Know Your Place

Clarence Thomas bestie Harlan Crow has so many friends testifying to his good character.  As Law Boy Esq. put it on Twitter, "incredible to watch everyone on the right chime in with 'I am also financially intertwined with the billionaire Nazi guy'."

Among these friends is the notorious Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and other modern classics.  Murray declared that Crow's "decency, integrity, and kindness" are recognized by everyone who knows him, "[i]ncluding people of the left." (It would be interesting to know who some of those "people of the left" are, but it's not really important.) Murray even dedicated his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class to Crow.

I have to admit that much of what I'm seeing online about Thomas, Crow, and Murray is basically ragegasms, the opiate of liberals and the left.  The people throwing these tantrums don't know how mainstream Murray's views are, by which I mean that they are held not only by the right but by liberals and many leftists.

As I've pointed out before, people who are outraged by scientific rationalizations of race and sex are likely to embrace biological explanations of sexual orientation, gender and other "identity", mental illness, and alcoholism and other addictions.  Racial essentialism is making a comeback too, as shown by the popularity of DNA testing to trace people's "roots."

Murray has sometimes tried to minimize his interest in race, and to foreground the application of his methods and arguments to class.  It's on that issue that liberals agree with him, even if they're not aware of it.  Chris Hayes, the liberal pundit for MSNBC who occupies probably the farthest "left" position in American corporate media, wrote in his 2012 book on meritocracy, "First, kids are not created equal.  Some are much smarter than others.  And second, the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege.  That was the idea, anyway" (35), of Hunter College High School's competitive entrance exams to select superior students.  I pointed out in my discussion of his book that Hayes assumes that unequal smartness has something to with how kids are "created," and that the superior kids deserve an elite place in society. Not all liberals would agree with Hayes, but I don't have the impression that many even noticed the problematic position he took here.

It's not true that "the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege."  The privileges of wealth, race, and sex have always been justified on the basis of innate virtue.  If they weren't just naturally superior (so goes the claim), the rich, the male, the white wouldn't be on top of the heap; but a look at the Bushes, the Trumps, the Kennedys, the Buckleys, and other American elites should be enough to show that money buys the mediocre and even the inferior a lot of influence and power.  Charles Murray isn't the first social scientist to try to justify those social hierarchies on the basis of biology, and he won't be the last. Many have toiled in that vineyard, and though their fruits have been discredited many times over the past century, there's never a shortage of money to keep them toiling, nor of sensitive journalists who will promote their claims. 

I think that even fewer leftists would agree with Frederik DeBoer, who wrote in 2017 a tortured defense of biological stratification.  Soon after posting it, he deleted it and almost all of his online writing up to that point, so I'll draw here on the extensive quotations I used in my discussion.

To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?

I've been trying to find some quotations I remember from Charles Murray that looked very similar to this; no luck.  Murray admits that racism and sexism are real and deplorable, but they are receding, so differences in status and wealth will increasingly be due solely to innate and immutable differences in ability.  The result will be a 'natural' stratification in society as the genetically superior marry and live among their own kind.  It's all rather sad, but some are destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and presumably to live in squalor.  Being enlightened scientists, we don't blame them, but we can't pretend that they are as good as we are.

This is, of course, the traditional defense of racial and other hierarchies.  DeBoer was aware that the optics of his position were unfortunate, and he hastily denied that he had any such position in mind,  However:

The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,

All this may or may not be true.  But first, it's evasive.  While DeBoer strenuously distanced himself from racist or sexist or even classist interpretations of his "case," he seemed to be assuming that low-performing students pop up at random in any population.  How is society to know which kids should be encouraged, and which kids left to their own devices? He didn't say.  Later in this article DeBoer acknowledged that our "metrics" for academic talent are inadequate; he went on hiatus soon after he posted it, but he has returned, and has published a couple of books which apparently (judging from their Amazon listings and reviews) extend his position.  Maybe I'll get to them, maybe I won't.

A few years later I began reading the English novelist Miss Read, whose stories are set in a rural English village and narrated by a kindly but conservative English schoolmarm.  I think Miss Read would have agreed with DeBoer.  She's on the alert for the talented few who can be prepped for advancement to grammar school, but is content to teach most of her pupils no more than the three R's, because they just aren't capable of any more than that. If she were right, England should have remained a rural backwater, populated by barely literate farmers and shopkeepers and the schoolmarms who stuffed the ABCs into their reluctant brains.

But she was wrong.  Most of the kids I went to school with in the 1950s and 1960s, in a semi-rural Indiana town, looked to me like Miss Read's pupils looked to her.  But many or most of them went on to community college and beyond, learned accounting and computer and other skills, which if not intellectual are certainly academic.  What Miss Read and Frederik DeBoer don't seem to realize is that although you can map "achievement" on a graph and individuals may stay much the same relative to each other, the average goes up.  The mediocrities of today know a lot more than the mediocrities of a century ago.

