Truth in Science
Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment, and Public Policy.
by Bernard D. Davis.
Prometheus Books. 324 pp. $22.95.
The success of science is due in great part to its emphasis on objectivity: the separating of evidence from preconceptions and the willingness to draw conclusions even when they conflict with traditional beliefs. But in recent years the objectivity of science has come under increasing attack, an attack spearheaded by a small group of scientists anxious to create a more congenial setting for their favored political agendas. Their point of view, moreover, has received wide and often favorable attention; few within the scientific community have risen to meet the challenge.
One who has done so is Bernard D. Davis, the Adele Lehman Professor of Bacterial Physiology emeritus at Harvard University. In Storm Over Biology, a collection of richly documented essays, Davis traces the histories of the recent controversies, examines the beliefs and methods of the activists, and offers a powerful case for continued adherence to the ideal of strict objectivity, of mind over heart, in scientific research and reportng.
A few of the activist scientists not only doubt the validity of this ideal but have gone so far as openly to promote a politically based science. Davis quotes Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin from their book, Not in Our Genes (1984):
We share a commitment to the prospect of the creation of a more socially just—a socialist—society. And we recognize that a critical science is an integral part of the struggle to create that society, just as we also believe that the social function of much of today’s science is to hinder the creation of that society by acting to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race.
The neo-Marxist credo expressed in this and many other writings of the activists is derived from the notion that modern biology is infected with “genetic determinism, the belief that hereditary factors are both all-important in shaping human behavior and irremediable. In the view of the activists, this belief must be expunged if a just society is ever to result.
But the truth is, as Davis shows, that genetic determinism is a straw man. Virtually all biologists are neither genetic determinists nor environmental determinists but rather interactionists: that is, they believe that heredity is important in human cognition and behavior, but also that it interacts with the environment in complex ways to produce the final results. Only by understanding both heredity and the environment is it possible to learn enough about human behavior to base the search for a safer and socially just world on reality. The activists, in their Manichean view of the world, simply refuse to believe that most scientists feel this way—as indeed they refuse to believe that most scientists try to be objective in their research agendas—but it happens to be so.
It is not surprising to find that many of the radicals have banded together to carry on a sort of guerrilla warfare against “determinist” and other undesirable forms of research. Science for the People, perhaps the most successful such group, was recently described by one of its members, Richard Levins of Harvard University, as follows:
Science for the People is one of the few organizations created by the upsurge of the 1960’s that survived the ebb of the 1970’s and links the struggles of the Vietnam period to the new wave of activity against new military adventurism and reactionary backlash. I think we managed to do this for several reasons: our political struggles are directly linked to our work lives, on a terrain we know well and where our skills are relevant. . . . This makes us effective even when there are few of us. On our own terrain we have the advantage of a better understanding of the major issues than do our adversaries.
Self-doubt, ordinarily thought a virtue in science, has not been allowed to stall the endeavors of Science for the People. As Levins puts it: “Of course, being right is no guarantee of victory in politics, but it helps, and in fact we have won important victories against biological determinism.”
The activists have indeed won some victories—if not against genetic determinism, the phantom enemy, at least against ideas and research programs classified as determinist. A dramatic example occurred at the Harvard Medical School in the mid-1970’s. Earlier research had disclosed that XYY males, that is, males with an extra Y chromosome in the sex-determining pair, are 10-20 times more likely to be represented in institutions for the criminally insane than in the general male population, that is, among males possessing the XY genotype (1-2 percent of the XYY versus 0.1 percent of the XY). Two questions immediately arose, one scientific and the other clinical: how does this slight behavioral bias appear during development, and what precautions might be taken to diminish it? Stanley Walzer (a psychiatrist) and Park Gerald (a geneticist) undertook a careful, highly confidential study of XYY infant boys, with another group of XY infants followed as controls. Their primary goal was to learn more about the effects of an extra chromosome in human development, with the hope that such knowledge would help to diminish the harmful consequences.
The study, routine in the field of behavioral genetics, was viewed very differently by a small group of activists led by the microbial geneticists Jonathan Beckwith of Harvard Medical School and Jonathan King of MIT. To them, the study was neither good science nor an errand of mercy but an attempt by the ruling class to exploit and stigmatize a segment of the population. Beckwith first lodged a formal complaint with the Medical School. After a careful review, the faculty concluded that the study was proper and ethical and upheld it by a vote of 199 to 35. In the meantime, however, Beckwith, King, and their associates were holding open meetings and a press conference to denounce the XYY study as socially dangerous and evil. During the following month Walzer and his family received about twenty anonymous, abusive, and sometimes threatening telephone calls. Faced with mounting publicity and the possibility of widening pressure (death to any confidential study), Walzer and Gerald decided to abandon further genetic screening (while continuing with the children already being followed). A triumphant Beckwith wrote in the magazine, Science for the People:
A coalition of Science for the People at Harvard Medical School and outside advocacy groups were able to halt the screening and possible stigmatization of XYY infants at a Harvard-affiliated hospital. While these two examples [the second involved a building expansion at Harvard Medical School] represent only the tip of the iceberg of the ways in which particular ruling-class institutions exploit the surrounding community, the victories should encourage people at other institutions to join in such struggles.
