Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Disputes over the scientific validity of behavioral genetics are as old as the field itself. Often these disputes have been politicized, with less-than-rational motivations attributed by disputants to their opponents. In early 20th-century Britain when Ronald A. Fisher developed many of the now-classical statistical methodologies of behavioral genetics ( Fisher, 1924, 1925, 1930 ), critics such as J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben alleged that these methods were being employed in a scientifically invalid manner to support eugenics ( Haldane, 1938, 1946 ; Hogben, 1933 ). These criticisms were met with reciprocal criticism of the “communists and fellow-travelers” who questioned these statistical tools ( Mazumdar, 1992 ). Decades later, in the late 1960s and 1970s, behavioral genetics came under fire again as a result of claims about the genetic basis for the gap in IQ scores between white and black populations. In this “IQ Controversy” critics of hereditarianism, such as Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, and Noam Chomsky, made no secret of their belief that the research they attacked was certainly racist in substance and perhaps even carried out with a racist agenda. Hereditarians like Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Hans Eysenck responded that their critics were not genuinely concerned with the validity of their scientific research, but merely seeking to censor science in ... log in or subscribe to read full text