[P.S. When I was much younger, I read some mid-20th-century popular books on the theory of relativity.  Their authors said that when Einstein first published his paper in 1905, it was considered so difficult that only a very few physicists could hope to understand it, but as time went on that changed, and relativity became a comparatively routine college physics subject.  Part of this was improved teaching as instructors assimilated the theory.  Part of it was due to the perceived difficulty of any new idea, which familiarity made easier to grasp.  Part of it may even have been guild protectionism, claiming that only the elect could or ever would understand.]

Another related example: When the first digital computers were developed, they were programmed by women - women who essentially created the field of programming.  What they did was considered easy, albeit drudgework that men shouldn't have to bother themselves by doing.  But eventually men moved into the field and women were driven out.  At that point programming came to be regarded as a very difficult, advanced intellectual task beyond the ability of women, something only men were capable of, and women fought their way back into the field with great difficulty against that assumption.  It wasn't the task that changed, or the academic abilities needed to carry it out.  For details, see Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).

There's also the little matter that some more intellectual subjects, like reading, writing, history, and others, are taught systematically so as to bore most students.  I say "systematically" because I don't know that anyone sat down and planned it that way, but the results are consistent.  When students are taught with better methods, they learn a lot more, and they learn it eagerly and with interest.  Whether DeBoer would consider that "plasticity," I don't know.  Nor does it matter.  

What matters here is that though DeBoer considers himself a leftist, he basically agrees with the educationally conservative (though condescendingly liberal, in a sense) Miss Read and the right-wing Charles Murray.  Murray's position, however much liberals may deplore it, is in reality one that they hold themselves in many cases.  That's why they react to the mere mention of his name with fury: it's easier than informing themselves and thinking about it.

Individual differences, however "profound," are not a problem.  Society needs differences.  If everybody were Einstein, there'd be no one to do everything that an Einstein doesn't, won't, or can't do.  Schooling should be oriented, not to finding the few who can tolerate boredom enough to learn intellectual skills, but to finding out what each student can do and helping them to learn to do it.  I cheerfully concede that there would be a lot of opposition to doing that, but it's not the result of individual differences.  I also think that DeBoer, Hayes, Miss Read, and their ilk exaggerate the difficulty of most of what must be learned.  The "metrics" we have can't tell us in advance what a child is capable of, though that's the holy grail of certain researchers (and mocked by Michael Young in his satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy). Such people are not the friends of human potential, but its opponents, and they can be found all over the political spectrum.

Racism Never Dies, It Just Fades Away for Awhile and Then Returns

I decided to read Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Professors Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, after Ta-Nehisi Coates recommended it, and so far, a hundred pages in, I'm very glad I did.  Just about every page has something instructive on it.  For example:

One of the present authors some years ago tested the limits of the free market in racist ideas.  A crotchety yet likable right-wing colleague approached, looking disquieted and in need of moral support.  He was "having trouble" with a certain black student in his bio-psychology class.  What was wrong, he wondered, with saying that "black people may, or (mind you) may not, prove to be intellectually inferior to white people?  In science, you frame a hypothesis, devise an experiment, find out."  The student raised her hand and, when recognized, blasted him.  "Do you know So-and-So (the student in question)?" asked the bio-psychologist.  (The author did happen to know the student in question, an eighteen-year-old single mother of twins who was as bright as they come and not one to brook insult.)  "Why can't she grasp that there's a scientific approach to things, blah, blah?"  Finally, the author put a question, "If, as you say, there is no hypothesis that science excludes, why not try this assignment?  Let your students pick any white ethnic group and any stereotype commonly applied to it, greedy, mendacious, dumb, drunken, gangsterish, and so on then formulate a hypothesis, design the experiment, find out."  The colleague's face froze.  [page 47 of the e-book]

Sounds like a great idea to me!  As it happens, I'm "multiracial" myself.  From what my parents told me when I was a kid, I am a mix of Teutonic, Celtic, and Mediterranean races.  I wonder what my fellow Irishman Andrew Sullivan, who likes to whine that Political Correctness has inhibited 'scientific' research into intelligence and race, would say to research investigating (and thereby legitimating) the link between the Celt and drunkenness, criminality, etc.  After all, we must follow Science wherever it leads, and in the good old days when (as Sullivan fantasizes) research into intelligence hadn't yet been "politicized," the mental and moral inferiority of certain white ethnic groups was considered not merely a suitable subject for scientific inquiry, but a proven fact.  And as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in a 1988 essay, ''In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites."

