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Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run

Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run By Edward M. Miller, PhD

This paper originally appeared in Research in Biopolitics, Vol. 5, Steven A. Peterson
and Al Somit, Eds., Greenwich, Connecticut; JAI Press, 1997, p. 391-416.

Paper requested for Recent Explorations in Biology and Politics.
Al Somit & Steven A. Peterson, Ed. JAI Press

Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run
by Edward M. Miller, PhD
Department of Economics and Finance
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, La. 70148

April 8, 1997

There is a simple economic argument for eugenics. Eugenics is defined as efforts to improve the gene pool in a particular population. Standard micro-economic theories of wages hold that a worker's wage equals the marginal product of his working time. Much textbook discussion of his marginal product focus on the quantities of cooperating factors: capital, land, and natural resources which labor has to work with. However, another important determinant is the worker's attributes and abilities. There is evidence that these are strongly affect by his genes (see below). It follows that efforts to maximize a nation's standard of living should try to improve its citizens' genetic quality, especially with regard to intelligence and other economically important traits. Improving the genetic quality of citizens calls for having those carrying the genes for desirable traits (as evidenced by their possession of the traits themselves) producing more than their proportionate share of that nation's children.

A secondary economic goal is to minimize the externalities in the economy resulting from the activities of one citizen affecting another citizen. An example would be minimizing the amounts that must be expended on welfare for those unable to earn the socially established minimum standard of living. Such people may be on welfare because of disease and handicaps, because low intelligence or personality problems make it hard to find and retain jobs, or because of drug addiction and alcoholism. Many of these conditions have an important genetic component.

Another important externality is criminal activity. Again it is known that from adoption studies and other sources that criminality has a significant genetic component (Rowe & Osgood, 1984; Lynn, 1996). As a result, an eugenics program can hope to reduce crime rates.

Notice the above arguments hold regardless of whether the intelligence of the population is believed to rising, falling, or remaining constant. If the intelligence is falling and expected to continue falling, it does follow that eventually something must be done or the maintenance of a modern industrial civilization will prove impossible. The available evidence is that those of higher IQ (who typically have genes that make for higher IQs) are having smaller families than those of lower IQ's (Herrenstein & Murray, 1994; Lynn, 1996; Miller, 1997a).

If a program of eugenics is to be introduced into modern countries, it will most likely be as a byproduct of births being restricted to restrain population growth. Thus, it will be argued below that in the long run society is faced with a choice between having the population restrained by misery, and having it restrained by conscious restrictions of births. Once the idea of preventing some births is accepted, it will then be natural to discuss the question of which births. It is then very likely that decisions will be based at least partially on preventing the births that are most likely to result in what that society regards as low quality citizens. This will be a eugenics program, although as will be pointed out some of the gains may arise from insuring that those children born are born into the families that provide better environments.

Consequence of Unrestrained Fertility

To introduce the case for eugenics consider Diagram 1. [Not available. Ed.] There is a simple income distribution on it with income increasing from left to right. Also shown is a certain level of income below which people fail to reproduce themselves. This is shown as a straight line. However, in practice it is probably a band, with women slightly below the line having only slightly less than two children surviving to adulthood. Women far below the line have relatively few children surviving to adulthood. Above the line the differences in survival to adulthood probabilities are probably small. But in the interests of simplicity, these complexities can not be shown.

What are the conditions for long run equilibrium? The first condition is that the population be stable. Obviously a continually growing population eventually exceeds the resources of the earth, or of the home country. This is not the place to get into debates about just what these limits are, or exactly when the world as a whole or particular country will come up against these limits. The purpose here is to show how societies will differ depending on how the state of zero population growth is achieved, and whether it is done by misery of the Malthusian type, or by eugenics.

It is important that the world is asymmetric, such that being far above the line probably does less for childhood survival than being below it. The diagram shows how with unrestrained fertility, the more unequal the income distribution, the higher the average income. The reason is that for population growth to be constrained by poverty to zero, there must be many below the poverty line. A given level of misery among those whose reproduction is being restrained by poverty is consistent with many different standards of living for those above the line. A more unequal distribution of income permits the average to be further above the line, consistent with any given amount of poverty, including that amount of poverty needed to keep the population stable.

If the distribution of income is to be completely equal, the average woman has to be at the poverty line, such that poverty prevents her from raising only slightly more than a single female offspring to reproductive age. It takes extreme poverty to achieve this outcome. Even in many poor third world countries the population is growing, and the typical woman much more than reproduces herself.

If income becomes more unequal, it becomes possible for most of the population to be far above the poverty line, while still allowing a high enough fraction of the population to be far enough below the poverty line to prevent population growth. This leads to the very unpleasant conclusion that for a nation to enjoy a high average income is consistent with that nation having a stable population only if that income is unevenly distributed. Only with high inequality will enough of the population be far enough below the poverty line to prevent population growth.

Without birth control, any attempt to raise the poor's living standard merely increases their children's survival rates, increases the population, and pulls the average standard of living back down. If income is redistributed from the rich to the poor, one predictable effect is that the rich live less well. Another is that the poor increase in number until rising misery returns the population growth rate to zero. This rather unpleasant vision is the standard Malthusian one.

Unfortunately, in the long run, without population control, attempts to eliminate poverty merely increase the population and reintroduce poverty. The obvious solution is to replace misery as a device for controlling population growth with some other program for limiting the birth rate and stabilizing population. While there is certainly something very intrusive about the government acting to limit births, it seems preferable to allowing population growth to be limited by poverty.

If there is to be some family size limitation, at least among certain families, perhaps we sh
ould be asking what criteria should be used to decide who should have children, and who should be prevented or discouraged from having children?

The Role of Genes

This may be a good point to refer to the evidence that many humans traits are strongly influenced by genes (Rowe 1994; Lynn 1996; Miller, 1997a). This evidence come from the science of behavior genetics. The first testable predication of a theory that variability in a trait is genetically influenced is that the trait will run in families. However, traits can also run in families because they are environmentally influenced, and each generation creates for their children an environment similar to the one they themselves were raised in. Thus, it is necessary to look for situations where environmental theories and genetic theories make different predictions.

One such situation is in adoptions, where the environment is created by the family of adoption, and the genes come from the biological parents. If there is no genetic influence, there will be zero correlation between the children's traits and those of the biological parents. To the extent the environment of rearing is influential, the adoptee's traits will be correlated with the family of rearing, while to the extent that genes are influential (or prenatal conditions) it will be correlated with the family of genetic origin.

Another method is twin studies. Here findings that monozygotic twins are more alike than dizygotic twins provides evidence of genetic effects. This is an example of a more general effect, in which, by examining the extent to which those who differ in genetic relationships resemble reach other, one can model the role of genetic factors. Especially impressive are the studies of separated twins that were raised apart. These frequently grow up to be quite similar in personality and intelligence (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990; Pederson, Plomin, McClearn, & Friberg, 1988).

Due to space limitations, this is not the place to present all the evidence for the importance of genetic factors in intelligence and personality. However, there is strong evidence that most traits are genetically influenced (see for instance Rowe 1994 for summary evidence on the large number of traits for which genetic influences have been shown). Even what appear to be social attitudes have been shown to be affected by genes (Eaves, Eysenck, & Martin, 1989).

In general, the evidence for the role of genes in so many factors raises the possibility of controlling who bears children to influence the traits found in succeeding generations. This makes it useful to begin to discuss how eugenic policies might be carried out

Non-Eugenic Discouragement of Population Growth

In the short run, population growth can be restrained by encouraging smaller families by various voluntary means. By lecturing about the dangers of population growth and the environmental problems of a large population, some people may be persuaded to choose smaller families. However, these are likely to be the most responsible people. With each generation, the fraction of such responsible people is likely to decline. There is evidence that altruism (Rushton, 1980) is affected by genes. A voluntary program selects against such genes. Eventually this method will fail.

Because women that have many opportunities for high prestige jobs (professors etc.) frequently take them and choose to have few children, a common proposal for reducing the birth rate is to increase women's access to such jobs (Hoffman, 1975). Rhetorically this makes it easy to be both feminist and concerned about population growth.

For instance, in America the number of children per women 35-44 (when women have virtually completed their child bearing) is 1.6 for women with 16 years or more of education (college graduates usually), while it is 2.6 for those with 0-11 years of education (usually non-high school graduates), with those with in-between levels having 1.9 children for some college, and 2.0 children for high school graduates (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Presumably the college graduates delay the start of childbearing to complete their education (which may continue into graduate and professional school), and then frequently choose an interesting career over staying at home for child rearing. If these effects are caused by the education (rather than a common cause, such as a desire for a career causing the education), it would follow that providing more education for females would reduce population growth. If the whole population of the world had the US pattern of female education and birthrates, overpopulation would not be a threat.

Observations like the above lead many to argue that the solution (or at least a major part of it) for excessive population growth is to educate women, and to increase their opportunity to play high prestige roles in society. Women will then choose these roles over child bearing and rearing.

However, there are problems with this policy proposal (besides the obvious ones of whether the education is really causing the low birth rates, and how poor countries could afford to educate their women so well).

Unfortunately, the evidence is that much of what determines whether women will have access to high paying, high prestige jobs is genetic, notably the genes for intelligence (Jensen 1981; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Seligman, 1992, Storfer, 1990). Educating women and encouraging them to take up jobs that reduce their childbearing will work for the first few generations, but it will gradually lower the intelligence level of the population.

Herrnstein & Murray (1994) show that the average IQ of female college graduates was 111, versus 81 for the women who did not finish high school. The others were in between (103 for those with some college, and 95 for high school graduates). If we try to control population growth by encouraging the more intelligent women to choose careers over childbearing, in the long run the average intelligence must decline. This occurs because of the high heritability for intelligence. Because the intelligent women usually marry intelligent men, discouraging reproduction by intelligent women also reduces reproduction by intelligent men. Thus, this apparently desirable method for controlling population growth, so consistent with modern feminism, lacks long run viability.

However, there are other problems with any voluntary method for controlling population growth. It is likely that the drives for fatherhood or motherhood run in families for either cultural or genetic reasons. Those with weaker drives to be parents will be more readily persuaded to forgo parenthood. However, efforts to persuade people to voluntarily forgo parenthood merely assure that in the next generation will come disproportionately from those with stronger drives for parenthood. Thus, a voluntary program will eventually eliminate those who are easily persuaded to forgo parenthood. Those left will, for either genetic or cultural reasons (including religious ones), be unwilling to forgo parenthood. This is similar to the argument made above for appealing to the citizen's altruism to limit population growth. After the altruistic have been persuaded to limit their reproduction, and to gradually eliminate themselves, who is left that can voluntarily be persuaded to limit their births?

It is also true that some ethnic groups have higher birth rates than other (most likely for cultural reasons). If these differences persist, the mathematics insure that eventually the nation's growth rate will equal the growth rate of its fastest growing ethnic components. To use an extreme example, Hutterites (a sect that does not believe in birth control) may be the fastest growing group in a nation. If other groups can be persuaded to restrict their birth rates, given enough time the Hutterites will become any nation's dominant group. Then that nation's population growth rate will be that of the Hutterites.

Thus, eventually, population must stabi
lize and the alternatives are:

1. That this is done by restricting births by government coercion

2. This is done by poverty.

For the type of society that can result from poverty see Scheper-Hughes (1992) description of everyday life in Northeastern Brazil. She paints a disturbing picture in which most families live in poverty and infant mortality is very high, high enough so that parents become reconciled to losing children. Indeed, it appears as if they are subconsciously deciding to let some children die of malnutrition. Yet as bad as the situation described is, the population is still growing. The typical poor women still manages to more than reproduce herself. A even higher degree of misery would be required to limit population growth.

Besides limiting population growth rates, there is one other advantage to limiting family size. Right now the poorest families are the largest (Lynn 1996: Herrenstein & Murray, 1994). Mathematically, this implies that the percentage of the nation's children that are raised in poverty exceeds the percentage of the adults that are poor. In the US, child advocacy groups regularly point out the high fraction of the nation's children who are being raised in poverty. They consistently fail to point out how restricting the birth rates among the poor would help to solve this problem. The effect would be partially by lowering the percentage of children who are born into poor families. If this resulted in lowering family size among the poor, the low income families could spread their resources out more among their children.

Spreading the family's resources among fewer children would increase the per child amounts not only for economic resources such as money, but also of non-economic resources. It also permits (but does not guarantee) more parental time per child, and more supervision, which is usually believed to be good. For instance, it is know that children raised in large families more often grow up to be criminals, and in mainstream criminology this is attributed to such children receiving less parental supervision (Lynn, 1996)

Possible Eugenic Goals

If the government is to decide who is to have children, they may wish to decide on some rational criteria, so as to improve the gene pool or to accomplish other goals.

Admittedly, some might try to restrict population growth by an across the board restriction, thus apparently avoiding hard decisions about who should be allowed to reproduce. For instance, families might be somehow limited to two or three children (China now has a limit of one). However, for a stable population, two is too few, and three too many. In theory, one might alternate restriction of two with those of three for different generations (two children per family in several generations, and then a generation permitting three children per couple to rebuild the population). Likewise, if the number required for a stable population was 2.2, one might randomly assign certain families to the three child category, thus avoiding having to make choices on a rational basis. However, either of these procedures for avoiding making hard choices seems to forgo the advantages of selectivity for little reason.

If parental time for child rearing is very important, or if most adults want strongly to be parents, the goal might be families approximately equal in size. Any limits would then be to two or three children per family, and the selectivity would be limited to deciding on some basis which families would be allowed to have three children rather than two.

If the emphasis is more on insuring that children are born with the best possible genes, a greater degree of variability in family size might be considered desirable. Each family might be allowed a minimum of one child to give them the pleasures of parenthood, and possibly to provide society with whatever benefits may result from adults being parents (more conservative behavior among males for instance). The desired average of a little more than two children per family could then be achieved by having the selected parents have at least three children, and possibly more.

While different policies have implications for the percentages of the children that have occupied different birth orders, there is not now strong evidence that would justify preferring children of any particular birth order (Ernst & Angst, 1983). Clearly different strategies could change the percentage of middle children relative to first and last borns. Sulloway (1995, 1996) has presented evidence that first born are more conservative and later born more likely to be rebels, but it is not obvious which society should pick when it can choose.

Of course, if the goal is to provide an even more rapid genetic improvement while still retaining traditional family structures, those couples with the worse genetic endowment would be prevented from reproducing. The deficit would be made up for by much larger families among the couples with the better genes (however defined). This would require that many of these families have four or more children. Since there is no real evidence that large families are bad for children, this would seem to be an acceptable alternative.

Of course, if one is willing to explore unconventional family structures such as making more use of artificial impregnation, even where the wife has a husband who could father her children, or where the potential mother lacks a husband (as with single women or lesbian couples), there is scope for more rapidly spreading desirable genes. One might even consider cloning now that this has been shown to be possible in mammals (Specter, 1997).

Eugenic Aspects of Non-Eugenic Policies

Anything that slows the reproduction of those with genetic traits society does not want to perpetuate may be an eugenic policy. These aspects are not always discussed.

For instance, prison visits of wives for sexual purposes may encourage births by those carrying genes for criminality. Yet the discussions of this typically consist of the opponents saying that prison should be as unpleasant as practical, and that it is inconsistent with punishment to provide sexual access. On the other side, those in favor of conjugal visits typically argue they help to hold marriages together, prevent the spouse from being penalized, and perhaps help in managing the prisoners. Mention of any genetic effect seems to be missing.

It is sometimes proposed that rapists be castrated. This is generally proposed merely as punishment, but yet it should reduce the births of those with personality traits (possibly poor impulse control) that lead to rape and other crimes (for a discussion of the role of genes in rape see Ellis, 1989)..

Castration seems to work. Recidivism rates have been found to be 0 to 7.4% in a study of 2,055 European rapists (Bradford, 1990), which is far lower than the US recidivism rates, which have been reported to be as high as 40%. Given that castration is likely to be far cheaper than years of imprisonment, it might be used.

Perhaps even more effective in reducing rapes might be surgery that prevented erections by cutting relevant nerves. This would eliminate the reinforcing effects of fantasies accompanied by masturbation, probably reducing the motivation for rape and other sex crimes. This is purely a speculative proposal at this stage, but one that should be the subject of some discussion.

In principle, castration might be used for other violent crimes also. It has the attraction of being relatively low cost. If there is a substantial genetic basis for most crimes, and the evidence is that there is (Lynn, 1996), castration would reduce the number of offspring left by such criminals. If it is desirable to reduce the rate of population growth for other reasons, as was argued above, criminals would seem to be good ones to deprive of the benefits of fatherhood.

Of course, castration of criminals might deprive their wives or girl friends of parenthood. It is likely in many case they would become
pregnant even without artificial insemination. However, with the availability of artificial insemination, they would be expected to frequently choose artificial insemination rather than remaining childless. The result would be replacing the sperm of a criminal with what could be a very high quality sperm. Obviously that would tend to reduce the frequency of the genes most closely related to criminal activity.

