How The Bell Curve Naturalized Inequality
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/08/the-bell-curve-murray-herrnstein-genetics-hereditarianism-inequality
Motivated by progressive aims, too many anti-hereditarians take the bait and leap right into the jaws of the genetic trap by attacking genetics itself, as though the many shortcomings of the science promoted by hereditarians and other determinists was the core problem.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the rush of scientists to embrace the nascent field of epigenetics, which, in its most extreme and overhyped form, posits considerable inheritance of acquired characteristics in a nongenetic fashion, resurrecting Lamarckism for the twenty-first century. Many scientists will even go out of their way to avoid genetics because they themselves buy into the falsehood that “genetic” means “determined.” In addition to being an ineffective response to hereditarianism, the frequency with which critics step into the genetic trap gives hereditarianism support by strengthening the often-unstated framing of social problems as being located in the basic constitution of individuals in an inevitable world, as opposed to calling for us to dedicate our efforts toward finding new social organizations to address historically contingent and by no means inevitable inequalities.
A good first step in combating hereditarianism is to stop agreeing with it. The second step is to turn our attention to the social world, examining the causes of poverty and human suffering that are often clear enough to be observed even without the use of a microscope.