Racecraft isn't just entertaining, though: it shows the persistence of racist notions that I'd thought were abandoned, such as the "racial" classification of blood, which the Red Cross revived in 2010, and which has been championed by Project RACE, a group that seeks a US Census classification of "multiracial" because, it claims, it would "help to prevent mistaken diagnoses and thus 'save lives.'  In the early 1990s, a researcher repeatedly asked activists how a state-sponsored racial classification could possibly accomplish any such thing.  No one proffered an answer.  Indeed, no one seemed to have thought much, if at all, in terms of workaday cause and effect" (page 65).  And that reminds me of a white liberal pundit I read a few years ago (blessedly I've forgotten his name) who declared race is "as real as nappy hair."  Most of the people to whom I mentioned that absurdity couldn't see anything absurd about it; they thought it was obvious that hair texture is a "racial" trait.

Probably I'll have more to say about Racecraft soon.

The Magic Gene

Oh, my head hurts.  First my friend A linked to this article from a Canadian magazine decrying the growing anti-intellectualism of American life.  As far as I can tell, the differences between the US and Canada in that area are a matter of degree, not of kind.  And while it's perfectly okay for the People's Republic of Canuckistan to criticize America, the Chomsky/King principle would prioritize criticism of one's own country before lashing out at others.

There's a funny story about that, in fact, from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (The New Press, 2002):

Now, when I go to Canada, I do get asked onto mainstream national radio and television a lot, as distinct from here -- a lot.  But see, that's because I criticize the United States, and in Canada they like it when people come up and dump on the United States -- because the United States is always pushing them around all the time, so it's nice if somebody comes and says how rotten the United States is once in a while.  On the other hand, I got sick of this a couple of times, and I started talking about Canada -- and I was off so fast you couldn't even see it ...

There's this nationwide talk radio show in Canada which everybody tunes in some time in the morning, and every time I'd go into Toronto they would invite me to come on that show.  So we'd have whatever it is, fifteen minutes, and this guy would ask me some leading questions, I'd tell him how rotten the United States is, big smile.

Well, one time I got really sick of this, and I started talking about Canada ...

Then I said something about Canada and the Vietnam War -- Canada was always denouncing the United States during the Vietnam War for its criminal actions, meanwhile Canada was probably the leading military exporter in the world per capita, enriching itself on the destruction of Indochina.  So I mentioned some of this stuff.  He went off into kind of a tantrum.  I actually thought it was sort of funny, but apparently his listeners didn't -- when I left, about ten minutes of listening to this harangue, the producer, quivering, stopped me and said: "Oh my god, the switchboard's lighting up, we're getting thousands of phone calls from all over Canada."

And apparently the phone calls were just about the fact that this guy Gzowski was being impolite -- I don't know if people agreed with me particularly, but there were a lot of people who were very angry about the way he was going about it.  Like I said, I thought it was comical, it didn't bother me ... 

Anyway, they made a big effort, they called me up in Boston, and we went through another show -- in which Gzowski was very contrite and quiet, just to make it up to the audience.  But that was the last time I ever heard from them; I've never been asked on that show with him again.

And that's happened to me elsewhere in Canada too, I should say -- I mean, I've been invited to universities in Canada where they've literally refused to pay my plane fare after I gave talks in which I denounced Canada.  So you know, Canada's very nice as long as you're criticizing the United States -- try going after Canada and see what happens to you [289-90].

Notice that Chomsky isn't complaining here about people being mean to him; he's just pointing out that "the media system works the same in both countries" (290-1).  You can get on mainstream US television and denounce other countries, especially official enemies, to your heart's content, with no requirement of factual accuracy or rationality.  You can even denounce the US government, if you're a Republican, and you'll get airtime and sympathetic treatment, which tells us something about the actual orientation of our corporate media.  But certain criticisms may not be uttered in their precincts.

This doesn't in itself mean that the criticisms by Jonathan Gatehouse, the article's author, are necessarily inaccurate, only that he's not sticking his neck out.  As far as I can see, some of his accusations are accurate, others are not.  Much of what he complains about has nothing to do with intelligence or the intellect.  For example:

The cost of a simple appendectomy in the United States averages $33,000 and it’s not uncommon for such bills to top six figures. More than 15 per cent of the population has no health insurance whatsoever. Yet efforts to fill that gaping hole via the Affordable Health Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remain distinctly unpopular. Nonsensical myths about the government’s “real” intentions have found so much traction that 30 per cent still believe that there will be official “death panels” to make decisions on end-of-life care.