One side benefit of such a program would probably be selection against low intelligence. It is known that arrested criminals tend to have below average intelligence. For instance, Herrenstein & Murray (1994, p 248) found that 12% of the male whites in the very dull category were in a correctional facility when interviewed versus 3% for the whole sample.

Population Control via Incentives: Eugenic Aspects

There are a number of ways people might be induced to limit births that would not involved coercion (other than to pay the taxes to finance the programs). Most such programs would probably have an eugenic effect since those with lower incomes or shorter time horizons would probably find any given incentive program more attractive.

Payments for sterilization might be offered, say $5,000 or $10,000. These sums would be attractive to those who have a weak desire to leave descendants. Very likely such programs would select for other desirable traits such as a tendency to weight income in the distant future less than in the present. Banfield (1974) has argued that a greater desire for current pleasure (related to the economist's concept of time preference) lies behind many of the inner city problems. For instance, if one needs $20 for a date tonight the easiest way to obtain it is to snatch someone's purse. Admittedly, repeated purse snatching is likely to end in a jail sentence, but that is sometime in the distant future. At a high enough interest rate, stealing the purse becomes rational.

Likewise, drug taking brings immediate pleasure even if at the cost of future addiction. Sex brings immediate pleasure even if the cost is unwed motherhood, or for the father, financial responsibility for children. Watching TV is more pleasant than studying, but studying has long run returns in higher income. Maintaining real estate takes time, but over the long run it makes for a more comfortable home. Saving (and forgoing use of credit) reduces current consumption, but increases future consumption. Creating a small business often means putting in long hours and doing without many pleasures. However, eventually, the small business may succeed. One can imagine many such examples.

There is very little solid research on whether time preference has a genetic basis. It is known to vary with ethnic background. For instance, in Trinidad children of Indian descent (ancestors from India) are less willing to accept a small piece of candy now rather than a larger piece of candy in the future than those of African descent (Mischel & Metzer, 1962). However, since most personality traits are strongly affected by genes with a substantial heritability, it is very likely that the ability to defer gratification is a trait with a genetic component.

If a desire for immediate gratification plays a role in criminality, as it appears to (Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985), it is to be expected that restraining the reproduction of convicted criminals would also tend to restrict the reproduction of those with a short time preference.

It is very likely that many modern methods of birth control select for a desire for immediate gratification. Consider for instance the simple condom. Using this for birth control requires stopping the sequence of events (often seduction) that lead to impregnation to put a condom on. Those who have a strong desire for immediate gratification are much less likely to do this. The same argument applies to inserting a diaphragm, coitus interruptus, or using sponges. Even using birth control pills requires obtaining the pills in advance, and remembering to take them at the right time.

A significant fraction of births represent failures of birth control (Van Court, 1983). For the United States, the Kost & Forrest (1995) analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth reported that 36% of births were unplanned. For those with less than twelve years of education, 58% of the births were unplanned versus only 27% among college graduates. Besides the obvious dysgenetic effect on intelligence, these probably have a dysgenic effect in that the families that who have children through birth control failure are probably less willing to defer gratification, and have a lower ability to plan ahead. Also, it is very likely that inability to defer gratification goes with a lower intelligence. Incidentally, the high fraction of births that are unplanned suggests that improved methods of birth control that are easier may have a significant eugenic effect.

One other trait that may go with accidental pregnancies is drinking alcohol. Many people are inhibited about sex and loosen up with alcohol (or are plied with alcohol by their potential sex partners). Alcohol in general lowers inhibitions. These lower inhibitions are both towards having sex, and towards having unprotected sex. In the modern world, where most children born are raised to sexual maturity, the fact that birth control methods are readily available to most everyone to be used or not, may act as a selective agent for alcohol consumption. The reason is that people who are drunk, or merely under the influence of alcohol are less likely to use birth control, and are therefore more leave offspring with the same propensity for alcohol consumption. However, this desire for alcohol also goes along with alcoholism, and this makes a mate less desirable (and intoxication can make the sex act harder for males).

Boulding (1969) has proposed transferable licenses for child bearing, each couple to get 2.2 licenses. They could then be bought or sold. Those who valued children most would have the larger families (probably a good in itself). In practice, many poor people and those with short time horizons would sell their licenses for the money. This would have a desirable eugenic effect.

Barry (1969) has proposed payments for potential parents who have no more than two children, such payments to be proportional to income. He bases the proposal to make the payments proportional to income on a desire to have the upper and middle classes restrict their fertility as much as the lower classes. His rationale for trying to restrict fertility as much in the upper and middle classes is to maintain the opportunity for upward mobility for the poor. Interestingly, this paper, although appearing in a journal stating on the cover that is was formerly the Eugenics Quarterly, displays no awareness that restriction of fertility among the lower classes would increase the genetic quality of the population. However, his explicit rationale for trying to avoid disproportionate fertility restriction among the lower classes does point out a possible disadvantage to eugenics programs. If fertility is disproportionately restricted among the lower classes as a successful eugenics program would do, there is likely to be more social downward mobility, with more of the population feeling they were ranked lower than their parents (and they will be correct). If moving downwards in the social hierarchy makes people feel bad (and it does), this is a disadvantage to an eugenics program.

Any plan that offers large sums of cash for sterilization, or for restricting child bearing, would reduce the birth rates most among those with a strong desire for current consumption. Such large cash payments would be especially attractive to drug addicts who often need money to purchase drugs. There could be expected to be effects on future rates of drug abuse from such an eugenics program.

If it were politically possible, one might even trade drugs for sterilization or implantation of a birth control device, or at least provide enough drugs so that there w
ould not be withdrawal problems around the time of the sterilization.

Since crack, alcohol, (and probably other drugs) affect the fetus, there would be strong social savings if these addicted women could be prevented from having children. It could also slow down the spread of AIDS, which is frequently transmitted from mother to child. Notice that such benefits are environmental in nature.

Welfare and Birth Control

An obvious idea is to tie the receipt of welfare to using a drug which prevents having additional children while on welfare, such as Norplant. Given the correlation of being on welfare with low intelligence, and probably with other undesirable genetic traits, such a proposal would improve the nation's genetic stock. Given the difficulty of knowing whether promises to use birth control are being observed, tying receipt of welfare to using most methods of birth control is probably infeasible. Penalizing mothers for having babies after they promised not to would either end up penalizing the children, or force the mothers into having abortions.

It is to be expected that any measure that reduces the pool of low IQ, uneducated individuals would reduce the competition for the jobs such people can do. Such a program should reduce the unemployment rate, and raise incomes among the low IQ part of the population.

The final outcome of such birth control would be to reduce inequalities by two mechanisms.

1 Reducing the number of those with traits leading to low income (low IQ, short time preference, etc.) in the society. This raises the weighted average skill level.

2. By raising the wages rates for unskilled labor. It is a standard prediction of economic models that reducing the supply raising the price. It follows that reducing the supply of low wage labor would raise the wage rates for such services.

Public support

Although the word eugenics is very unpopular among intellectuals, there may not be as much opposition among the ordinary voters.

One Texas legislator in an informal poll found 3,533 to 2,604 in favor of sterilization for welfare moms with 3 or more children. (Reilly, 1991, p.161). The Boston Globe found, in a call in telephone poll, that 49% supported sterilization of the mentally ill.

China has apparently adopted a sterilization law targeting mentally retarded parents in one province (Reilly, 1994, p. 164). While China is politically quite different from the United States, this still shows that such actions may be possible

Singapore has announced eugenic programs aimed at promoting births by the better educated (Chan, 1987), and in particular by graduate women. There was also announced a program to reward low income families under 30 with less than two children for being sterilized with US$4,000 as a down payment for a government low cost apartment.

Arguments Against Eugenics

Of course, there are arguments against eugenics programs. Government power over private citizen's lives is always subject to abuse. So history teaches. US state run programs seem to have had problems with some sterilizations that were not for good eugenic reasons (Reilly, 1991). Any government program is going to make numerous mistakes and possibly suffer from some corruption. Certainly it has not always been known which traits were genetically influenced, and there were some sterilizations done under the various laws that probably do not contribute to improving the genetic stock. For instance, there is a case of a woman who was the offspring of incest, but apparently otherwise unhandicapped, being sterilized.

Currently, we are far from having much knowledge of which genes influence particular traits, or from knowing all the traits that are subject to genetic influences. If we were given complete copies of the genetic sequences for two individuals we could not tell which one we preferred. That is true. However, such a high level of knowledge is not needed for a useful eugenics program.

It is generally known that many traits are genetically influenced (see above) and people generally agree on which direction is good. For instance:

1. High intelligence is good.

2. Self control is good.

3. Criminality and rape are bad.

4. Most diseases are bad.

The above provides a basis for deciding whose reproduction to encourage. At this point we could proceed with a start on programs, hoping to improve knowledge in the future.

One theoretical concern is that many traits may be influenced by pleitropic genes such that selecting for a desirable trait also selects for another trait that is undesirable. Thus there could be unintended consequences from an eugenics program.

To illustrate the type of problem that is theoretically possible consider myopia. This is widely considered to be a genetically influenced condition. It is known to run in families, and twin studies show it to have a high degree of heritability (Curtin 1985). However, it is also known that high intelligence and myopia go together (Teasdale, Fuchs, & Goldschmidt, 1988; Rosner & Belkin 1987; Benbow & Benbow 1984, p. 484 and 1986). High intelligence is also known to be a partially genetic trait. The evidence is that the two genetic traits are pleitropic, with one gene affecting both (Cohn, Cohn, & Jensen, 1988). One possibility is that the close work that results from reading and studying leads to myopia. Another, which the writer has proposed, is that a single gene (or gene complex) affects both brain size and the size of the eyeball (which is embryologically derived from the same tissue as the brain) and this produces the correlation (Miller 1992, 1996d).

Now, if someone tried to discourage those with myopia from reproducing, a byproduct would be selection for lower intelligence. This would be unfortunate, since myopia is relatively easily handled with corrective glasses. Of course, enough is known so that the above mistake appears unlikely. About the only way it could be made would be for a version of political correctness to make selection for intelligence impossible, while selection against genetic disease related conditions was promoted.

A slightly more difficult problem is the possibility that genes that promote certain forms of mental illness are also genes that contribute to genius or originality. There is some evidence for this proposition (Eysenck 1995; Goodwin & Jamieson, 1990; Karlsson, 1991). Efforts to discourage reproduction by those with manic-depressive illness or schizophrenia, both of which have been shown to have a genetic component in twin studies, might produce adverse effects on creativity.

One can also imagine other unanticipated genetic problems. Many polymorphisms are believed to protect against one disease but to increase vulnerability against another. They survive in the population over the long run because whenever a particular allele become more common, the diseases it makes for vulnerability to become more common, and the allele making for vulnerability is selected against.

It must be admitted there is a chance that this could happen. If we knew that a particular allele made for vulnerability to a particular well-publicized disease, say AIDS, there might be pressure to discourage reproduction by carriers of such an allele. Indeed, a mutation that appears to protect against AIDS has been recently found (Kolata, 1996). This could increase vulnerability to another disease where the effect was not known, or just possibly a new disease would then emerge that could then spread more rapidly. It is also conceivable that a gene for a desirable trait may also increase vulnerability to a disease.

Another theoretical argument that is sometimes heard is that genetic diversity is needed for further evolution and that eugenic programs might reduce this diversity, eliminating a desirable allele. The analogy is sometimes made with certain crops where the genetic diversity may have been greatly reduced, increasing the vulnerability to certain diseases.

However, in any one generation any realistic program will make only minor changes in the gene pool. This will give plenty of time to reverse direction if unintended consequences emerge. Desirable genes are unlikely to be eliminated from the gene pool by a feasible short-term eugenics programs. Any appreciable reduction in diversity is so far in the future that little concern is needed for now.

Eugenics when the Problem is Partially Environmental in Origin

Frequently those who object to eugenics programs to reduce births in families suffering from a particular problem assert that the targeted social problem is environmental in origin. For instance, if it is proposed to raise average intelligence levels by reducing the number borne to parents with low intelligence, it may be argued that low intelligence is of environmental origin. It is definitely true that there is an environmental component to most social problems, including low intelligence and poverty.

However, it does not follow that eugenics programs cannot reduce problems caused by social causes. Whenever a problem is known to run in families, reducing the number of children in families with the problem should reduce any problem's incidence. Suppose low intelligence was caused by a unknown type of bad parenting that was in certain families, with each child as an adult copying its own parents' bad parenting. Increasing the fraction of children in the families that practiced good parenting (which might be determined by the parents themselves being of high intelligence) would still increase intelligence in the next generation. An environmentally caused problem whose exact mechanism is unknown can be handled by decreasing the fraction of births in certain families, just as a genetically caused problem can be handled. In most cases the policy implications of environmentally and genetically caused low IQ are the same as far as who is encouraged to have children. The key question for predicting the effects of a program is the correlation between the IQ's of parents and children. Knowing the causes of this correlation is not critical.

There are a few cases of low IQ known to be due to environmental causes (say an accident that injured the brain) where there would be no eugenic objection having children. However, such cases are rare. Even in these cases, one might feel that it was best for the child not to have a low IQ parent and wish to discourage childbearing.

Eugenic programs that work by manipulating family size can be expected to work, although slowly and over a period of generations. If there are unrecognized environmental factors being transmitted from parents to children, such programs will also increase the percentage of children exposed to such positive environmental effects.

Westman (1994), convinced that bad parenting leads to most problems has written a book which proposes licensing parents. Some of his proposals would probably end up having eugenic effects. Those who could not get licensed as parents would probably be of genetically low intelligence, and the proposal would end up having positive eugenic effects.

Admittedly, if it were known that there existed a particular environmental factor that affected intelligence, an obvious alternative would be to deal directly with the factor. For instance, if it turned out that rocking children to sleep promoted intelligence (the reference is to speculations in Storfer 1990), it would still be true that we could increase the percentage of intelligent children in the next generation by encouraging parents who were intelligent (who had probably been rocked to sleep themselves). Even more efficient would be to encourage those who planned to rock children to sleep to have large families. Of course, if we did have knowledge that such a simple intervention raised intelligence, we would not choose to exploit it by manipulating family size depending on their proclivity to rock children to sleep. Instead we would have a program to teach mothers to rock their children to sleep, or perhaps we would discover that mothers themselves had already read the research results and were rocking their children to sleep.

However, as of now we know of few environmental interventions that do much for children's intelligence, or that improve other aspects of their personality. Spitz (1986) has traced the history of efforts to raise intelligence by environmental means. There is a long series of episodes in which some intervention was proposed, received much favorable publicity, and was then found to have little permanent effect. The most recent such episode has involved early childhood programs of the Head Start type. These were found to temporarily raise intelligence scores. However, once removed from the program the children were found to gradually return to the low level of performance of those who had never been in such programs.

That there is little hope for environmental manipulation in raising IQ is shown by adoption studies in which even the intervention of putting children into whole new environments seems to have little effect on their adult intellectual performance, although some effect on childhood performance is seen.

For instance, Loehlin, Horn, & Willerman (1989) found that unrelated adopted siblings, when tested at 13-24 years of age, had essentially no resemblance to each other (r=-.01). Scarr and Weinberg (1978) studied children aged between 16 and 22 in adopted and biological families. In the adopted families the correlations were .16 between adopted father and child, .09 between mother and child, and -.03 between siblings. Children who were raised from infancy together differ as much as unrelated pairs of children. This provides powerful evidence that the environment of rearing has little impact on adult intelligence. If the massive intervention of changing the family of rearing (which also affects things like schooling) has little impact, the chances seem small that more modest interventions that affect only schooling, housing, health, or a similar variable will have much impact.

The same study showed correlations between siblings of .35 when raised in biological families, and .40 between father and child, and .41 between mother and child. Since it was argued above that the family of rearing had relatively little impact, most of these similarities must be because parents, children, and sibling share genes. This, of course, is evidence for genetic effects.

However, regardless of what is causing the resemblance between parents and children in biological families (which are the vast majority of families), the fact of such resemblance suggests that increasing the percentage of children borne into high IQ families will raise the intelligence of the next generation. One should not hope for a massive rate of improvement, but the potential for improvement is there.

It is here that one finds the chief political problem with eugenic programs. At best one can hope for only slow increase in the frequency of genes for a trait. If a politician is looking for something he can announce that will plausibly make a difference by the next election, or even by when he retires, eugenic programs will seldom appeal. Given the ease of confusing correlation with causation, and the large number of variables that can be correlated with social outcome variables, there will virtually always be some intervention that can be plausibly argued to have the potential for having a quicker impact. Some may even be plausibly claimed to capable of solving the problem, eliminating the need for a eugenics program. Since there is usually significant prestige and money associated with sponsoring such an intervention, there can be expected to be partisans for one or more such interventions arguing for them. For a politician looking for a program he can announce that will plausibly be dealing with a serious social problem, there will usually be several candidate programs supported with at least correlational evidence (even if no one has yet done a well controlled intervention st
udy).

