Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that
heredityHeredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause a species to evolve...
plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of
geneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems. Hereditarians adopt the view that an understanding of
human evolutionHuman evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
can extend the understanding of human nature.
Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that
heredityHeredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause a species to evolve...
plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of
geneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems. Hereditarians adopt the view that an understanding of
human evolutionHuman evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
can extend the understanding of human nature. They have explicitly abandoned the
standard social science modelThe term the Standard Social Science Model was first introduced to a wide audience in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind, and is commonly used by proponents of evolutionary psychology to describe a "blank slate" or "cultural determinist" perspective they attribute to the social sciences that...
.
Competing theories
The opposite of hereditarnianism is
behaviorismBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
or
social determinismSocial determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior ....
. This disagreement and controversy is part of the
nature versus nurtureThe nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature", i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences...
debate.
Hereditarianism is sometimes used as a
synonymSynonyms are different words with identical or very similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn and onoma . The words car and automobile are synonyms...
for
biologicalBiological determinism is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism...
or
genetic determinismGenetic determinism is the belief that genes determine physical and behavioral phenotypes. It is usually taken to mean "that the genotype completely determines the phenotype, that is, the genes completely determine how an organism turns out", or that "genes alone determine human traits and...
, 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 (1999) describes Huntington's disease 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 (Dennett, 2003). In most cases, hereditarians believe that genes play an intermediate role. In all cases, they believe this is an empirical and not a philosophical question.
Some scholars argue that an organism inherits only
alleleAn allele is one of a series of different forms of a gene. The word is a short form of allelomorph , which was used in the early days of genetics to describe variant forms of a gene detected as different phenotypes...
s, and that only the interaction of alleles with environment creates
phenotypeA phenotype is any observable characteristic or trait of an organism: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior. Phenotypes result from the expression of an organism's genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and possible interactions...
s. Put another way, in this view there are no additive genetic or environmental effects, only interactions.
Steven PinkerSteven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science...
has criticized this view, which he terms "holistic interactionism".
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/nature_nurture.pdf Philosopher
Daniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive...
satirized this view: "Surely 'everyone knows' that the nature-nurture debate was resolved long ago, and neither side wins since everything-is-a-mixture-of-both-and-it's-all-very-complicated, so let's think of something else, right?" The hereditarian view is that for a set of actual people (i.e., a given set of genes and environments) it is possible to partition the causal influences between genetic and environmental variation.
Contemporary hereditarianism
Herediatrianism has seen a resurgence since the mid-1970's, as
sociobiologySociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines which attempts to explain social behavior in animal species by considering the Darwinian advantages specific behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution,...
, behavioral genetics and the
gene-centered view of evolutionThe gene-centered view of evolution, gene selection theory or selfish gene theory holds that natural selection acts through differential survival of competing genes, increasing the frequency of those alleles whose phenotypic effects successfully promote their own propagation...
began to influence scholarly and political discourse. The concept came to the attention of the public following the 1994 publication of
The Bell CurveThe Bell Curve is a controversial, best-selling 1994 book by the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray...
, which ignited intense debate about possible correlations between
race and intelligenceThe potential correlation between race and intelligence is the subject of oftentimes controversial research and ongoing debate. Intelligence quotient tests regularly demonstrate statistically significant differences in the average scores of various racial and ethnic groups, though no consensus...
.
Contemporary hereditarianism encompasses a number of interrelated fields and points of view:
- gene-centric view of evolution
The gene-centered view of evolution, gene selection theory or selfish gene theory holds that natural selection acts through differential survival of competing genes, increasing the frequency of those alleles whose phenotypic effects successfully promote their own propagation...
- Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines which attempts to explain social behavior in animal species by considering the Darwinian advantages specific behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution,...
- Cognitive science
Cognitive science can be defined as the study of mind or the study of thought. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and biology. It relies on varying scientific methodology Cognitive...
- Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
- Human behavioral ecology
Human behavioral ecology or human evolutionary ecology applies the principles of evolutionary theory and optimization to the study of human behavioral and cultural diversity. HBE examines the adaptive design of traits, behaviors, and life histories of humans in an ecological context. HBE overlaps...
