The United States senate was told in 1899 that:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration…He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile people.

William Bradford Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, argued that, since blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, they should not be given equal opportunities, a view also held by the well-known psychologist Hans J. Eysenck. Human nature is seen as the source and explanation of all social ills, having drawn certain distorted parallels with the lifestyles of other animals. The broader claims of sociobiology are that racism and nationalism are natural extensions of tribalism, which, in turn, is a product of “kin selection”. “Nationalism and racism,” states EO Wilson, “are culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism.” This idea has even been suggested by Richard Dawkins: “Conceivably, racial prejudice could be interpreted as an irrational generalisation of a kin-selected tendency to identify with individuals physically resembling oneself and to be nasty to individuals different in appearance.”[85]

According to the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, “in hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay at home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and on that ground alone appears to have a genetic origin.” He says that men are “naturally” polygamous, while women are “naturally” monogamous. The characteristic of sociobiology is the comparison of human social relations with the animal world, as justification for male dominance and class structure. “The genetic bias,” says Wilson, “is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labour even in the most free and most egalitarian of future societies.” This is the theme, based on the animal world, which zoologist Desmond Morris attempts to popularise.

The recent attempts to prove that intelligence is inherited has centred around IQ testing. The Bell Curve by Charles Murray regurgitates the old argument that genetics explains the gap between the average IQ of American whites and blacks. The fundamental arguments in this book have been repeatedly demolished. According to psychiatrist Peter Breggin, it is an attempt to “resurrect the King Kong image of Afro-Americans as violent and stupid.” (The Guardian, 13 March 1995). But the most crushing evidence against the theories of genetic determinism come from a recent book entitled The History and Geography of Human Genes by population geneticists Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza. The book is a remarkable synthesis of more than 50 years research in population genetics. It is the most authoritative account to date of how humans vary at the level of their chromosomes. The firm conclusion of the book is that, once the genes for surface traits such as colouration and stature are discounted, the human ‘races’ are remarkably alike under the skin. That variation between individuals is far greater than the variation among groups. According to the magazine Time:

“In fact, the diversity among individuals is so enormous that the whole concept of race becomes meaningless at the genetic level. The authors say there is ‘no scientific basis’ for theories touting the genetic superiority of any one population over another.” (16th January 1995.)

In reviewing the book, the Time article states:

“Despite the difficulties, the scientists made some myth-shattering discoveries. One of them jumps right off the book’s cover: a colour map of the world genetic variation has Africa on one end of the spectrum and Australia on the other. Because Australia’s aborigines and sub-Saharan Africans share such superficial traits as skin colour and body shape, they were widely assumed to be closely related. But their genes tell a different story. Of all humans, Australians are most distant from the Africans and most closely resemble their neighbours, the Southeast Asians.” The review concludes, “What the eye sees as racial differences – between Europeans and Africans, for example – are mainly adaptions to climate as humans moved from one continent to another.”

The book also confirms that the birthplace of humanity and so the starting point for the original human migrations was Africa, thereby demonstrating that the split from the African branch is the oldest on the human family tree.

The use of biological and genetic theories to justify reactionary policies is not a new phenomenon, although in the last decade or so it has been given a new lease of life by the general tendency of Western governments to go onto the offensive against the welfare state and all the other social conquests of the working class. The law of the market – that is the law of the jungle – is back in fashion. That includes, of course, the universities, where there are always enough people willing to swim with the prevailing current, which does their career prospects no harm whatsoever.

There are many honest academics who approach their subject in a dispassionate manner, but it would indeed be naïve to believe that the fact that a person has a string of letters after his or her name makes them immune from the pressures of the society in which they live, whether they are aware of it or not. In 1949, N. Pastore conducted a study into the opinions of twenty-four psychologists, biologists and sociologists concerning the so-called nature-nurture problem. Out of twelve “liberals or radicals”, eleven said the environment was more important than heredity, and one the opposite. In the conservative camp, the result was exactly the opposite – eleven hereditarians and only one environmentalist! Dobzhansky found this result “disconcerting”. For our part, we find it quite predictable.

Roger Scruton draws the social lessons: “Bioeconomics says that government programmes that force individuals to be less competitive and selfish than they are genetically programmed to be are preordained to fail.” This fitted in perfectly with the reemergence of genetic determinism in America, and their proof that blacks were inferior to whites, and the working class was inferior to the middle and upper classes. The scientific backing for such fallacies is used to create an aura of so-called respectability and objectivity.

  1. Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene, p. 108.