How are such partisans to be defeated, or how is one going to determine whether they should be defeated (since there is a small chance that one of their interventions will indeed prove very effective)? It is probably wise to press for actual experimental evidence (from studies with adequate controls) that such programs work. A problem is that partisans are likely to be so convinced that their programs work that they will argue that it is unethical to deprive some citizens of the program in order to provide a control group. Yet this must be done if we are to know which, if any, interventions work. When the interventions take the form of providing poorer children with what the educated prosperous families already enjoy, the evidence from the low correlations of adopted children with siblings can be used to suggest the programs will not work.

Eugenic type programs are unlikely to be adopted because of arguments that they are solutions for social problems. They work too slowly to be attractive for this alone. They are likely to be adopted when there is agreement that birth rates are too high, and that some will have to forgo child bearing. This then forces consideration of the question of who should forgo childbearing. One can then argue that the parents which do not exhibit the traits that society values, and (who are likely to be carrying undesirable genes), are those that should forgo child bearing.

The biggest political problem with eugenics now is its association with Nazi Germany and the claim that the extermination of the Jews was part of their eugenics program (see Kuhl, 1994). While there is not space here for a full answer, it appears the Nazi Anti-Semitism was why they tried to exterminate the Jews (see Saetz, 1985). Given the strength of that drive, the outcome would have been the same regardless of their views on eugenics.

The Racial Obstacle

The other major political problem is that desirable genes are distributed unequally among the racial groups, as is the socioeconomic status and phenotypic traits that would be used as surrogates for the possession of desirable traits. The trait that is most economically important is intelligence (Herrenstein and Murray, 1994; Seligman 1992). There is no real dispute that races differ in measured intelligence, and not much dispute among experts on intelligence that the difference is real in the sense that it is reflected in unequal school and job performance. There is more debate as to what causes it.

Even in the 1980's the experts were divided three to one in favor of explaning for black/white differences in IQ by both genetic and environmental causes (Snyderman and Rothman, 1988).

Perhaps the most powerful evidence for a difference in the frequency of genes affecting intelligence is provided by the outcomes of the experiment of adopting black children into white households, where at age 17 the gap between black and white adoptees was approximately that which is found when children of each race are raised in families of their own race (Levin, 1994; Lynn, 1994).

Among the recent pieces of evidence that at least part of the racial difference is genetic is the Jensen & Johnson finding (1994) that the black/white difference in head size in children disappeared when intelligence was controlled for. Jensen (1994) also found that the extent of the g loading on a test (roughly how well the test measures only intelligence) was significantly related to the correlation of the test with head size.

There are numerous other reasons for believing that the genes affecting many socially important traits differ in frequency between the races (Miller 1994b, c, d, 1995a, b, 1996a, b, 1997b, 1997c; Rushton 1995).

It follows that any eugenics program in the United States that does not contain special provisions for blacks will restrict the reproduction of blacks more than it does of whites. In the current environment, such a program would be denounced strongly as racist. This alone would prevent such a program from being adapted. Of course, programs could be designed to provide quotas for different racial groups, or to make other special provisions. On the other hand, if the program offers voluntary payments for sterilizations or for having Norplant inserted, blacks and other low income groups would receive a disproportionate proportion of the financial incentives. However, this is unlikely to keep the current black leadership from objecting vehemently to such programs.

Forces for Eugenics

However, in the developed world of the US, Europe, and Japan there does not seem to be the compelling need to restrict family sizes. Birth rates are near, and often below, that needed to keep the population from growing. In these circumstances, the power elites will see eugenic programs as restricting their freedoms and are unlikely to be supportive. This leaves one with the somewhat pessimistic conclusion that a slow deterioration in the genetic quality of the developed world's population is likely to continue. What could change this?

Probably the most likely thing to change is the state of scientific knowledge. As time passes, more and more knowledge of genetics accumulates. More importantly, the molecular genetics revolution makes it likely that someday the working of the relevant genes will be discovered at the molecular level. It is also possible that the biology behind intelligence and certain forms of behavior will come to be understood well enough so that it will seem very plausible that genes are determinative.

For instance, Tu & Israel (1995) have found that alcohol consumption by Orientals in North America is predicted largely by a single gene. Berman & Noble (1995) have found reduced visuospatial performance in children with the D2 dopamine receptor A1 allele. Plomin et al (1995) have found evidence for genetic markers being related to IQ. Skuder et al (1995) have found evidence for a polymorphism in mitochondrial DNA that is associated with IQ. Reed et al. (1995) have shown lower cognitive performance in normal older adult male twins carrying the apolipoprotein E*4 allele. The apolipoprotein E*4 allele (Kamboh, 1995) is known to increase susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease. Keltikangas-Jarvinen, Raikkonen & Ki (1993) have shown apolipoprotein E phenotypes affect temperament in children, adolescents, and young adults. Bertilsson et al (1989) have shown that there are personality differences that correspond to differences in Debrisoquine hydroxylation (a genetic difference). Lesch et al (1996) have very recently presented evidence that differences in a gene affecting the regulation of serotonin affects anxiety. As findings of this type accumulate, it will be easier for the public to accept the idea that genes affect behavior.

As another example, the author has put forward a theory in which intelligence depends on the extent of myelination (Miller 1994a, 1996c). The theory is supported by extensive empirical analysis and explains a wide variety of facts. It is also empirically testable by directly measuring the amount of myelin after death for the more intelligent, and comparing it with the amounts found in the less intelligent brains. Likewise, there is now a large literature showing that brain size (and head size as a proxy for brain size) is correlated with intelligence (Miller, 1992; Rushton & Ankney, 1996; Wickett, Vernon, & Lee, 1994; Willerman, Schultz, Rutledge, & Bigler, 1991). As such evidence becomes better accepted, more people will find it easy to believe that such variables as brain size or myelination are subject to strong genetic effects. Hopefully, this in turn will make it easier to accept that intelligence is itself genetically influenced. For those that doubt that brain size has substantial heritability there is already evidence that head size has substantial heritability (Rushton & Osborne, 1995).

Another possibility is that technology may make some types of eugenics more feasible, and they become popular. Modern fertility enhan
cing technology is expensive and is primarily used by families of high income who badly want a child. Thus it probably has some eugenic effects.

Artificial insemination has a potential for being used for eugenic purposes. In many couples where the male has inadequate quantity or quality of sperm, the couple chooses to use artificial insemination in order to have children. There is probably some positive eugenic effect in the current sources of sperm since many are reported to be near universities or medical schools where the population would be of above average intelligence. However, while great care is taken to screen donors for genetic diseases and for sexually transmitted diseases, it is not now customary to use an intelligence test to select donors of high intelligence, although such tests would be easy to administer.

Yet given the willingness of parents to pay for expensive college educations for their children, it would surely seem worthwhile for the potential parents to pay the slightly higher costs of higher quality sperm. The costs would be slightly higher because not only would there be the cost of testing, but it would probably be necessary to pay more to donors in order to have a larger pool to select from. However, the cost would still be minor in relation to the total cost of conceiving and rearing a child. If well-heeled parents seek the best designer jeans for their offspring, why shouldn't they seek the best genes?

However, one sperm bank has received considerable publicity by seeking high quality, intelligent donor, originally Nobel prize winners. (See Grahm, 1983) There is no reason other sperm banks could not adopt similar methods. Since one sperm donation can supply several inseminations and donors can be expected to donate repeatedly, the cost of seeking high quality donors would be low.

In spite of the apparently very high benefit-cost ratio from selecting sperm on the basis of the donors intelligence, an Italian doctors group has decided that there should be no selection of sperm based on the social, economic or professional standing of the donor (Montalbano, 1995). Yet, these are all cheaply ascertained surrogates for intelligence, and other genetic traits that contribute to obtaining high social and professional standing.

Should Lesbians or single women become mothers by artificial insemination? If the sperm used is of high quality, it is very likely that the offspring will be of high intelligence, and unlikely that they will become public burdens. Should post-menopausal women have babies using advanced technology and their husbands sperm, as a 62 year old women recently did in Italy (Montalbano, 1995). Given the high cost of such technologies, it is very likely that their husbands had genes for high intelligence. Yet this measure was to be banned by the new Italian doctors code, as was artificial insemination after a partner's death .

More speculatively, it is now feasible to fertilize a woman's egg outside of the womb and then implant it. Right now the procedure is used only for couples who would otherwise be infertile. One can imagine a time when the wealthier couples have potential embryos checked for genetic problems, or perhaps have several embryos fertilized and then select the one for implantation that appears genetically the best.

Mammalian cloning has been shown to be possible, and if applied to humans will probably involve the cloning of high IQ individuals, even if the basis for choosing an individual to clone is something else (being the dictator, or having extraordinary talents in certain areas).

It is also conceivable that selective abortion might be used to avoid bearing children that carry what are considered undesirable combinations of genes. This is done to a limited extent now for Downs syndrome and certain other genetic conditions. If such expensive procedures are adapted they may be adapted by the wealthier couples rather than the poorer ones.

A factor that could lead to eugenics programs is that the power elite is likely to have the genes that we would like to encourage. This elite will be very receptive to rationalizations that will permit those who wish for large families to have them. A rule that exempted those of high IQ from family size restrictions would virtually always exempt the elite (politicians, executives, professors, union leaders, army officers etc.) from family size restrictions. Likewise, programs that discourage those convicted of crimes (or suffering from alcoholism or drug abuse) from having children are unlikely to impact heavily on the ruling classes. If circumstances emerge where nationwide family size restriction is desirable, eugenics may come to provide the rationale for the rule makers to exempt themselves from the rules.

Conclusions

There is sufficient knowledge now about the importance of genetic factors to indicate that, over time, income could be raised by eugenics. Such a program is not politically feasible now, but someday it may be, especially when overpopulation makes it necessary to restrict births. Eugenics may then become popular among the ruling classes because it provides a rationale for exempting them from the restrictions that would otherwise apply.

In practice, eugenics programs may take the form of trying to reallocate child bearing from families with undesirable traits to families with desirable traits. This should increase for the next generation the proportion of the population with desirable traits. Although such programs are traditionally referred to as eugenics programs (i.e. ones to improve the population genetically), such programs can be expected to work for traits transmitted within families from parents to children regardless of whether such transmission is by genetic means or by other means. All that is necessary to predict the success of such programs is to know the correlation to be expected between parental traits and those of the offspring, information that is already available for many traits.

Even when the degree of political support for direct eugenic measures is weak (say only 20% of the population would vote for them) consideration of the eugenic effects of alternative ways of accomplishing certain goals might change the ranking of alternative methods for accomplishing these goals, and produce some eugenic benefits.

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1963 - An Interesting Exchange of Ideas

The following are excerpts from Man and his Future, a CIBA Foundation Volume edited by Gordon Wolstenholme, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1963. At this symposium, a number of papers were presented and discussions held. One thing that's particularly interesting is how they grappled with the eugenicists' dilemma-- the obvious need for eugenics and the extreme difficulty of formulating a workable plan. The first quote is from Biological Future of Man, by Joshua Lederberg:

Human talents are widely disparate; much of the disparity (no one suggests all) has a genetic basis. The facts of human reproduction are all gloomy--the stratification of fecundity by economic status, the new environmental insults to our genes, the sheltering of humanitarian medicine [of] the once-lethal defects. Even if these evils were tolerable or neutralized or mis-stated, do we not still sinfully waste a treasure of knowledge by ignoring the creative possibilities of genetic improvement?

Why bother now with somatic selection, so slow in its impact? Investing a fraction of the effort, we should soon lean how to manipulate chromosome ploidy, homozygosis, gametic selection full diagnosis of heterozygotes, to accomplish in one or two generations of eugenic practice what would now take ten or one hundred. What a clumsy job we would have done on mongolism even just five years ago, before we understood the chromosomal basis of the disease!

The following excerpts are from a discussion among the symposium participants (transcribed in the same volume) on the subject of Eugenics and Genetics. Several references were made to Muller's idea. They are referring to Hermann J. Muller, Nobel-prize winning geneticist, and his idea of a repository of germinal material obtained from superior men to be used for artificial insemination. (Muller's idea later materialized into The Repository for Germinal Choice, founded by Hermann J. Muller and Robert Klark Graham, which began operations in 1979.)

Francis Crick:

I certainly agree with what Dr. Lederberg has said about the extraordinary rate of increase in biological knowledge, particularly in some fields. What impresses me even more is the great lack of biological knowledge among ordinary people; the ordinary educated layman, and to some extent among scientists other than biologists. I also think it's deplorable the knowledge of natural selection is not taught properly in schools . . . .

Lederberg and I have arrived independently at an idea (which I hope he does not mind me quoting) that the type of solution which might become socially acceptable is simply to encourage by financial means those people who are more socially desirable to have more children (this is not the idea favoured by Muller). The obvious way to do this is to tax children. This seems dreadful to a good liberal [a conservative or libertarian in the US] because it is exactly the opposite of everything he has been brought up to believe. But at least it is logical. There are various objections; there will be people who, however much the tax is, will have many children, but they may be a minority. It is unreasonable to take money as an exact measure of social desirability, but at least they are fairly positively correlated. Of course, it is perfectly clear that you could not take such measures, as Muller very rightly said, with public opinion as it is, and with the general lack of biological knowledge.

Now to come to Muller's ideas. Is it possible that his scheme is the best way to give this type of biological education to the public at large? If some individuals were allowed to choose the father in the way he suggests, this might make the population as a whole reflect on the social responsibilities of parenthood . . . . . [I]t might happen that one particular country would initiate a larger-scale programme than any of the others, and after 20, 25, or 30 years the results might be rather startling, if, for example, all Nobel Prizes began to go to, say, Finland because they had gone in for improvement of their population on an extensive scale! If there are advantages in these techniques, and one society or nation does adopt them with marked success, this will accelerate adoption elsewhere.

Pirie:

Taking up Crick's point about the humanist argument on whether one has a right to have children, I would say that in a society in which the community is responsible for peoples welfare--health, hospitals, unemployment insurance, etc.-- the answer is No. . . . What has always seemed to me the ideal contraceptive technique would be a situation in which people would normally be infertile, and should do something if on any particular occasion they wished to become fertile. If such a method were available, how much trouble would it cause in a community once the idea had penetrated?

Francis Crick:

I believe that basically society has the right to decide, but what techniques can our society use to impose this to a reasonable extent (not necessarily 100%), without incurring some other costs? The proposal of licensing that I somewhat playfully suggested might, or might not, be acceptable in our present social system . . . .

Joshua Lederberg:,

In answer to Dr. Bronowski's question about our motivation, I think that most of us here believe that the present population of the world is not intelligent enough to keep itself from being blown up, and we would like to make some provision for the future so that it will have a slightly better chance of avoiding this particular contingency. I am not saying that our measures will be effective, but I think that is our motivation; it is not the negative but the positive aspects of genetic control that we are dealing with here.

On the other hand, I have serious doubts about the proposals for controlling reproduction that have been presented to us. The aspects of social control that seem to be necessary to make these proposals technically effective are I think extremely offensive and extremely dangerous. But leaving the matter to individual choice, which from a social standpoint is the most ideal, is certainly not going to be technically effective . . . .

Sir Julian Huxley:

. . .[T]he main thing is to aim at positive improvement. Much is possible and there are methods to do it. You need not start with drastic methods; nobody is going to solve the population problem by saying that a certain number of people are not going to be allowed to have any children. But you can make a start. At the moment many governments are encouraging people to have more children than they otherwise would by means of family allowances . . . . At the moment the population certainly wouldn't tolerate compulsory eugenic or sterilization measures, but if you start some experiments, including some voluntary ones, and see that they work and if you make a massive attempt at educating people and making them understand what is at issue, you might be able, within a generation, to have an effect on the general population. After all, our moral values evolve like everything else, and they evolve largely on the basis of the knowledge we have and share.

Trowell:

. . . . I have never understood how the human race got over the biological hurdle of moving from polygamy to monogamy. Under the polygamous system the favoured and cultured person, the king or chief, sires a large number of people in the community, and under those conditions we ought to have intelligence building up more rapidly than under the conditions of monogamy. As far as I understand, the human race was polygamous for the best part of a million years, whereas it has been monogamous in varying degrees of stability for a very short time . . . .

Francis Crick:

. . . [T]hose of us
who are humanists have a great difficulty in that we are unable to formulate our ends as clearly as is possible for those of us who are Christians. Nevertheless there are some ends that we can all share, even though we have these differences. In is surely clear that good health, high intelligence, and general benevolence--the qualities Muller listed--are desirable qualities which we would all agree on. We would agree also that these qualities are not evenly distributed. There are people who are deficient in intelligence (I mention intelligence because this is something we can to some extent measure). Surely it is a very reasonable aim for us to try to increase that. Some of the arguments that nature is doing it all right may possibly be correct but they seem to me only to reflect conservatism and to have no real basis in fact . . .

Are the methods for improvement which we have at our disposal effective? Now there are difficult technical questions here, but my point, which Huxley made rather strongly, is that we are likely to achieve a considerable improvement--not perhaps as fast as we could do by other methods or even as fast as may turn out to be necessary--by using a very primitive knowledge of genetics; that is, by simply taking people with the qualities we like, and letting them have more children . . .