- Dual inheritance theory
Dual Inheritance Theory , also known as Gene-Culture Coevolution, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution...
- Behavioral genetics
- Human variability
Human variability, or human variation, is the range of possible values for any measurable characteristic, physical or mental, of human beings. Differences can be trivial or important, transient or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, congenital or acquired, genetic or environmental...
, including sexIn biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
and race differences
Political implications
Historically, hereditarians were more likely to be
conservativeConservatism is the diverse political and social philosophy that supports tradition and the status quo, or that calls for a return to the values and society of an earlier age, the status quo ante. However, the term has been used by politicians and political commentators with a variety of meanings...
(Pastore, 1949). They view social and economic inequality as a natural result of variation in talent and character. Thus, likewise they explain class and race differences as the result of partly-genetic group differences. Behaviorists were more likely to be
liberalsLiberalism is the belief in the importance of individual freedom. This belief is widely accepted today throughout the world, and was recognized as an important value by many philosophers throughout history...
or leftists. They believe economic disadvantage and structural problems in the social order were to blame for group differences. Conservative economist
Thomas SowellThomas Sowell , is an American economist, social commentator, and author of dozens of books. He often writes from an economically laissez-faire perspective. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1990, he won the Francis Boyer Award, presented by the...
has noted the converse relationship in his book
A Conflict of VisionsA Conflict of Visions is a book by Thomas Sowell. Sowell's opening chapter tries to answer the question of whythe same people tend to be political adversaries in issue after issue,when the issues vary enormously in subject matter, and sometimes...
: noting that conservatives tend to have a hereditarian view of human nature (Sowell calls this the "constrained" view) and liberals tend to have a behaviorist ("unconstrained") view.
However, the historical correspondence between hereditarianism and conservatism has broken down at least among proponents of hereditarianism. Many notable hereditarians are avowedly liberal. A notable example was
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
's defense of sociobiology. Philosopher
Peter SingerPeter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics , University of Melbourne...
describes his vision of a new liberal political view that embraces hereditarianism in his 1999 book
A Darwinian LeftA Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation is a book by Peter Singer , which argues that the view of human nature provided by evolution is compatible with and should be incorporated into the ideological framework of the Left...
. Similarly, in his 2002 book
The Blank SlateThe Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences. Pinker argues that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations...
, psychologist
Steven PinkerSteven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science...
endorses the view that hereditarianism is the empirically correct view of human nature, that this does have political implications which would constrain the goals of some liberal philosophies, but that embracing rather than rejecting the hereditarian view of human nature is the best way to achieve liberal goals.
The controversial
Pioneer FundThe Pioneer Fund is a U.S. non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J...
, established in 1937 is now a leading source of funding for scientists wishing to investigate hereditarian hypotheses.
Notable hereditarians
- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
(against behaviorism, but disagreeing with the hereditarian explanation in race and intelligenceThe potential correlation between race and intelligence is the subject of oftentimes controversial research and ongoing debate. Intelligence quotient tests regularly demonstrate statistically significant differences in the average scores of various racial and ethnic groups, though no consensus...
--though defending the scientific legitimacy of the question) (Chomsky, 2003)
- Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL is a British ethologist, zoologist, Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologist and theorist and a popular science author....
- Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive...
- Richard Herrnstein
Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior. His major research finding as an experimental psychologist is called "matching law" -- the tendency of animals to allocate their...
- Lloyd Humphreys
Lloyd G. Humphreys was a differential psychologist and methodologist who focused on assessing individual differences in human behavior....
- Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another...
- Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial and ethnic differences. Lynn says that there are race and sex differences in intelligence....
- Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science...
- J. Philippe Rushton
John Philippe Rushton is a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, most widely known for his work on intelligence and racial differences, particularly his book Race, Evolution and Behavior. His work in this area is highly controversial, and many have criticized it as...
- William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics...
- James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson, born April 6, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the two co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, with Francis Crick in 1953...
- E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher , theorist , naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology....