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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. Editorial viii Attachment 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 Joseph Schwartz Attachment ix 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. Editorial x Attachment 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. Joseph Schwartz Attachment xi 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