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REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY FOR A NEW EUGENICS

Paper for The Galton Institute conference
"Man and Society in the New Millennium"
16 - 17 September 1999
at The Zoological Society of London
Regents Park, London NW1 4RY

Published as: Whitney, G. (1999). Reproduction technology for a new eugenics. The Mankind Quarterly, XL, #2, 179-192.

Introduction

The first century or two of the new millennium will almost certainly be a golden age for eugenics. Through application of new genetic knowledge and reproductive technologies the Galtonian Revolution will come to fruition. This new revolution in the new millennium, which I call the Galtonian Revolution (Whitney, 1995; 1997a) will be more momentous for the future of mankind than was the Copernican Revolution or the Darwinian Revolution. For with the Galtonian Revolution, for the first time, the major changes will not be to ideas alone, but rather the major change will be to mankind itself.

In order to briefly discuss some of the reproductive technology that will contribute to the new eugenics, I need first to define the term "eugenics". So many different people with so many different agendas have appropriated this neat word, coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, that the word by itself can stand for almost anything (Whitney, 1990). Surely to some eugenics is a route to prevention rather than mere treatment of the ills of humanity. Also a path to the greatest good for the greatest number. To others eugenics is a new blasphemy, a devil-word; a term of hate and abhorrence, a term that in word associations is supposed to be linked with Hitler, Holocaust, genocide and the murder of innocents.

For the purposes of today's talk the definition of "eugenics" is one given by Sir Francis Galton himself. In 1904 at a meeting of the Sociological Society, Sir Francis said:

"Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage."

It is interesting, and overlooked by many, that Galton's own definition included both nature and nurture approaches to the improvement of humanity.

In that same talk Galton (1904) went on to briefly address what is meant by "improvement". "What is meant by the syllable Eu in Eugenics, whose English equivalent is good?" First of all, the goodness of a trait depended upon the balance of that trait with others in appropriate proportions; thus goodness was relative to the balance of traits in the individual and also to the make-up of the population. What was good might be much influenced by education, and the goodness or badness of traits was not an absolute, but relative to the current form of civilization. Thus Galton suggested that as much as possible we should keep morals out of the discussion and avoid absolutes, to keep out of endlessly entangling philosophical distinctions. One wishes that some of our current crop of so-called "bioethicists" would heed this advice.

Galton suggested that although

"no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it is better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men."(Galton, 1904: 36).

And so with men. As we approach the new millennium we have at our call a reproductive technology that is beyond any imagined by the early eugenicists.

Reproductive Technology

The advances over the last 50 or so years in genetics, molecular genetics, and developmental biology, are placing in our hands a wide range of technology that can be applied to eugenic ends. However, not all of these applications of reproductive technology are new.

Artificial insemination with a thought toward quality of offspring has been around for a long time. Dr William Pancoast of Jefferson College of Medicine in Philadelphia used sperm donated by "the best looking medical student" in his class when he impregnated a woman whose husband was infertile. That artificial insemination took place in 1884, although it was not reported until 25 years later, out of fear of controversy (NABER, 1996).

In vitro fertilization, the making of "test tube babies", has led to much consideration of a technological revolution in the field of human reproduction. It was only on July 25th, 1978, that Louise Brown, at 5 ¾ lb., was born in an English hospital. She was the first test tube baby (Bayertz, 1994). In the slightly more than two decades since the birth of Louise Brown there have been thousands of instances of in vitro fertilization. About 15% of couples are sterile, and in about half of the cases the problem is with the female, often blocked Fallopian tubes. For these couples in vitro fertilization with subsequent implantation of the embryo allows them to birth their own genetic child.

However, the embryo need not be implanted in the uterus of the woman that provided the egg. The first instance of egg donation was reported in 1984 from Australia (Cohen, 1996). People wanting pregnancy can be implanted with an embryo made with someone else's egg, or surrogate mums can carry the embryo as a service for someone else. The laboratory access that is a part of in vitro fertilization makes possible a wide range of procedures that depend on access to the embryo - diagnosis, genetic manipulation -and a whole series of further techniques such as embryo preservation.

Cryopreservation, combined with artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, greatly expanded the possibilities for eugenic births. It has been suggested that the half-life of semen frozen in liquid nitrogen is more than 1,000 years. With liquid nitrogen, frozen semen, eggs, or embryos can be shipped to almost any location. The famous "Repository for Germinal Choice", founded by Robert K. Graham and Hermann J. Muller, the 1946 Nobel Prize Winner, opened for business in 1980. Originally intended as a sperm bank for Nobel Prize Winners, it was later expanded to accept material from a wider range of healthy and outstanding donors. The Los Angeles Times (Hotz, 1997) reported that as of 1997 the Repository had contributed to the birth of 218 children, in at least 5 different countries, and the children that the staff knew about were all "bright and healthy".

According to news reports, in June of 1999 China opened a government-run "Notables' Sperm Bank" that accepts donors in three categories: intellectuals with at least a master's degree; top businessmen; and successful artists, entertainers, and athletes (Holden, 1999). Clinic officials are quoted as saying that they "would seek 'select sperm with high-quality characteristics' to fulfil a popular demand for 'attractive, intelligent children'" (Pottinger, 1999). It sounds to me like a fine plan indeed.

Nuclear substitution is an even more recent innovation. For mammals the first viable offspring from the substitution into an egg of the nucleus from an adult cell, was "Dolly", the famous sheep from Edinburgh that was announced in 1997 (Wilmut, et. al., 1997). Such cloning of the adult genome has attracted tremendous interest. Of course the resulting offspring will not be a phenotypic duplicate of the adult that donated the nucleus. Often overlooked in discussions is that the clone will also not be a complete genetic duplicate of the donor. The nuclear genes, those on the chromosomes, will be duplicates, but the mitochondrial DNA will be that provided by the egg. It remains to be seen how important this w
ill be.

However, from the point of view of eugenics nuclear substitution with adult material will be extremely interesting. What is sidestepped is the genetic recombination that takes place at meiosis, the chromosomal crossing-over and the random sampling of a half-helping of genes into the haploid gametes that combine at fertilization. Instead of playing nature's roulette, the blind chance and dumb luck of sexual reproduction can be eliminated by substituting an already proven diploid genome. One of the major consequences would be a reduction in regression toward the mean for multifactorial traits. The action of Galton's "law of filial regression" could be largely eliminated. Also, as David Lykken (Lykken, et. al., 1992) has emphasized, some genetic characteristics are not normally transmitted from parent to offspring. The phenotypic traits that result from dominance and epistatic interactions among the genes in a unique genotype are lost with sexual recombination, but can be retained by cloning. He refers to such traits as "emergenic", extremes of genetic characteristics that are often not familial, but rather emerge as a consequence of a unique combination of genes in a unique genotype. Geniuses are perhaps one class of emergenic individuals. The amazing, often precocious abilities of geniuses has posed a problem for both genetic and environmental explanations; the truly extreme genius often crops up in an otherwise undistinguished family and often leaves undistinguished progeny. As Lykken puts it, "The answer is, I think, that genius consists of unique configurations of attributes that cannot be transmitted in half-helpings" (Lykken, 1999). Such emergenic individuals, where the half-helping of a haploid gamete loses the unique configuration, will have a chance at recreation through nuclear substitution.

Many authors have commented on the irony that Sir Francis Galton himself passed without progeny. With improvement of techniques for recovery of DNA from tissue samples, and nuclear substitution, I expect that Sir Francis' unique genotype will be reborn in the new millennium.

Pre-natal diagnosis has been a real possibility since the 1959 discovery that aneuploidy, specifically trisomy-21, was the cause of Down's syndrome. Initially dependent on amniocentesis, newer and less risky procedures are available for the prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal anomalies as well as a large number of single-gene disorders. Advocates of pre-natal diagnosis, combined with the possibility of therapeutic abortion, have made the strong case that these essentially negative eugenic procedures are life-enhancing and life-giving, rather than life-destroying. Instead of suffering the agony and long term problems of a defective child, the pregnancy can be terminated and replaced with a healthy baby. Now so many prospective parents benefit from testing that Down's syndrome, once the most common form of severe retardation, is becoming rare in advanced countries. So too, Tay-Sachs disease among Askenazi Jews is a well-known success story for the eugenic benefits of pre-natal diagnosis.

Pre-implantation diagnosis and modification, made possible by in vitro fertilization, provides whole new dimensions to pre-natal diagnosis. The revolutionary impact of in vitro fertilization with regard to eugenics is that it involves as a matter-of-course access to the embryo during its earliest stages of development. The cells of early embryos are totipotent stem cells, when separated each is capable of producing a complete individual.

Separation in nature gives rise to monozygous - identical - twins or triplets, sometimes even more genetically identical clones. In the laboratory, cell mass division of the early embryo was first used to produce multiple clones of a human embryo in 1993 (Harris, 1998). With multiple copies of the identical genotype, a wide range of diagnostic procedures can be conducted with some of the clones, without fear of damage to the clone that might eventually be implanted for gestational development.

Access to the egg, sperm, and early embryo facilitates a wide range of genetic manipulations. Many techniques already routine in animal research might find application in human eugenics. Knockouts are individuals in which specific genes have been rendered non-functional. Gene substitution techniques can insert functional genes to compensate for defective natural genes, or to enhance trait expression beyond the naturally occurring range. Transgenic procedures involve the insertion of functional genes, even ones from other species. In wide use for research, a recent experiment demonstrates the application of transgenic technology to primates: Monkeys are being developed that have bioluminescence from jellyfish (Lau, 1999). Personally, I have no interest in having my private parts glow in the dark; however, it would be interesting to be able to navigate like a homing pigeon.

Many additional and more sophisticated techniques are undoubtedly on the way; in June of 1999, at the meeting of the American Society of Gene Therapy, "chimeraplasty" was considered, by which single-base DNA mistakes can be corrected in cell cultures and experimental animals (Gura, 1999). It is only a matter of time until these techniques are perfected to a level permitting moral application to human problems. Many of the techniques mentioned earlier, such as nuclear substitution and genetic manipulations are not yet efficient enough to be unquestionably suitable in therapeutic and eugenic application for humans. But with the pace of research it is surely only a matter of time, and a short time at that.

Designer children is a label often disparagingly applied by critics in discussions of individual's new abilities to make personal choices and eugenic decisions about their own children. Critics of eugenics blather about invented moral and ethical issues. But as bioethecist John Harris (1998) has said,

"The best I can do here is repeat a perhaps familiar thought, namely that although this is often taken to be a difficult question and indeed the idea of parents being able to choose such things very often causes outrage, I have found difficulty in seeing this question as problematic. It seems to me to come to this: either such traits as hair colour, eye colour, gender, and the like are important or they are not. If they are not important why not let people choose? And if they are important, can it be right to leave such important matters to chance? (Harris, 1998:29).

Ideological and Political Problems

Which brings us to the issue of social attitudes toward eugenics. For at least the last half of this century there has been an unrelenting campaign to demonize eugenics. This propaganda assault has been so influential that all of the institutions and academic departments that were founded by Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to advance the study and application of eugenics, have changed their name to eliminate the term. As one example, and the longest hold-out, in 1988 at its annual meeting the Eugenics Society adopted a resolution that changed its name to eliminate the word "eugenics". This organization that had started in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, was renamed to the more innocuous "Galton Institute"(Pearson, 1991), to which I am indebted for the honor of being here today.

How is it possible that the prevention of human suffering has become identified as evil? From whence has come the unrelenting propaganda campaign to demonize eugenics, which after all is devoted to the prevention of suffering and the improvement of mankind? In a word, the answer is Marxism, including its present incarnation as Politically Correct modern liberalism.

In order to understand the campaign against eugenics, it helps to place it in the context of an on-going ideological and political war. Two general commentaries about the political scene in America, and that generalize to western civilization, catch the flavor of events with th
eir titles. One is entitled "It's a War, Stupid!" written by David Horowitz, Peter Collier and J.P. Duberg (1997). David Horowitz is one of the more prolific writers among the crop of American "neo-conservatives"; they are radical-left activists from the 1960s who have grown up. Horowitz is a self-proclaimed "red-diaper baby", raised in the communist party atmosphere of New York City. It's a War, Stupid! Makes the point that a one-sided ideological war has been going on for much of this century, a war of socialists against traditional society. As with any war, truth is one of the first casualties. Horowitz's message is that many of the combatants on the side of the good guys don't even realize what is going on.

The other title is "America's 30 Years War: Who is winning?", written by Balint Vazsonyi(1998). Vazsonyi escaped his native Hungary during the short-lived Revolution of the 1950s. Having lived under two socialist totalitarian regimes, the Nazi and the Soviet, he is personally familiar with the tactics. His concern in the book is that socialism is slowly transforming America. While the liberal media tout the end of the cold war with the collapse of the Soviet economy, it is the socialists who are winning a worldwide ideological and political war. Vazsonyi points out the unique English, Anglo-Saxon roots of what he calls America's basic founding principles. He identifies four: rule of law; individual rights; guarantee of personal property; and a shared cultural identity. These basic principles are slowly being replaced by socialism. Today we have government-mandated group rights, government controlled redistribution of property, and divisive multiculturalism.

The basis for this late-20th century all-out war against eugenics is that the big winner from the Second-World War was Bolshevism, international socialism. As early as the 1920s, while many western progressive socialists were still also eugenicists, Stoddard was warning of Bolshevism's denial of heredity (Pearson, 1991). Two of Marxist-Leninist's bedrock ideological underpinnings became environmental determinism, and radical egalitarianism. In the socialist state, all differences between individuals or groups are said to be caused by past exploitation, and since all people are inherently the same, social engineering can transform the world. Of course genetics, recognizing both inherited and environmental causes, is inconsistent with Marxist ideology, and eugenics, the application of genetic knowledge for the benefit of humanity is anathema to socialist environmentalism.

Everyone knows of the travesty of post-war science in the Soviet Union - the 1948 purging of genetics because it was inconsistent with Politically Correct environmentalism - that became known as Lysenkoism. Under Lysenkoism the only acceptable explanation for differences, even among strains of wheat, was environmental differences, thus they practiced "vernalization", that is, early education of little plants as they allowed their seed grain to deteriorate genetically (Soyfer, 1994). Everyone knows of Lysenkoism, and rightly criticizes the absurdity of denying scientific reality in the service of an ideology.

Yet today, no one acknowledges the obvious fact that there is no substantive difference between Lysenkoism and official government policy toward education in America (Whitney, 1998).

Both of the major political parties entertain various vernalizations -ever earlier head start programs - while they demonize as "hateful" or "racist" anyone who suggests that radical egalitarianism and environmental determinism miss an important part of the real world. With Political Correctness, and though-control crimes, euphemistically called "hate crimes", western society is becoming ever more constricted. In some European countries, such as Germany, one can be imprisoned for discussing basic science. In the United Kingdom, long term university faculty can be sacked, as illustrated by Christopher Brand, lately of Edinburgh University, sacked for the high crime of telling the truth (Whitney, 1997b).

A favorite attack on eugenics is to equate it with Nazis. In various ways a slippery slope is argued: official government sanctioning of eugenic concepts leads inevitably to, racism, anti-Semitism, euthanasia, genocide, holocaust, and all the rest of it. Confounding eugenics with Nazism has been so successful a tactic since World War 2, that many people who are interested in eugenics do what they are suppose to do: hang their head in shame and shut their mouth. However, what should be shouted is that the whole argument is a sham, another falsehood.

As Marian Van Court has pointed out, in the first half of the 20th century, a total of at least 29 countries passed eugenic laws, including Germany, United States, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Greece and Spain. One of these advanced countries proceeded in time of war from euthanasia to genocide. The other 28 countries did not. One out of 29 does not establish a pattern (Van Court, 1998). The post-war propaganda linking eugenics to Nazism and a slippery slope to holocaust is just that: Horrific, continuing propaganda warfare.

Unintended consequences

The tone and content of this paper is strongly supportive of eugenics. However, there is one aspect of traditional eugenic programs that I have concerns about: That is government regulation of any sort. Voluntary personal decisions are one thing, government coercion is another. I can think of nothing as grotesque as to have the likes of Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or Tony Blair making my reproductive choices.

One problem is that we actually know so little about genetics that it is terribly premature for government regulation. Imagine what the central planners that gave us the soviet economy could do with the vastly more complex human gene pool. Although the Human Genome Project is well along toward sequencing the bases in a human genome (Whitney, 1997a), we know next to nothing about what most of the genes do. We don't even know how many there are. Just recently the human mutation rate was estimated to be considerably higher than previously thought (Crow, 1999 ). Just in mid-1999 it was reported that the functional human genome may be one-third larger than previous estimates (Wade, 1999).

Playing in the dark as we are at this time, it may be best to let people make their own decisions. We do not need totalitarian control, a set of self-chosen "anointed ones" (Sowell, 1996) controlling the reproductive behavior of a domesticated proletariat. In little understood systems we must expect to encounter what we seem to have encountered, which is unintended consequences.

