I recently ran across Hugh Kenner’s 1970 review of geneticist C.D. Darlington’s book The Evolution of Man and Society (1969). Darlington had done important work in genetics in the 1930s, but had revealed a penchant for troubling indulgences in “race science.” This was one of them.
Darlington’s book was an attempt to explain the entire history of humanity via genetic traits, with many excursions into racial generalizations and invocations of both Social Darwinist and eugenicist tropes.
Darlington had already gotten into trouble for making some very suspect remarks about race over the course of his career, and the excerpts I’ve read of the book show it to be loaded with the kind of pseudoscience that continues to plague us in things like The Bell Curve. (No, I’m not going to read the whole thing; I saw no signs of Robert Young’s review below being off the mark.)
Despite being deeply skeptical of the enterprise and explicitly disavowing the idea of racial superiority, I’m afraid Kenner still seems far too charitable:
Breezily confident that official historical motives are probably fraudulent, he often rises to majestic crankery. Like French farce, relying on one order of causation only, that which sweeps bankers to the doors of undulant blondes, such Swiftian reasonableness need not be wholly credited to be tonic.
But in looking up this happily forgotten book, I discovered Robert M. Young’s review, Understanding It All, which has an parable at the end that points out a fallacy common among scientists and other analytical types.
On the positive side, Darlington has raised very interesting issues connected with unconscious selection, sexual selection, monasticism, primogeniture, hereditary immunities, and the dynastic and social consequences of inbreeding (and incest) versus outbreeding. The book also touches on eugenic questions which cannot be answered with in the limits of science as now constituted. However, these matters are so inextricably interwoven with dubious assertions which are liable to reactionary and racialist interpretations that one would do better to start elsewhere
I have tried to convey the conclusion that in the opinion of one historian of biology this book is insidious, and its surface plausibility depends on ambiguities, premature conclusions and downright puns. At the end of the volume Darlington has listed ‘a succession of pioneers’; in the proof copy these were called ‘some precursors’. The list includes Paine, Malthus, Darwin, Marx, Galton, Bagehot, Tylor and Acton.
A psychiatrist colleague of mine turned up the other day to discuss problems of explanation in that confused discipline. I spoke of my preoccupation with trying to convey the problems raised by this book. ‘It is well-known,’ he said. ‘A specialised scientist stares down his microscope for 40 years and does very good work. Towards the end of his career he asks himself about the wider meaning of it all. He racks back the focus knob on the microscope, tilts the instrument back, and looks about him through its eyepieces. He stares hard for a time, a marvellous gleam comes into his eyes, and he exclaims, “I understand all!”’
This unfortunate sort of myopia, whose origins are rather apparent from this parable, too easily applies methodologies and principles applicable to one domain to any and all others. Kenner’s line bears repeating: this fallacy assumes that one purported causal order trumps any and all others.
The significance is not that this myopia is a privileging of the natural sciences above any other forms of understanding (although it is), but a privileging of one aspect of science above all other aspects.
The corresponding mistake made when attempting to address this fallacy, as with Edward O. Wilson in Consilience, is to think that unifications of scientific domains are unifications of methodology rather than of models. Unifying methodologies is the fast track to pseudoscience.
We are dealing, rather, with overlapping models, with overlapping “manifest images,” in Wilfrid Sellars’ term. So I conclude with a passage from Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, 50 years old, to show how little the best lessons of philosophy of science have been absorbed.
Our contrast then, is between two ideal constructs: (a) the correlational and categorial refinement of the ‘original image’, which refinement I am calling the manifest image; (b) the image derived from the fruits of postulational theory construction which I am calling the scientific image.
It may be objected at this point that there is no such thing as the image of man built from postulated entities and processes, but rather as many images as there are sciences which touch on aspects of human behaviour. And, of course, in a sense this is true. There are as many scientific images of man as there are sciences which have something to say about man. Thus, there is man as he appears to the theoretical physicist — a swirl of physical particles, forces, and fields. There is man as he appears to the biochemist, to the physiologist, to the behaviourist, to the social scientist; and all of these images are to be contrasted with man as he appears to himself in sophisticated common sense, the manifest image which even today contains most of what he knows about himself at the properly human level.
Thus the conception of the scientific or postulational image is an idealization in the sense that it is a conception of an integration of a manifold of images, each of which is the application to man of a framework of concepts which have a certain autonomy. For each scientific theory is, from the standpoint of methodology, a structure which is built at a different ‘place’ and by different procedures within the intersubjectively accessible world of perceptible things. Thus ‘the’ scientific image is a construct from a number of images, each of which is supported by the manifest world.
Wilfrid Sellars, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1962)
Those working deeply in a particular science should take time occasionally to deliteralize their studies, to prevent the apparent inexorable causalities of their field from enveloping the entire world. Economists, you too.
26 July 2011 at 20:39
Deliteralize or dereify, yes. And I like the methodology vs. models distinction too. Sellars FTW!
27 July 2011 at 22:29
I like the word “dereify” a lot. I don’t think it’d ever occur to me.
Sellars is the best cult philosopher since Peirce! Both have significant web presence…not coincidentally.
11 February 2018 at 10:25
Darlington was a brilliant man, and this massive tome a brilliant work, even if somewhat “reductionist” and “scientistic”. How often do professional historians simply gloss over the relevance of biology to developing truly satisfactory explanations for human social phenomena? Darlington was a true scientist acting here as a true historian, albeit focusing on his area of expertise – as any reader would naturally hope he would, given the dearth of biologically informed ‘macrohistories’.
And, sorry, Mr. Slate writer: The Bell Curve, though popular, was anything but “pseudoscience”. It dealt with the ever-intensifying cognitive stratification of American society – the causal link between socioeconomic status and testable IQ (which has only grown stronger since 1994) – while also regaling us with the evidence for the obvious low IQ of the perpetual underclass. It also discussed (and low-balled!) well researched and abundantly verified evidence for genetically determined interracial differences in IQ (and commonsense “intelligence”).
You egalitarians are antiscience (and anti-truth), but you are losing, simply because the weight of evidence is so one-sided, and the internet increasingly prevents its suppression. Darlington will one day be recognized for the great man he was, historian as well as scientist.