Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

4 PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL

However, now something else is also going on; the message is rebound-
ing with unpleasant dissonance. It is as if the very intensity, scale, and
exuberance of output are revealing a science over stretched. Inconsisten-
cies are coming to light, exposing deeper fault lines in the science itself.
Put simply, the more we get, the less reliable the science seems to be: the
stronger the claims, the more patently improbable the results. It suggests,
what many have long suspected, that something is— and has been— going
on other than pure science. Many human scientists are now speaking
of a rising crisis in this and related domains.
Th ey started to become concerned at least ten years ago. In 2005, John
Ioannidis, in PLoS Medicine, summarized the “increasing concern that
most current published research fi ndings are false.” Ten years later, an
editorial in the journal BioMed Central (September 2, 2015) states: “In
recent de cades, the reproducibility of a shocking number of scientifi c
studies has been called into question... with the increasing number of
studies revealing that much of science cannot be reproduced or repli-
cated.” A paper in BMC Neuroscience (July 23, 2015), concurs that “hall-
mark papers... have been fl agged as largely unreproducible.”
More sensational has been a “Reproducibility Proj ect” in psy chol ogy,
in which investigators asked scientists to attempt to replicate published
results of a hundred key proj ects. Th ey found that only 39  percent of them
were successful.^1 Some dispute these fi ndings,^2 but it is now generally
accepted that many, if not most, fi ndings about genes and brains are not
as strong as originally thought. I will have much more to say about this
later in this and other chapters. Th e point is that we are now being asked
to take a harder look at this science, and its deeper, social, preconcep-
tions. It is dawning on critics that, although claiming to supplant the old
ideological authority, the new science of human potential may have sim-
ply become another tool of that ideology.
Some readers may be surprised that such a thing is even pos si ble in
science. So I want to be clear about what I mean. We now know that ideol-
ogy is not just the bombastic roar or blatant self- interest of the ideologue; it
can also arise in the more quiet output of the scholar. In science generally, it
tends to fl ow in more subtle, usually unconscious, currents, shaped by the
social and po liti cal landscape from which it springs. Like every one else,
scientists tend to absorb and refl ect the prejudices, social structures, and

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