7

Equality as Biological Fact

Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way.

—STEPHEN JAY GOULD1

HUMANS, AS A PART OF THE NATURAL WORLD, derive our sustenance from working with the external environment, live in many different types of societies with a variety of social norms, display a wide range of traits and behaviors that are shaped by and interact with local environmental conditions as well as the stimuli of the society in which we live. There is no such thing as a fixed set of human traits and behaviors that are displayed equally in all societies. No group is innately intellectually or morally superior to another. We are not compelled by our biology to act in antisocial ways—to be greedy, selfish, and competitive, for men to dominate women, for whites to discriminate against people of color. Rather than being written in our genes, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression are the creation of unequal societies. The future is therefore open to the creation of a genuinely equal society.

We are a very young species with a small founding population. This helps to explain the low genetic variability among randomly selected humans, around 0.1 percent. And most of that small 0.1 percent variation, some 85 to 90 percent, is found within populations from the same continent; about 10 percent more than among a collection of people from Asia, Africa, and Europe.2 “As a species, Homo sapiens is more homogenous (there is less genetic variation) than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees. And in the place where we all began, Africa, populations in Congo, Ethiopia, and South Africa are more different from each other than each is from the population in northern Europe.”³

Individuals within a given population vary in capabilities (social, physical, intellectual) depending on a host of factors, including family circumstances, economic conditions, available opportunities for education and healthcare, genetic inheritance, life experiences, motivation and interests, even birth order. However, one of the myths perpetuated is that there are distinct human groups with various observable traits that have differing intellectual and social abilities. In this chapter, we will discuss race as a political invention; we will also look at several studies that posit that hormones and the architecture of the brain are accountable for gender differences. Finally, we will discuss these findings in the context of epigenetics, indicating that there is an intimate interaction between the environment and how genes are expressed.

THE POLITICAL INVENTION OF RACE

Race has no foundation in biology. But the idea of race and its all-too-real consequences through systematic and pervasive racism in all areas of life persists because it is useful to a system that thrives by differentiating people into unequal and competing groups. This works to perpetuate ruling elites and their positions of power in capitalism—the more divisions and disagreements there are among people, the less possibility of united actions that might challenge the system.

“Race,” as it emerged in capitalist societies, is an invention of a political system that governs by sorting people into social groupings. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.⁴ Despite the absence of scientific evidence for the existence of biologically separate “races,” classification of people into supposed races continues to be used to attribute capabilities and behaviors to various groups, with the many adverse social consequences we discussed in chapter 4.

In their 2012 book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Barbara and Karen Fields describe how distorted thinking about race can be:

Racism, something the oppressor does, [is transformed] into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss. Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”—a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke—paff—reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.5

The existence of racism means that people are viewed through a distorted lens, leading to mistaken assumptions regarding cause and effect. For example, assuming that race is a biological reality encourages scientists to search for genetic explanations for the high incidence of diseases such as asthma or hypertension among the African American population. However, the cause for the high incidence of these diseases is racism and the resulting stresses and environmental contamination in African American communities. It is a similar issue for the supposed differences in intellectual abilities between supposed races.

Scientific racism has a long history, but it resurfaced in the 1990s with the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by psychologist and Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein and influential political scientist Charles Murray. The Bell Curve used performance on IQ tests as supposed proof that there are real differences in intelligence between different races as well as classes, that are definitively based on genetics and environmental factors.

In 2015, Murray continued to argue that IQ scores of children correlate with their parents’ IQ as well as with their family economic status. Differences in family economic status are therefore justified by such findings because they are but a reflection of ability. Using his circular argument, Murray wants us to acknowledge the reality of differences in supposedly innate intelligence so that we help “children whose strengths do not lie in academics” do something else.6

There are many problems with such experiments and how they are interpreted. Any kind of test is stressful for children, particularly if one knows it’s supposedly testing how smart you are. There is a tendency for students to perform up to, or down to, expectations. As a 2015 Scientific American article explained:

Decades of science have shown that pervasive stereotypes of certain identity groups as less intelligent or less capable in academics often lead students of these groups to worry that they could be judged through the lens of these negative stereotypes. This threat is stressful and can undermine these students’ learning, performance, and engagement…. When we give students exercises designed to reduce stereotype threat, we see their school performance and engagement increase, and the racial achievement gap shrinks.⁷

As other researchers have found, poor test performance “results not from the content of performance measures, but from the context in which they are assessed—from psychological threats in common academic environments, which depress the performances of people targeted by negative intellectual stereotypes.”⁸

Despite the problems inherent in differentiating people based on tests, the whole idea that something as complex as intelligence can be measured by a simple test is absurd, especially one in which knowledge that a person previously acquired is needed to do well. As a British researcher put it in 2013, “I can report hard evidence of what most of us have suspected all along: previously reported links between general intelligence and ‘race’ are bunkum.”⁹ The very idea of testing for racial difference is itself racist. Science tells us that there is only one race of our species, the human race.

