Review by Peter LaFreniere Department of Psychology, University of Maine, Orono,



Years ago a colleague who knew how fond I was of explaining our primate origins to students asked me, "Did you know we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees"? "I'm comfortable with that", I replied, "as long as I still only share 50% with my brother", introducing a conundrum for many students that few professors can adequately resolve. Thus it was with great interest that I sought out Jonathan Marks' new book, What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee.



The question Mr. Marks poses in his title provides a wonderful entree into the fascinating and intersecting worlds of human biology and culture. The lessons are at once simple and complex; one can both overstate (and understate) the similarities between ourselves and our nearest genetic relatives. Indeed those qualified to offer a balanced perspective must be equally expert in a variety of relevant disciplines and fair-minded in their synthesis of an ever widening and more technical knowledge base. Marks notes in his preface to the paperback edition that his goal was to "relativize the genetic place of humans and apes: not to deny it or challenge it, but simply to place that scientific work in an appropriate cultural and historical context" (p. xv). Sounds great.



But turn the page and the reader discovers that the sciences and the humanities are "coming apart at the seams" and that "This rift is probably irreparable" (p. 1). Sounds ominous.



A few pages later, we learn that "Humans are marked by a large number of physical, ecological, mental, and social distinctions from other life...what does genetics have to say about all this? Nothing. Sameness/otherness is a philosophical paradox that is resolved by argument, not by data." (p.22)



This last sentence is one of the few in the book that the student who had purchased and read the book before me had both highlighted and starred. Clearly, for this student this represents one of the most important messages of the book. To me the statement seemed intended to support his main goal which has little to do with Chimpanzees but more to do with proclaiming race a socially constructed myth. (Marks: "I use "race" the way I use "angels" or "psychic energy", p.137). Moreover, one learns that families are also social constructions; genetic ties "form a relatively small part of what composes a family" (p. 135). And one more chestnut: calling humans "Mammals" is also a social construction, a political gesture by Linnaeus to induce women into breastfeeding their infants (pp. 49-50). Chimpanzees and mammals aside, much of the book is spent debunking race as having no biological reality, genes as having no influence on brain or behavior, and scientists as having no ability to measure anything, particularly human abilities. On the topic of race Marks states, "Teaching that racial categories lack biological validity can be as much a challenge as teaching that the earth goes around the sun must have been in the seventeenth century." Odd, I thought Copernicus taught us to face facts even if they make us uncomfortable.



Such is the triumph of sophistry over data in what Marks calls "Molecular Anthropology". Of course, once the student buys the notion that important debates are resolved by argument, not data, it is a simple step to dismiss all inconvenient data from one's argument as irrelevant. Methods are even more irrelevant because they just produce irrelevant facts that are probably not true anyway, and most likely the product of a devious mind with a hidden and evil agenda, that is to say a "scientist". This attitude and the hostile tone that Marks adopts in the first chapter are maintained throughout the book as Marks jumps from one sensationalistic headline grabbing topic to another, occasionally showing himself in command of some relevant facts regarding genetics, but more often attacking and trivializing the same group of scientists (geneticists) who have provided him his borrowed expertise. Listen to the tone of his comments regarding those who dare measure human abilities: "Furthermore, this raises a darker question: What are we to make of scientists who assert the existence of real constitutional differences in ability? If we cannot gauge differences in ability in any reliable manner, if ability is not a scientific concept, it is a corruption of science to assert in its name that one group indeed has less ability than another... We now need to define the boundaries of science in order to distinguish the authoritative voice of scientists speaking as scientists from the voice of scientists speaking as citizens. This distinction is vital to keeping science from being tarnished by those few scientists who have chosen to invoke it as a validation of odious social and political doctrines." (pp. 93-94)



Just who are these odious scientists who think that human abilities can actually be measured in any reliable manner?



