Gould

 “Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political ­retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government ­spending on social programmes, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power.”

Stephen Jay Gould

“What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked? Why struggle and spend to raise the unboostable IQ of races or social classes at the bottom of the economic ladder? - better simply to accept nature's unfortunate dictates and save a passel of federal funds. (We can then more easily sustain tax breaks for the wealthy!) Why bother yourself about underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in your honored and remunerative bailiwick if such absence records the diminished ability or general immorality, biologically imposed, of most members in the rejected group, and not the legacy or current reality of social prejudice?

The new upsurge of biological determinism in this century constitutes one of the saddest ironies of U.S. history. We like to think of America as a land with generally egalitarian traditions, a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." We recognize, au contraire, that many European nations, with their long histories of monarchy, feudal order, and social stratification, have been less committed to ideals of social justice or equality of opportunity. Since the IQ test originated in France, we might naturally assume that the false hereditarian interpretations, so commonly and so harmfully imposed upon the tested, arose in Europe. Ironically, this reasonable assumption is entirely false.

Alfred Binet, the French inventor, not only avoided a hereditarian interpretation of his test, but explicitly (and fervently) warned against such a reading as a perversion of his desire to use the tests for identifying children who needed special help. (Binet argued that an innatist interpretation would only stigmatize children as unteachable, producing a result opposite to his intent - a fear entirely and tragically justified by later history.)

The hereditarian interpretation of IQ arose in America, largely through proselytization of the three psychologists - H. H. Goddard, L. M. Terman, and R. M. Yerkew - who translated and popularized the tests in this country. If we ask how such a perversion could occur in our land of liberty and justice for all, we must remember that the years just following World War I, the time of peak activity for these scientists, featured a narrow, parochial, jingoistic, isolationist, "nativist" (WASP, not Indian), rally-round-the-flag, tinhorn patriotism unmatched by any other period during our century, even in the heyday of McCarthyism during the early 1950s. This was the age of restriction upon immigration, the spread of Jewish quotas, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the height of lynchings in the Southern states. Interestingly, most of the men who built biodeterminism in the 1920s recanted their own conclusions during the liberal swing of the 1930s, when Ph.D.s walked depression breadlines and poverty could no longer be explained by innate stupidity.

The two most recent episodes also correlate with political swings. Arthur Jensen launched the first of these in 1969, with a notoriously fallacious article on the supposed innateness of group differences in IQ (with emphasis on disparity between whites and blacks in America). His chilling opening line belied all his later claims that he had only published as a disinterested scholar, and not as a man with a social agenda. He began with an explicit attack upon the federal Head Start program: "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." Richard Herrnstein fired a second major salvo in 1971, with an article in the Atlantic Monthly that became the outline and epitome of The Bell Curve.

In analyzing why Jensen's piece became such a cause celébre, we must turn to social context. Since Jensen's article contained no novel argument, we must seek the newly fertile soil that allowed such an old and ever-present seed to germinate.

I am no social pundit, and my view on this issue may be naive. But I well remember these politically active times of my youth. I recall the growth of opposition to the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (and the fear inspired by attendant urban riots), the stepping down of Lyndon Johnson, inside and outside strife at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention of 1968, and the resulting election of Richard Nixon as president - with the onset of a conservative reaction that always engenders renewed attention for the false and old, but now again useful, arguments of biological determinism.

The third major episode then kicked off in 1994, with the publication of The Bell Curve. The book contained nothing new, though the authors spun out the old arguments over 800 pages filled with copious charts and graphs that bamboozle people into confusing both novelty and profundity with their fear of incomprehension. When I met Charles Murray in debate at Harvard's Institute of Politics, I could only think to begin with a favorite line from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost: "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."

The remarkable impact of The Bell Curve must therefore, and once again as always, be recording a swing of the political pendulum to a sad position that requires a rationale for affirming social inequalities as dictates of biology”.

Stephen Jay Gould