Reading Agustín Fuentes’s review of Nicholas Wade’s 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, is a profoundly dispiriting experience. Not merely because Fuentes’ review is so unlike the other articles he circulated for his seminar with us (it is polemical, even impatient, whereas all the other essays are sober and scholarly, charging Wade with offering “a sloppy, erroneous, and highly prejudiced view of human genetics and evolution” [216]), but because Wade’s book was clearly written in ignorance of all the work Fuentes and other biological anthropologists have been doing for the past twenty or thirty years. The depressing thing about the review, in other words, is not that it exists but that it is necessary– as necessary, apparently, in 2014 as in 1914.
Fuentes came to Penn State, and to participate in the Boundaries project, in order to talk about what makes us human– biologically and socially, in evolutionary terms. He places great stress on human creativity, cooperation (or hypercooperation), and niche construction, whereas “pop” evolutionary theory from the days of Herbert Spencer to the days of Richard Dawkins has stressed selfishness and cooperation: to paraphrase Tennyson, it sees nature red in gene and chromosome. And it should be noted that Fuentes’s sense of “cooperation” is not all about sharing and caring; it includes the advanced, post-Neolithic forms of cooperation and planning we now know as war and genocide. But it is grounded in contemporary, cutting-edge, peer- reviewed work on how niche construction literally changes the evolutionary game by carving out spheres in which organisms and their environments engage in mutually transformative co- development.
Wade’s book, by contrast, seems as if it could have been written a century ago, invested as it is in a spurious account of “racial” divisions among humans, all of which can be explained in terms of genetic inheritance– although Wade shows no sign that he understands how “inheritance” works (there is, for example, no account of epigenetics or genetic drift, let alone of niche construction). And yet Wade is not some random crank churning out Social Darwinist screeds in a Quonset hut far from the avenues of public debate and discussion. For decades he has worked as a science writer for Nature (1967-71), Science (1972-82), and the Science Times section of The New York Times (1982-2012). He is one of the people the lay public relies on for information about contemporary, cutting-edge, peer-reviewed work in the sciences.
I remarked during the seminar that Fuentes’s engagement with Wade reminded me of Stephen Jay Gould’s “Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition” of The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1996. In that essay, Gould reflects on the book’s first fifteen years of life, and on the bitter irony that the volume he intended to put to rest the racist, biological-determinist pseudoscience of Arthur Jensen and William Shockley was now fighting the resurgent racist, biological-determinist pseudoscience of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. “I regard the critique of biological determinism as both timeless and timely,” Gould wrote. “The need for analysis is timeless because the errors of biological determinism are so deep and insidious, and because the argument appeals to the worst manifestations of our common nature” (26-27). One is almost tempted to conclude that it is human nature to misconstrue the meaning of “human nature.” But Gould, as is his wont, had a more “materialist” explanation for the periodic resurgence of zombie pseudoscience:
The reasons for recurrence are sociopolitical, and not far to seek: resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked? (28)
If Gould is right, then the resurgence of biological determinism should be a perennial thing, timed to correlate both with periods of enforced austerity and periods of unsettling rebellion. Even though correlation is not causation, it is not hard to conclude that an appeal to the fixed laws of Nature and the Genome is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Fuentes is dealing with a variant of this determinism, to be sure, less concentrated on the idea of the inheritance of intelligence than on a dated and inadequate idea of inheritance itself. But surely his first major attempt at a “popular” book, Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature (why, it even adopts the “myth busters” meme!) can be placed in a lineage that includes Gould, even if Fuentes’s book shares only 98 percent of its DNA with Gould’s. (That is one reason I added two chapters of the book to our seminar readings.)
What, then, is the role of the scientist who realizes the potential implications of her work for human beings, when her work is on human beings? Fuentes is not wrong to claim that mistaken, ill-grounded beliefs about human heritages and capacities have pernicious effects on human policies and populations. So I was especially struck by Hannah Landecker’s insistence, in her piquant reply to Margaret Lock’s essay, “Comprehending the Body in the Era of the Epigenome,” that
it has not and should not be the cultural anthropologist’s responsibility to determine whether epigenetic phenomena are really heritable over generations of individual organisms or not. It is however our responsibility to ask what definition is given to both “really” and “heritable” in these formulations that makes this such a fraught question today. (165)
I highlight this question not because Landecker is our next visitor (OK, partly because Landecker is our next visitor), but because it seems to matter, both for the future of academe and the future of Homo sapiens sapiens, whether we “really” have an adequate (as opposed to “accurate”– I am not going to invite the positivists in the back door, I promise) understanding of questions like, “are epigenetic phenomena really heritable over generations, or is this just social constructionism with a neo-Lamarckian face?”
For it is one thing, I think, to suggest that profound historical traumas and social injustices can scar a population in a figurative or metaphorical sense. It is evocative, and it makes the point. But it is quite another, more serious thing to suggest that the legacy of traumas and injustices includes decisive, inheritable biochemical alterations and neurophysiological effects. To return to Gould’s citation of Darwin’s denunciation of slavery in The Voyage of the Beagle, “if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” How much greater, one imagines, if that misery be passed down, yea, unto seven times seventy generations.
How can our series broach this question in a way that makes sense to anthropologists, biologists, historians of science, artists, humanists, and curious passersby?