Race, Genetics, and Scientific Integrity

331 Brief communication RACE, GENETICS, AND SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY To THE editor: I am pleased that the journal highlights many of the glaring inequities in our health care system. Your authors rightly pinpoint a number of factors that contribute to these problems—racism (both institutional and individual), sexism, class bias, language barriers, bureaucratic ineptitude, inadequate funding, and so forth. I should add to the list an item that is rarely discussed: the reluctance of the scientific community either to accept correction of its errors or to acknowledge fraudulent work. For example, since the mid-1850s, unscrupulous authors have purported to show that intelligence is determined by race. More recently, Nobel Prize winner William B. Shockley1 of Stanford University and educational psychologist Arthur Jensen1-2 of the University of California at Berkeley have argued that genetics accounts for alleged IQ differences among the races. J. Phillippe Rushton3 at the University of Western Ontario now suggests that Asians are more intelligent and less criminal than are whites, and whites smarter and less prone to crime than are blacks, because Asians evolved later than whites, who in turn evolved later than blacks. Rushton's explanation is diametrically opposed to that put forward by the late Carleton Coon1, who alleged blacks to be inferior to whites because they evolved later than whites. There is neither valid scientific justification for this alleged inferiority nor for either of its presumed explanations. These notions, and others like them, are more deeply entrenched than one might think. Indeed, racism has triumphed in the scientific establishment, galvanized in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision to end school desegregation. In 1961 and again in 1964, Dwight J. Ingle, professor and chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Physiology and member of the National Academy of Sciences, warned in Science, one of our most prestigious scientific journals, of the dangers of desegregation, equal rights, and the advancement of Negroes in government. In 1967, Ingle invited Jensen to speak at the National Academy of Sciences and then arranged for publication in the Academy's Proceedings Jensen's new method for estimating the heritability of intelligence. To date—24 years later—Academy members have resisted many ]ourna\ of: Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, Vol. 2, No. 3, Winter 1991 332_________________________________________________________ attempts to publish a critique by Atam Vetta of Oxford showing that Jensen's "method" cannot accomplish what he proposed.1 Close examination of the writings of Shockley, Jensen, Rushton, and some others reveals such gross inconsistencies, methodological inadequacies, and invalid generalizations as to render any interpretation meaningless. But the scientific establishment, by blocking publication of critiques and denigrating dissenting scientists, has for years steadfastly resisted calls to challenge these writings: • From 1933 to 1951, at least four distinguished scientists—R.A. Fisher4 of Cambridge University, J.B.S. Haldane5 and L. Hogben6 of the University of London, and Jane LoevingeiOf Washington University in St. Louis, tried to sound the alarm that the literature claiming the absence of heredity/environment interaction, and the existence of the so-called heritability of intelligence, is flawed. Fisher, the inventor of the analysis of variance, warned against "the so-called coefficient of heritability, which I regard as one of those unfortunate short-cuts which have emerged in biometry for lack of a more thorough analysis of the data."4 These scientists were concerned that unwary readers might not understand that heritability (a statistical tool) and heredity (a biological phenomenon) are two vastly different concepts—a point of confusion that Shockley, Jensen, and others have exploited. But these important contributions have usually been ignored in the scientific literature.8 • In 1970, Professors J.L. Jinks and David W. Fulker announced in the American Psychological Association's prestigious Psychological Bulletin their interpretation, based on a reanalysis of previous studies, that environment does not interact with the genetic makeup of people to affect IQ. Their analysis and its implication—that intelligence is largely hereditary —were contradicted when Vetta discovered an algebraic error that invalidated the authors' methods and interpretations. But Vetta's correction was rejected by the editor of Psychological Bulletin, who wrote that the critique "does not materially alter the implications of Jinks...