True, the US health care system is not in good shape.  But it's false that "efforts to fill that gaping hole" are "distinctly unpopular."  As has often been pointed out, the majority of Americans favor a universal single-payer system -- like Canada's -- or a national health service like Britain's, despite a determined propaganda campaign against them.  (And those socialistic systems are themselves under attack, so far unsuccessful but determined and unrelenting, in their own countries.)  The enemies of real health care reform in the US are not the general population, but our elites, like President Obama, who jeer at the idea of turning the US into Canada.  The ACA is basically a negotiated treaty between the American people and the health insurance industry and Big Pharma.  And despite the right's propaganda campaign, the ACA has evidently been pretty successful so far.  This is not exactly news unless you rely for your information on the usual suspects, namely the US corporate media and certain liberal outliers.  It appears that Gatehouse did exactly that, which doesn't speak well for his intellectual capacity.

The rest of the article is more of the same: Oh noes!  Many Americans don't believe in Evolution!  American students are falling behind the rest of the civilized world!  George W. Bush and Sarah Palin drop their G's!  Even Obama does!  The NSA!  Soundbytes!  Twitter!  LOLcats!  Oh noes!  Most of this is either false, dubious, or irrelevant.  Gatehouse has simply gone to the same well as those he criticizes:

Most perplexing, however, is where the stupid is flowing from. As conservative pundit David Frum recently noted, where it was once the least informed who were most vulnerable to inaccuracies, it now seems to be the exact opposite. “More sophisticated news consumers turn out to use this sophistication to do a better job of filtering out what they don’t want to hear,” he blogged.

It should be remembered where David Frum originally flowed from: Canada.  And he's hardly a reliable source, considering his participation in the American Right from the Reagan administration to Bush II.  From time to time he'll pull himself up short and weep great remorseful tears over what he has wrought, such as his 1995 jeremiad Dead Right (Basic Books), but then he goes back and does some more.  And given the history of American wack, I am skeptical of Frum's claim, seconded by Gatehouse, that "it was once the least informed who were most vulnerable to inaccuracies."  Frum may not be aware of American elites' fondness for end-times Christianity (search for Boyer in that post), but he should know about their anti-Semitism, which kept Jewish students and faculty out of Ivy League and other elite institutions.

Then today I got a link to this article at In These Times.  It's more of the same, a review of a recent book that attempts to rehabilitate scientific racism yet again.  But the durability of scientific racism, whatever you can say about it, is simply not a sign of anti-intellectual or anti-science heresy.  Quite the contrary: it means that people like science and respect it and want its support and prestige for their beliefs.  Does Jonathan Marks, the reviewer, realize just how intimately entwined scientific racism has been with Darwinian theory, historically speaking?  It doesn't look like it.

Not too surprisingly, Marks is an anthropologist.  Anthropologists have been among the most consistent critics of scientific racism, from the great Franz Boas onward, so they have been accused by proponents of scientific racism of (what else?) hostility to science, trying to make reality conform to their fuzzy-brained hippy-dippy politically-correct fantasies.  (The very first comment under Marks's review takes this tack, I see.)  This has been such a satisfying tactic that proponents of scientific racism use it even on fellow biologists, geneticists, and other lab-oriented scientists.

This doesn't mean that all humanities-oriented critiques of scientific racism have been well-made.  (The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.)  I wonder what Marks thinks of the attempts to prove a genetic basis for homosexuality, for example.  Many people who vehemently reject scientific racism applied to "race" and gender will embrace it when it "proves" that homosexuality is a biological condition, and those who attack that project mostly content themselves with babble about "social construction," a concept they don't seem to understand.  This isn't always true -- the anthropologist Roger Lancaster did a fine job dismantling scientific racism in The Trouble With Nature: Sex and Science in Popular Culture (California, 2003), for example -- but it seems to be the hegemonic response nowadays.  That's not anti-intellectualism, of course: such people are the very model of a modern intellectual.  They just don't do intellectualism very well.  But few people ever have, and Jonathan Marks and Jonathan Gatehouse aren't exceptions to the rule.

Here's an interesting observation from Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature (196):

Far from providing the occasion for self-evident truths or stable understandings, the question of reproduction actually seems ripe for mythical thinking and magical investments.  (In a place no more exotic than my native North Carolina, for example, I have met many people – some of whom work in hospitals, are familiar with medical models of reproduction, and understand how ultrasound works – who believe that a child’s sex is not fixed until moments before birth, and who thus urge expecting mothers to eat certain foods and to avoid engaging in certain activities so as to influence the sex of the child.)

In other words, magical thinking and scientific training are not mutually exclusive.  Magical thinking is part of our evolutionary heritage, after all, and magic isn't incompatible with the intellect -- indeed, intelligent and intellectual people constructed elaborate systems of magic in all cultures.  You don't achieve intellectual consistency by disavowing magic, crossing your fingers, spitting over your shoulder, and sprinkling salt on a bird's tail.

