REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 27
ture. The depth records the link of biological determinism to some
of the oldest issues and errors of our philosophical traditions—
including reductionism, or the desire to explain partly random, large-
scale, and irreducibly complex phenomena by deterministic behav-
ior of smallest constituent parts (physical objects by atoms in motion,
mental functioning by inherited amount of a central stuff); reifica-
tion, or the propensity to convert an abstract concept (like intelli-
gence) into a hard entity (like an amount of quantifiable brain stuff);
dichotomization, or our desire to parse complex and continuous real-
ity into divisions by two (smart and stupid, black and white); and
hierarchy, or our inclination to order items by ranking them in a
linear series of increasing worth (grades of innate intelligence in
this case, then often broken into a twofold division by our urges to
dichotomize, as in normal vs. feeble-minded, to use the favored
terminology of early days in IQ testing).
When we join our tendencies to commit these general errors
with the sociopolitical reality of a xenophobia that so often (and so
sadly) regulates our attitude to "others" judged inferior, we grasp
the potency of biological determinism as a social weapon—for "oth-
ers" will be thereby demeaned, and their lower socioeconomic status
validated as a scientific consequence of their innate ineptitude
rather than society's unfair choices. May I therefore repeat Darwin's
great line: "If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of
nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin."
But critiques of biological determinism are also timely at certain
moments (including the present) because—and you may now
choose your favorite image, from heads of the Lernaean Hydra if
your tastes be classical, to bad pennies or returning cats if you prefer
familiar proverbs, to crabgrass on suburban lawns if you favor ver-
nacular modernity—the same bad arguments recur every few years
with a predictable and depressing regularity. No sooner do we de-
bunk one version than the next chapter of the same bad text
emerges to ephemeral prominence.
No mystery attends the reason for these recurrences. They are
not manifestations of some underlying cyclicity, obeying a natural
law that might be captured in a mathematical formula as convenient
as IQ; nor do these episodes represent any hot item of new data
or some previously unconsidered novel twist in argument, for the
theory of unitary, rankable, innate, and effectively unchangeable