The very fact of the AAAS sponsoring this symposium on the "controversy" is an indication of the success we have had in making the claims of the sociobiologists controversial. What caught many of us in Science for the People by surprise at the AAAS meetings was the extent of the spreading negative reaction to...
Tag - biological determinism
I have been doing research in bacterial genetics for the last 12 years at Harvard Medical School and I am a member of Science for the People. Over the last couple of years, we have been discussing in our laboratory how the recombinant DNA technique could make certain of our experiments much easier to do. However, as a...
In the past few years much energy and enthusiasm has been directed towards the supposedly new idea of extending the comparative study of animal social systems to human social systems. However, we of the Sociobiology Study Group see this movement as the latest reappearance of a much older doctrine of biological...
In the middle of May, as students at Harvard Medical School were preparing for their exams, as many medical schools around the country were completing their admissions decisions, as President Ford spoke of "alternatives to busing," Bernard D. Davis, a Professor at Harvard Medical School, stirred up a storm the impact...
Recently, Science for the People groups in Boston and Ann Arbor have formed to analyze and combat this latest appearance of biological determinism. The Boston group prepared a critique which was published in the New York Review of Books (Nov. 13, 1974) and both groups are preparing articles for popular and academic...
In a similar fashion, the theories put forth by the sociobiologists and their predecessors help to support maintenance of the status quo and to convince people that revolutionary changes in social relationships (e.g. class structure and sex roles) are impossible. One way we see this done is by the rapid incorporation...
Jensen, Herrnstein and others have claimed that people's IQ is highly inherited and plays a large part in determining their "success" in later life. In this section of the magazine we show the fallacies of all these arguments. "IQ and Class Structure" demonstrates that IQ is not a cause of success and that it is...
A raft of reports has appeared claiming a genetic basis for intelligence in human beings. These hereditarian explanations for intelligence have been given considerable publicity—by far more than given to opposing views. As a result, whether consciously or not, the U.S. scientific and general public has begun to absorb...
In the past five years, there has been a wave of ideological attacks by intellectuals on those who are without power and wealth—specifically blacks, the unemployed, the working class in general. This new wave has emanated from the elite universities and has been designed to prove that the "lower" classes are...