For example, when effective means of contraception were introduced last century, some of the main results seem to have been dysgenic (Lynn, 1996). Sir Francis Galton spoke of ways to test and bring together promising young men and women so that they would be more likely to form eugenic matches. This desire for assortative mating was not a prime reason for the push for women's liberation including co-educational higher education, but it has been one of the consequences of young women going to college with young men. Assoritative mating extends the range of a metrical trait even if there is no change in gene frequency (Lynch & Walsh, 1998). With the characteristics of the IQ distribution, if a population raised its average by only 5 points, it would double the incidence of gifted people 3 standard deviations above the mean, and cut by half the number of retarded. Selective higher education may be genetically stratifying our society, another unintended consequence (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Weiss, 1995).

The legalization of voluntary abortions in the United States in 1973 may have had the unintended consequence of lowering the crime rate in the 1990s. This is because women at higher risk of raising criminals; teenage mothers, single mums, blacks, have disproportionately higher rates of abortion (Donohue & Levitt, 199
9).

As a final example of unexpected consequences, consider the effects of modern medicine on the gene pool. Many eugenicists have lamented the dysgenic effects of modern medicine that keeps alive severely affected, genetically anomalous individuals. However, the provision of supportive medicine may actually reduce the incidence of the deleterious genes. John Hartung and Peter Ellison (1977) have reported that, probably due to the psychological and physical stress of caring for a severely affected offspring, parents of such medically maintained children tend to have fewer later progeny, enough fewer to actually reduce the incidence of the responsible genes.

Although we know so little at the present time, our store of genetic knowledge and reproductive technology is vastly greater than at any time in the past. And our rate of acquisition of new knowledge and techniques is accelerating. If we can just educate the people, defeat the socialist ideologues, and keep the politician's hands off, then, with the new reproductive technology contributing to the Galtonian Revolution, a brave, and wonderful, new world awaits us in the new millennium.

Acknowledgment

I thank Marian Van Court for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. Preparation of this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Pioneer Fund.

References

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Hotz, Robert Lee (1997). Robert Graham, Founder of exclusive sperm bank, dies. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, February 18.

Lau, Edie (1999). Flourescent monkeys may shed a valuable scientific light. Sacramento CA: Sacramento Bee, August 23.

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Pottinger, Matt (1999). High-class Chinese sperm bank proves controversial. Beijing: Reuters, June 25.

Sowell, Thomas (1996). The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. New York: Basic Books.

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The Consequences of Variable Intelligence By: Tatu Vanhanen

University of Helsinki, Finland

[The following article originally appeared in Mankind Quarterly, Volume XXXV, Number 4, Summer, 1995.]

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE

Human Intelligence and National Power:
A Political Essay in Sociobiology
Seymour W. Itzkoff
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality
Seymour W. Itzkoff
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1992.

The Decline of Intelligence in America:
A Strategy for National Renewal
Seymour W. Itzkoff
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994.

Seymour W. Itzkoff argues in his three books published in 1991-94 that there are significant hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups and that as a consequence of this variation there are very large differences in educability, social status, and economic achievements of individuals and groups. According to him, intelligence is part of each individual's inheritance, as much as one's height and personality. Therefore,

"the issue of intellectual variability in humans and the consequent variability in average intelligence between groups of individuals, and their ethnic, racial, religious, and national identities, is the Copernican problem of our time" (1991, 10).

He challenges the egalitarian dream of socialists, sociologists, and liberal egalitarians, according to which intelligence is uniformly distributed in all populations and all humans were equal to any social and intellectual task if only they were not held down. Itzkoff points out and enumerates great failures of social policies based on these unrealistic views of human nature. The theme is the same in all three books, but he discusses it from different perspectives.

In Human Intelligence and National Power. A Political Essay in Sociobiology (1991), he focuses on the evolution of human intelligence and the emergence of intellectually different human groups, as well as on various consequences of the variability of human intelligence, including the European florescence, the failure of communism, the rise of Japan's power, the decline of the United Sates, and the Third World debacle. He emphasizes the significance of intellectual homogeneity in ethnically homogeneous nation-states and examines the ways to raise the level of general intelligence "g".

In The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality (1992), Itzkoff focuses on the failure of Marxists and liberal egalitarians to create an egalitarian and classless society and argues that their basic assumptions of human nature were wrong. They failed to recognize that human beings are endowed with differing quantities and qualities of intelligence and that the same concerns ethnic groups. From this perspective, he examines the hallucinations and misfortunes of our evil century, the methods to achieve classlessness and to end oppression and degradation, the ethic of intervention, the democratic quest, essential feminism, the mysterious ethnicity, and the significance of the wealthy. His message is that America's social dilemmas are in part due to hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups.

In the latest book, The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal (1994), Itzkoff analyses the problems and social pathologies of America and claims that they are related to the decline of general intelligence. His central idea is that new generations are coming from the lower end of the intellectual, and thus the social, scale. As a consequence, a population of permanently poor Third World Americans is emerging. In the second part of the book, he recommends policies intended to turn the trend. The solution proposed in this book is simple: the government should stimulate the finest to form families of the traditional sort in which children are conceived, born, raised, and educated to the highest levels for which they are capable, and the helpless should be encouraged and guided not to have children that they cannot rear and educate to functional cultural levels.

The problems analyzed in Itzkoff's books are extremely important. He has had courage to take up issues that have not been discussed because it has not been politically correct to assume that there might be intellectually different human groups and that social inequalities might in part be due to variable intelligence in humans. It has been difficult even for evolutionary biologists to accept the idea that humans vary in general intelligence (see, for example, Gould 1981; Lewontin 1982). Even more difficult it has been to accept the claim that there are hereditary intellectual differences between ethnic groups (see Vine 1994). I try in this essay to tell about Professor Itzkoff's central ideas, arguments, evidence, examples, and renewal proposals and to evaluate the practical significance of his theoretical insights and reform proposals.

The Evolutionary Roots of Intellectual Differences

Let us start from his central idea concerning hereditary differences between individuals and groups. How to explain the origin of assumed group differences?

He traces the origin of intellectual variability of human groups to the geographical dispersion of early humans and to the variation in their environmental circumstances. According to him, Homo erectus originated in Africa, but it possibly split into modern geographical races of man already one or 1,5 million years ago when some groups emigrated from Africa to the other Old World continents.

At this stage of human evolution, from about 1,5 to 0.5 million years ago, various groups of humans, whether races or ethnic groups, seem to have had similar levels of intelligence. There were not many differences in tools used by them. However, after 500,000 B.P., a revolution begins to occur in the North, in Europe and western Asia among Caucasoids during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. Intelligence helped the survival of people in harsh and variable environmental conditions. High intelligence was useful. The average brain size and intelligence increased in Caucasoid populations through natural selection. He says that

"in the challenging environment of the north, a big brain had extraordinary selective value. These humans could think deeply and analytically" ( 1992, 37).

Finally, about 35,000 B.P., Cro-Magnon appeared in Europe. His assumption is that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Europe as a consequence of adaptation to harsh and variable environmental conditions:

"the northern quadrant of humanity subject to the flow and ebb of the glaciers inhabited a far more challenging and dangerous environment than those living in the tropical south" (1991, 194).

There was not similar pressure for intellectual evolution among the human populations living in "millions-of-years-old tropical garden of Eden." Consequently, northern populations achieved a higher level of general intelligence than tropical populations.

Itzkoff assumes that the ability of large-skulled, adaptively able northern sub-species of Homo to handle this ferocious Ice-age environment and even prosper probably forced them to migrate for more space. Over the period of 150,000 years, they moved east and south and spread their genes. He further assumes that

"modern blacks originated in Western Africa after 10,000 B.P. as a result of mixtures between indigenous proto-Negroids and Pygmies, and incoming Caucasoids" (1991, 40).

[As a consequence,]

"Negroid and Caucasoid races have biologically more in common with each other than they do with any of the other races" (1991, 42).

The original Mongoloid descendants of Homo erectus pekinensis along the Yellow R
iver Valley also absorbed a steady stream of Caucasoid wanderers across the Siberian and Kazakhistan plains. The same concerns the Koreans and Japanese,

"who speak a Uralic/Altaic language related to the hybrid Siberian steppe peoples and thence to the Estonians and Finns" (1991, 42).

[In this way the Cro-Magnon people wandered from their unknown Eurasian homeland to the other parts of the world]

"hybridizing with the existing transitional erectine-sapiens humans all over the world."

[The New Guinea, Australian and Tasmanian Australid populations are possible exceptions (1991, 18, 39). Today's]

"racial divisions are the remnant memories of ancient human separations that go back several million years"
( 1992, 7).

This is a very interesting assumption on the origin of intellectual differences between human populations and of geographical races. It differs radically from interpretations, according to which the evolution of modern people took place in Africa.

C. B. Stringer, for example, claims that

"all living people are closely related and share a recent common ancestor who probably lived in Africa. From that African ancestral group, all the living peoples of the world originated. "

He continues that the ancestors of Europeans , Asians and the populations of the American and Australian continents probably share common ancestors within the past 60,000 years. This idea does not presuppose any significant intellectual differences between human populations. In fact, Stringer emphasizes their similarity:

"What is certain is that the early modern peoples of each part of the world were all similar in basic anatomy and behavior, but regional differences in physique and culture rapidly developed subsequently" (Stringer 1992, 249. See also Howells 1992; Ritter 1981, 98-101).

Stephen Jay Gould, similarly, assumes that Homo sapiens

"is tens of thousands, or at most a few hundred thousand, years old, and all modern human races probably split from a common ancestral stock only tens of thousands of years ago" (Gould 1981, 323).

Itzkoff's assumption differs from the "Out of Africa" hypothesis in two important points: (1) he claims that human populations have racially differed from each other one or 1.5 million years, although there have been new mixtures later on, and (2) he provides a plausible explanation for the origin of intellectual differences between human populations. The alternate hypothesis would be unable to provide any explanation for intellectual differences between the northern and tropical populations. The crucial question is whether such differences really exist.

General Intelligence "g"

Itzkoff's claims that individuals vary in intelligence and that such variation is principally due to hereditary factors. What kind of evidence does he provide to support this claim?

He refers to intelligence tests (I.Q.) that have been carried out in various countries since the beginning of this century. They indicate consistently that humans vary in intelligence. A heated debate has continued on the question whether such variation is more due to hereditary or environmental factors and whether there is any "general intelligence" that could be measured (see Gould 1981; Lewontin 1982; Itzkoff 1987).

Itzkoff refers to evidence of the existence of general intelligence "g" and of its hereditarian character. According to him, 50-80 percent of general intelligence seems to be due to hereditarian factors. Innumerable studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins have provided evidence on the hereditary nature of intelligence. For example, he says,

"identical twins reared apart in differing life circumstances are much more similar intellectually than fraternal twins reared under the same roof" (Itzkoff 1987, 142; cf. 1991, 27).

[ Worldwide studies of sibling adaptation, he continues,]

"regardless of the race or ethnicity involved, reveal that a sociologically uplifting environment has no long-term impact either on the personality or the intellectual profile that the children bring with them from their biological heritage" (1992, 88).

The results of these studies also imply that the genetic variation in intelligence depends on a relatively small number of genes because the possible variability between even closely related individuals seems to be enormous (see 1992, 31-32; 1994, 101). Itzkoff comes to the conclusion that it

"should be clear to all but the most ideologically and theologically devout environmentalists that human achievement and personality have a dominating biological and thus hereditary component" (1992, 31).

I think that it would be difficult to disprove his argument that human intelligence varies and that hereditary component is dominating in this variation. If we accept the argument on the hereditary intellectual differences between individuals, it becomes difficult to deny the possibility that there might be hereditary intellectual differences between ethnic groups, too.

This is a much more inflammatory proposition than the claim of individual intellectual differences. Everybody has probably made observations of great individual differences in intelligence, but it is more difficult to make observations of the average intelligence of ethnic or racial groups. Therefore, it has been easy to deny the existence of such differences and to argue that there cannot be any significant differences in the average intelligence of ethnic or racial groups. And if all human races separated from a common ancestral stock in Africa only some tens of thousand years ago, it would be difficult to find any plausible explanation for the emergence of such differences. However, Itzkoff has a plausible explanation for the origin of intellectual differences between human groups, as mentioned above, and he provides data that indicate the existence of such differences among contemporary ethnic groups His evidence is based on the consistency of the results of intelligence tests (I.Q.) carried out in many countries.

According to the results of intelligence tests given in his books, the average I.Q. for American whites is 100, for African-Americans 82-85, for Hispanics somewhere in between, and for native Americans in the low to mid-90s, whereas it is 103-107 for Japanese and probably more than 100 for Han Chinese, too. Itzkoff stresses that they are ethnic groups that differ from each other in intelligence, not racial groups, but, on the other hand, he emphasizes the difference between northern and tropical populations. In general

"the northern peoples of the world, the residue of the original Caucasoids and Mongoloids have more on average brain power" (1992, 50).

This is probably the most controversial part of his argumentation, but because his conclusions and policy recommendations are based on it, those who disagree with him should try to show that he is wrong. It is not enough to say that it is not politically correct to make such propositions. In open society, people should be prepared to discuss and examine also the ideas that contradict their own convictions and belief systems.

Itzkoff provides additional support for his thesis from empirical data on educational and economic achievements of different ethnic and national groups. According to him, it was natural that the technological civilization emerged in the North, in the area of Caucasoid Eurasians. The present great economic inequalities between the north and the south are related to intellectual differences. Therefore, it has been difficult to equalize economic conditions between the industrially developed north and the Third World countries. It has succeeded only in the parts of the world where national ethnic groups have been intellectually approximately equal with Caucasoids. This concerns particularly northern Mongoloids, Japanese, Koreans and Han Chinese.

On the other hand, development aid from the north has not been enough to generate and maintain technological de
velopment in Africa. Itzkoff finds further evidence for his thesis from the fact that all immigrant groups have not succeeded equally in America. According to his data, more intelligent ethnic groups have succeeded much better than less intelligent groups.

Social Consequences

We come to the social consequences of variable intelligence. They are enormous. For example, Itzkoff refers to many types of social facts and problems connected with variable intelligence in humans. He argues that social inequalities are persistent because humans vary in intelligence. He accuses the ideology of egalitarianism for the genocides and holocausts of this century. Communists killed tens of millions of people of higher intelligence to further equality. The failure of communism was caused, according to his interpretation, by their erroneous assumption that intelligence is distributed homogeneously among individuals. They believed that the masses could easily be educated to fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the bourgeoisie establishment.

It was not so. Marxists had forgotten Marx's refutation of those sections of the Gotha Program (German socialist parties) that asserted the absolute uniformity of human abilities. Marx himself believed in the existence of intellectual differences in human beings.

Itzkoff further argues that Japan's economic success story has been powered by the high intelligence of the ethnically homogeneous Japanese people. Because of universally high intelligence of its ethnically homogeneous population, the Japanese state does not need to subsidize any permanently "catch-up" portions of the nation, and because there is a rich supply of talent ready to step in, the salaries of executives remain relatively low. In Japan, the average chief executive earns about eight times the average of his workers; in the United States the average chief executive earns about 160 times the worker average (1992, 152).

Itzkoff presents an extremely inflammatory and important explanation for the failure of modernization in most parts of the Third World. According to his assumption, it is due to clear differences in average intelligence between the northern and southern populations. Northeast Asia, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, are rapidly rising from war and political chaos because of the high intelligence of their populations, whereas in Africa, Central and South America, and many parts of southern Asia, the pace of modernization has been at best slack. Many hundreds of billions of dollars in loans have simply gone down the drain in corruption and incompetence. The reason for the Third World debacle is in the fact that the level of intelligence is lower in the tropical south. He supports this assumption by the experiences gathered from minority populations of the tropical south living in the north. Some members of such minorities thrive and prosper, but the majority falls into despair.

On the other hand,

"ethnic Han Chinese living in either Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines achieve at levels parallel to their Chinese compatriots in the U.S. or Hong Kong, despite extensive negative discrimination." And Japanese, Germans, and Italians born in Brazil achieve as their confreres do in their respective homelands (1991, 195).

The Decline of the United States

The major problem examined by Itzkoff concerns the decline of the United States and its causes. He complains of the lack of open discussion and warns that never

"in history has a society that has blocked the open search for truth survived to prosper. "

[ In America, the intellectual leadership of the great public media institutions and the universities has effectively handcuffed the elected political representatives and prevented them from considering solutions:]

"The taboo word is, of course, race. Because so much of our internal tragedy does involve the minorities of color, the stereotyped excuse is that discussions about biological intelligence and the variable behavior that it elicits will militate against the interests of these minorities."

[He does not accept this argumentation, and he tries to show that it is in the interest of all Americans to think deeply ]

"about this reality of variable human intelligence and whether there might be a connection between this issue and the fact that our national profile is sinking so rapidly" ( 1994, 6).