In the face of the results of all research that finds against any biological definition of race and all evidence showing it to be entirely socially constructed, racism justified through science is far from dead and continues to crop up as a biological explanation for inequality. In 2014, Nicholas Wade, longtime science writer for the New York Times, published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. Contrary to all genetic evidence, he maintains that there are three distinct human races: Africans, Caucasians, and East Asians. According to Wade, not only do these races have distinct phenotypes (that is, they look different), they have different genetically determined behavior patterns.

Wade argues it was genetics, and not specific historical developments, that allowed the people in Western Europe to develop more open societies with legal frameworks that protect private property and promote business interests—perfect for the development of capitalism. This is why some countries remain poor: they just don’t have the right genes.10

The real reasons why some countries, regions, or groups of people are “underdeveloped” are simply ignored. Many of these countries were exploited for centuries, first as colonies and sources of slaves and later by commercial ventures seeking resource extraction and cheap labor. As a result, their societies were destabilized and people were killed and displaced during colonial and imperial interventions. Today, countries of the Global South have to compete with the power of giant corporations headquartered in the advanced capitalist countries and buttressed by their governments and “free trade” agreements written to favor their business interests. This is the reason it is so hard for the poorer countries to grow their economies in a world in which the game has been rigged to favor large corporations in the wealthy countries.

In the United States, centuries of slavery followed by racism and discrimination in all areas of life have prevented the equal participation in society of African Americans. This inequality is not a consequence of genetic differences between African American and white populations, but a result of historical and economic, social, and political conditions created by those in power.

WOMEN AND BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

The same can be said for the systemic inequalities experienced by women. Since its publication in 1992, John Gray’s best-selling book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. The book portrays psychological differences between the sexes as being so extreme, they appear to originate from vastly different sources, which then manifest in behaviors that are incomprehensible to the other gender. Examples of supposedly fundamental psychological differences Gray gives include how when stressed, men retreat “to their cave” and women “need to talk.”

In her bestselling 2006 book, The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist and founder of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco, reports that many differences between male and female behavior can be attributed to hormones: “What we’ve found is that the female brain is so deeply affected by hormones that their influence can be said to create a woman’s reality. They can shape a woman’s values and desires, and tell her, day to day, what’s important.”11

Brizendine conducts a series of case studies reflecting nearly every stereotype about men and women and said she was surprised to discover just how affected women’s behavior was by the presence or absence of certain hormones. She argues that not understanding the effects of hormonal cycles is itself dangerous because women end up blaming themselves. She notes, crucially, that 80 percent of women are only mildly affected by hormone fluctuations, and that “a hormone alone does not cause a behavior. Hormones merely raise the likelihood that under certain circumstances a behavior will occur.”¹²

There have been other studies like Brizendine’s that propose that the divergent ways that men and women interact with the world are a matter of differences in brain chemistry. For example, in 2013, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania mapped the neural connections in the brains of hundreds of males and females aged eight to twenty-two. A reporter describing the research suggested that the scientists found that “stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.”¹³

The study’s chief researcher, Ragini Verma, commented to the Guardian’s science correspondent that the team’s results “surprisingly” validated gender stereotypes. Yet, despite all the much-hyped claims of differences in cognition assigned to gender, they are repeatedly found to be trivial and socially constructed such that “our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable.”14

Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University, commenting on the University of Pennsylvania study, noted that the authors act “as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain—they even provide a diagram—but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain.”¹⁵

Bringing together ideas about the construction of race and gender and the social suppositions they rest on, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling argues, “Ideas about race and gender emerge from underlying assumptions about the body’s physical nature. Understanding how race and gender work—together and independently—helps us learn more about how the social becomes embodied.”¹⁶ Fausto-Sterling goes on:

Our bodily experiences are brought into being by our development in particular cultures and historical periods. But especially as a biologist, I want to make the argument more specific. As we grow and develop, we literally, not just “discursively” (that is through language and cultural practices), construct our bodies, incorporating experience into our very flesh. To understand this claim, we must erode the distinctions between the physical and the social.¹⁷

Peter Dorman creatively demonstrated the absurdity of the research on gender differences in abilities supposedly caused by genetics. Commenting on a scientific article on differences in reading, mathematics, and science, he wrote sarcastically:

This proves what many of us have suspected all along: boys are genetically inferior when it comes to reading, at least careful reading. Their brains are not wired for words. So stop trying to make excuses for things like guys failing to understand mortgage contracts or IPCC reports on climate science. This is not a social failing; it’s because of evolutionary inheritance. Back in the cave age, males who got absorbed in reading were eaten by sabretooths or something. Pretending that biological differences don’t exist is just Political Correctness, and we know how horrible that is.18

