Richard A. Shweder wrote in the New York Times in 1991:
Anyone who has lived long enough in the social sciences has seen the nature-nurture pendulum swing: from nature in the first decades of the century, to nurture in the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, to nature once again in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
“In Search of Human Nature” is a chronicle of the nature-nurture debate and a masterly intellectual history of the reverberation of Darwinian ideas in popular social thought and in the thoughts of social scientists. Carl N. Degler, an obvious admirer of contemporary sociobiological ideas and a distinguished historian at Stanford University, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his book “Neither Black Nor White,” argues that the Darwinian concepts of instinct, heredity and biological explanations of behavior are back — this time without the racism, without the sexism, without the eugenics and without recourse to the legend of the inherent inferiority of the uncivilized and the poor. I suspect Mr. Degler is half right — biology is back.
Just last year an article in Science magazine pointed out the many similarities between identical twins raised in different homes and declared: “For almost every behavioral trait so far investigated, from reaction time to religiosity, an important fraction of the variation among people turns out to be associated with genetic variation.”
Equally revealing was “Three Cheers for Behavioral Genetics,” an address delivered in 1986 by Sandra Scarr, the president of the Behavioral Genetics Association. Though she began by speaking out eloquently against one of the disquieting undercurrents of our times — against the idea that when it comes to innate intelligence something is wrong with black children — she then went on to conclude that “social-class differences in IQ are largely genetic.” One of the basic messages of her address was that children of successful people may do better in life because they have better genes, and that those who believe anyone can be President do not think much of the office.
Another sign of the times appeared in the winter issue of the journal The Public Interest. There one finds an essay by Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist at Harvard University, in which he severely criticizes social scientists and policy makers for suppressing debate about the biological basis for racial differences and urges them to consider “the possibility that the different outcomes [ in intellectual achievement, criminality and health for blacks and whites ] are also the product of differing average endowments of people in the two races.”
Mr. Degler’s thesis is that such biological explanations of group differences were rampant in Western social thought from the time of Charles Darwin until the late 1920’s, when they were excommunicated from polite and scholarly discourse. Mr. Degler says that although Darwin himself viewed racial differences as insignificant, his ideas about the biological roots of human behavior led to social Darwinism. He believes Darwin inadvertently set loose the supernumerary imp of genic group differences by positing that savage peoples did not have the bodies to support civilization.
Between 1880 and 1925, Mr. Degler shows, any scientist could, credibly and without censure, write in scientific publications about the maternal instinct of women and the hunting instinct of men. Any well-educated person could stereotype men as “unfettered by any such sentiment as sympathy, and therefore wholly devoid of moral conceptions of any kind.” One could profess in public forums that when it came to the good things in life — intelligence, morality, character — blacks, yellows, Mediterranean or Eastern European whites had relatively bad genes. Sociological textbooks could declare that “the negro is not simply a black Anglo-Saxon deficient in school.” Essays in The American Journal of Sociology could proclaim that there is “no reason why races may not differ as much in moral and intellectual traits as obviously as they do in bodily traits” and that it is a mistake “to subject them to the same methods of government.”
Remember Al Campanis, the Los Angeles Dodger executive who was fired in 1987 after a notorious interview on Nightline in which he said, during a celebration of the racial integration of baseball, “I truly believe that they [ black major league baseball players ] may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager”? Such sentiments would scarcely have attracted attention 70 years ago.
But in the 1920’s, biological explanations for group differences became taboo. These ideas were banished, Mr. Degler suggests, largely for ideological and political reasons. A coalition of Roosevelt liberals, newly arrived European immigrants and northward-bound migrating blacks favored equal opportunity for the disadvantaged, as did scholars who sympathized with downtrodden groups and who were willing to assume that differences between groups in intellectual achievement, behavior, talent and interest were mainly the result of social and educational discrimination.
