Defending the environmentalist position in the little cyber-world of scientific racism is not an easy task. The difficulty does not come from the strength of the easily debunked contradictory biologic arguments that are based on flawed logic but from scientific racists’ misunderstanding of environmentalism as a notion and their ignorance of the complex reality behind. I must be true to everyone here: I have never ever been partly convinced by any hereditarian argument, never did they make me doubt the validity of the environmental position that I defend due to what I’ve learned from reading and from my life experience. For that reason, I will dedicate this publication to explaining environmentalism, or at least my conception of environmentalism, and make clear about its relationship to the hereditarian position.
First of all, environmentalism is not due to political correctness. I have no issue with blaming some populations for the terrible environments they create for themselves due to inadequate cultural tendencies or political choices. As a Black man, my environmentalism is not even caused by racial solidarity. I understand the meaning of “average”and “overlapping distribution” and I’m not that much bothered by the idea of being among the lucky few within a racial group that has a higher proportion of violent simple minded people. Therefore, it is important that you realize that environmentalism is not idealism, those who defend it are not blind to the realities and Blacks who share this position do not do so because scientific racism is stubbornly dedicated to demonstrating the lower humanity of their race. Truth be told, I’m about as pesimistic as the average scientific racist regarding to the possibility that different races reach equality on various social indicators, I know people do not like to be told what to do for themselves, I know that policies are implemented within particular ideological frames that have little consideration for objectivity.
Another misconception is that we use the word “environment” as a substitute to traditional left-wing terms such as “society” or “poverty” to support the implementation of a socialist agenda. Environmentalism is actually broader and more complex than that. It basically encompasses all of the non-genetic factors that influence one’s destiny. As “environment” is becoming cliché, I’m considering replacing it by the word “circumstances” including individual circumstances and collective circumstances. Environmentalism is the acknowledgment that individuals and communities are shaped by the circumstances they had to face and still have to face. Environmentalism is also the recognition that individuals within a race are more likely to face similar circumstances than sharing the same genetic variants and that in parralel, individuals of two different races are more likely to face different circumstances than sharing different genes variants. With that in mind, we realize that environment is the most crucial factor of similarity within a group and of dissimilarity between different groups.
What reinforce the environmentalist position is that a large number of its components have been demonstrated by replicated studies. Environmental interventions making no use of genetic therapy or medication have been shown to have significant effects on individual achievements and intellectual performances. And as far as I’m concerned, I’m one living manifestation of the environmentalist miracle. In other words, environmentalism is serious, it corresponds to the observed reality and the same could not be said about hereditarianism which is still lacking the direct evidence of its assertions after decades of waiting for the Messiah gene that will expose the truth. Furthermore, hereditarianism has to rely on flawed associations and scientifically dubious studies, data and methodology. It thus deserves the pseudoscience label that comes along with the larger ideological background of its proponents.
Now I believe you want to have a brief summary of what is included on the list of environmental factors, or circumstances that cause group differences in achievement and performance in cognitive performance tests. On the long and non-exhaustive list are: lifestyle, upbringing, diet, health, pre-natal development, social culture, ethnic culture, religion, education, intellectual stimulation, life experience, stress, confidence, identification, group history, family structure and history, peer pressures and economic conditions. Most of these factors are linked to each other, some of them allow some degree of individual action to adress them while others depend on external forces that are harder for a single person to escape. All of this makes it difficult to either put the blame on society or individual behaviors to explain group differences.
One regular commenter told me that he had explored the multitude of environmental arguments explaining group differences in social status and failed to be satisfied by most of them. I think this failure is caused by an inadequate intellectual attitude that consists in the quest of a dominant single explanatory factor. In opposition to hereditarianism, environmental arguments, though their validity has been demonstrated never individually present themselves as the main answer to the question of group differences. Each one of them fractionally contributes to the big picture of group patterns, this is why they can’t be dismissed because they are not able to wholly explain the achievement gaps if taken separately but must be thought as coming in addition to other environmental influences.
The other mistake that is often made when an hereditarian challenges the yet proven validity of an environmental factor is thinking that it is supposed to affect everyone in the same way. The reality is much more complex and there is great variation in the way individuals are impacted and react to environmental factors. All Black people do not express the same attitudes when they face racism, racism itself differs according to the group it is directed to. Anti-semitism is nothing like negrophobia and can’t result in the same psychological outcomes in its victims. Family structure is an other example of factor that causes individual variation in outcomes with some persons doing pretty well without a father at home whereas others experience dramatic developmental issues due to this absence.
We can speculate that genetics play a role in the variation between different individuals in the way they react to similar circumstances but in the absence of evidence, it remains more reasonable to investigate the interaction of various environmental influences. More importantly, we should keep ourselves from expanding the weak indications of genetic contributions to personality and life outcomes to groups of millions of individuals sharing only a small fraction of their genetic makeup. Especially when group differences are mainly caused by the undeniable variation in the amount of negative or positive environmental influences that affect each group’s members.
With respect to genetics, I come along with the mainstream consensus that genes may play a moderate role (somewhere around 50%) in the variation in cognitive ability between individuals. However, I see no reason for this genetic basis to be an explanation of group patterns. The Rushtonian evolutionary theories can’t be supported by science and could not result in overlapping bell curves expressing variation over time when visible racial adaptive traits show fixed clearly distinct distributions between races and are common to all of their respective members. The invalidity of the evolutionary hypothesis does not remove the possibility of different frequencies of gene variants affecting intelligence and behavior between different races but it has yet to be proven while keeping in mind that heritability is only suspected to explain a moderate part of the variation without much certitude.
For instance, a correlation in IQ of 0.47 between siblings is actually very weak to claim a strong genetic influence. Even though this correlation reaches a higher level in identical twins raised together (0.7 – 0.8) it may indicate the strength of pre-natal influences as much as it can support genetic hypotheses, however, the lower correlation in identical twins raised apart clearly shows that different environments result in different cognitive testing performances. If we acknowledge the weakness of correlations in IQ found between individuals of the same family, we can reasonably assume that the correlations between members of the same race are even lower and come close to zero.
With all the elements mentioned before, the possibility of genetic factors influencing intellectual performance does not contradict a 100% environmental position in explaining IQ gaps between groups considering that people from different race have similar average genetic potentialities but face significantly different environmental pressures that cause the observed gaps whose breadth varries across time and places. If by an accident of logic the hereditarian position was found to hold a part of the truth, we wouldn’t have to rush in genetic engeneering or eugenic programs to “phase out” certain populations as suggested by the most prominent scholars of scientific racism. The best understood genetic disorders can have their symptoms managed by environmental intervention methods like medication, changes in lifestyle or diet. The good news with IQ gaps and achievement issues is that we already know the remedies to cure them so that genetic evidences, if they are found one day, would not bring anything new under the sun except maybe a more sympathetic medical approach.
