In the immediate aftermath of Charles Darwin's epochal Origin of Species, social theorists were quick to apply the doctrine to man. If it was true that “survival of the fittest” was nature's rule for selection, could human society do otherwise, these Social Darwinists wondered. For them, nature “red in tooth and claw” became the driving principle of society, replacing the mystical and theological forces of earlier times. The grinding poverty, the brutal inhumanity, the untempered egotism that accompanied the rapid industrialization of the 19th century seemed to some to be part of nature's plan, akin to the sufferings of animals in their “struggle for existence.” Success in society, measured by wealth and social position, was the human counterpart, to these theorists, of successful reproduction in animals. Human society was seen as evolving insofar as it favored its most able members.
Almost as soon as Darwinism was applied to social theory, there were problems. First, it did not appear that society's “best” were also society's most prolific in producing offspring, as they would have to be to fulfill their biological destiny. The upper classes simply did not think of having babies as the ultimate measure of their worth. Moreover, if a nation was moved by compassion or political expedience to redistribute some part of its wealth for the sake of its suffering masses, it seemed to be trafficking dangerously with nature's prime tool—survival. What would be the result, the Darwinians asked ominously, if those who otherwise would die or fail to have families, except for private or public charity, started surviving and reproducing? The answer seemed unmistakably clear—the impoverishment of man's hereditary legacy. The biological debt incurred by charity in one generation seemed likely to pass on to its descendants as diminished vigor and adaptability.
For the early Darwinians, the idea of perfectible man had been swamped by the central lesson of the new biology—that all creatures operated within the scope permitted by their biology. For man, the scope might be great, even vastly greater than other animals, but limitless it was not. Furthermore, a man's future was continuously shaped, for good or ill, by the genetic legacy piled up by his ancestors. Instead of a Hegelian evolution toward the one and only perfect society, Darwinians envisioned a host of less promising outcomes, including even extinction. While Darwin himself had managed to avoid these troubled political topics, some of his followers relentlessly pressed what they believed to be the logic of natural selection.
Logic notwithstanding, Social Darwinism started going out of style in the United States after World War I. Biological determinism doubtless came hard to begin with, running as it did against the American grain. Not only did it challenge our egalitarianism, it also said that a Horatio Alger hero might need more than hard work to get ahead. Darwinian evolution portrays nature as wasteful, disinterestedly selecting a few from among the many. That is hard medicine to swallow for a people whose institutions are conceived, in principle if often not in fact, in precisely the opposite terms—that every individual is precious and unique, equally precious and unique. But Darwinism was not only disagreeable, it could also be dangerous, as a rationalization for individual or class or racial advantages. And then, in the 1930's, Nazi Germany proved how lethal the idea of group superiority could become in malevolent hands.
For whatever reasons, then, we today have mostly grown up in an intellectual climate dominated by extreme, unrestrained environmentalism, which is the modern alternative to Darwinism, the religious alternatives having gone into decline also. Virtually all influential political and social theories since the 1930's assume that society, together with the individuals composing it, is shaped mainly by social forces. Change those forces, the theorists promise, and man in society will change accordingly. It may be no accident that social scientists gravitate toward theories that give them the maximum potential for practical influence. Thus, among experts, the doctrine of environmentalism reigns, not only supreme, but virtually alone, in almost every sphere of human affairs. The biological analogies to human matters—as in Robert Ardrey on territory or Desmond Morris on sex or Konrad Lorenz on aggression—have been resisted, although they clearly strike a resonance among laymen.
To solve our monetary, criminal, medical, economic, educational, emotional, familial problems, we call on environmental solutions—we adjust interest rates, penal practices, health habits, manufacturing processes, school curricula, occupational pressures, parental expectations, and so on. To be sure, no one should object to society's investing resources in the things it can get hold of. If interest rates, penal institutions, medical facilities, capital investment, and so on, are within our control, and if changing them helps, change them we should. But tagging along with that simple and unobjectionable pragmatism comes a conviction that the things we can change are the only things that make a difference. In other words, if mortality rates or productivity fail to improve, the remedy is assumed to be more social intervention, often more of the same sort of social intervention. The possibility that society may yield to non-social pressures is usually greeted with the reaction one customarily accords astrology, except for the greater hostility we reserve for threatening notions, which astrology is not. By dogma, not by data, it has been decreed that we may safely disregard non-social agents that we cannot readily control. And the prime non-social agent, to our knowledge, is our own genetic potential. Except for the prevailing orthodoxy, we would want to know how genetic factors interact with our social goals—in medicine, economic advancement, educational innovation, even in the deterrence of crime. While in certain areas of social life, genes may contribute little or nothing, in others their contribution may be both substantial and substantially overlooked, because of the environmentalist doctrine that dominates both our education and our attitudes toward social policy.
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As a psychologist submerged for twenty years in the depths of environmentalistic behaviorism, I was slow to identify the current that guided my work, especially since almost everyone around me was caught in the same stream. Behaviorism—that pragmatic, empirical, and distinctly American brand of psychology—has concentrated in the laboratory on the study of the learning process, while its public pronouncements have held out the promise of a science to remake man by applying its “laws” of learning and conditioning. Eventually, however, my confidence in the environmentalist doctrine broke down, when my study of the subject of intelligence testing (or, more broadly, mental testing) persuaded me that the facts about people point to the role of the genes in human society.
