Staying Ahead of the Bell Curve

In the days when a high school student could avoid taking calculus and still get into college (it was the spring of 1969), I elected a course on probabilities and statistics during my senior year. My only distinct memory of that class was a simple point the geeky young teacher made about allegations of race-based I.Q. differences and overlapping bell curves, long before the controversy generated by the study of that name. In case you don’t already know that point I’ll get back to it later.

Perhaps the greatest moral burden borne by the historic ties of progressivism to science is the American eugenics movement. The link is frequently cited by critics of progressive politics. As execrable as the consequences of American eugenics were, however, the original movement’s philosophy was not that of the eugenic racism of Nazi ideology. In the United States the victims of eugenic sterilization seem mostly to have been white, as in the infamous case of Carrie Buck. Here the risk factor for sterilization during the heyday of eugenics was not race, but class.

Nonetheless, progressives have special reason to be alert to the misuse of genetic information. A New York Times article notes that the onrush of new genetic information appears to reflect differences in various characteristics that are statistically associated with continents of origin—Africa, Asia and Europe—and even regions in some cases. These associations are gaining causal explanations through identifiable differences in DNA chromosomes. So far these genetic discoveries have to do with broad physical and physiological characteristics like skin color and proclivity to perspire.

Yet as the Times notes, behavioral genetics can’t be far away, including genetic correlations and causal explanations for differences in such hot-button traits as I.Q. As one of the interviewees notes, DNA only confers a range of possibilities with multiple post-conception influences—diet, education, nurturing, exposure to toxins, etc.—determining where any particular individual falls on any given scale. This is a critical, albeit complex, fact about genetics that needs to be communicated to the public before new rationalizations for old-fashioned racism take hold.

My high school probabilities teacher delivered his simple point: Say Group A collectively falls a few points higher on a scale than Group B. The individuals in each group are distributed through the x and y axes. Now lay the curves over each other, so that nearly all of us fall in the overlapping space. And of course the collective divergences depend on which characteristic you’re graphing.

“So none of us,” he concluded with uncharacteristic passion that leafy Hudson Valley fall afternoon, “has a right to feel superior to anybody.”

Tags: genetics

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