One (among many) is the soft-spoken, hard-nosed behavioral geneticist, Thomas Bouchard, a leading researcher at the University of Minnesota over the past 35 years. Marks establishes several "facts" about Bouchard: First, that his research is of questionable ethics because it was primarily funded by the conservative Pioneer Fund. Second, that his work compares the oddities of twins separated at birth and later reunited. The student who preceded me in reading Marks' caricature of the methods of behavior genetics writes in the margin: Jim Twins, genes vs. coincidence? (Note: The "Jim twins" are a pair of remarkably similar brothers and the most famous twins in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart). Marks omits that Bouchard has received over 30 grants that are peer reviewed by the most authoritative body of scientists in their field, funded by the National Science Foundation and many other major funding sources in the U.S., and that have led to hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles detailing extensive data sets quite different than some incredibly naive journalistic account of the "Jim Twins". Rather than inform students of the logic and limits of heritability estimates derived, not from anecdotes, but by comparing a large international database of groups of identical and fraternal twins reared apart and together, he chooses to lead the naive reader to this question: Is the fact that the "Jim twins" married identically named women, and have identically named sons and dogs genetic in origin or just a coincidence? Of course it's a coincidence, and it is as completely irrelevant to behavior genetics as a SNL ("Saturday Night Live": a U.S. television comedy show -- Ed.) episode on the same topic.



Marks continues to display his penchant for one-sided diatribes: "A committed ideologue scientist, with funding from a radical organization (which would achieve greater notoriety for their funding of much of the racist work cited in The Bell Curve), builds a research program on patently idiotic stories of reunited twins, which should be of greater interest to mythologists than geneticists." (p. 150)



In contrast to Marks' socially constructed reality of Tom Bouchard, here is the University of Minnesota's social construction: "For many years Minnesota's Department of Psychology was almost alone in its emphasis on genetic factors in behavior. At a time when most American social scientists were strongly environmentalist, Professor Paterson was emphasizing heritable factors in general intelligence and special mental abilities while William Heron demonstrated that maze-learning abilities in rats could be selectively bred. As early as 1962, Paul Meehl advanced a genetic theory for the etiology of schizophrenia and, in 1966, Irving Gottesman initiated a program of training in behavioral genetics in the Department of Psychology. Noting 'that everything is more interesting if you do it with twins,' David Lykken, established the Minnesota Twin Registry in 1969, closely followed by his collaboration with Thomas Bouchard and Auke Tellegen on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart ... The tendency to ask critical questions, to challenge unquestioned assumptions, and, perhaps most characteristically, to press for quantification and measurement is now, as always, the hallmark of the Minnesota psychologist" ([...]).



For the uninitiated, let's make the record clear: Minnesota is not some prairie college; rather, their psychology department has been ranked at or near the top in graduate programs in the United States since the 1920's. Either Marks is completely ignorant of the scientific methods of behavioral genetics or he knowingly misrepresents scientists by innuendo and misleading accounts of their character, methods and data. As an activist with a habit of writing sarcastic letters denouncing the fools who disagree with him, he has now graduated to writing sarcastic books. Having read the book, I'm sure I would prefer a one-page letter.



Much of this is simply propaganda. Rather than instruct students about the basics of behavioral genetics, Marks chooses to mislead them. If I had one sentence to explain heritability to students I could do more than Marks does in his entire book. (Here's the sentence: Heritability of a trait is calculated by doubling the difference in the correlations between identical and fraternal twins reared together.) Let the more general lesson of the rising tide of propaganda on American campuses be clear: If one's beliefs are at increasing odds with the consensual facts of modern science, then obfuscation, propaganda, threat and censorship become the principal tools by which one must pursue one's agenda.



Need more evidence? Here is Marks' refutation of Frans de Waal's attempt to get people to consider both Nature and Nurture. Notice the pattern of Marks' critici

Скачать книгу бесплатно (pdf, 1.07 Mb)

---

Читать «What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes People and Their Genes»