In the early days of mental testing, individual differences in test scores were usually taken to show inherited differences among people. Given the Darwinian bias of the time, that was the natural assumption. Today's scholars see quite clearly the weakness of the early bias—genetics may have nothing to do with the similarity between parents and children. Parents give their children more than genes; they also pass on their outlook, their habits, their cultural milieu. Today, the parent-child similarity in scores usually gets blamed on cultural, rather than genetic, inheritance. Today's scholars do not see that their environmental explanation is every bit as rash a leap as the genetic conclusions of early testers. The similarity between parents and children (and among kinfolk generally) may be cultural, genetic, or both in any ratio of admixture. And to find out requires the methods of quantitative genetics, a set of powerful statistical procedures that can unravel how much the genetic and non-genetic factors each contribute to the correlations among kinfolk for any measurable trait.
In a practical sense, we all know perfectly well that people's endowments vary, and that some of those endowments run in families. No one would be surprised to learn that the children of professional basketball players tend to be taller than average. Since basketball players are tall, since height is somewhat inherited, and since tall men probably marry taller-than-average women, the tall children follow naturally. In fact, we know that height is somewhat inherited only because it runs in families, for no one has seen the genes for height. For height, inheritance reveals itself in the pattern of family resemblances rather than in a direct scrutiny of genes. Of course, resemblances can deceive. If, for example, diet was all-important for height, then the resemblances between parents and children would be entirely non-genetic. However, foster children, sharing the same diet, should then resemble their foster siblings as much as ordinary children resemble their natural siblings, which is of course not the case for height. From just such comparisons, and many others, we would gradually build up an estimate of the degree to which height passes through the germ plasm. We would know how much to expect tall people to cluster in given families, which would occasionally produce a basketball player, when height combined with the other requisites.
So it would be for any trait that plays a significant social role and has some genetic basis. And if, for the sake of discussion, one grants the possibility that mental abilities do vary at all genetically, then a powerful and surprising conclusion follows—namely, that society may segregate people into social groupings or classes based at least partly on biology. For if mental capacity is to any degree inherited, and if social standing reflects mental capacity, then social standing must be a mirror, albeit an imperfect one, of inherited ability. Moreover, as society equalizes the opportunities for advancement, which is to say as society becomes “fairer,” by the ordinary standards of fairness, it will tend more and more to base its social distinctions on genetic grounds. In other words, if parents no longer can pass social and economic advantages on to their children—let us say, because of taxes and welfare and public housing and uniformly excellent public schools—they will instead contribute to their children's success and failure only by their genetic legacy.
The study of mental capacity has made the foregoing argument more than merely hypothetical, but our environmentalist bias has prevented us from noticing that society is willy-nilly subject to the laws of biology. There is evidence not only for the genetic ingredients in mental capacity, but also in social status. Many of the means and ends of contemporary social policy fail to take into account those biological constraints, and they may consequently misfire. Equalizing educational opportunity may have the unexpected and unwelcome effect of emphasizing the inborn intellectual differences among people. It may instead be better to diversify education, providing multiple pathways instead of just one. Technology, while lightening some of the burdens of working people, may be creating others, in particular by wiping out those intellectually simple jobs that used to occupy the less-endowed portion of the population. Even the efforts to encourage social mobility may have its penalties. The biological gap between social classes will grow if the people who rise from lower to higher status are selected for their native ability, as is bound to happen to some extent. All this seemed to me interesting and important enough to set before the general public, and I did so in an article entitled “IQ” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine for September 1971.
The article recounted the history of intelligence testing and summarized the main facts about the inheritance of, and the social-class differences in, IQ. While those facts have quietly accumulated in the technical literature for several generations, calling them to the public's attention can be unpopular if not hazardous, as I was soon to discover. Not that tempests in academic teapots are all that noteworthy, but this one may have some broader relevance as proof of the power of the egalitarian orthodoxy.
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II
Within a few days after my article's publication on August 19, 1971, I received a letter from a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, in which, among other things, he wrote: “Your heresy on equality of native intelligence will get you crucified if the experience of those of us who have expressed similar ideas is any indication.” His experience was first-hand, dating from when he had written on the heritability of intelligence and had been treated like a moral pariah instead of like the scholar he actually is. I answered about two weeks after publication, with guarded optimism: “So far, the reactions to my paper have been civil and, occasionally, gratifying. It is too soon, though, to start believing that the subject of inborn intellectual differences can be discussed rationally in the United States. More likely, I am enjoying the quiet of the summer doldrums.”
My correspondent and I were not the only ones awaiting the surge of counter-reaction to my “heresy.” In a generally accurate account in Time (August 23, 1971) summarizing the main points mostly by direct or indirect quotation from my article, the writer added, “Many blacks and whites will be angered by his defense of intelligence testing because they believe that the racial characteristics it discloses reflect no real differences in ability but only the cultural deprivation of blacks and the cultural bias of IQ tests.” That sentence, and the accompanying illustration, showing a white and a black child at school, seemed out of place, since my article took what might be called an explicitly agnostic stand on racial (i.e., black-white) differences in tested intelligence. For technical but compelling reasons, as touched on in my article, I believe that racial and ethnic group differences are hard to pin down as regards inheritance. My interest was not race, but social-class differences. It is true that there was an editor's introduction to my article that mentioned racial differences in IQ, but that, too, avoided drawing any conclusions.
The Time writer was not the only commentator who gravitated toward the racial issue. (In fairness to him, he did write, “Herrnstein avoids the racial issue, concentrating on the relative influence of ‘nature and nurture’ [heredity and environment] in shaping intelligence.”) For example, Alvin Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, appeared on the Op-Ed page of the Boston Globe at the beginning of December, when the uproar was peaking. Fulfilling Time's prophecy of the anger coming, Professor Poussaint said: “Richard J. Herrnstein, professor of psychology at Harvard, may or may not be a racist. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Whether he intended it or not, he has become the enemy of black people and his pronouncements are a threat to the survival of every black person in America.” Later on in his article, he asked rhetorically: “Shall we carry banners for Herrnstein proclaiming his right to freedom of speech? Why do these social scientists focus on white-black differences?”
