Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature

Not in Our Genes offers a penetrating critique of certain assumptions we have about how much of who we are is determined by our genetics. This book also examines how our understanding of genetics has been molded by certain ideologies, and perpetuated through deeply flawed studies and misinformation to serve those ideologies. This is an academic work, and the discussions of biological determinism often assume the reader can handle some philosophical terminology the authors don't have space to explain. I would suggest keeping a dictionary handy for this one. Still, if you are up for a book that will challenge the way you think about heredity, IQ, the nature/nurture question, and the reliability of scientific evidence, this vintage paperback is well worth purchasing.

The book was in great condition and I am reading it for a class and it is very interesting.

Written 30 years ago, the book provides a clearly written reply to those who claim social progress is limited by our flawed human nature. The authors trace the history of biological determinist thinking and demonstrate its links with, and service to, the capitalist economic order. For those seeking a scientific alternative to the bleak predictions of E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, this book will provide much food for thought and a more positive interpretation of human potential.

Richard Lewontin is a very famous geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and New York Review of Books polemicist. Steven Rose is a neurobiologist, and Leon Kamin is a psychologist. Only Kamin knows anything about human beings by training in a behavioral science. This distribution of training explains why the only seriously scientific contribution in this book is the discussion of IQ. Lewontin and Rose feel qualified to offer extended expositions of social theory by virtue of their adherence to Marxism, which is a complete theory of society, history, and culture---or so the authors apparently believe.

"We share a commitment to the prospect of the creation of a more socially just---a socialist---society," they inform us (p. ix). Well, okay, this is 1984 and there were still many smart people with good hearts out there who believed that Marxian socialism was the path to social justice. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin argue that sociobiology of the sort developed by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology) is a deeply conservative defense of the status quo, capitalism. The authors' concept of ideology and its position in society is refreshingly simple: "we use the term ideology here and throughout this book," they say, "with a precise meaning. Ideologies are the ruling idea of a particular society at a particular time. They are ideas that express the "naturalness" of any existing social order and help maintain it." (p. 4) There then follows a most famous and indeed lyrical quote by Marx and Engels from The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas... the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships."

For Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, capitalism maintains itself by fostering an ideology that considers itself the only feasible form of social organization, and proclaims at the same time that is it the most fair and just of possible social forms. The dispossessed and discriminated against, in the current situation, ethnic and racial minorities, the poor, women, and the working classes, are taught the dominant ideology, accept it uncritically, and remain subservient. It is thus the role of the intellectual to reveal the falsity of the ideology to the masses, who will then be better prepared to struggle for their own emancipation.

Little of the ideology of capitalism intersects science, but where it does, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin consider it their task to uncover the falsities perpetrated in the name of politically neutral science. This is, of course, a huge job. The twin axes of capitalist ideology uncovered in this book are reductionism and biological determinism. Reductionism is the attempt to explain all human behavior as mechanical causality as opposed to dialectically interactionist holism, biological determinism is the theory that our genes determine our behavior. "Critics of biological determinism," we are told, "are like members of a fire brigade, constantly being called out in the middle of the night to put out the latest conflagration, always responding to immediate emergencies... Now it is IQ and race, now the genetic fixity of human nature. All of these deterministic fires need to be doused with the cold water of reason behavior the entire intellectual neighborhood is in flames." (p. 264) Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin thus present themselves as the true Ghostbusters of the Left.

Now, the great social movements of the era in the United States were the women's movement for gender equality, and the civil rights movement for African American human rights. Both of these were phenomenally successful, although to this day incompletely worked out. The dominant class ideologies that supported the oppression of women and blacks did have strong pseudo-scientific justifications, in the form of assertions that women and black were genetically inferior to men and whites. I do not know whether the arguments of Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, as well as other scientists (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould) contributed to lifting the veil of ideology to the degree that successful contestation on behalf of women and blacks could be mounted. If so, more power to them, because the arguments that women and blacks are genetically inferior, and that their subordinate status could be justified in terms of this inferiority, was widely argued by scientists at the turn of the twentieth century.

However, the villains of this book are not from the distant past, but rather are the contemporary thinkers Richard Dawkins, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Edward O. Wilson. Actually, we can really leave Dawkins out of this because he never explicitly applied his ideas to contemporary politics. Now Jensen and Herrnstein did both argue that the cause of the low IQ of American blacks was genetic inferiority, and both suggested that the goal of racial economic equality was unattainable. However both were roundly and widely criticized for lack of supportive data. Our Marxists fire brigade was not necessary for this task. The authors do take Dawkins to task, but his evolutionary biology is far too sophisticated for political life (imagine a Senator giving an anti-civil rights speech based on the "selfish gene"), and he certainly is not now, nor has he ever been, an opponent of movements for social equality.

Thus, the real object of this critique is Edward O. Wilson, and is famously brilliant book Sociobiology (1975). The problem is that Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin's critique of Wilson is a complete straw man. If you don't believe me, go back and read the supposedly offending material in Wilson's book. It simply isn't there. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin call Wilson and biological determinist, but Wilson is careful to reject genes to phenotype determinism by presenting a prototype of gene-culture coevolution. Indeed, this is the same sort of gene-culture interdependence that Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin advocate in the name of "dialectical interaction." Wilson does assert "Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility," says Wilson, "that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." (p. 562) The notion of biologicizing ethics, of course, means adding a biological grounding to ethical theory, not deriving morality from our genes.

Why would Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin hate Wilson's work so strongly? Why would they misrepresent it so thoroughly? We do not really find out in this book. We might suppose, as Wilson suggests in the new Preface to the book, published in 2000, that gene-culture coevolution places too much power in the ability of individuals to reject the sort of cultural indoctrination that Marxian socialist societies so eagerly attempt to impose on the people. Whatever the truth, this book is ham-handed and crude to the point of being silly. Perhaps the authors might learn a little more social theory before trying to protect us from the evil pseudo-scientists.

One of the best explanations of how cultural and social constructs frame empirical research, producing outcomes far less influenced by how the material world works than by the confirmation biases experts bring to it.

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin have expressed in clear language the problems of research in psychology and biology. They expose the social function of psychological, biological, and cultural reductionism as well as exploring the limits of their internal logics and validities. Needless to say, those caught up in the mainstream of traditional psychological and biological theory will protest, but in doing so will only betray the strong "interests" which shape and color their so-called dispassionate and objective endeavors -- which is part of what this book will detail. This book allows its readers to move outside the box of their over-learned scientistic practices; and it asks us to think about what we are doing when we do scientific research, its social implications, and its socio-economic determinants. I found this challenge compelling and enjoyable.

Lewontin, Rose and Kamin argue that people are the way they are because of social conditioning and birth privilege, not because of their biology. Not in Our Genes, and similar books, balance the argument that our actions and motives are governed only by our genes.

This book has some useful insights worth exploring. Having said that, as with many other books that argue specific areas have controlling influence on human behavior, this book needs to be read with discretion.

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

Lewontin, Rose and Kamin -- an evolutionary geneticist, neurobiologist and a psychologist -- provide the scientific and historic basis which allows one to drive a Mack truck through the holes in the arguments of biological determinism. Although their credentials
are weighty and their science precise, the book is not only very readable - it's
downright entertaining. After all, reading about the alleged "data" collected by those
bent on proving that biology is god through identical twin studies is downright hysterical
and should be a cautionary tale known to every student of science. The references
provided by the authors should also provide further good reading. This is a book to
own and share.