WOMEN AND THE SCIENCES

It remains common to consider it a part of human nature or brain structure that women are supposedly not able to competently perform certain tasks, such as those needed by medical doctors. In 2005, Larry Summers, president of Harvard University at the time, remarked that “in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude and particularly of the variability of aptitude” that explain the underrepresentation of women in these fields.¹⁹ These comments—presumably referring to assumed differences in brain structure and function that mean that women can’t think as well in math and science as men—show that a strong ideological view of a gendered human nature still exists. A decade later, Nobel Laureate Sir Timothy Hunt, a biochemist, argued that science laboratories should be segregated so that female scientists would not distract their male colleagues: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab…. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”²⁰ Though Summers and Hunt ultimately lost their jobs, their prejudices are endemic to academia.²¹

Biased hiring and promotion practices are widely practiced among the science faculties of educational institutions. A 2012 study by social psychology researchers at Yale University found that science professors, male and female, consistently preferred male professors for mentoring positions or jobs. Women hires were offered salaries $4,000 lower than identically qualified male candidates. The pervasiveness of the bias was considered to be due to subconscious cultural attitudes inculcated throughout a lifetime saturated in a sexist culture, and not to individual, conscious prejudices.²²

During the early to mid-twentieth century, women worked against formidable odds to get opportunities to become scientists. When they did, their work was either ignored or co-opted by others without proper credit. There are countless examples of this. For example, the research by the remarkable plant geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), showing that corn genes or parts of genes could change location on chromosomes during cell division, was largely ignored. For many years the phenomenon of “jumping genes” was mainly considered an eccentric curiosity or oddity. The findings that some 50 percent of the human genome and as much as 80 percent of the corn genome are composed of what are now called “transposable elements” indicate the significance of McClintock’s research, for which she was belatedly awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983.23 McClintock’s later work on epigenetics, heritable changes not caused by changes to the DNA sequence,²⁴ is another indication that she was ahead of her time.

The work of the English chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) provided critical evidence for ferreting out the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick essentially appropriated Franklin’s work and originally did not even acknowledge the significance of her contribution to “their” discovery. Crick has since died, but Watson, who as a world-famous geneticist really should know better, has become infamous and a pariah within the scientific community for his openly espoused racist and sexist bigotry.²⁵

Ada Lovelace is recognized by many as the world’s first computer programmer. But Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s analytical engine gained little attention when they were originally published in 1843 (under her initials A.A.L.). It wasn’t until they were republished in B.V. Bowden’s 1953 Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines that her work found a much wider audience.

All six primary programmers for the first modern computer, ENIAC, were women—Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They are most often referred to as “computers” and “the ENIAC Girls.” They too, received little attention at the time they worked; programming was undervalued precisely because it was done almost entirely by women. These women weren’t even invited to the dinner following the announcement that the machine worked in 1946.

Katherine G. Johnson, an African American woman who grew up in deeply segregated West Virginia, was one of NASA’s “human computers” in the 1950s. She is credited with developing the calculations for numerous space flights that took place during the 1960s, and when electronic computers began to be used, “they asked Johnson to double-check the computer’s work.” She co-authored the paper that provided the mathematical basis for orbital flights, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position,” and was responsible for calculating the path of the Apollo 11 trip to the moon.26 Although her skills got her equal footing on the job with all-white male mathematicians, Johnson still had to deal with segregation in the workplace, including using separate bathrooms and places to eat.

Institutionalized gender bias promotes the notion that aptitudes in math and the sciences are incompatible with women’s natural abilities. Moreover, characteristics associated with leadership are viewed as incongruent with women’s gender roles. Promotion is still biased toward male academics, mothers are viewed as less competent in the workforce than women who are not mothers, women who appear more “feminine” get passed over for opportunities and promotions, and the list of studies showing institutional bias against women continues to grow. A study at Stanford University even shows that although there have been significant gains by women in math and science, scientists are still pictured as overwhelmingly male and white—that is, children tend to depict scientists as male and white, even though the number of female and nonwhite scientists has been steadily increasing.²⁷ And findings of research on the development of gender stereotypes in children indicates continuing challenges: “Many children assimilate the idea that brilliance is a male quality at a young age. This stereotype begins to shape children’s interests as soon as it is acquired and is thus likely to narrow the range of careers they will one day contemplate.”²⁸

Unequal opportunities and treatment by race and gender have nothing to do with genetics, brain structure and chemistry, or hormones. They are a result of economic, social, and political conditions created and maintained by a system that benefits from these inequities.