Inadvertently, I would suppose, Professor Poussaint was disseminating something other than the article I had written. Not many of my critics seemed to have read it. Perhaps not many people at all read it; it was, after all, rather long and tough going in spots. There seemed, in fact, to be a pattern: those who gave clear signs of having read it rarely got excited, while those who got excited had usually not read it. I spent a good deal of time during these months reciting its contents to people who had gotten upset over something I had not said. In any event, to the people who read Poussaint's précis instead of the original, he was conveying the false impression of an argument for significant, perhaps innate, racial differences. While he may have succeeded in directing the hostility of certain people toward the social sciences in general and me in particular, he was also spreading a message of racial inequality, to those who wanted to hear it as well as to those who did not.
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What is the relation between individual differences and racial differences? Perhaps this is the place to answer that question, for the temptation to slide from one issue to the other is apparently almost irresistible, yet the issues themselves may not in fact be fundamentally related. For my purposes, inherited individual differences said something interesting about the membership of social classes. To the extent that social groupings draw on heritable talents, they will also reflect biological constraints. Intelligence tests measure something both heritable and socially significant, and are therefore the prime example of my point. It may, in fact, safely be said that in any complex, modern society that permits some degree of social mobility—capitalist, socialist, or otherwise—the social classes contain some element of genetic segregation for mental capacity. Or, to put it more simply social position tends to run in families for genetic, as well as for social, reasons. Moreover, if a society minimizes the social inheritance of social standing (by sharply progressive taxes and the like), it will maximize the genetic inheritance. The connection between social position and genetic inheritance, intimate and direct as it is, cannot be legislated out of existence by any extant, or even any plausible, social reform. As long as genetic factors contribute to success or failure, status differences will have a genetic component.
In contrast, any statistical connection between race and social position could be a by-product of social forces, rather than of anything genetic. In the United States, for example, blacks bunch disproportionately at the lower end of the social scale (although progressively less so in recent years), as shown in average income and unemployment figures, geographical dispersion, average education level, and so on. But since both inherited and non-inherited determiners contribute to a person's average social position, that disproportion could be the outcome of racial prejudice or other social disadvantages, instead of a genetic handicap. Yet it is not hard to see why so many readers assumed that my analysis of class differences cryptically expressed the racial inferiority of blacks. The stages in that false assumption must have gone something like this: 1) I claim that social classes reflect genetic differences; 2) blacks turn up in the lower classes out of proportion to their number in the general population; 3) blacks must therefore have a disproportionate endowment of the genes that keep people in the lower classes. By the same fallacious line of argument: 1) Selection for a basketball team reflects a high genetic endowment for height and agility; 2) college graduates turn up disproportionately often on professional basketball teams, as compared to people who have not graduated; 3) college graduates must therefore be disproportionately tall and agile. The fallacy in both cases is to consider the genetic factor as the only one, so that the outcomes can be due only to genetic differences. Professional teams recruit from college teams; doubtless social classes also recruit less than even-handedly.
We do not know why blacks bunch toward the lower end of the social scale, or, for that matter, why Jews bunch toward the top. Cultural factors, general surroundings, and racial discrimination each complicates the analysis in unknown ways. Given the interest and the data, one might succeed in teasing apart the genetic and non-genetic factors for various groups, but such was neither my goal nor my subject. Instead, I hoped to call attention, first, to the genetic spine running through the social-class continuum, giving it a rigidity that few social theorists, let alone ordinary laymen, recognize; and, second, to the likely stiffening of the genetic spine if society manages to wipe out the complicating factors like racial discrimination and varying social inheritance and give everyone an equal chance.
To be sure, not all my readers read the issue of race into my article. Newsweek's writer, in contrast to Time's, got the point and kept it. After summarizing the article carefully and accurately, he wrote, “But even if he carefully skirts the racial issue, Herrnstein's thesis seems bound to attract fervent opposition among both scholars and political radicals.” On August 23, 1971, when Newsweek carried that sentence, there was still no sign of “fervent” opposition, for Harvard was still on summer vacation. By the time fall classes began, the September issue of the Atlantic, containing my article, had been replaced on the newsstands by October's, and my 200 offprints quickly were depleted. Nevertheless, on September 20 and 21, flyers were handed out at both Boston University and Harvard University. At Boston University, the leaflet's title was “Defeat the Bosses' Ideas,” while at Harvard it was entitled “Fight Harvard Prof's Fascist Lies”; one leaflet was in elite type, the other was pica, but the texts were identical and both leaflets were signed by the “University Action Group,” a new name to me at that point. I later identified the UAG as an assortment of SDS'ers and their older sympathizers, plus members of the Progressive Labor party.
The leaflet called for a demonstration at the offices of the Atlantic, which, judging from the brief article the day after in the Boston Herald-Traveler, was uneventful. “Several dozen persons” assembled on the street in front of the Atlantic's building, but failed to persuade the editor to stop distributing my article or even to meet with them en masse. He did meet with a few representatives in his office, but they remained unhappy with the Atlantic. Nor were they pacified later by the Atlantic's efforts at even-handedness, as in publishing, in the December issue, over seven pages of letters to the editor covering the full range of reactions to my article.
