Hereditarianism is the research program according to which

heredity Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic infor ...

plays a central role in determining

human nature Human nature comprises the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—including ways of Thought, thinking, feeling, and agency (philosophy), acting—that humans are said to have nature (philosophy), naturally. The term is often used to denote ...

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. It can be described as t ...

and

personality Personality is any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life. These interrelated patterns are relatively stable, but can change over long time per ...

. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetic influences to explain human behavior and solve human social-political problems. They stress the value of evolutionary explanations in all areas of the

human sciences Human science (or human sciences in the plural) studies the philosophical, biological, social, justice, and cultural aspects of human life. Human science aims to expand the understanding of the human world through a broad interdisciplinary appro ...

. Most prominently in intelligence research, they purport that

genetic predisposition Genetic predisposition refers to a genetic characteristic which influences the possible phenotypic development of an individual organism within a species or population under the influence of environmental conditions. The term genetic susceptibil ...

determines individual life outcomes more than do either structured environmental influences (i.e. nurture) or developmental noise respectively.

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 A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

for

biological Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of ...

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 ''The Tim ...

describes

Huntington's disease Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is an incurable neurodegenerative disease that is mostly Genetic disorder#Autosomal dominant, inherited. It typically presents as a triad of progressive psychiatric, cognitive, and ...

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 Sir Francis Galton (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English polymath and the originator of eugenics during the Victorian era; his ideas later became the basis of behavioural genetics. Galton produced over 340 papers and b ...

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 ''Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development'' is an 1883 book by Francis Galton, in which he covers a variety of psychological phenomena and their subsequent measurement. In this text he also references the idea of eugenics Eugenic ...

'' (1883). ''

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

'' (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 Psycho ...

and political scientist Charles Murray, 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 regarding 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 th ...

, 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 psychology, cognitive psychologist, psycholinguistics, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psycholo ...

, 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 ...

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

Political implications

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

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

, 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 Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that indivi ...

were more likely to be liberals or

leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politi ...

s, 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 who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secu ...

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

Criticism

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."

References

External links