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Another “victory” of the activists, less clear-cut but more important, has been the extensive public discrediting of IQ testing. Here Davis concentrates on the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, a member of Science for the People, who over the past ten years has ferreted out many alleged genetic determinists. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Gould attempted to destroy once and for all the ideas that general intelligence has meaning, that it can be measured, and hence that it can be reliably thought to be inherited. The book was enthusiastically reviewed by the general press and in literary journals, and received a National Book Critics Circle Award; reviewers commonly expressed relief that a scientist had exposed the dangers of intelligence testing and discredited it on technical grounds. In sharp contrast, reviews in the scientific journals were mostly critical, some harshly so, citing many distortions and errors of fact.
Through the efforts of Gould, Leon Kamin, and others (some of whom are serious scholars with no political ax to grind), the impression has become widespread in the news media and among the public that IQ tests are relatively useless, and that intelligence is not subject to hereditary influence. But what do scientists and educators who actually study the subject think about IQ? In a recent poll by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman (Public Interest, Spring 1986), a random sample of 1,020 professionals in the American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, Behavior Genetics Association, and similar organizations generally agreed on the attributes of intelligence, with three traits—abstract reasoning, problem-solving ability, and capacity to acquire knowledge—named almost unanimously.
Furthermore, the great majority of those polled agreed that some attributes of intelligence not only can be measured, but are “adequately” measured by existing tests. They were of the opinion that IQ as a score on a test does bear a meaningful relationship to intelligence as ordinarily conceived (although the two are by no means identical). Ninety-four percent of respondents indicated that there is reasonable evidence for a significant heritable component of IQ in the American white population, the population on which most relevant studies have been conducted. The mean rating placed on this component of heritability was 0.60, approximately the same that has been reported in a number of independent studies during the past twenty years. A heritability of 0.60 means that 60 percent of the variance measured in the population is due to genetic differences among individuals.
This is not to say that IQ is a refined measure, or that intelligence testing is at a high level of development; researchers have scarcely begun to understand general intelligence and the interlocking of its many components. Nor is it meant to imply that studies on intelligence should be reported with anything but exceptional sensitivity and freedom from bias. The real point is the wide discrepancy between what the critics of IQ are saying and what professionals actually working in the field perceive to be the truth. The suspiciousness toward intelligence research which the critics have been able to inculcate represents a triumph of propaganda over science.
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Storm Over Biology is an encyclopedia of such controversies that have ignited along the seismic fault lines of biology and medicine. In addition to the XYY and IQ episodes, Davis explores creationism, minority admissions in medical school, genetic engineering, socio-biology, and other issues. Throughout, in dealing with these controversial matters, Davis manages to hold fast to his own ideal of objectivity and to remain minimally polemical in tone. He himself has at times been the object of attack by the radical Left for positions which can be variously classified as liberal or conservative. (For example, while critical of the excessive lowering of standards in medical schools in the name of affirmative action, he was the first department chairman in Harvard’s history to have a black appointed to a tenured professorship.) In fact, Davis is that rarest of birds, an agitated moderate. His style is analytic and balanced to the point of dryness, and he is unfailingly polite to those he confronts: while criticizing Stephen Jay Gould’s ideological excursions, for instance, he has also called him a “national treasure” for his popularizations of natural history.
In the foreword to Storm Over Biology, Edward Shi1s concludes that the growing anti-science movement presents more of a long-term threat than is generally recognized. He is probably right, even though the sources of that threat are only loosely connected. They include the radical Left (itself many-faceted) and the religious fundamentalists of the Right, as well as the vague but widely-felt concern on the part of the larger public that scientists are out to dominate man and nature, to reduce freedom of choice, and somehow to diminish or abnegate the soul. As Davis points out, the critics of science are further assisted by the externalist movement among historians and philosophers of science, which emphasizes social pressures and the cultural or psychological backgrounds of individual scientists, rather than scientific truth, as the main factors which propel ideas to the fore.
Without doubt, all scientists are influenced by the cultures in which they are raised and the values they have adopted. They are biased in their choice of research problems and the manner in which they report results. But most scientists regard such bias as a vice to be minimized, while only the activists regard it as a virtue to be promoted—so long as it services the “correct” ideology. Storm Over Biology is a refreshing contribution precisely because of its reassertion of the ideal of objective truth on which people of different cultures can agree, independently of political differences. It is also courageous in its willingness to apply these principles without flinching where scientific evidence on human diversity comes into conflict with egalitarian assumptions. In this book Davis has presented a powerful argument for the venerable proposition that whereas scientific truth can help to produce a better world, visions of a better world cannot lead to scientific truth.
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