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A few weeks into the semester, the student daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, carried the news that the “radicals” at Harvard had decided to conduct “a fall offensive against” me. (They were not really radical, in the sense of getting at the roots of anything, or even of being politically innovative. On the contrary, my radical critics were quite old-fashioned and doctrinaire, as leftist extremists go, which I will try to prove later on. Meanwhile, I call them radicals because that was how the press referred to them.) By that time, however, I was already well acquainted with the offensive, for the large, undergraduate course that a colleague and I teach was attended by radicals at virtually every lecture, handing out leaflets to the 200-300 students as they entered. One or two new leaflets were prepared each week, setting forth essentially the same points as in the first document, in various permutations and elaborations, usually calling for a “rally” at some appointed time and place. Most of the time, the radicals entered the lecture hall and took seats, although, with one or two exceptions, they were not enrolled in the course. Generally, they were quiet while my colleague or I lectured, but occasionally they would ask questions designed to expose my “racism” or simply make pronouncements to that effect. Often they would approach the front of the lecture hall at the end of a class to denounce me or to accuse me of one thing and another, which, since the accusations were unfailingly false, I would deny. A few times, they hung large placards around the room, and scribbled further accusations across the blackboard.
My colleague and I tried to deliver our lectures as normally as we could, but we sensed we were fighting a losing battle. The atmosphere in the room was hardly conducive to the business of education, with students taking sides “for” or “against” the lecturer. My student allies were no more able to respond with proper objectivity to the material being taught than my opposition, even when it had nothing to do with intelligence or other points of controversy. Scholarly detachment proved to be a crucial, but fragile, ingredient of our course, for it was badly damaged, even though the radicals usually refrained from the flamboyant kinds of classroom disruption. which is why the university administration felt it could not do much to help us.
Meanwhile, the campus in general was deluged with the same leaflets, along with posters glued to fences, trees, buildings, and the walls of the local subway station. One of the most widely circulated posters took the form of a “Wanted” announcement in the post-office (or old Western) style, photograph and all. “Wanted for Racism” above the picture, my name and alias (“Pigeon-man”) below, were followed by a detailing of charges: I was wanted “for the fraudulent use of ‘science’ in the service of racial ‘superiority,’ male supremacy, and unemployment.” Then, as documentation, five misquotations purporting to be from my article were given. A year later, scraps of posters can still be seen on trees, fences, etc., but only by one with a trained eye.
At first, in the hope that open discussion might calm things down, I scheduled a public session open to all comers, to answer questions about my article. The meeting was widely advertised, in the Crimson and in leaflets by the radicals. The radicals, plus a few hundred others, came, and some questions were asked and answered. At least at the beginning, the two-hour session consisted mainly of my trying to clarify, or simply explain, technicalities of correlational analysis and the measurement of heritability. Toward the end of the meeting, when the departure of most of the rest of the audience had left a high density of radicals, the tone began to deteriorate. Instead of questions, the comments from the floor started sounding more like accusations—of racism, of connivance with political reactionaries, of dishonesty in my presentation of data. But even so, this was one of the better meetings of the year, for it was civilized enough to allow an actual exchange of remarks. (The stranger who threatened to stab me “some night in Harvard yard” as I was leaving the lecture hall, I took to be acting impulsively and not reflecting official SDS or UAG or PLP policy.) All in all, the radicals did not seem (at least to me) to have promoted their cause at the meeting, for they had little besides anger to confront me with. Nevertheless, within a few weeks, they were clamoring for another public meeting. I refused because I thought it was a waste of time, and I think they expected me to. They, in turn, made much of my “unwillingness to discuss the article.” However, at no time did any of the more active radicals make any effort to discuss the issues with me privately or by mail or in the seminar on “intelligence” that a colleague and I were conducting during the fall semester. In fact, fewer than 20 students enrolled for the course, which was a detailed survey of the very issues that were being so hotly and publicly contested.
While intense, the radical campaign appeared to involve fewer than a dozen active radicals and perhaps another dozen part-time participants, not all of whom were Harvard students. Yet in some respects, they had the support of many students and faculty members, especially in regard to the touchy subject of inheritance and racism. And, without any doubt, the earnest abhorrence of racism was fueling much of the attack directed toward me, however misguided it may have been. Moreover, there were some well-intentioned faculty members who hoped to keep the facts on inheritance and society obscured behind a smokescreen of controversy. As in other recent campus issues, the radicals were acting out, albeit crudely, the sentiments of substantial numbers of “liberals,” to use the imprecise, but familiar, designation.
Notwithstanding the sparse ranks, the radicals enjoyed abundant press coverage throughout the autumn and winter, primarily in the Crimson, but also in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the National Observer, and other major newspapers and magazines. The peak of local news coverage came in the December 8 Crimson, containing two full pages of editorial comment and various letters to the editor. The occasion was an ad published in the Crimson some days earlier and signed by 107 members of the Harvard faculty, disapproving of the radicals' tactics. The faculty ad had said, among other things: “The openminded search for truth cannot proceed in an atmosphere of political intimidation,” and “The entire academic community should make it plain that it regards such harassment [of me] as has occurred as not only an unforgivable attack upon legitimate scholarship but also as an assault upon intellectual freedom.”
The majority of the Crimson staff, as well as a few faculty members, found the ad provocative and were therefore prompted into further commentary. The main editorial drew a distinction: “We are not convinced by the statement of 107 faculty members which defends Herrnstein on the grounds of a vague ‘intellectual freedom.’ This freedom is apparently all-inclusive; at least, its proponents have not taken the time to define it. The boundary between ideas and actions is an academic distinction. The distinction, while fuzzy, is important. Generally, intellectual freedom guarantees that ideas will be opposed only by other ideas, and that a theorist will always have a place in the academic community. But in some cases, when theorists become policymakers, the distinction between idea and action vanishes. In such cases—for instance, when social scientists commissioned by the government draw up plans to expand the Vietnam war—the phrase ‘intellectual freedom’ no longer applies and the academic community can no longer offer sanctuary.” As these editorialists saw it, then, the question was whether to put my article in the category of reprehensible policymaking, like expanding the Vietnam war, or whether I qualified for “sanctuary.” It was, apparently, not an easy choice, for, after all, my “prognosis of a hereditary caste of the unemployable could leave ominous thoughts in the minds of some readers,” and, moreover, it was clear that “the threat of [my] ideas is more dangerous than the imagined threat of SDS and UAG to intellectual freedom.” Furthermore, “by publicizing the uncertainty of the ideas and the potential harm of their implications, SDS and UAG have performed a service.” But even so, the majority of the editorial board concluded that “in this case, the concept of academic freedom applies. Herrnstein's opponents should limit themselves to the arena of ideas.” I was awarded a qualified sanctuary.
