Download EDITORIAL On Genetic Fundamentalism

EDITORIAL
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 USA in the Deep South in the
early 1900s. A reaction to modernism, the Fundamentals of the Bible were
widely circulated in a response to the increasing impoverishment of the
American agricultural South relative to the industrial North. Central to the
Christian fundamentalism of the USA 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 nineteenth
century to industrialized murder in the twentieth, to Saddam Hussein and the
invasion of Iraq in the twenty-first. 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 USA, with its bid for equal time in American 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 utilizes 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.
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In the USA in the 1880s, Francis Amasa Walker, the third president of MIT,
whose death in 1897 produced obituaries in 150 American 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 nineteenth 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 be very few 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 give them up, if at all, only 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 aeroplanes 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 eighty 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 IQ
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
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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 will
not 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 thirty years,
quavers when putting it forward as a myth.
Once we can recognize 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.
An A–Z of Genetic Fundamentalism
Aggression
Science (1993). Research News. Evidence found of a possible ‘aggression gene’. Science,
260: 1722–1723.
Alcoholism
Noble, E. P., & Blum, K. (1991). The dopamine D2 receptor gene and alcoholism.
Journal of the American Medical Association, 265: 2667.
Anti-ssemitism
MacDonald, K. (1998). Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. New York:
Praeger.
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Anxiety
Lesch, K.-P., Bengel, D., Heils, A., Sabol, S. Z., Greenberg, B. D., Petri, S., Benjamin, J.,
Müller, C. R., Hamer, D. H., & Murphy, D. L. (1996). Association of anxiety-related
traits with a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region.
Science, 274: 1527–1531, 1483.
Autism
Random samples (1997). A gene is linked to autism. Science, 276: 905
News Focus (2001). New hints into the biological basis of autism. Science, 294: 34–37.
Bi-p
polar
Egleland, J. A., Gerhard, D. S., Pauls, D. L., et al. (1987). Bipolar affective disorder
linked to chromosome markers on chromosome 11. Nature, 325: 783–787.
Black athletes
Entine, J. (2000). Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid
to Talk About It. New York: Public Affairs
Criminal behaviour
News and comment (1994). Violence study hits a nerve in Germany. Science, 264: 653.
Felsenthal, E. (1994). Man’s genes made him kill, his lawyers claim. Wall Street Journal,
November 1: B1–B5.
Genius
McCrone, J. (1993). Is there a gene for genius? Independent on Sunday, 2 May: 52–53.
Homosexuality
Hamer, D. H., Hu, S., Magnuson, V. L., Hu, N., & Pattatucci, A. M. L. (1993). A linkage
between DNA markers on the X chromosome and male sexual orientation. Science,
261: 291, 321–327.
Research News (1992). Twin study links genes to homosexuality. Science, 255: 33.
Hyperactivity
Random samples (1993). Hyperactivity tied to gene defect. Science, 260: 295.
Intelligence
Plomin, Robert (1999), Genetics and general cognitive ability. Nature, 402: 25–29.
Briefings (1991). On the trail of genes for IQ. Science, 253: 1352.
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Male and female brains
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and
Female Brain. London: Allen Lane.
Mental illness
Features (2003). Decoding mental illness. Science, 302: 2039.
Promiscuity
Barash, D. P., & Lipton, J. E. (2001). The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in
Animals and People. San Francisco, CA: Freeman.
Vedantam, S. (2003). Desire and DNA: is promiscuity innate? Washington Post, 1
August, p. A01.
Rape
Thornhill, R., & Palmer, C. T. (2000). A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of
Sexual Coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Burn, J. (2000). Is the unspeakable truth about rape that it is natural? Times, 23 January.
Schizophrenia
DeLisi, L. E., & Felischmaker, W. (2007). Schizophrenia research in the era of the
genome. In: J. A. Liberman, T. S. Tropu, & D. O. Perkins (Eds.), The American
Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Schizophrenia (pp. 109–110). Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric Publishing.
Sullivan, P. F., Owen, M. J., O’Donovan, M. C., & Freedman, R. (2007). Genetics and
schizoprenia. In: J. A. Liberman, T. S. Tropu, & D. O. Perkins (Eds.), The American
Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Schizophrenia (pp. 39–53). Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric Publishing.
Sex crimes
News (2001). Y-chromosome analysis urged for sex crimes. Nature, 413: 6.
Spite
Reynolds, J. (2004). Spite? It’s all down to nasty genes. Scotsman, 3 September.
Xenophobia
Hamilton, W. D. (1975). Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach from evolutionary
genetics. In: R. Fox (Ed.), Biosocial Anthropology (pp. 133–153). London: Malaby
Press.
Editorial