What does he mean by "decline of the United States?" Itzkoff claims that this decline

"can be confirmed by any of the criteria that historians have ever used to measure the state and condition of a nation and its people" (1994, 3).

The indicators of decline used by Itzkoff include the rise of criminality in American cities, the status change from a great creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation, the enormous loss of high-wage jobs, the fact that some 50-80 percent of the workforce is not able to work and produce at an internationally competitive level, the decline in educational standards and achievements of the public schools as indicated by the quarter-century decline of SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, social disintegration, and the expanding poverty populations at the bottom of society. It seems to me that he has presented enough empirical evidence on the decline of the United States compared to Japan or to some European nations.

Itzkoff explains the economic and educational sinking of the United States by the decline of the average intelligence. The welfare policies encouraged the poorest, least capable sectors of the population, from all the races and ethnic groups to have children. However, he does not provide much statistical evidence for his claim that poor sections of the population have produced relatively more children than more wealthy and educated ones. It is not self-evident that this claim should be true.

According to sociobiological theories, wealthy and dominant sections of the population are expected to have been reproductively more successful than poor ones, at least until modern times (see Betzig 1986; Rogers 1990, Roskaft et al. 1992). Therefore, I would like to see more statistical evidence. One example, to which he refers, concerns the blacks. The proportion of black citizens in the U.S. grew from 9.8 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in the mid-1980s.

Itzkoff sharply criticizes the welfare-policies that have produced a new human zoo. He says:

"Like animals whom we now have trained to reproduce in captivity, there is a new and growing class of Homo sapiens living within the ostensibly modern societies."

[He assumes that even Marx would look at this new and classically unrecognized situation with horrified wonder:]

"What he would see would be the public welfare hospitals where they are born, the flocks of social workers who minister to their dole, the Head Start teachers, then the special education and remedial classes in the state schools, the drug clinics, probation officers, public health nurses, the police and the jails, the crime-ridden public housing projects, the food-stamps, the underground subways, bus terminals, and railway stations and the spaces over the heating vents on the public streets that serve as sleeping places, the municipal hospital emergency rooms, and then the AIDS wards and hallways where they die" (1992, 90-91).

On the other hand, the invention of "the pill" and feminist ideas decreased the birth rate among educated and more intelligent sectors of the population. Liberal equalitarians told the people that it was not important who had the babies. The children could easily be educated to high levels of social productivity, they preached. To the educated classes,

"both men and women, they urged liberation, careerism, and material consumption, heaven forbid conceiving, bearing, and raising large families" (1992, 91).

[As a consequence,]

"the United States mean I.Q. has dropped about five points over th
e last several generations, the result of this differential birth rate" ( 1991, 163-187).

Briefly stated, Itzkoff argues that the poor and intellectually lower sections of the population have been reproductively much more successful than the wealthy and more intelligent sections of the population and that it has caused the fall of national intelligence. He estimates that already by 1994, roughly half of the American population can be seen to be sinking below international levels of intellectual and educational achievement needed to maintain competitive production. And he asks, what is "to become of these individuals, and then of the formerly wealthy nation that encouraged their coming into being?" (1994, 107). He assumes that they will be pushed deeper and deeper into the culture of poverty. What to do?

Remedies Proposed

Professor Itzkoff argues that because social pathologies and other problems of the United States have been aggravated by the decline of general intelligence of its population, the best remedy would be to increase the level of general intelligence. He stresses that it is not a purely racial or ethnic issue because those at the bottom of the intellectual pyramid come from all groups, white, African-American, Latino, and others. It is clear, however, on the basis of his books that the problem focuses on African-Americans and other ethnic groups originated from the south.

The remedy proposed by Itzkoff is simple: the most intelligent and educated men and women should bear and raise many more children than those from the bottom of the economic and educational social class structure. Besides, the traditional nuclear heterosexual family should be saved. He accuses liberal egalitarians for hating monogamy and the nuclear family:

"They fear and despise men as heads of household, and thus with a woman actively raising her brood of children in the home, the kids not out in day care or with illegal aliens acting as 'foster' parents. The idea that males and females differ in any important bio-cultural manner, physical or intellectual, is anathema to their unisex ideology, and their despising of historical male and female values."

[ As a consequence of liberal policies, Itzkoff continues, we]

"have lost the children of almost two generations of our educated and liberated women. It has had almost the same effect as if it had been genocide" (1994, 126, 133).

According to his interpretation, it will depend on the policies of the government whether the reproduction trends change to the proposed direction or not. The government should pass

" social policy legislation aimed at creating inducements, as well as legal protections, that will lead to the wealthy and successful having more than their share of children and the poor limiting their procreative activity in the interest of their own individual social and economic aspirations" (1992, 160).

The prescription is clear, but it seems to me that he does not yet have any clear idea what such "social policy legislation" should include and how the government could carry out such policies. However, he makes some proposals.

• First, people should be reeducated.
• Second, job priorities should be given to married men with families.
• Third, all births should require the identification of the father.
• Fourth, men and women at the top of social scale without children should be punished through the tax system.

The government should try

"to establish a long-term social policy that will `encourage' the birth of 50 percent more children from the upper half of the social and income brackets than from the lower."

[It is not clear how it could be done, although he says that we]

"must persuade the potentially parasitic classes at the top and at the bottom of society to act appropriately. The wealthy educated will have to validate their socially acquired assets by bearing their own offspring or adopting needy children. Those at the bottom should be humanely persuaded, with generous gifts if deemed appropriate but for one generation only to refrain from conceiving and having children" (1994, 192-195).

Itzkoff makes several other interesting reform proposals. I refer to only two of them. He would like to decrease the relative number of African-Americans because their average level of general intelligence "g" is low. The discouragement of illegitimate births would serve this purpose.

On the other hand, he suggests that the "talented tenth" of the African-Americans should produce many more children than the less intelligent majority. In this way it would be possible to raise the general intelligence of the African-American minority.

Besides, the United States should change its immigration policies radically. No more illegal immigration, he says, and

"those who are here in violation of our laws, along with the children that have been born here in the interim," must return to their homelands (1994, 161).

Only talented people, irrespective of their race, should be allowed to immigrate to the country.

Itzkoff is deeply worried about the declining intelligence in America because he would like to retain his country among the first class nations in the competitive world of the twenty-first century, which is not possible without a highly intelligent population. America's crisis is a natality crisis, he says, but the leadership of the United States is indifferent to this issue. It does not care who is having the children.

Discussion

I agree with Professor Itzkoff in most points of his analysis. Evidently humans vary in intelligence, and this variation is principally due to hereditary factors. He has convinced me that ethnic groups may also vary in general intelligence "g". I agree with him that social consequences of intellectual variability are enormous and that they can be seen in all areas of human life. The origin of social inequalities is in the fact that humans are not similar in their intelligence and other capabilities. It is also quite probable that a significant part of the persistent poverty in the Third World is related to intellectual differences between ethnic groups. He is probably right in his central assumption that the level of general intelligence would increase if the upper half of social and income brackets could produce 50 percent more children than the lower half. The problem is how to get people to follow his advice.

According to the sociobiological inclusive fitness hypothesis, all organisms are programmed to further their own reproductive interests and not to concern themselves about others (see, for example Dawkins 1976; Alexander 1980). Therefore, I assume that it would be extremely difficult or impossible to persuade the members of any minority ethnic group to sacrifice their own reproductive interests for the assumed higher interests of the nation.

It might be possible to achieve some results by economic and other inducements, but it is quite possible that coercion and even force would be needed to achieve substantial results. Itzkoff has not proposed or discussed the use of coercion, although he proposes that the births should be reduced at the bottom of the social and economic scale and that all births should require the identification of the father. Is this a case in which the government might use coercion and even force to carry out its family policy?

If the father cannot be identified and made responsible for the child, the state might require the prevention of the birth by compulsory abortion. However, if coercion and force become necessary to prevent the births of unwanted children, we have to ask whether the aims are worthwhile enough to justify such policies. Is the maintenance of intelligence so important that it justifies the use of coercion and force against women who break the legal rules of reproduction? I do not know, and Itzkoff has not discussed this problem. It should be discussed because
I do not believe that his radical reproductive reforms could be carried out without coercion.

It is true that African-Americans are at the bottom of the social and economic scale, but I would like to point out that they have not been losers in the Darwinian struggle for existence. In fact, according to the data given by Itzkoff, they have been even more successful than the whites because their relative number has increased in the United States since the 1940s. It means that in some way they have become better adapted to their social environment than the white majority. Despite their poverty, they have borne and raised children more than their share, whereas many wealthy and educated and probably also highly intelligent whites feel themselves so poor and insecure that they cannot afford to have children.

We should remember that in the Darwinian struggle for existence reproduction is the only criterion of success, not wealth, education, or intelligence. By this criterion the American blacks have been more successful than the whites.

Itzkoff has brought into discussion the issue of variable intelligence in humans and indicated through extensive evidence and examples its crucial importance in national and international politics. I think that it is time for us to take biological factors seriously and examine their relevance from various perspectives.

As Itzkoff says, the scientific evidence for the biological roots of our social behavior continues to accumulate (1994, 5). It is becoming clear that environmental egalitarians were wrong in their traditional assumption that human behavior and social structures are principally, if not completely, shaped by our environment. Human nature matters probably more than we can imagine. Itzkoff has focused on one very important aspect of human nature, to hereditary intellectual differences between individuals and groups, and he has disclosed its social and political relevance in superb manner.

References

• Alexander, Richard D, 1980 Darwinism and Human Affairs. London: Pitman Publishing.
• Betzig, L. L. 1986 Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History. New York: AIdine.
• Dawkins, Richard 1979 The Selfish Gene. London: Granada Publishing.
• Gould, Stephen Jay 1981 The Mismeasure of Man. Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Penguin Books.
• Howells, W. W. 1992 "The dispersion of modern humans," in Steve Jones, Robert Martin and David Pilbeam (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. pps. 389-401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Itzkoff, Seymour W. 1987 Why Humans Vary in Intelligence. Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paideia Publishers.
• Lewontin, Richard 1982 Human Diversity. New York: Scientific American Books.
• Ritter, Horst 1981 Humangenetik: Grundlagen - Erkenntnisse - Entwicklungen. Breisgau: Herder Freiburg.
• Rogers, Alan R. 1990 "Evolutionary Economics of Human Reproduction," Ethology and Sociobiology Vol. 11 , No. 6.
• Roskaft,Eivin, Annelise Wara, and Auslaug Viken 1992 "Reproductive Success in Relation to Resource-Access and Parental Age in a Small Norwegian Farming Parish During the Period 1700-1900, " Ethology and Sociobiology Vol. 13, Numbers 5/6.
• Stringer, C. B. 1992 "Evolution of early humans," in Steve Jones et al. (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. ss. 241-251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Vine, Ian 1994 "The Political Abuse of Sociobiology - A Test Case" (a book review of Itzkoff's "Human Intelligence and National Power: A Political Essay in Sociobiology"), ESS Newsletter No. 33, January 1994, 13-31

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Raymond B. Cattell and The Fourth Inquisition

By Glayde Whitney
Florida State University

This paper originally appeared in The Mankind Quarterly , vol. 38, #1 & 2, Fall/Winter 1997, p.99-124.

Raymond B. Cattell was selected to receive the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement from the American Psychological Foundation. The award ceremony was canceled at the last minute when threats were made to disrupt the Chicago convention of the APA amid charges that Cattell's work was racist. It took only two political activists to derail the APF. This event is analyzed as an instance of Inquisitional attack on rational thought and inquiry, in the context of modern liberalism with radical egalitarianism.

The events of August 1997 will assure that the already eminent scientist Raymond B. Cattell will be remembered in history as elevated to the pantheon occupied by such as Roger Bacon, William of Occam, and Galileo Galilei. The infamous events of August and the players will be summarized below, but first a context needs to be established in order to make any sense of the scurrilous attack and the craven response of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Approaches to Knowledge

The Harvard biologist, historian and philosopher of science Ernst Mayr (1982) has suggested that as human populations evolve from savagery to civilization their approach to knowledge takes one or another of two paths.

One approach leads to modern science, the other to authoritative dogma. The direction toward science, traceable back to the philosophies of ancient Greece, is unique to Western civilization. The much more common direction toward authoritative dogmas is illustrated by the revealed religions that sprang from the Middle East.

The direction toward science traces to the first recorded Western philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c.636-c.546 BC). Thales maintained that to gain knowledge and understanding one should start with naturalistic observation, that is, descriptions of events as they exist in the real world. We should then seek natural explanations for natural phenomena. Gods, supernatural beings, and forces or events that were outside the system should not be invoked as explanations for events within the system. A third major position was that it is acceptable, even encouraged, to question existing explanations, to use criticism in order to improve knowledge and theories. These three principles that trace to the beginnings of recorded Western thought capture the essence of modern science; naturalistic observation, natural explanation, and criticism as a beneficial tool to advancing knowledge.

Alas, from Thales' time through today his approach has, on a worldwide basis, been a minority position under constant attack. The road to dogma starts with assertions of knowledge based in authority. Often from a great man or leader come statements, frequently but not always based in revelation. The religious and political aspects of dogmatic systems often become commingled. The revelations leading to dogmas often claim supernatural inspiration, but this is not necessarily the case. Christian theology, Marxian sociology, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory equally well illustrate dogmatic belief systems. The systems with their statements to account for reality become codified into a set of rigid beliefs. Not only is criticism and questioning not encouraged, it is condemned. The less than complete supporter, the doubter, is shunned, outcast, outlawed, a heretic, criminal and evil sinner. Followers will believe on the basis of acceptance of authority ("on faith") and will not deviate from the established dogmas that tend to become ever more rigid. Encounters with the partially understood real world, in all its foibles, always lead to discrepancy between dogma and natural observation of real phenomena.

It is considered necessary to preserve the authoritarian dogma and the power of the authorities in the face of conflicting truths. The Path of Righteousness knows what is good for man and society. Dissenters, free thinkers, or those with new knowledge are viewed as a threat to all that is Good. Sanctions, laws, censorship, need to be imposed and enforced. This is the realm of Inquisitions. In the history of Western civilization there have been four main identifiable inquisitions. It is the fourth that we suffer today.

Inquisitions

First Inquisition. The first major inquisition was established in 1233 AD to suppress heresy. The groundwork leading up to the need for this inquisition extends back to the origins of the Christian religion in the west. The few centuries around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire were turbulent. The Roman Emperor Constantine I had his famous vision (312 AD) which led to his establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. Shortly thereafter the Empire fell; various invading Germanic tribes repeatedly sacked Rome. In the turmoil many of the writings of the ancients, Greek and Roman, were temporarily "lost" to Western civilization. Aristotle, Galen, Thales, were reintroduced only centuries later.

St. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) early systematized Christian doctrine in his monumental On the Trinity. He argued against paganism in The City of God, and provided what has been called a "classic of Christian mysticism" in his autobiographical Confessions. Augustine came to be recognized as the father of theology and over the centuries of the dark ages his approach became official dogma.

The essence of Augustinian dogma is that truth must be accepted on faith. And truth resides in the revealed word of God as represented in the Bible and interpreted by the leaders of the Church. With the "rediscovery" of the learned writings of the Ancients, often acquired from Islam and translated from Arabic back into Latin, problems arose. Here was knowledge, and approaches to knowledge such as Aristotelian deductive logic, not envisioned in the existing dogma. The age of the scholastics was upon the world as scholars tried to incorporate the new knowledge.

Robert Grosseteste (1175 - 1253), Franciscan and first chancellor of Oxford University, studied Aristotle and attempted to integrate the Greek knowledge with Christian dogma. He suggested that there were actually two routes to knowledge, observation with deductive reasoning was one route, while authority (revelation from the written word as interpreted by dogma) was another. In the direction of science, Grosseteste formulated his famous Principle of Falsification: when faced with an apparent conflict between observation and dogma, go with the observation. Experience can falsify the pronouncements of authority.

This won't do at all, hence the Papal Inquisition of 1233. Times were dicey for the scholastics. William of Occam (c.1285 - 1349) escaped capture when he fled. In the same year (1264) was published Roger Bacon's De Computo Naturali and Thomas Acquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles. For his troubles Bacon (c. 1214 - 1294) was imprisoned - 15 years - for heresy. Among the charged crimes was "suggesting novelties". Although it was touch-and-go for Acquinas (1225 -1274), he was eventually sainted and his solutions (Summa Theologica) became the new dogma. As had Grosseteste, Acquinas tried to integrate Greek natural philosophy, essentially Aristotle, with Christian dogma. In God's perfect wisdom these two approaches to knowledge will always ultimately agree. However, in our fallibility there will on occasion appear to be a conflict between rational observation (science) and the revealed word (religion). When in doubt, go with revelation. The subsequent hardening of the new theology into dogma set the stage for the third inquisition.