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III
I had a long-standing date to speak to the staff and students of the psychology department at the University of Iowa about some of my research on the learning process in animals. A few weeks before my scheduled talk on February 25, 1972, the chairman of the Iowa department called to say that the radicals at his university were stirring up interest in my impending visit, and that the interest was not friendly. He was calling to give me a chance to think about what he saw as the three obvious alternative courses of action: cancel the visit, come as planned, or come and debate with the radicals to “defuse” the situation. I asked for a few days to think it over, and to see the pertinent leaflets and articles in the student newspaper that he offered to send. The stirrings in Iowa City, it turned out, began when the student newspaper published verbatim a radical pamphlet I had seen in Harvard Square under the title, “Public Statement on the Herrnstein Controversy,” except that their headline writer had retitled it as “Noted Psychologist a Racist, Sexist.” Next came some letters to the editor defending my article by pointing out that, contrary to the pamphlet, it was neither about, nor took any position on, racial or sex differences in mental ability or the causes of contemporary unemployment or poverty; and finally the inevitable counterreaction from the radicals. And it was also inevitable that at some point in the exchange one of the radicals noted that I was scheduled to speak at Iowa and that I should be “confronted.”
Soon leaflets were drumming up interest among those who might have missed the coverage in the student newspaper. One leaflet started off to depict me as a racist by means of a string of misquotations, and ended with the following:
Right now at Harvard there is a growing student-faculty movement against Herrnstein to remove his cover of “scholarship” and expose him for the racist quack he is. They have made it impossible for him to spread his theory in public without controversy in the entire Boston area. In fact, he has said that he may not teach undergraduates anymore. Now he is coming to the Midwest to speak to students at the University of Iowa. Iowa City SDS has called a Midwest demonstration against Herrnstein, with people coming from all over this region to confront Herrnstein. The next day we'll have a conference to discuss ways to continue the fight against racism on our campuses. Come with us to confront Richard Herrnstein! ! ! !
The leaflet promised a teach-in on Monday before my talk on Friday, featuring the national secretary of SDS, then a rally and march just prior to the demonstration at my talk, followed the next day by the “Midwest Conference on Racism.” It also reminded its readers of an impending National Convention (on racism) at Harvard, and offered transportation to Cambridge. Among the stack of leaflets was one of the “Wanted for Racism” posters that had been pasted all over the walls and fences around Harvard Square. It was clear that there was at least enough coordination among these radical groups so that they could swap leaflets.
When I called back, I told the chairman of the department that I would not debate with the radicals, because they were obviously not interested in debating my article with me, as their pamphlets amply revealed. However, I said, I did not like to think that I had lost my right to move freely around the country; consequently I preferred to come to give my talk on animal behavior, assuming that I could do so safely. And as to safety, it seemed to me and the chairman, the question was strictly numerical: a dozen or so radicals could do little more than shout, while a large angry crowd might be menacing physically. We agreed to wait to see how many turned up for the Monday teach-in, and also to get an impression of their intentions.
While awaiting the next report, I received a call from Princeton University, where I was scheduled to speak about two weeks later, also on my research on animals. As at Iowa, the Princeton radicals were using the student newspaper to let it be known that I was coming to speak, and that they were planning to confront me, for my “racism.” A psychology professor (who had earlier been a colleague at Harvard) was reported in the newspaper to have called my article “at the least, . . . evil, elitist, and racist.” In another item, a radical was quoted as saying that I would be “forced” to answer questions, presumably if I did not answer voluntarily. I told my caller about the troubles at Iowa, and asked to defer a decision about Princeton until after I had had some more experience with the problem. He was more than willing to wait. I also asked him to convey to the radicals my willingness to answer any questions they might care to send me. Although I believe my message was delivered, no questions have ever arrived.
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Meanwhile, the teach-in at Iowa proved an uncertain harbinger. About 100 people turned up, including an unknown number of university administration spies and curiosity seekers. The national secretary of SDS was quoted as calling for a disruption of my talk, but she did not get universal assent from her partisans. While the speakers at the teach-in generally agreed on my villainy, there was as yet no consensus on a course of action to deal with me. I felt obliged to interpret the news optimistically and therefore agreed to come as planned. The chairman of the department appeared to be glad of that decision, for he did not want it to seem that Iowa had failed to meet the challenge of a couple of dozen radicals out of a university community well in excess of twenty thousand.
When I arrived in Cedar Rapids at about noon on Friday, the professor who met me at the airport conveyed reports of an influx of radicals, from as far away as Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. Driving through the late winter countryside between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, we talked about the crescendo of radical exhortation during the week. It was still not clear what the radicals were going to do, but whatever it was, they would have as much help as they could muster from a radius of at least a few hundred miles. I still felt obliged to continue as planned and spent a quiet few hours visiting the psychology department's laboratories and meeting some of the staff and graduate students.
