theory was that it finally quashed all “pretensions of natural equality” (as he put it in his book Hereditary Genius in 1876).

Galton soon turned this new biology of heredity into a social and political mission. He founded the Eugenics Society, with the aim of restricting reproduction to those with the most potential (as he perceived it). To make it scientific, and seemingly objective, though, he needed a scientific measure of potential. Such measure would serve, he argued, “for the indication of superior strains or races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Pinning Down Potential
• 2. Pretend Genes
• 3. Pretend Intelligence
• 4. Real Genes, Real Intelligence
• 5. Intelligent Development
• 6. How the Brain Makes Potential
• 7. A Creative Cognition
• 8. Potential Between Brains: Social Intelligence
• 9. Human Intelligence
• 10. Promoting Potential
• 11. The Problems of Education Are Not Genetic
• 12. Summary and Conclusions
• Notes
• Index