EPIGENETICS AND THE INTERACTION OF ENVIRONMENT, ORGANISM, AND GENES

The more we learn about genetics and the role of DNA, the molecule that holds the code for most of the basic functioning of cells, the more biological determinism becomes untenable. Despite the best attempts of ideologues to show otherwise, the idea that humans have genetically determined social traits and talents that determine who they will be and how successful they will be before they’re even born has been clearly debunked. Many environmental stimuli affect the functioning of our cells and bodies in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.

The study of the chemicals that are attached to genes in our DNA is called epigenetics. Established as a new field of study in the twenty-first century, scientists have found that the attachment of a methyl group (CH₃) to DNA affects the degree of expression of genes. In addition, changes in the surface chemicals on histones—the protein bundles that the chromosomes wrap around—also influence gene expression. The chemicals attached to genes and histones determine whether a particular gene will function to make a protein and, if it does, how much it will make. “Like a computer, DNA is impotent without its software, the epigenome, telling it when, where and how to work.”29

Although it is still a young field of study, epigenetic research has indicated:

1)  A number of factors, including exposure to airborne pollution and a variety of other chemicals in the environment as well as psychological and material stress, can cause changes in the epigenome.

2)  Some of these epigenetic changes are implicated in a range of diseases, including cancer as well as other serious health conditions.³⁰

3)  These epigenetic changes can be passed along to offspring, affecting the lives of their children or grandchildren.

Studies of genetically identical mice in different environments have shown some surprising results. One group was observed over a three-month period in an intricate environment of great diversity, while another group of control mice were kept in plain cages. Even though the mice were all genetically identical and behaved similarly at the beginning of the experiment, their exploratory behavior was markedly different by the end. Mice that moved around a lot and explored grew new nerve cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain influenced by environmental complexity. In other words, the brain structure of genetically identical mice changed as a result of their life activity.

As the researchers pointed out, these changes come about because of contingent facts in the mouse’s life, highlighting the plasticity of the brain:

Different experiences might modify gene expression by changing the control systems in a cell’s DNA. Such changes are known to happen in human identical twins as they age. Other factors that might generate individual differences in genetically identical animals include intrauterine position during fetal development, nutrition, maternal stress, and early postnatal events, such as a researcher handling individual mice. Finally, there is mere chance. If the mice entered the cage in the same general spot, some might have been on the outside of the crowd, others on the inside.31

The field of epigenetics has added a new dimension to the outdated nature versus nurture debate, underlining just how wrong the proposed dichotomy was in the first place. The genes, as well as chemical markers attached to the DNA that are present as a result of environmental influences (chemical, physical, and social), combine to influence much of what happens with respect to human well-being and development. The stress effects of poverty, maltreatment, being constantly reminded that you are “the Other,” and exposure to toxins have a negative influence on individuals directly subject to those factors. Furthermore, we now know those negative impacts can be passed on to our progeny.

The idea of either nature or nurture, or some percentage of each, determining our behavior and development has always provided an incomplete and inaccurate account of how genes, organism, and environment interact. How should we understand the interaction of organism and environment? Biological determinism holds that everything about an organism is set from birth by its genetic makeup. Alternatively, the organism is a blank slate, ready for environmental imprinting. These static and one-sided accounts are sometimes melded to hypothesize a certain percentage of each, genes and the environment, that determines the organism’s life track. None of these explanations are satisfactory, however, as they fail to capture the dynamic and reciprocating interaction between all three factors: gene, organism, and environment. In the case of humans, our environment is social as much as it is chemical and biological.32

IN SUMMARY, HUMANS, AS A PART of the natural world, derive our sustenance from working with the external environment, live in many different types of societies with a variety of social norms, display a wide range of traits and behaviors that are shaped by and interact with local environmental conditions as well as the stimuli of the society in which we live. There is no such thing as a fixed set of human traits and behaviors that are equally displayed in all societies.

No group is innately intellectually or morally superior to another. We are not compelled by our biology to act in antisocial ways—to be greedy, selfish, and competitive, for men to dominate women, for whites to discriminate against people of color. Rather than being written in our genes, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression are the creation of unequal societies. Confirming Anne Fausto-Sterling’s assertion that “we must erode the distinctions between the physical and the social,” recent scientific research illustrates even further how subject to change humans and other species are, depending on how we live our lives and the type of environment to which we are subjected. The issue isn’t unequal innate abilities or behaviors of different groups of people (which are nonexistent) but rather the damage done to people by societal inequity. Rather than being written in our genes, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression are the creation of unequal societies. The future is therefore open to the creation of a society of genuine equality; there is nothing in our biology to constrain or derail its blossoming.

As biology can inform us about social impacts of unequal treatment and conditions on people, broad ecological knowledge of the natural world offers insight as to how we might bring about a genuinely sustainable society. It is to this exploration that we turn in Part Three.