Second Inquisition. The second of the major inquisitions was established in 1478 as the Spanish Inquisition. This one was primarily the result of conflicts between competing segments of society. The Spanish monarchy established the inquisition to enforce laws of conversion and to catch false converts. Over the preceding centuries members of the Jewish community had steadily amassed increasing proportions of wealth and power. They, along with Muslims, had been forced to either convert or leave the country. When it was suspected that many of the conversos were secretly retaining their Jewish values and culture, the inquisition was established to root them out. A consideration of this second recognized inquisition would lead too far astray for the present essay. MacDonald (1994) provides an in-depth consideration of the Spanish Inquisition from the point of view of the social sciences.

Third Inquisition. The third of the main inquisitions was established in 1542 to suppress heresy. As with the first inquisition, a basic problem was that the established authorities would not integrate new knowledge that was discovered after the establishment of their dogmas. Instead the new knowledge was treated as a central threat to all that was good in society. Suppression and censorship was the answer.

The synthesis of Greek wisdom and Christian theology that was rigidified as dogma after the work of St. Thomas Acquinas included the flat earth with man as the center of the universe. Clearly the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system could not be tolerated. Although widely discussed, Copernicus' theory was published only in 1543 when the author was on his deathbed, and then presented only as a speculative thought exercise. It was in 1591 that Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) was arrested for a variety of thought crimes, including that he believed the Copernican "theory" to be true.

Andrew White poignantly wrote:

But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the truth lived on. (p.125)

It has been pointed out that in the latter decades of the 20th century the fourth inquisition no longer burns its victims, although it has arranged the firing of rather many.

The story of Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) is well known to all. Only a decade after the burning of Bruno, Galileo built a telescope. By 1610 he was proclaiming on the basis of new evidence the truth of the Copernican Theory. In essence, "come look through the telescope and see for yourself the evidence for the theory". Arrested by the Inquisition in 1616, he was released only to be re-arrested in 1633. Held under house arrest, the old man was forced under threat of torture to recant.

For the physical sciences the inquisitional suppression and censorship was coming to an end. Indeed, Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727), born in the year of Galileo's death, lived to be knighted and upon death was buried in Westminster Abbey, two of the highest honors from his Church and Country.

Lagging the physical sciences by a few centuries, the psychological and social sciences are still suffering attempts at suppression and censorship, which characterize the inquisitional approach.

Fourth Inquisition. The fourth inquisition was established in the mid-twentieth century to suppress heresy. As with the first and third inquisitions, a main problem has been that the ideologues did not integrate new knowledge with their already established objectives and dogmas. Instead they viewed new discoveries as a direct threat to all that was good and important in society. As with the earlier inquisitions, the fourth attempts to suppress and censor new knowledge that is perceived to be threatening to old dogmas.

Somewhere between Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton an influential segment of the intelligentsia lurched far to the ideological and political left. Thomas Jefferson certainly did not confuse rule of law ("all men are created equal") and hereditary reality. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote,

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents .... For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son." (Jefferson, 1813).

In the face of what experience proves, and in open antagonism to much of twentieth century science, a powerful strain of modern liberalism worships radical egalitarianism. Modern liberalism is attempting to enforce Lysenkoism throughout Western civilization. The travesty that is Lysenkoism ruined the science and economy of the Soviet Union. It is well known as an example of the folly of attempting to repeal truth in the service of ideology (Berg, 1988; Medvedev, 1971; Soyfer, 1994). What is less often acknowledged is that the spirit of Lysenkoism is alive and well in the form of modern liberalism's enforcement of radical egalitarianism.

There and here the guiding theory is identical; it is socialist utopia based on egalitarianism, with what the behavioral scientists call environmental determinism. In 1948 Stalin actually outlawed genetics as being a western bourgeois construction that was incompatible with the truths of Marxist-Leninism. Like outlawing the heliocentric nature of the solar system. Hillary doesn't have quite that political clout, yet.

The theory that Stalin and Hillary share is that all those newborns, wheat plants for Uncle Joe, human babies for Mother Hillary, have identical potentials for growth and development. If some individuals don't do as well as others, it is because of their early experience. This is obviously true - everyone knows that fertilizer is important for wheat plants, and everyone knows that early nutrition and stimulation is important for humans. This is so obviously true that anyone who questions its application to the problems at hand is an idiot, an enemy of the state, and a mean-spirited hate monger. There the eminent scientist who objected, the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, died of disease and starvation in Gulag. Here eminent scientists that voice objections are subjected to vitriolic ad hominem attacks [And the end of whatever federal research support they may have had].

In addition to individual differences there are those vexatious group differences. There winter wheat and spring wheat did not produce equal crop outcomes. Here it is altogether too obvious that various ethnic/racial groups do not produce equal educational, criminal, or job performance outcomes. Although no one was actually sure of all of the reasons for the differential outcomes, if you did not acquiesce to the environmentalist socialist egalitarian explanation, you were evil, a maverick beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. There a hated Morganist-Mendelist, here a contemptuous racist. (Whitney, 1997).

Exactly where and how modern liberalism escaped the bounds of reality is a topic of widespread discussion. The seeds of radical egalitarianism may be contained in the basics of Christianity, with its teaching that all men are equal in the eyes of God (Bork, 1996; Pearson, 1996). Certainly the nineteenth century New England, largely Unitarian, social reformers were influenced not only by their religion, but also by the contemporaneous revolutionaries in Europe.

A major lurch to the left occurred with the bloody French revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality, fraternity". Then there was the 1847 publication of the Communist Manifesto, followed by the 1848 wave of riots and revolutio
ns throughout Europe. The 1867 first volume of Das Kapital was dedicated to Darwin for the notions of evolutionary materialism and progress in the world. However, it is essentially non-biological and like the rest of Marx's writing contains no appreciation of evolutionary biology.

In areas pretending to science, as late as 1934 Franz Boas was maintaining that the basis of all serious study was the work of Theodor Waitz. Waitz's major work of 1858 was the pre-Darwinian On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man. This thread was not originally anti-Darwinian; rather it was a-Darwinian or non-Darwinian, an approach to the study of man rooted in biblical creationism with a monogenesist emphasis (Mayr, 1982; Degler, 1991).

Many writers agree that a major wrenching leftward happened with the protest decade of the 1960s. In his autobiographical Radical Son, David Horowitz (1997) describes how a group of ideologically committed red-diaper babies, with support and encouragement of the underground Communist Party, engineered much of the radicalism of the 1960s. In Destructive Generation Collier and Horowitz (1995) explain that "the utopianism of the Left is a secular religion. However sordid Leftist practice may be, defending Leftist ideals is, for the true believer, tantamount to defending the ideals of humanity itself. To protect the faith is the highest calling of the radical creed. The more the evidence weighs against the belief, the more noble the act of believing becomes" (p. 246).

There is a "readiness to reshape reality to make the world correspond to an idea" (p. 37). There is a "willingness to tinker with the facts to serve a greater truth" (p.37). And so it has obviously been since the 1960s. Over recent decades, as the scientific data accumulate the stridency of the Left intensifies. Driven by ideology and not constrained by the truth, as all else fails they engage in misrepresentation and character assassination.

Raymond B. Cattell described some aspects of the workings of this inquisition which has been snarling at his heels for many decades. In A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, Cattell (1972) wrote:

The danger is not only that politicians and private institutions with axes to grind will find tame or corruptible social scientists to support their positions. The greater danger which recent experiences both here and abroad, e.g., Lysenkoism in Russia, have revealed is that partisans primarily political in interest and intention either accidentally or deliberately infiltrate the ranks of science. In the case of the Lysenko episode, and comparable events in Nazi Germany, the disturbing realization to scientists was that the exile or death of those ejected from their academic positions followed what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists, but was actually politically staged." (p. 38).

Robert Bork has commented on a recent high-profile example of "what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists" (Cattell, 1972, p.38). Bork (1996) pointed out that:

For egalitarians there is always lurking the nightmare that there may be genetic differences between ethnic groups that result in different average levels of performance in different activities. Only that fear can explain the explosive rage with which some commentators received The Bell Curve by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which, as a small part of a much larger thesis concluded that there are heritable differences in cognitive ability among the races. Some comments expressed respectful and thoughtful disagreement, some asked for careful reexamination of the data and arguments, but some did little more than shout "Nazi". Herrnstein and Murray are not racists but serious scholars. They may be right or they may not, but the episode indicates the degree to which the ideology of egalitarianism censors expression and thought in sensitive areas. (pp. 267-268).

Many contemporary events amply illustrate the truly inquisitional nature of modern liberalism in the defense of radical egalitarianism. The titles of some papers written by targets of the inquisition are informative, such as "Egalitarian fiction and collective fraud" (Gottfredson, 1994) and "Ideology and censorship in behavior genetics" (Whitney, 1995). While under criminal investigation instigated because of his research, Rushton (1994) wrote "The equalitarian dogma revisited".

It is Christopher Brand, lately of Edinburgh University, UK, who in 1997 suffered the high penalty of being fired for challenging the egalitarian fiction. Having been on the psychology department faculty for over twenty years, in 1996 Brand authored a book entitled The g Factor. Published in the UK by John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest of the international scholarly houses, the company's promotional literature contained the statement:

The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern `educationalists'. This short book provides a great deal for thought and debate.

Brand's book enjoyed brisk sales in the UK for about 6 weeks, and was scheduled for release in the US, when it was suddenly "depublished", actually withdrawn from circulation, seemingly at the command of Wiley's New York executive headquarters. Wiley told the media that the book "makes assertions that we find repellent". Branded a "racist", Christopher Brand was in due course suspended from teaching and administrative duties at Edinburgh University. A "Special Tribunal" was convened, following which Mr. Brand was sacked. At the time of this writing, and in accord with the procedures of classical Lysenkoism, the proceedings of the Special Tribunal remain secret.

The present fourth inquisition is directly analogous with the preceding first and third inquisitions. The agenda and objectives of liberalism were established first before, and then with complete disregard for, Darwin's (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The dogmatic position of modern liberalism with radical egalitarianism was established in a philosophical and political context. The positions were hardened into dogma with no regard for the discoveries of the explorations of the 19th century. Additionally, the genetics and behavior genetics that routinely attacked with religious fervor by the radical egalitarians twentieth century science, not nineteenth century political theology. Marx was writing in the 1840s and 1860s, while Mendel's epoch-setting experiments and theory were not widely appreciated until after 1900.

Unfortunately the radical egalitarianism characteristic of modern liberalism became formalized as a quasi-theological dogma just before the discovery of much new knowledge. Just as the first inquisition arose because the existing dogma did not encompass knowledge of Aristotle, and the third inquisition functioned because the dogma was inconsistent with the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, so the current fourth inquisition exists in large part because its dogma is inconsistent with the discoveries of Darwin, Galton, and Mendel.

One must never underestimate what Richard John Neuhaus called "the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intoler- ance and illiberality of liberalism." (Bork, 1996, p. 336).

The Events of August 1997

The highest honor bestowed by the American Psychological Association (APA) is the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science. As the APA prepared for its 105th annual convention to be held in August, the house organ American Psychologist (1997) for August announced the winner of the Gold Medal.

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishment in 4 areas of psychology. The 1997 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Li
fe Achievement in Psychological Science is Raymond B. Cattell.

Joseph D. Matarazzo, President of the APF, will present the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science at the 105th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association on August 16, 1997, at 5:00 p.m. in Ballroom III of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers in Chicago. (p. 797).

The 92-year-old Cattell, with a traveling companion to assist him, traveled from his retirement home in Hawaii to be at the meeting in Chicago to receive this special honor, a gold medal award for a lifetime of work. But Joseph D. Matarazzo did not present the Gold Medal on August 16. Instead:

On Aug. 13, the foundation decided to postpone the presentation of the award to Raymond B. Cattell, in the week preceeding the opening of the APA's 1997 Annual Convention, concerns that Cattell's writings were racist and advocated the separation of the races were voiced to the association. (http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep97/award.html).

Since its founding in 1892, the American Psychological Association (APA) has only once changed the statement of objectives contained in its bylaws. In 1892 the one objective was "to advance psychology as a science." From 1945 there have been three: "The object of the APA shall be to advance psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare". From 1945, political concerns, left wing, became a more prominent, and contentious, part of the APA. In the files of the historian of the Psychonomic Society are letters from prominent psychologists of the time: "All manner of interests, mostly non-scientific, sprang up"; the APA proliferated into a "chaotic monster" that "fails to discriminate between science and charlatanry". It engaged in much political lobbying for mostly liberal causes. In protest, breakaway scientists formed the Psychonomic Society in 1959. Many members of the APA drifted away over the years, often in protest of the politicization of the Association. Finally a major schism occurred. In 1987/88 psychologists who wished to separate from the increasingly professional and political APA formed the American Psychological Society. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the remnant APA was such an easy mark for the Inquisition in 1997.

The New York Times for August 15 reported an interview with Rhea Farberman, director of communications for the association:

Ms. Farberman said a committee had voted to give Cattell the award "before it knew of the information that has since come to light," adding "This new information has raised a lot of concerns, and we want to be thorough in making a judgment." (Hilts, 1997).

This excuse of new information "coming to light" is preposterous. Cattell has never been retiring about his interpretations of data and theory. Frankly outspoken throughout his long career, his views have been widely known for decades among the scientific community. Ms. Farberman appears to be impugning the competence of the leading psychologists that had in full knowledge chosen Cattell for their most prestigious award. It was not even for "new information" that Cattell is on the hit list of the Inquisition; that information has been public knowledge for years.

Poor Ms. Farberman, and the APF, should have realized that with the (as yet) uncensored Internet it is becoming almost impossible to hide the most embarrassing details of organizational snafus. From winnowing great masses of Internet traffic (and admittedly some of it second-hand or further removed, and impossible to cite confidential sources) it seems that it was not new information but failure of courage that tripped up the APF. Apparently the original and lengthly letter of nomination spelled out both Cattell's scientific strengths and specifically flagged those of his views that are deemed controversial. A committee of some six well-informed past-presidents chose Cattell as deserving the Gold Medal with full knowledge of his works. Then after the award was publicly announced, a well- experienced Inquisitor, Barry Mehler (not himself a psychologist), is reputed to have threatened to disrupt the convention if the award were given to Cattell. Shades of a `60s convention in Chicago! Against much advice, and with at least one eminent psychologist threatening to resign if he did so, Matarazzo decided to cancel the ceremony and further investigate the award.

The official citation that accompanied the Gold Medal Award is as follows:

In a remarkable 70-year career, Raymond B. Cattell has made prodigious, landmark contributions to psychology, including factor analytic mapping of the domains of personality, motivation, and abilities; exploration of three different medias of assessment; separation of fluid and crystallized intelligence; and numerous methodological innovations. Thus, Cattell became recognized in numerous substantive areas, providing a model of the complete psychologist in an age of specialization. It may be said that Cattell stands without peer in his creation of a unified theory of individual differences integrating intellectual, temperamental, and dynamic domains of personality in the context of environmental and hereditary influences. (Amer. Psychol, 1997, 797).

The fact is that it was Cattell's massive contribution to science that led to the APF decision to select him for this prestigious award, but the decision to withhold it was made on purely political grounds, i.e. that he "advocated the separation of the races." It is that substantive and theoretical domain specified in the last two words of his citation, "hereditary influences", that long ago flagged Cattell as a target of the Inquisition. In craven response to the attack on Cattell, the APA announced that the American Psychological Foundation would now appoint a special Blue Ribbon Panel, to consist of both psychologists and non-psychologists, to review the award.

The Accusers

Only two accusers have been publicly mentioned as attacking the award of the Gold Medal to Cattell. Apparently it doesn't take much to derail an organization as sensitive to the Inquisitional furies as is the APA. Neither were psychologists. The heavyweight was Abraham Foxman, identified in the New York Times as "the national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith," who has "written to the association protesting the award, saying it would give the group's `seal of approval to a man who has, whatever his other achievements, exhibited a lifelong commitment to racial supremacy theories.'" (Hilts, 1997).

Although it was probably the criticism of the influential ADL organization that caused the APA to hold up the award at the last moment, the initiative would seem to have come from the lesser accuser, one Barry Mehler, an associate professor of humanities at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Mehler has incorporated something that he calls "The Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR)".

On the Internet Mehler has provided quotes of himself: "`ISAR created this story and it's far from over,' Mehler said. `It is gratifying to see my Institute attain this level of credibility in so short a time. I will be monitoring the investigation of the blue-ribbon committee.' ... Mehler ... has made national headlines with his recent criticism of the American Psychological Foundation's (APF) choice of psychologist Raymond B. Cattell for a lifetime achievement award .... Mehler's protest has stirred up national publicity in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Mehler has been interviewed by radio giant WBAI in New York and has received numerous inquiries into the Cattell issue". Mehler has also posted a sample of his writing, a paper entitled "In Genes We Trust: When Science Bows to Racism". Mehler reports that the paper was a cover feature in the magazine Reform Judaism for Winter 1994, and was revised and republished in four further outlets, 1, The Public Eye, 2, RaceFile, 3, Networking: A Publication of
the Fight the Right Network, and 4, B'nai B'rith Messenger.