The weird thing, and another example of magical thinking, is that both Marks and Gatehouse talk as though there was a time when the intellect was universally respected, when all educated people were rigorously logical, and everyone sought a good scientific education.  I don't know of any such time; this frame for their arguments indicates that what drives them is not intellect or science, but a very common, non-rational nostalgia for a Golden Age that never was.  It quickly became clear as I read their diatribes that they called any idea they didn't like "anti-intellectual"; it's hard to imagine a clearer case of anti-intellectualism at work.

Going back to Gatehouse: Are Canadians anti-intellectual or pro-intellectual?  By Gatehouse's standards, it would appear that they're intellectual when their insecurities are being stroked by criticism of the Great Satan to the South, and anti-intellectual when they refuse to countenance criticism of their own country.  Maybe "anti-intellectualism" isn't the right conceptual tool for the job.

Smite the Amalekites

Intriguing little article here about former child star Kirk Cameron (later of the Left Behind movies) joining the campaign against Darwin and evolution. I liked this bit:

The 50-page intro [to the selections from Darwin's Origin of Species], written by evangelist author Ray Comfort, will present a "balanced view of Creationism with information from scientists who actually believe God created the universe." Those scientists include Albert Einstein and a host of thinkers whose lives predated 'The Origin of Species,' such as Isaac Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus.

It's open to question whether Einstein actually believed that "God created the universe" -- Einstein's concept of God was that of Baruch Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue for his heretical views. "In [his later philosophical] works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. Can there be any mystery as to why one of history's boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community?" I think Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort would side with the synagogue rather than with Spinoza or Einstein.

It's also well-established by now, thanks to James R. Moore's The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge, 1979) and David Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders (Eerdman, 1987), that the initial Christian response to The Origin of Species was often quite positive, and that among the Christians who embraced Darwin's theory were such exemplars of conservative evangelical thought as Benjamin Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary. (The Theopedia article on Warfield, significantly, forgets to mention Warfield's embrace of Natural Selection.)

Comfort's introduction "paints Darwin as both racist and misogynistic and explicitly highlights 'Adolph Hitler's undeniable connection to the theory.'" This is a hot-button topic, of course: it's okay for evangelists and teabaggers to play the Hitler card, but not for anyone else, and Comfort's historical sloppiness about Einstein should warn the public to be skeptical about anything else he says. The Hitler connection is tricky, and of course contemporary Darwinists will reflexively deny it. In a new English translation of his 2001 book The Pure Society from Darwin to Hitler (Verso Books, 2009), the historian of science Andre Pichot undermines the denial, though not in a way that will give any comfort to today's Creationists or Intelligent Designers. (Thanks to Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb for bringing Pichot to my attention with this post.)

The eugenic laws that were enacted by Hitler and his regime didn't derive directly from Darwin, but they were endorsed by many if not most Darwinian biologists of the early 20th century, who connected them to Darwinian theory. It's important to remember that forced sterilization of the "unfit" and "inferior" began not in Hitler's Germany but in the United States -- the first such law was passed in Indiana in 1907. As Pichot writes (page 179),

It is probable, therefore, that even without the Nazis, Germany would at some point or other have adopted and put into effect legislation of this kind. Besides, it was only the Catholic Church that made any institutional protest, particularly in the person of the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen – whom we shall meet again later on, and who condemned eugenic sterilization in a pastoral declaration of 29 January 1937.

Comfort's guilt-by-association doesn't work very well in any case. Pichot reminds us that eugenic research in the US and Germany was supported by

fairly characteristic individuals and groups: Krupp (steel and armaments), Harriman (railways), Carnegie (steel), Rockefeller (petrol), Wickliffe Draper (textiles), to list only the names already encountered. The mildest comment would be that these fairy godparents who watched over the cradle of eugenics made a mistake in their philanthropic aim, and that the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of Nazi biology is at the very least a sign of a certain blindness – comparable to that of the Carnegie Institution, which did not put an end to the eugenic activity at Cold Spring Harbor until 1940, when the laboratory was drifting into becoming a centre of Nazi propaganda. ... [185]

And to the extent that this work involved reputable scientists rather than mere fantasists, there was no reason why Rockefeller should not fund it. After all, a journal as prestigious as Nature published in 1936 an article signed E. W. M. (perhaps E. W. MacBride), which proposed to resolve social problems by way of social sterilization, with a view to punishing people who appealed to state aid for raising their children [188].