The outcome remained uncertain until about 3:45—45 minutes before the scheduled time for my talk. We were then told by a campus policeman that a group of 75 to 100 people had gained entrance to the lecture hall (whose capacity was variously estimated to me during the day as between 250 and 350), in spite of the campus police who were supposedly stationed at the door to keep anyone out until just a few minutes before 4:30. By a few minutes after 4:00, the lecture hall was filled, but not with the usual audience for a technical, rather mathematical, talk on the learned responses of pigeons. The legitimate audience for that talk—whose world population falls considerably short of 350, let alone the fraction in and around Iowa City—was unlikely to turn up much before 4:25. And not only was the lecture hall filled, its walls were festooned with placards denouncing me as racist, fascist, etc., and speakers were already addressing the crowd—warming them up. The chairman talked by telephone to someone higher up in the administration about the impending crisis and apparently received nothing more helpful than a suggestion that we move to a larger lecture hall, a suggestion I quickly rejected.
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At the suitable time, the chairman, a professor in the department, and I walked to the physics building, housing the lecture hall. Going in through a back corridor, we could hear the crowd shouting and chanting but we could not see them. I had earlier been told that if during my talk I should suddenly “feel some urgency” about escaping from the hall, I should go through a particular pair of double doors, thence through another single door, whereupon I would find myself in an alley at the end of which a green, unmarked car with a driver would be awaiting me. I was rehearsing those instructions mentally when we arrived at the small preparation room adjoining the hall. In the room were about 8 or 10 uniformed campus policemen and a smaller group of men in mufti. The crowd next door was noisily chanting, “We want Herrnstein!” The thought of the equations I needed to scribble on the blackboard to help explain my slides of graphs and data seemed hopelessly incongruous.
It was now clear that I was not going to be able to give my talk, even if I went into the hall and tried. Some observers estimated that there were 75 to 100 active demonstrators in the room, both local and out-of-towners, and most of the rest Were spectators attracted by the prospect of the confrontation. No doubt, most of the scholarly audience for my talk was locked out in the front corridor, along with the couple of hundred other people who arrived after the room was jammed beyond its capacity.
In the prep room, I asked the head of the campus police whether he could assure my safety if I went into the lecture hall. In effect, he said no. I asked further if it would help him do his job if I went in and allowed my talk to be disrupted, for it was obvious that the crowd would not accord 60 seconds, let alone 60 minutes, to the mathematical basis of learned behavior in animals. I was thinking of the growing legalism on today's campuses, especially in regard to leftist disruptions. Would my not going in make it impossible to prosecute or discipline the disrupters? Perhaps, I thought, I had a responsibility to allow my talk to be disrupted. The police chief (quite properly, now that I look back on it) answered that I should not concern myself with helping him do his job. “Then,” I said, “let's call it off.” I did not like calling it off, but I liked still less the bravado of going ahead with it under impossible circumstances. And there did seem to be some physical risk, since the police clearly had no control whatsoever over the situation. It may really have been quite an innocuous occasion, but at the time it sounded to me not unlike a Colosseum-ful of eager Romans. With evident relief, the police hustled me through the door leading to the alley and there was the unmarked car, as promised.
One outcome of the episode was a decision to handle Princeton differently. I called my contact there within a day or two and asked what would be done to assure my safe coming and going, particularly in light of the well-publicized threat to “force” me to answer questions. I reiterated my willingness to answer questions by mail or in a scholarly setting. But I was determined to give the talk I had been invited to give—on visual perception in pigeons—and not on whatever it was the radicals had in mind. He promised to inquire into the administration's plans for my visit. A call back a few days later provided no basis for optimism. Except for the department chairman's avowed hope that I would be able to give my talk, the university administration was going to do nothing. While I had no reason to doubt the sincerity of the chairman's hopes, I considered them futile and therefore cancelled the talk.
The first public manifestation of the Princeton administration was a letter in the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, a day after my scheduled talk. (At Iowa, too, the administration became publicly active only after the event, perhaps with some justification since it had no obvious precedent to guide it.) Said President Goheen of Princeton, “The administration can do nothing ‘to guarantee a scholar's right to speak,’ when the scholar withdraws from an invitation to lecture without exploring the extent to which he could have been assured a fair and uninterrupted hearing.” Mr. Goheen was chiding (besides me), not the SDS or UAG, but a group of students (signing themselves as the “USA”) for an ad they placed in the Daily Princetonian protesting the university's failure to assure my freedom of movement. The president's view of the matter was partly shared by a chemistry professor, who also had a letter in that issue of the student newspaper, identifying himself as a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union. Said Professor Jones, “That Professor Herrnstein was unwilling to discuss publicly his views on IQ is unfortunate, but does not really cloud the issue. His unwillingness is not grounds for threats and intimidation.” Lest there be any doubts about the threats, the very same page of the Daily Princetonian featured an article by a spokesman for the radicals stating the plans for my visit: “Herrnstein [would] be allowed to deliver his talk uninterrupted, after which we would use the question period to challenge him on his racist, sexist, and elitist theories. If he refused to debate or answer questions, we would have blocked the doors of the room until he consented to speak on the IQ controversy.”
Both President Goheen and Professor Jones also expressed some sympathy for me. And Professor Jones even expressed displeasure at the behavior of the radicals, which was, in fact, the main point of his letter. I, however, had begun to see that between the radicals and the liberal-intellectual community there was a more subtle connection than I had at first appreciated. Thus, while Professor Jones deplored the conduct of the radicals, he also left some doubts about my character. And so did President Goheen, although the only conduct he publicly deplored at this time was that of the conservative students who placed the ad saying that Princeton had lost something by not assuring my safety.
