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Heritability appears to prop up the status quo –
people at the top made it because they were the smartest, not because they are
privileged. Photograph: Alamy
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I often listen to The Life Scientific on
BBC Radio 4, and just as often switch it off after 15 minutes because I can’t
follow the science. This is probably because I’m not quite intelligent enough.
Or was I simply raised in an insufficiently nurturing environment? Last week,
Jim Al-Khalili interviewed Prof Robert Plomin, a behavioural geneticist who
specialises in the inheritability of intelligence. His subject is a taboo for
many because it raises the spectre of the discredited “science” of eugenics.
Plomin has spent the last several decades examining 10,000
pairs of identical twins, as well as adopted children. His conclusion, and he considers
it cast iron, is that DNA accounts for up to two thirds of your intelligence,
while environment – whether educational, familial or societal – accounts for
only around 20% of variation.
I’m less interested in the subject itself than how
uncomfortable we are talking about it. We are happy to attribute other familial
characteristics – sense of humour, looks, disposition and so on – to
inheritance. Even with intelligence we are ready, in privacy, to accept the
idea that if our children are clever, they got their smarts from us. However,
in the public arena, this view is an embarrassment. Children, from an
institutional stand, are equal and tractable lumps of clay, capable of being
moulded into any appropriate shape.
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Prof Robert Plomin. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the
Guardian
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Rather than take a firm view on the heritability of
intelligence, I would pose this question: what if it were true? Heritability
seems to condemn us to the destinies written in our genes. Furthermore, it
appears to prop up the status quo – people at the top made it because they were
the smartest, not because they are privileged. Their children can be expected
to perform similarly. Thus inequality is entrenched.
But Plomin points out that this is not a problem with the
evidence, but with policy. The outcome might not be elitist but quite the
reverse – a government perhaps choosing to spend the most money on those who
struggle, rather than concentrating resources on educating the smartest.
Suspicion of heritability remains, for good reason – not the
least of which is the question of what constitutes intelligence. However, the
prestige of those who achieve highly in examinations (Plomin’s studies focused
on academic results) has much to do with our collective overvaluing of learning
ability as a society.
Academic skills are just a relatively small component of a
whole nexus of traits that make up a well-rounded human being – including such
qualities as empathy, emotional intelligence, imagination, kindness and
curiosity. I have met many highly intelligent people who were ill-functioning
and dislikable human beings, and many people, not the sharpest tools in the
box, who nevertheless had dignity, integrity and self-respect. Perhaps we would
be more open to thinking about the subject if we valued such qualities more and
the power of abstraction less.
I think evidence has to be respected. Conclusions must be
arrived at through reason and research, not wishful thinking. The jury is still
out about heritable intelligence – but a lot of the evidence is in, and it
points strongly in a direction many of us would find invidious to our hopes and
values. Therefore we refuse to countenance it.
If heritability is key, as Plomin strongly asserts, we must
nonetheless swallow our prejudice. For this to happen, we have to find a way of
setting “intelligence” on an equal level with all the other qualities that we
collectively value in human beings. Or perhaps we just should carry on not talking
about it. It’s been working out so far, right?
Quite.
Source: The Guardian
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