Worse still for the Creationists, some of the same wealthy philanthropists who funded the eugenic research that Hitler used as a springboard for the Final Solution, also funded and supported "end-time prophecy" work in the US. Paul Boyer wrote in And Time Shall Be No More (Harvard, 1992, page 100):

Nor did premillennialism in the 1865-1920 years appeal solely to the poor and disaffected; it also found support among the middle classes, the well-to-do, and even the elite. The signers of an 1891 memorial to President Benjamin Harrison written by premillennialist William Blackstone and urging support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine included Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Two Los Angeles oilmen, Lyman and Milton Stewart, financed the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals. Chicago department-store owner John Pirie hosted Cyrus Scofield's annual Bible conferences at Sea Cliff, Pirie's estate on Long Island. The head of the Quaker Oats Company, Henry Crowell, chaired the board of trustees of the Moody Bible Institute. Large middle-class Baptist and Presbyterian churches in New York, St. Louis, Boston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and many other cities were bastions of premillennialism in these years. As Ian Rennie has written, dispensationalism attracted some of the most outstanding evangelicals of the day – and some of the wealthiest. Whatever else may be said of, belief in an imminent Second Coming, in punishment of the wicked, and in a Millennium when the injustices of the present age will be set right, cannot be dismissed -- in the Middle Ages, in the pre- World War I, era, or in the late twentieth century -- as merely the desperate creed of the disinherited.

And why not? As Boyer also points out (page 95), "Some interpreters even saw union-made labels as the Mark of the Beast."

B. B. Warfield, the Calvinist divine who embraced Darwin's theory, was anti-racist and used evolutionary theory to argue for the unity of the human species. (See Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders, page 120-1.) Proto-creationists like the geologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz, on the other hand, were often explicitly racist; Agassiz defended slavery, and his writings were used by slaveowners to justify their lifestyle. (It wasn't until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 when the SBC seceded from the mainstream Baptists, repudiated its original defense of slavery and racism.)

Pichot doesn't mention misogyny in connection with Darwin, but though it wouldn't surprise me, it should be a point in his favor where conservative Christians are concerned. Pichot says that like his contemporary and co-inventor of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Wallace, "Darwin himself shows an astonishing (and very Victorian) mixture of religious moralism and intellectual poverty, along with a colonialist racism quite lacking in soul" (85). As for racism, Pichot quotes (63) Darwin from The Descent of Man (689 in the 2004 Penguin edition):

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many … For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Again, this is not the kind of racism that most conservative Christians, either in Darwin's day or the present, would object to. Considering what Christian English and American society were like then, or now, complaints about savages torturing their enemies, offering up bloody sacrifices (read the history of European war for the bloody sacrifice of millions of human lives in the cause of Christianity and democracy), subjecting their women, knowing no decency, or haunted by gross superstitions obviously boomerang on Darwin. And on today's Christian Right: has Cameron or Comfort had anything to say about the use of torture by the Bush administration, for example?

Coming from American Christians, complaints about Darwin's racism ring especially false. The Protestants who colonized the English colonies were quite happy to equate the original inhabitants of the land they claimed with the Canaanites and Amalekites, to be exterminated without compunction or mercy, and their present-day successors haven't really repudiated that view, preferring at most to try to ignore it. Pichot also quotes Wallace from his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (Macmillan, 1875, 318-319), which he says Darwin praised in The Descent of Man:

It is the same great law of “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”, which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come into contact. The red Indian in North America, and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die out, not from any one special cause, but from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical, qualities of the European are superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary population, to his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of more rapid increase, -- enable him when in contact with the savage man, to conquer him in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense, just as the better adapted, increase at the expense of the less adapted varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, -- just as the weeds of Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native productions by the inherent vigour of their organization, and by their greater capacity for existence and multiplication.

Pichot comments acidly, "We might of course remind Wallace that many American and African plants were introduced to Europe and prospered (which is more than people from these lands ever did), but the suspicion is that the purpose of the botanical comparison is simply to naturalize the extermination of indigenous Americans and Australians, reducing this to as natural a phenomenon as the disappearance of a plant in a habitat colonized by another" (56). The trouble with Wallace and Darwin, then, is not that they broke with Christianity, but they didn't break with it decisively enough. But given the divisions on race among both Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, it's clear that Pichot is right to say (page 266) that "As we have already seen in the case of eugenics, Darwinian genetic theories were an inexhaustible sophistry, on the basis of which anything and everything could be justified." You could say the same thing about Christianity.

We Must, We Must, We Must Work On Our Bust!

I’ve read the first fifty pages of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape (MIT Press, 2000), and already some interesting themes have begun to emerge. The book attracted a lot of attention on publication, partly because of the authors’ media blitz (appearances on CNN, NPR, NBC, etc.), and because of their recommendation that rape could be curtailed if boys had to take classes on rape prevention before they got their driver’s license, and if girls would stop wearing tight sweaters. Why am I not surprised that with wisdom like that, the first printing of 10,000 sold out in a month?

A Natural History of Rape begins with Thornhill and Palmer hiding behind the skirts of evolutionary psychologist Margo Wilson, who assures the reader solemnly:

Rape is horrific for women. The mere thought of rape arouses anxiety, revulsion, and anger, so it is not surprising that women are very ambivalent about subjecting rape to scientific scrutiny….