At Princeton, as at Harvard, administrators could not make too public a display of solidarity with me (although privately I often received unqualified support). Their problem, some would admit, was not to seem to be defending my “views,” while defending my rights. And that was a valid distinction, as far as it went. It was all the more compelling if the “views” were unpopular to a large fraction of the university, as the hereditarian case is under any circumstance. However, the radicals had promulgated a truly offensive rendition of my article—as racist, fascist, anti-working class, and so on. Even if an administrator had taken the trouble to read my article and had seen that the accusations were false—as several clearly did—he could ill afford to seem to be associating himself with it. Some of my more knowledgeable colleagues were caught in a similar position. They told me privately that they agreed with the article, but publicly they chose to remain noncommital. By stirring up an angry controversy, the radicals had thus loaded the dice against the open exchange of argument and information, as President Bok at Harvard finally said publicly, after it had dragged on for seven months. I suspected that many liberal social scientists, wedded to environmentalism, were not keen for open exchange in any event, even when they genuinely deplored the radical tactics.
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IV
The occasional hostility of Marxists toward the study of genetics is neither new nor localized at Harvard, Iowa, or Princeton. Its most egregious manifestation was T. D. Lysenko's domination over Russian biology during the Stalinist era. Starting in the mid-30's, as Stalin was consolidating his tyranny, classical Mendelian theory and its successors suddenly became a target of political attack masquerading as scientific criticism. For example, in 1937 a Russian agricultural expert denounced the chromosome theory and its application to agriculture as a “fascist distortion of genetics and fascist utilizaton of genetics for political aims, inimical to the progress of mankind.” That particular quotation (given in Zhores Medvedev's The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, 1969) turned up in the journal edited by Lysenko, one of the prime organs in the assault on modern genetics.
The Lysenkoite aberration might have remained nothing more than a historical curiosity had it not had the approval, and no doubt also the assistance, of Stalin. Lysenko's targets were both the subject itself, as it had been built by Mendel's successors, and certain Russian biologists who were fruitfully developing an indigenous version. As a result, for about twenty-five years, both the subject and its honest investigators fared woefully in Russia. During that period, genetics in Russia was stunted, if not crippled, and the geneticists, particularly the most eminent ones, were driven out of their laboratories and institutes—by lack of support, imprisonment, and even execution. Until at least the mid-1950's, the price for intellectual integrity in the study of genetics came cruelly high.
Genetics was no random victim of revolutionary zeal, for in its case, science and politics were at cross-purposes in Russia. The leaders of the Russian Revolution, committed as they were to remaking society in a hurry, had little sympathy for the idea that the hereditary endowment of living beings—from wheat to man—was fixed in the germ plasm, largely out of reach of the influence of the environment, even the new socialist environment. Neither the random and unpredictable changes of genetic mutation nor the glacial drift of natural selection suited the purposes, let alone the temperament, of Marxist visionaries. And according to modern genetics, those are the only ways to alter the hereditary makeup of species. Even the ultimate Marxist goal, the “classless” society, was threatened by the possibility of genetic human differences. It is hard to argue that the “class struggle” can be resolved by a redistribution of wealth and capital, if it should turn out that something more than economics distinguishes the contending classes. And the well-established fact that the upper and lower classes differ in their psychological make-up, for example in their measured intelligence, plus the fact that intelligence, so defined, is substantially heritable, can be just such an unwieldy complication for Marxists, though by no means the only one.
The rhetoric of Lysenko and his associates, as recounted by Medvedev, himself a beleaguered Russian biologist, makes the affinity to my radical critics undeniable. Summarizing some of the atrocities committed during the late 1930's against the study of man's inheritance, Medvedev wrote: “The virtual ban on investigations in human genetics had very harmful consequences, not yet fully understood or assessed. The direct responsibility for this lies with those ‘critics’ who vulgarly identified human genetics with racism and fascism.” Not only the vulgar accusations of “racism” and “fascism,” but also the political paranoia can be found in both the Russian and the domestic Marxist reactions to the application of biology to the study of man, as shown by the following quotations. First, from Lysenko, writing in 1947 on the Darwinian conception of human society in relation to capitalist countries:
Bourgeois science had to invent intraspecific struggle. In nature, they [i.e., the bourgeois scientists] say, within each species there is a cruel struggle for food, which is in short supply, and for living conditions. The stronger, better-adapted individuals are the victors. The same, then, occurs among people: the capitalists have millions, the workers live in poverty, because the capitalists supposedly are more intelligent and more able because of their heredity.
We Soviet people know well that the oppression of the workers, the dominance of the capitalist class, and imperialist wars have nothing to do with any biological laws. They are all based on the laws of a rotting, moribund, bourgeois, capitalist society.
Next, a few sentences from a leaflet handed out in my class last October:
The emergence of Herrnstein as their ideological mouthpiece is itself a sign of the desperate state of the Rockefellers and other racist rulers. For Herrnstein offers only the stalest, exhausted thoughts and data. The thoughts are no more than warmed over social Darwinism that was concocted a century ago to justify the oppression and class structure of society. . . . Herrnstein's ideas do not stand in isolation; they are attempts to render palatable acts of inhumanity and exploitation. As such they must be fought as hard as those acts themselves.
Lysenko's mentor, a Russian philosopher named I. I. Present, writing in 1962 on “Dialectical Materialism and the Problem of Genetics,” further exemplifies the tone of the Lysenkoite suppression of modern genetics, as follows:
The world bourgeoisie mobilized all ideological means of struggle against Marxism and those scientific theories which serve as a basis and consolidation of the dialectic-materialistic outlook. In particular, Weismannism-Morganism with its theory of an immortal hereditary substance was widely utilized. With the aid of this doctrine, attempts are made to justify the exploitation of workers, colonialism, and racial discrimination. At the same time it is used for proving the proposition that the moving force of social development is not the manufacture of material goods, not the class struggle, but the hereditary substrate, above all, of great personalities.
