Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that heredity plays a significant role in determining

human nature Human nature is a concept that denotes the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—that humans are said to have naturally. The term is often used to denote the essence of humankind, or ...

and character traits, such as

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be des ...

and

personality Personality is the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that are formed from biological and environmental factors, and which change over time. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, m ...

. Hereditarians believe in the power of

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems. Hereditarians adopt the view that an understanding of

human evolution Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of '' Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development o ...

can extend the understanding of human nature.

Overview

Social scientist Barry Mehler defines hereditarianism as "the belief that a substantial part of both group and individual differences in human behavioral traits are caused by genetic differences". Hereditarianism is sometimes used as a synonym for biological or genetic determinism, though some scholars distinguish the two terms. When distinguished, biological determinism is used to mean that heredity is the only factor. Supporters of hereditarianism reject this sense of biological determinism for most cases. However, in some cases genetic determinism is true; for example,

Matt Ridley Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, (born 7 February 1958), is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics and has been a regular contributor to ''Th ...

describes

Huntington's disease Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly inherited. The earliest symptoms are often subtle problems with mood or mental abilities. A general lack of coordination and an uns ...

as "pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability". In other cases, hereditarians would see no role for genes; for example, the condition of "''not knowing a word of Chinese''" has nothing to do (directly) with genes. Hereditarians point to the heritability of cognitive ability, and the outsized influence that cognitive ability has on life outcomes, as evidence in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint. According to Plomin and Van Stumm (2018), "Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait." Estimates for the heritability of intelligence range from 20% in infancy to 80% in adulthood.

History

Francis Galton is generally considered the father of hereditarianism. In his book ''

Hereditary Genius ''Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences'' is a book by Francis Galton about the genetic inheritance of intelligence. It was first published in 1869 by Macmillan Publishers. The first American edition was published by D. A ...

'' (1869), Galton pioneered research on the heredity of

. Galton continued research into the heredity of human behavior in his later works, including "The History of Twins" (1875) and '' Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development'' (1883). ''

The Bell Curve ''The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life'' is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by ...

'' (1994), by psychologist

Richard Herrnstein Richard Julius Herrnstein (May 20, 1930 – September 13, 1994) was an American psychologist at Harvard University. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. Herrnstein was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psycholo ...

and political scientist

Charles Murray Charles Murray may refer to: Politicians *Charles Murray, 1st Earl of Dunmore (1661–1710), British peer *Charles Murray (author and diplomat) (1806–1895), British author and diplomat *Charles Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore (1841–1907), Scotti ...

, argued that the heritability of cognitive ability, combined with a modern American society in which cognitive ability is the leading determinant of success, was leading to an increasingly rich and segregated " cognitive elite". Herrnstein and Murray also examined how cognitive ability predicts socially desirable behavior. They also discussed the debate regarding

race and intelligence Discussions of race and intelligence – specifically, claims of differences in intelligence along racial lines – have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced. With the inc ...

, concluding that the evidence to date didn't justify an estimate on the degree of influence of genetics versus environmental causes for average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Today the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain such differences, and that they are rather environmental in origin. Cognitive psychologist

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...

, in his book ''

The Blank Slate ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is s ...

'' (2002), argues that biology explains much more about human nature than people generally acknowledge.

Competing theories

Theories opposed to hereditarianism include behaviorism,

social determinism Social determinism is the theory that social interactions alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors). A social determinist would only consider social dynamics like customs, cultural expectations, educatio ...

and

environmental determinism Environmental determinism (also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism) is the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories. Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, ...

. This disagreement and controversy is part of the nature versus nurture debate. But both are based on the assumption that genes and environment have large independent effects. The dominant view outside psychology among biologists and geneticists is that both of these are gross oversimplifications and that the behavioral/psychological phenotype for human beings is determined by a function of genes and environment which cannot be decomposed into a sum of functions of the two independently. And this especially because human behavior is uniquely plastic compared to that of other animals. The commonly cited heritability, h², is meaningful only in the context of the independent effects model. This model may be a good approximation to the real function given that the range of genomes and the range of environments is sufficiently narrow, e.g., white upper middle class Americans living in Chicago. Ronald C. Bailey argues that hereditarianism is based on five fallacious assumptions. In a 1997 paper, he also wrote that "...behavior geneticists will continue to be very limited in their ability to partition the effects of genes, the environment, and their covariance and interaction on human behavior and cognitive ability."

Political implications

In 1949, Nicolas Pastore claimed that hereditarians were more likely to be

conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...

, that they view social and economic inequality as a natural result of variation in talent and character. Consequently, they explain class and race differences as the result of partly genetic group differences. Pastore contrasted this with the claim that behaviorists were more likely to be liberals or leftists, that they believe economic disadvantage and structural problems in the social order were to blame for group differences. However, the historical correspondence between hereditarianism and conservatism has broken down at least among proponents of hereditarianism. Philosopher

Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...

describes his vision of a new liberal political view that embraces hereditarianism in his 1999 book, '' A Darwinian Left''.

References

* Mehler B

in Chambliss JJ, (ed.) ''Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia''. New York: Garland 1996.

External links