Genes, Brains, and Human Potential, by Ken Richardson (preface)

KEN RICHARDSON

GENES, BRAINS, AND HUMAN POTENTIAL The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

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he causes of variation in human potential—for attributes like intelligence, and educational and occupational achievement—are always interesting. The expression “fulfilling our potential” is widely used and implies destinies already laid down, with variable, but definite, limits.

Moreover, the causes of variation really matter: perceptions of someone’s—a child’s—potential can seriously prejudice how the individual might be treated by others and by our institutions. As everyone knows, that is why a nature-nurture debate has smoldered around the issue for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Thank goodness, then—you might think—that modern scientists are, according to widespread reports, settling the issue at last. They can tell us about the real nature of intelligence, and even measure it with IQ tests.

They have revealed, in remarkably exact proportions, how individual differences are due to different genes. Thanks to the brilliant technology that sequenced the human genome, we are told that scientists are now even identifying the genes responsible for that variation. They are also showing how those genes—in interaction with environments—shape our brains to determine our levels of intelligence (and differences in them). What is more, those scientists might soon be able to design genetically informed interventions in schools to help those not so well endowed, or even target specific genes to boost IQ and give the world more geniuses. So now, at last, we can put that heated nature-nurture debate behind us once and for all.

However, there is something wrong with that scenario. None of it is true.

The advances turn out to be more hype than reality. The findings are crude, based on assumptions that are decades old and long since criticized as

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deeply flawed. There is not even an agreed-on theory of how to describe potential or intelligence. And as for discovering “genes for” intelligence or other potential, none have been found (in spite of the mind-boggling costs and continuing promissory notes).

Nor will they, it is now clear, because the endeavor is based on several misconceptions of the nature of genes, the nature of human potential, the nature of development and of brain functions, and even the nature of the environment. The problems behind the hype are conceptual, not the need for more data to add to the (inconclusive) piles we already have. Whatever powerful new technologies are applied, we will still only get slightly more sophisticated expressions of essentially the same message. That is because the concepts themselves are really only veneered expressions of a very old—albeit often unconscious—ideology, rooted in the class, gender, and ethnic structure of society: a ladder view of a social order imposed on our genes and brains.

This book seeks to reveal, describe, and explain all of that. But it is also aims to do much more. Nearly all the debate and discussion about human potential takes place in a fuzzy atmosphere of hunch and informal preconception. The joke is well known: ask a dozen psychologists what intelligence is, and you will get a dozen different answers. Behind the exaggerated claims there remains little scientific theory and definition of potential, in fact—little understanding of intelligence, how it evolved, how it develops, how we can promote it. These are prime conditions for ideological “infill”— the real obstacle, I shall argue, to understanding human potential.

The book seeks to remedy that fog and deficit. It requires a conceptual, not an empirical, revolution, and it so happens that one is now looming in biological systems research. It is beginning to permit, for the first time, an integration of findings and theory, from the molecular ensembles of the single cell to the amazing creativity of human social cognition. It is already showing, for example, that the classic, but elusive, “gene” is a conceptual phantom with deep ideological roots. The reappraisal puts us, as Evelyn Fox Keller explained recently, at “a critical turning point in the history of genetics,” where “recent work . . . obliges us to critically reexamine many of our most basic concepts.”1 Similar conceptual advances are revolutionizing our understanding of brain, cognitive systems, the engagement of these in social systems from

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ants to humans, and, finally, that transformative evolution to human culture and social cognition. They are nothing if not far reaching. Imagine that genes are not the “blueprints” or “recipes” we have been told they are; that living things existed before genes; that a child’s potential is not prelimited, but is created in the course of development; that the environment is vastly more complex—yet more providential—than it looks; that forms of “intelligence” exist even in single cells; that the brain and human intelligence develop throughout life; that, in humans, they are shaped by the “social tools” they have access to rather than innate programs.

Above all, imagine that, far from the gene-based ladder-view of people with graded brains, the vast majority of us, and our children, will be constitutionally “good enough” for participation at all levels of social activity and democratic institutions. This is the view that the new biology and psychology, and even many experts in human resources, in commerce and industry, are coming around to. It might just be bringing humans out of a long period of ideological gloom in which only the few are really “bright,” into a new enlightenment for everyone. It all suggests a far better, more hopeful, story to be told about human potential.