Like their Lysenkoite antecedents in Russia, my radical critics apparently also felt that one way to fight exploitation, colonialism, and racism was to undermine the study of human genetics. But the American branch struggles under substantial disadvantages, including the lack of official support from the government, the shortage of working cadres, and the unabated flourishing of “Weismannism-Morganism”—i.e., the genetic theory of inheritance—in biology departments. Not surprisingly, therefore, American anti-genetics has, at least so far, been far less virulent than Russian. Here, the price for pursuing the study of human genetics is mainly unpopularity; there, it was truly prohibitive.
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The boom in the experimental branch of genetics has resulted in a curious American inconsistency on the subject of human differences, not infrequently acute among biologists and geneticists themselves. And not just among Marxists either, for the environmentalism and egalitarianism that made genetics distasteful to the Russians also characterizes a vein within contemporary American liberalism, Thus, the very same people who one day abhor the idea of tampering with people's genes may, the next day, vigorously deny the conclusion that human society involves genetic factors. But if they really doubt the genetic ingredient in human affairs, why do they fret over genetic engineering? For some people, at least, politics explains the inconsistency. Liberals traditionally distrust the government, hence they are keenly reluctant to give away any power over the germ plasm. But, at the same time, contemporary liberals tend to be egalitarian, which sometimes becomes almost as firm a belief in innate human uniformity as among the Lysenkoites, especially when they are thinking about society's problems. Genetic engineering runs afoul of the distrust of government; my thesis on hereditary classes runs afoul of egalitarianism. Yet, if genes were not socially important, neither would warrant such alarm.
The egalitarian-environmental outlook is the prevailing bias of American intellectuals in general. I doubtless share the bias myself, for I find it far more congenial to hear that some social problem will be solved by new legislation than to be told that society may have to face problems whose roots are biological as well as social. Biology as an instrument of social change—for example, eugenics—strikes me, too, as posing gruesome possibilities that may be worse than the problem being solved. No more than most of my fellow academics do I like the prospect of some people tampering with some other people's germ plasm. But while that awful prospect is, for the moment, hypothetical, my thesis sets forth a contemporary biological reality in society. While the inheritance of intellectual capacity may not be as alarming in principle as direct genetic manipulation, it is clearly more timely.
To make matters worse, I note that as society succeeds in equalizing opportunity, the genetic factors likely become relatively more important, simply because the non-genetic factors, having been equalized, no longer contribute to the differences among people. And to cap it off, my case relies only on well-documented findings, easily found in many standard textbooks. The novelty, such as it is, in my argument is to have brought those commonplace facts into coordination and shown that the outcome is lethal to all forms of doctrinaire egalitarianism, both Marxist and American liberal-academic.
Some of my colleagues at Harvard, like my stymied hosts at Iowa and Princeton, have been earnestly shocked by how crudely the radicals deal with those who write on the heritability of IQ. Even committed leftists have expressed their sympathy and concern. Yet, the radicals have served well the egalitarian cause by deflecting attention away from the issues themselves. Insofar as public impressions are concerned, the radicals have protected the egalitarian position by isolating it from a confrontation with facts that would destroy its underpinnings. The sequence goes something like this:
- Radicals denounce me (or others who bring the facts to public attention) as “racist,” “fascist,” etc.
- In response, the liberal “expert” deplores the crudeness of the attack, while expressing apparently scholarly reservations about the “questionable” logic or the “tentative” findings or the underlying “political” biases in the document in question. The liberal expert's position appears to take the middle ground between the radicals at one extreme, and, for example, my article at the other.
- The public, observing the range of views, also takes the intermediate position—in this instance, the liberal one. It concludes that the prevailing egalitarianism of American political philosophy has not yet run into unequivocal factual trouble. Since the inherent American bias is egalitarian to begin with, the outcome appears both natural and desirable.
Most people, even most academics, do not have the time, training, or occasion to work through the technical literature on a controversial subject. Instead, they must rely on professionals for a disinterested evaluation. From some professionals, they hear that the inheritance of intelligence is “questionable.” What they fail to find out is that the question is not whether IQ is heritable, but whether the heritability is 60 per cent or 80 per cent (or even more, according to some estimates). The public does not discover that the heritability of IQ is not a new finding, on which the burden of proof suddenly falls, but the standard, virtually uncontested (i.e., by conflicting data) finding since the first decade of mental testing. Estimates of the high heritability of IQ started accumulating in the technical scientific literature by 1910. With improvements in the statistical techniques of quantitative genetics and in the quality and quantity of intelligence testing, the heritability of IQ has doubtless become psychology's best proved, socially significant empirical finding. In regard to the major, long-term social implications, it matters little whether the heritability is 60 per cent or 80 per cent, or even 40 per cent or 90 per cent, for, in any case, the more society equalizes opportunity, the more it will tend to drive the heritability higher, making genetic factors progressively more important.
The hostility of the radicals, the obscurantism of some academics, the public silence of other academics, the one-sided coverage in the news, the increasing reluctance of scientific periodicals to publish hereditarian findings or scientific agencies to support hereditarian research—these are all signs of a political orthodoxy on human equi-potentiality, to which scholarship has become hostage. I believe it is an orthodoxy whose social costs we can no longer afford, and not just, or even mainly, because it chokes off honest inquiry.
The false belief in the equality of human endowment leads to rigid, inflexible expectations, often doomed to frustration, thence to anger. Ever more shrilly, we call on our educational and social institutions to make everyone the same, when we should instead be trying to mold our institutions around the inescapable limitations and variations of human ability.