The authors of A Natural History of Rape are familiar with various expressions of such ambivalence, and they understand why women are so anxious. As scientists, they value knowledge and assume that trying to understand why rape occurs is far more beneficial for women in the long term even if the scientific inquiry inspires anxiety and revulsion. …

They passionately embrace the scientific method … [ix-x]

…but, I feel certain, only with the scientific method’s full and informed consent. On the next page, Thornhill and Palmer (henceforth T&P) chime in with the Boy Scout Oath, clean, thrifty, brave, reverent, and hairy-palmed:

As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human life, we hold that the ability to accomplish such a change is directly correlated with how much is known about the causes of human behavior. In contrast, mistaken notions about what causes rape are almost guaranteed to hinder its prevention.

Unfortunately, there is, as the zoologist Patricia Gowaty (1997, 1) puts it, a “troublesome antipathy of modern society, including many feminists, to science and scientific discourse.” [xi]

It’s not clear why the authors must dwell on the supposed “troublesome antipathy … to science and scientific discourse” in “modern society.” After all, there is a troublesome antipathy to feminism, and to women in general, in modern society. While American science no longer enjoys the almost unquestioned access to money that it did during the Cold War, it is still extremely prestigious and very well funded, compared to education or other social services that directly benefit the bulk of the US population. Even pseudoscientists try to dress themselves up in the trappings of science – the white coats, the mathematical formulas, the test tubes and other instruments. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, not antipathy, and one might say the same of Western science’s historical appropriation of the forms of magic and religion to bolster its own claims to authority.

But anyway. After the breastbeating over the lack of respect science gets nowadays, A Natural History of Rape proceeds to a basic explanation of evolutionary psychology. T&P stress that there’s no simple dichotomy between genes and environment, nature and culture.

The interaction of genes and environment in development is too intimate to be separated into “genes” and “environment.” Not only is it meaningless to suggest that any trait of an individual is environmentally or genetically “determined”; it is not even valid to talk of a trait as “primarily” genetic or environmental. However, since “biological” actually means “of or pertaining to life,” it is quite valid to claim that any phenotypic trait of an organism is biologically, or evolutionarily, determined…. Genes per se are not evaluated by selection. Instead, it is the interaction of genes and environment that selection evaluates. … Both the environmental and the genetic causes reflect evolutionary history, and equally so [21].

So far so good. As I read this, though, I realized that it was familiar. I had first learned about the inseparability of genes and environment by reading people like Ruth Hubbard and Richard Lewontin – distinguished biologists who are sharply critical of evolutionary psychology and its near relative sociobiology. While they differ in their interpretation of the evidence, they can hardly be accused of “antipathy … to science and scientific discourse.” This doesn’t stop Thornhill and Palmer from referring to every scientist who takes a different tack from theirs as “non-evolutionary” or even “anti-evolutionary,” though this leads to problems, as here:

Claims that cultural inheritance is independent of biological inheritance, whether made by non-evolutionary social scientists or by evolutionary biologists (Dawkins 1976 [The Selfish Gene!]… ), are erroneous. Culture is not the “superorganic” force that some social scientists have claimed it to be. Nor, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995) has pointed out, does culture consist of ideas (called memes) that parasitize minds independent of psychological (biological) adaptation, as certain biologists have claimed [27].

If even arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins is guilty of ignoring the universal power of biology, then perhaps T&P should cut some slack to those supposedly “non-evolutionary social scientists.” Critics of evolutionary psychology have also criticized meme theory, and that second sentence is clumsy, to say the least. It seems to say that Daniel Dennett is among the critics of meme theory, but as far as I can tell he’s one of its advocates. And if “certain biologists” regard culture as somehow independent of biology, then again, we’re dealing not with a division between pro- or anti-science, but with disagreements within science.

T&P point out the difference between evolutionary adaptations and “by-products.” The red color of blood, for example, is not thought to be the result of natural selection; it’s due to the “chemistry of hemoglobin in blood, and human color vision.” They insist that “When one is considering any feature of living things, whether evolution applies is never a question. The only legitimate question is how to apply evolutionary principles. This is the case for all human behaviors – even for such by-products as cosmetic surgery, the content of movies, legal systems, and fashion trends” (11). Hmmmm. This seems reasonable enough, though their choice of examples is telling. It’s no less true that feminism, abortion, contraception, the social sciences, “the Left,” and anti-science “ideology” are by-products of evolution. Though our boys T&P, like so many scientists, like to imagine that they are free of “ideology,” their pure untrammeled science displays a certain pro-male bias: what men do is just natural, thanks perhaps to our “human evolutionary history of stronger sexual selection acting on males than on females” (11), while what women do is ideological – but then ideology too, on T&P’s assumptions, is ultimately biological.

