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Rethinking scientific authority: Behavior genetics and race controversies

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Abstract

The controversy over the genetic explanation for racial differences in intelligence and behavior has been sustained by the platform the field of behavior genetics has offered race researchers. Explanations of this support have focused on political or scientific rationalities: behavior geneticists must support the claim that blacks are genetically less intelligent either for political reasons or they believe that conclusion is an unavoidable conclusion of objective science. These explanations do not withstand scrutiny given the field’s political diversity, self-image as a scientific endeavor, and skepticism about the scientificity of genetic racial explanations. Using qualitative data from interviews and the historical record, this article offers an alternate two-part explanation that focuses first, on the forces and struggles behavior geneticists faced as a field during the IQ and race controversy in the 1970s, and second, on the way sanctuary for race researchers has helped the field project images of strength to build scientific authority. The article offers a retheorization of scientific authority beyond the Weberian focus on legitimacy. It is shown to be first embedded in the relational structure of the field and second connected to the symbolic resources that provocative, though illegitimate, ideas can offer scientists.

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Notes

  1. But activists did protest and disrupt a conference on genetics and crime at the University of Maryland in 1995 (Masters, 1996).

  2. I analyzed acknowledgements in a multiyear sample of articles published in two behavior genetics journals and found only two acknowledgements of the Pioneer Fund (one of which was for Jensen). The other was for the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart run by Thomas Bouchard which has received over $1 million from the Fund but has never made any racial claims (Tucker, 2002).

  3. The possible exceptions they note are that races might differ in a few minor sensory capacities.

  4. Here I am employing Adut’s (2004) definition of scandal as the “disruptive publicity of transgression” and his analysis of scandal dynamics as centrally involving the actions of “moral entrepreneurs” who seek status gains for themselves by “denouncing” the norm transgressions of others (as often occurs in media, political, or business scandals) or “provocatively” transgressing the norms of some group (as often occurs in art scandals or demonstration politics).

  5. The notable exception was Cyril Burt’s fraudulent data on the IQ scores of twins reared apart—a key dataset for behavior geneticists through the early 1970s. On the fraud and scandal, see Gieryn and Figert (1986), Gillie (1976), Kamin (1974) and Tucker (1994a).

  6. See also Scarr (1987), Jensen (1972) and Rushton (1998).

  7. Fuller and Simmel (1986) document this shift in the scientific literature. Plomin (1979) shows the transition in the training and generational succession of the field’s membership.

  8. Another part of the story, too complicated to relate in full here, was how the field fractured during this period. Prior to the Jensen controversy, behavior genetics was a semi-coherent transdiscipline, but became afterwards a fragmented multidisciplinary space whose scientists had little in common. “Behavior genetics” had been a totality but became but one island in a larger archipelago of scientific approaches, while race research became seen as their local problem. As a result, most scientists interested in the inheritance of behavior lacked the inclinations, networks, or disciplinary institutions that might enable the regulation of deviant race researchers. See Panofsky (2014, 2016).

  9. This is different, of course, than saying they consider the question illegitimate or the hypothesis untrue. Analytically, at least, these are distinct issues.

  10. See Rushton and Jensen (2005) for the full case but also Jencks and Phillips (1998) for non-genetic explanations.

  11. This speaker also explained that he tries to participate in forums to foster public understanding of this science because “there’s always going to be a politics around it.”

  12. In some cases, critics—Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Steven Rose most notably—built careers as public intellectuals partly through engaging behavior genetics.

  13. Merton and Gieryn (1982) analyzed the question of whether to publicly publish deviance as a classic dilemma for the professions.

  14. This paper also suggests some ways that Sennett’s account of authority might be rethought to consider authority and power in other situations. For example, Sennett does not consider the power of intransigence, refusal, ignoring, and waiting. If “rejection” is a futile (or at least fraught) strategy for the powerless because of the bonds it builds with the powerful, what about refusing to do anything either way? This recalls Herman Melville’s (1853) Bartleby the scrivener who responded “I would prefer not to” in response to any request made by his employer and thus completely undermined that individual’s sense of his authority. What is more, Sennett mostly analyzes the bonds of authority in hierarchical settings and tends to show the relatively powerless as suffering consequences. But my analysis of behavior genetics—a field long facing skepticism and opposition—suggests how images of strength and bonds of rejection can benefit the relatively weak as well.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Craig Calhoun, Melissa Aronczyk, Michael McQuarrie, Sara Shostak, and Monika Krause and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to the NSF (SES 0328563) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting this research.

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  1. Institute for Society and Genetics and Departments of Public Policy and Sociology, UCLA, 3360 Life Sciences Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-7221, USA

    Aaron Panofsky

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Panofsky, A. Rethinking scientific authority: Behavior genetics and race controversies. Am J Cult Sociol 6, 322–358 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0032-z

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