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

12 PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL

In the twentieth century, understanding of the brain has relied heavi ly
on allusions to technological meta phors. So brain functions have been
likened to hydraulic and electric machines, clocks, telephone switch-
boards and networks, computers, factories and their command systems,
and many other such systems. Meta phors are, of course, common and
useful in science. I quibble only when they are recruited for ideological
functions.
In the brain, all those meta phors mentioned have been taken to sug-
gest origins in genes with individual diff erences expressed in brains. “High
cognitive ability,” says James Flynn in his book Intelligence and Human Pro-
gress (2013), “begins with ge ne tic potential for a better- engineered brain.”
He doesn’t tell us, though, how genes can actually be such “engineers.” In
fact, the computer or computational meta phor has been predominant
since the 1970s.^13 But other accounts appeal to social- structural meta phors.
In her book, Th e Executive Brain (2009), Elkhonon Goldberg tells us that
“the frontal lobes are to the brain what a conductor is to an orchestra, a
general to the army, the chief executive offi cer to a corporation.”
So the ladder view of society and its institutions is imposed on the
brain as on genes and intelligence. Th ese meta phors are still prevalent in
discourse about human potential, even though there is little evidence for
their real counter parts in brains. I will have more to say about them all
later in this chapter, and in chapter 6. More generally, whenever brain re-
search is being done today in the contexts of social (including gender
and ethnic) classes, education, employment, economic competition, com-
mercialism, and marketing, then there is a danger that we are being pre-
sented with an ideological brain.

A CONFUSING HERITABILITY

Th e selfi sh, in de pen dent gene has been the vehicle of another ideological
tool— a statistical device that many have heard of, but few seem to be clear
about. Th is is the concept of heritability. It was devised in the 1920s as a
guide to selective breeding, essentially as a simple statistical concept: the
proportion of variation in a trait, such as egg laying in hens, that is statis-
tically associated with ge ne tic variation (and expressed as a fraction from

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