It seems to me that T&P rely very heavily on an ambiguity in the writing of their targets:

Is the socially learned behavior known as culture still biological and subject to the only general biological theory – evolution by selection? A common justification for rejecting evolutionary explanations of human behavior is that it is not, and that hence it requires an entirely different approach. This view was expressed recently by the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling …: “I have found it useful to try to separate discussions of sociobiological approaches to the study of animal behavior from the application of such approaches to human behavior. I do this, not because I believe in a special, non-evolutionary creation for humans. Rather, I think that the evolution of culture has enormously complicated the task of understanding human behavior and development” [24].

Now, “feminist biologist” Fausto-Sterling’s disavowal of belief in a “special, non-evolutionary creation for humans” might be as disingenuous as T&P’s disavowal of ideology, but I don’t think it is. Even T&P acknowledge that not every feature of culture is the result of adaptation:

At one extreme are certain cultural behaviors, such as an individual’s adoption of a new hairstyle, that show no evidence of design by natural selection. Although a hairstyle is a by-product of numerous underlying psychological adaptations (perhaps concerning status, mate preferences, and/or visual acuity), a particular new hairstyle in itself cannot be considered an adaptation. At the other extreme are cultural behaviors that may have been copied for hundreds or even thousands of generations, thus implying the replication of both the genes involved and the environmental influence of the behavior of other individuals in each generation. In addition to language, such extremely traditional cultural behaviors include aspects of child care (feeding and caring), systems of kinship identification (kin terms, descent names, clan markings [!?]), techniques for manufacturing stone tools, hunting strategies, religious rituals, mating practices, and systems of punishment [27-28].

If a hostile critic were to yank sentences out of their context in this passage, they could be made to suggest that T&P believe culture is independent of biology. I think they are confused, however, on what is involved here. For example, I accept that the human capacity for language is a biological adaptation, but the fact that I speak English and not (say) Chinese is not the result of biological differences between me and a Chinese speaker, and it’s fair to say that it’s the result of forces that can reasonably be called “purely cultural”: when and where I was born, and the language I heard in early childhood. Those cultural forces can be said to rest on a biological substrate, and so aren’t “independent” of biology in that sense, but for purposes of analysis, scholars and scientists often (usually? always?) separate things that aren’t really separable: consider the range of medical specialties that focus on different systems of the human body as if they were independent of each other, though hopefully the specialists are aware on some level that they are all linked together. It’s possible that someday biologists will be able to explain the variety of human languages in biological terms, but if I want to understand Chinese, I don’t need to change my biology, I start studying Chinese.

I think Fausto-Sterling understands this distinction; it’s interesting that T&P apparently can’t. While their inability might be due to biology, I think it’s the result of ideology, the belief that the only meaningful explanations of differences among human beings must be biological – or to put it another way, they focus their inquiry on the biological “extreme” of the continuum they posit in that last quotation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing unless it causes them to forget the cultural extreme whose reality they concede – but it does cause them to do so, and to project their own ideological blindness onto their opponents.

There’s a reason for what scientists like Wilson, Gowaty, Thornhill and Palmer call an antipathy to science and scientific discourse in modern society: it’s the fact that scientists have so often claimed to know more than they do, and to make recommendations for social policy on the basis of that knowledge, only to have their “knowledge” crumble under further examination. Books like Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984), by Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, or Fausto-Sterling’s Myths of Gender (expanded edition, Harper, 1992), have exposed some of these bogus claims, much to the fury of biological reductionists. Steven Pinker, for example, has said that the very title of Not in Our Genes is proof that its authors believe that human beings are “blank slates.” Here Pinker’s just falling again into the either-or trap, assuming that a rejection of false claims about human biology is a rejection of all claims. Given the history of biological reductionism, I think it’s not unfair to urge that the burden of proof lies on its advocates. But given the ideology that science is self-correcting and that scientists’ claims should be subjected to criticism by their peers, it’s probably not surprising that biological reductionists should prefer to attack their critics’ supposed ideology, rather than answer the criticism. After all, their scientific forefathers did the same.

The embarrassing history of eugenics in the 20^th century is a prime example of this pattern. Each succeeding generation of biologists tries to distance itself from its predecessors, often simply by changing the name of their research program while leaving the substance untouched. They deplore their predecessors’ ideological blind spots, while assuring the public that this time they are free of such biases, unlike their wishful-thinking critics who are afraid to face the findings of true science. They have no biases or ideology; if you don’t like what they have to say, it’s because of your anti-scientific ideology, blah blah blah – all very familiar from the last turn of the wheel. Since so many of the targets of these biologists are other biologists, it’s fair to presume that the disputes are not between ideology and fact, or between science and anti-science, but between differing interpretations of the evidence by scientists themselves. That Thornhill and Palmer deliberately chose to frame the debate as an ideological one doesn’t inspire confidence in their work.