That is the story to be told in this book, but it involves a long route through much novel territory. To give you some sense of direction, here is a rough route map. In the first chapter, I explain why a new look at the whole field covered by the title is badly needed. I illustrate how ideology has (even unwittingly) perfused much of what passes for a science of potential through a key weakness—the vagueness of its basic concepts. The rest of the chapter illustrates, at some length, such weakness in the recent hype-ridden “advances” about genes and brains and intelligence.

What follows deconstructs the current edifice around those basic concepts—and then slowly builds a new one on sounder foundations.

Chapter 2 is about the peculiar, and largely mythical, model of the gene at the roots of the edifice; it exposes the flawed methods of inquiry (and results) developed around it. Chapter 3 shows how the IQ test—the basis of nearly all that is said about genes, brains, and intelligence—is the opposite of an objective measure. There is no agreed-on theory of intelligence: test constructors have simply decided in advance who is more or less “intelligent” and then built the test around that decision.

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The construction of a genuine biological model of intelligence, and of a new vision of potential, starts in chapter 4. It goes right back to basics: to molecular networks, and life before genes; to evolution and cells; the true nature of complex environments; the kind of information living things really need to survive in them; and the “intelligent systems” that use it. It also explains why the new concepts of “dynamical systems” are needed to understand them. It will be, for most readers, the most challenging chapter, but is crucial to the reconstruction that follows. There are a number of summaries, though; and some of the more complex parts can be skipped, anyway.

Chapter 5 applies these ideas to the explanation of development: the transformation of an original “speck” of matter into bodies and brains of dazzling variety and competencies, utilizing the same genome. It starts to tell us how potential and variation are actively created through the system dynamics, rather than passively received in genes. A dynamical, “intelligent” physiology, coordinating activities in disparate tissues, also has much to tell us about the nature of individual differences.

Chapters 4 and 5 begin to show how intelligent systems have evolved at many different levels, corresponding with more changeable environments. Chapter 6 describes how a “neural” system of intelligence emerged as more changeable environments were encountered. It contrasts the traditional mechanical and computational metaphors of brain functions with the emerging concepts of dynamical processes. Only the latter can deal with unpredictable environments, and I will show how brains based on dynamical processes are—even in nonhuman animals—far cleverer than we think.

Scientists’ views of brain functions, though, have been much informed by models of cognition. In chapter 7, I summarize these models, show their inadequacies, and offer the new perspective now emerging in dynamical systems research. For the first time, that perspective clearly describes how cognitive intelligence both transcends, yet emerges from, that in brain networks.

Chapter 8 puts cognition in the context of the evolution of social groupings from ants to apes. Even in ants, it has entailed a further leap of intelligent functions, between brains, which is even more complex than those within them (I call it “epicognition”). And that, in turn, sheds new

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light on the origins and nature of individual differences in social groups, some of which were hinted at by Charles Darwin himself.

Such new perspective is especially impor tant for understanding human evolution. Chapter 9 describes how humans evolved especially close forms of group dynamics, resulting in a new “layer” of regulation, namely, human culture. Much of the chapter goes on to describe the epochmaking fecundity of that unique intelligent system, explaining why humans adapt the world to themselves, when all other species are locked in to specific niches.

Throughout these chapters, I draw out implications for the understanding of individual differences. That is particularly the case when I turn, in chapter 10, to considering how to promote human potential, and contrast the emerging dynamical framework with traditional “input-output” models of causes and interventions (and why those have been disappointing).

As with chapter 11, where I bring the same perspective to bear on schooling and education, the implications for policy are stark and far reaching.

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS Integrating such a wide spectrum of research has been a necessary, but also a thrilling, trail to follow, and I hope readers will share some of that excitement. It would not have been possible without the thoughts and inspiration of the many ideas-makers I have had the pleasure of encountering along the way, either in person, or by other means. They are too numerous to list, here, but I hope their presence in these pages and the nature of the product will reflect my gratitude. The following, however, took time out from their own busy schedules to read drafts of the present work and offer extremely helpful comment and feedback: Claudia Chaufan, Jonathan Latham, Robert Lickliter, Mike Jones, Jay Joseph, Richard Lerner, David Moore, Sarah Norgate, Steven Rose, and Allison Wilson. My partner Susan Richardson has been a patient and supportive ally throughout the project, and Brian Richardson helped with some of the diagrams.

I am grateful to all of them for helping me turn a rough draft into a more readable and coherent product. If it still is not, the responsibility is entirely my own.