The paper is replete with passages such as: "With its legacy of Dr. Josef Mengele's twin experiments at Auschwitz and Dr. Burt's bogus science, twin studies fell into disfavor". Adjectives scattered throughout include "racist", "Hitler's race ideology", "Nazi produced", "Fascist ideologist", "notoriously anti-Semitic", "fraudulent", and it concludes, "we must beware of scientists who wish to play God".

Such loose use of similies is reprehensible. Mehler is seemingly confusing anti-liberalism with anti-Semitism. Anti-liberalism apparently is often confused with anti-Semitism. To illustrate, in the newsletter Details for July 1997, published by The Jewish Policy Center, Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote:

I would like to argue that the root cause of both anti-Semitism and intermarriage in America today is the same, namely, the Jewish community's disproportionate liberalism .... The vast majority of Americans care deeply about the value of family and religion. They recognize that these institutions have been the pillars of moral society for millennia. They realize that liberalism, which devalues these institutions, is largely responsible for the fact that life in America has become more squalid, more expensive, and more dangerous over the past 30 years .... Though virtually all Americans are too decent to let this blossom into full-fledged anti-Semitism, there is always that threat." (pp. 1-2).

Mehler has been guilty of this confusion for a long time. In the book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Pearson, 1997), author Roger Pearson provides a chapter entitled "Activist Lysenkoism: The Case of Barry Mehler". In this he points out that decades ago Mehler was a student in a "Program for Training in Research on Institutional Racism" that was headed by Jerry Hirsch, and that Hirsch had long ago attacked Cattell. For example, he quotes Hirsch as saying "`my University of Illinois squandered a career-long research professorship on [Cattell]." Likening Cattell to the "disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew," Hirsch railed against Cattell's "Hitler-like recommendations on the need for eugenic foresight" (p. 259).

Pearson continues:

Today Hirsch is retired, and we hear less from him. But his torch is being carried by someone who appears to be even more of a zealot. That someone is his erstwhile student, Barry Mehler. Let us look at this disciple of Jerry Hirsch, an excellent example of a political activist operating from the security of the academic world. Mehler has published little or no non-political material: he appears to specialize in politicized diatribes, filled with inaccuracies, for fringe publications on the Far Left, and glories in participating in non-academic TV shows such as Geraldo. His published works have targeted respected scholars with impressive research credentials who reject the aberrant theory that all individuals and peoples are equal (i.e., identical) in their inherited potential abilities. Moreover, copies of these error-filled and scandalous attacks on such scholars have often been mailed to journalists in anonymous envelopes. Recipients have ranged from well-known figures such as Jack Anderson, the syndicated columnist, to editors of student journals and to journalists working for local newspapers in towns where the scholars Mehler lambasts work and reside. (pp. 259-260).

Several qualities consistently characterize Mehler's attacks on the scholars he selects for `exposure.' He seldom attempts to present scientific evidence to contradict the findings of their research. Clearly, since they are writing within the limits of their own or related disciplines, and he has no demonstrated or academically recognized competence in these areas, he cannot do this. Instead he falls back on ad hominem attacks, labeling some of America's and Britain's finest scientists `racists,' `nazis' and `fascists.' Those whom he has attacked include a long list of distinguished scholars, such as: John Baker (Oxford), Thomas Bouchard (Minnesota), Sir Cyril Burt (London), Raymond Cattell (Illinois and Hawaii), C. D. Darlington (Oxford), Hans Eysenck (London), Linda Gottfredson (Deleware), James Gregor (UC Berkeley), Richard Herrnstein (Harvard), Arthur Jensen (UC Berkeley), Travis Osborne (Georgia), J. Philippe Rushton (Western Ontario), Nancy Segal (Minnesota), William Shockley (Stanford), Audrey Shuey (Randolph Macon Woman's College), Ernest Van den Haag (CUNY), and Daniel Vining (Pennsylvania). (p. 262).

The Charges

The charges lodged against Cattell have been described at some length. There is absolutely no need here to go into any detail with regard to any of Cattell's many technical scientific achievements. This is because, true to the form described above by Pearson, the scientific accomplishments of the great man do not figure in the charges leveled against him. The charges fall into three categories: [A] heresy; [B] blasphemy; and [C] cavorting with devils. In taking the charges up one-at-a-time, I hope to show that after cutting through the invective, and discarding the gratuitous ad hominems, there are indeed large kernels of truth embedded in each of them. As with most victims of Inquisitions, the target is largely guilty as charged.

[A] Heresy. The charge is made that Cattell has been, since the 1930s, an advocate of eugenics. Indeed beyond that, Cattell followed Galton's lead in suggesting that the science of eugenics could form the basis for a new approach to religion. Cattell proposed an ethical system founded in science, to be called "Beyondism". Mehler tells us:

Cattell first outlined his `evolutionary ethic' based on natural selection in Psychology and Social Progress (1933), and that "Cattell's first monograph on the topic was, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (Cattell, 1972), followed by Beyondism: Religion from Science" (Cattell, 1987).

The invective is contemptible. Mehler tells us that "`Beyondism' is a neo-fascist contrivance. Cattell promulgates ideas that he formulated within a demimonde of radical eugenicists and neo-fascists ... it is striking for its extremism, racism, and virulent bias". Of course the underlying heresy here, a belief in the well-established truth of genetic influence on individual differences, is totally at odds with the radical egalitarianism that is the Inquisition's most sacred dogma. Only with genetic causes would most of the practices advocated as eugenics be effective. People who have studied the life and works of Sir Francis Galton know that his original "eugenics" has since divided into two parts. One part, the basic science, has developed into what is today known as genetics and human genetics. The second part, the application of hereditary knowledge for the good of man and society, has developed into the largely voluntary genetic counseling of today (Whitney, 1990). Even Cattell is quoted as saying that his ideas have evolved and he is today an advocate of voluntary eugenics.

Contrary to Mehler's attempts to invoke wrath at the alleged anti-Semitism inherent in research into heredity, he should recognise, as so many Jewish scientists do, that the Jewish community has benefited from hereditarian research and eugenical practices at least as much as any other population. The case of population screening for carriers of Tay Sachs disease, followed by amniocentesis for heterozygous couples and voluntary abortion of affected fetuses, has been hailed as a great "life-giving". Parents can now choose to have a healthy baby instead of suffering through the agonizing death of a Tay Sachs affected child. For many years screening for Tay Sachs was limited to members of the Ashkenazim because they are the only population group with a relatively high frequency of the gene for Tay Sachs disease (Kaback, 1977). This is applied genetics eugenics in action. So too is the recently announced screening for the first identified gene that is causally linked to colorectal cancer. The screening is to be limited to Ashkenazim, the only group yet
found to harbor the gene (Hopkins, 1997a, 1997b; Laken, et. al., 1997). Again, eugenics in action. It is hard to understand how such hereditarian research and application eugenics is in any way "anti-Semitic", as Mehler has claimed.

Other sources list many advocates in making the point that back into the 1930s and before, many social progressives of both the right and the left were enthusiastic eugenicists (Pearson, 1996). One only has to think of H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Herman J. Muller. It has also been emphasized elsewhere that the painting of eugenics with the tar brush of a slippery slope to Nazism is post-war propaganda that is largely devoid of substance (Whitney, 1996). The very recent "exposés" in the newspapers of governmental sponsored eugenic programs in various social democratic countries even into the 1970s (e.g. Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland) serves to underscore the lack of relationship.

The charge published in The New York Times that Cattell is "a man who has, whatever his other achievements, exhibited a lifelong commitment to racial supremacy theories" (Hilts, 1997) needs translation out of political invectese. Yes, it is true that as an outstanding scientist with many other achievements, Cattell has exhibited a lifelong commitment to attempting to understand the causes of both individual and group differences. Cattell is guilty of being a scientist with an interest in the causes of individual differences. As such he has followed the empirical data wherever it may have lead. As just one example of suspected environmental effects, cognitive scientists have in recent decades been very interested in the so-called Flynn effect. The finding that in industrialized societies there seems to be taking place a substantial and prolonged increase in the level of intellectual functioning (Flynn, 1987). This is a phenomenon that Cattell empirically found and reported decades ago (Cattell, 1951).

Cattell is only guilty of advocating a version of secular humanism incorporating aspects of morality and ethics that would be informed by knowledge from modern science. He named it "Beyondism".

[B] Blasphemy. Mehler plays the Hitler card in order to underscore Cattell's reprehensibleness:

Hitler actually shared many values of the average American. He aimed at full employment, family values, and raising the standard of living, and countless other things, including the Volkswagen, which he designed himself for the average family. (The Beyondist, 1994, p. 2).

This is simply an attempt to smear Cattell by making him out to be a fan. Mehler is essentially quoting out of context. He omits the next and concluding sentence of Cattell's passage, which was:

The man turned out evil in his militarism and his treatment of the Jews and dissident Catholics, but that does not justify, to a rational person, calling all his attitudes mistaken.

If we were to respond flippantly to Mehler's nonsense, we could point out that according to customer information at the Volkswagen Company (phone 1-800-822-8987), through March of 1996, 21,276,932 persons have voted with their purchase in agreement with Cattell that in the Volkswagen Hitler did a good thing. But on a much more serious note, here it is only Mehler that is guilty of blaspheme. Mehler in effect trivializes the Holocaust by his loose and inappropriate invocation of Hitler.

[C] Cavorting with Devils. Mehler freely engages in guilt-by- association. Quite a few, mostly obscure or effectively marginalized, persons are named.

Wilmot Robertson seems to be the worst of the lot. Mehler says "To my knowledge, Cattell is the only major academic willing to be forthright about his association with Robertson." We are informed that Wilmot Robertson has written a few books, including one entitled The Dispossessed Majority, and that he publishes a "neo-fascist magazine" that is targeted toward an educated audience that is named Instauration. But that may be as it may be. Cattell is certainly not responsible for anything Robertson may write or publish. Neither is any interest he may or may not have in reading Robertson's publications a justifiable reason for denying him a well-earned award for his contributions to science. The recent behavior of the APA seems to indicate that science is still subject to politics under the current rule of the Fourth Inquisition.

Mehler even attacks Cattell's association with The Mankind Quarterly, protesting that: "Cattell has published numerous times in Pearson's Mankind Quarterly and Pearson has published a number of Cattell's monographs." Cattell has served on the editorial board of The Mankind Quarterly for many years. Although that journal does not always bend to comply with the dogma of modern politicized liberalism, there is nothing even remotely anti-Semitic about its contents. Mehler may understandably resent Pearson's exposé of his own writings (see Pearson, 1991). but Cattell's willingness to lend his name to the advisory board of The Mankind Quarterly in no way impugns Cattell's own status as a scholar, reflecting only to the credit of The Mankind Quarterly.

Another View

An eminent student of the human condition, the recently deceased Hans J. Eysenck, once addressed the very issues that now face the Blue Ribbon Panel convened by the APF to look into Cattell's Gold Medal:

This, then, is the "trahison des clercs" of which I make complaint: that both students and their elders and betters have begun to play a child's game of goodies and baddies, in which a man's work is judged, not in terms of its scientific content, or on any rational, empirical basis, but in terms of whether it agrees with the critic's preconceptions. And my suggestion for the future is that which Sir Francis Bacon gave centuries ago in The Advancement of Learning:

"To have the true testimonies of learning to be better heard, without the interruption of tacit objection, I think good to deliver it from the discredits and disgraces it hath received, all from ignorance; but ignorance severally disguised; appearing sometimes in the zeal and jealousy of devines; sometimes in the severity and arrogance of politiques; and sometimes in the errors and imperfections of learned men themselves ..."

However that may be, there are of course difficult ethical and moral problems and dilemmas involved in the discussion, and the exhortations of militant Leftists should not preclude serious discussion of these problems. Note first of all a `Resolution in Scientific Freedom,' signed by 50 eminent scientists, among them: Francis H.C. Crick, Nobel Prize-winner, Cambridge University; Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize-winner, College de France; Arthur R. Jensen, University of California; Richard Herrnstein, Harvard University; C.D. Darlington, Oxford University; and John C. Kendrew, Nobel Prize-winner, Cambridge University. The Resolution reads as follows:

The history of civilization shows many periods when scientific research or teaching was censured, punished, or suppressed for non-scientific reasons, usually for seeming to contradict some religious or political belief. Well-known scientist victims include: Galileo in orthodox Italy; Darwin, in Victorian England; Einstein, in Hitler's Germany; and Mendelian biologists, in Stalin's Russia.

Today, a similar suppression, censure, punishment, and defamation are being applied against scientists who emphasize the role of heredity in human behavior. Published positions are often misquoted and misrepresented; emotional appeals replace scientific reasoning; arguments are directed against the man rather than against the evidence (e.g. a scientist is called `fascist', and his arguments are ignored).

A large number of attacks come from non-scientists, or even anti-scientists, among the political militants on campus. Other attackers include academics committed to environmentalism in their explanation of almost all human differences. And a large number of scientist
s, who have studied the evidence and are persuaded of the great role played by heredity in human behavior, are silent, neither expressing their beliefs clearly in public, nor rallying strongly to the defence of their more outspoken colleagues.

The results are seen in the present academy; it is virtually heresy to express a hereditarian view, or to recommend further study of the biological bases of behavior. A kind of orthodox environmentalism dominates the liberal academy, and strongly inhibits teachers, researchers, and scholars from turning to biological explanations or efforts. Now, therefore, we the undersigned scientists from a variety of fields, declare the following beliefs and principles:

(1) We have investigated much evidence concerning the possible role of inheritance in human abilities and behaviors, and "we believe such hereditary influences" are very strong.

(2) We wish strongly to encourage research into the biological and hereditary bases of behavior, as a major complement to the environmental efforts at explanation.

(3) We strongly defend the right, and emphasize the scholarly duty, of the teacher to discuss hereditary influences on behavior, in appropriate settings and with responsible scholarship.

(4) We deplore the evasion of hereditary reasoning in current textbooks, and the failure to give responsible weight to heredity in disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, educational psychology, psychological measurement, and many others.

(5) We call upon liberal academics - upon faculty senates, upon professional and learned societies, upon the American Association of University Professors, upon the American Civil Liberties Union, upon the University Centres for Rational Alternatives, upon presidents and boards of trustees, upon departments of science, and upon the editors of scholarly journals - to insist upon the openness of social science to the well-grounded claims of the bio-behavioral reasoning, and to protect vigilantly any qualified faculty members who responsibly teach, research, or publish concerning such reasoning.

We so urge because as scientists we believe that human problems may best be remedied by increased human knowledge, and that such increases in knowledge lead much more probably to the enhancement of human happiness, than to the opposite.

I was asked by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to contribute an article on the ethics of science and the duties of scientists, with special reference to these events. What I wrote then I still believe to be right, and consequently the body of the text of my contribution is reprinted here in full. This is what I said:

It used to be taken for granted that it was not only ethically `right' for scientists to make public their discoveries; it was regarded as their `duty' to do so. Secrecy, the withholding of information, and the refusal to communicate knowledge were rightly regarded as cardinal sins against the scientific ethos.

This is true no more. In recent years it has been argued, more and more vociferously, that scientists should have regard for the social consequences of their discoveries, and of their pronouncements; if these consequences are undesirable, the research in the area involved should be terminated, and results already achieved should not be publicized.

The area which has seen most of this kind of argumentation is of course that concerned with the inheritance of intelligence, and with racial differences in ability; many even of those who acknowledge that Jensen's arguments are scientifically correct have argued that he was wrong (and that Herrnstein and I were wrong) in actually publishing the conclusions to which all the experimental work was leading. Stressing the possible hereditary nature of the IQ deficit of American blacks, as compared with American whites, might have serious consequences in jeopardizing the integration between the races so earnestly desired by both sides to the argument; carrying out further research might offend liberal opinion, and lead to further dispute, strife, and even bloodshed.

What good could come of work along these lines, it was frequently argued; the results would be of purely academic interest as both sides were agreed that there was much overlap in ability between the two races, so that each individual would still have to be judged in terms of his particular pattern of abilities, rather than as a member of a particular race. Better let sleeping dogs lie and studiously turn a blind eye to such facts and theories as might impinge on the general belief in universal egalitarianism, and threaten its very foundations.

"I believe that there are powerful arguments against this modern belief in the opportunistic silencing of inconvenient theories, and the refusal to support research which might unearth equally inconvenient facts, all in the supposed interests of society. The first argument by itself, I would suggest, is quite conclusive; it is based on the impossibility of forecasting the social consequences (or even the scientific consequences) of one's findings and theories. It is impossible to read the history of science without becoming aware of the fact that even the greatest scientists were incapable of looking ahead even a few years and predicting the consequences of their actions." (Eysenck, 1997, pp 45-48).

Guilty as Charged

With regard to Giordano Bruno, "His reward indeed came even for his faulty utterances when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, thoughtful men from all parts of the world united in erecting his statue on the spot where he had been burned by the Roman Inquisition nearly three hundred years before." (White, 1896/1965, p.80).

We can only hope that the Blue Ribbon Panel of the APF can render its verdict with regard to Raymond B. Cattell in a more timely fashion.

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