Is Our Biology to Blame

The biological sciences have a long history of service to humanity. Rapid advances in medical technology and astounding increases in agricultural productivity are but two obvious examples. But the use of biology is not always beneficial. We wish to examine a particular negative application known as "biological determinism," an old but recently revived doctrine that attempts to explain a variety of human social conditions as the result of natural biological processes. Although this revival covers several seemingly unrelated issues, the basic message is always clear: Social phenomena are rooted in causes that are fundamentally biological. Such a doctrine can be perniciously misleading. At times it promotes a fatalism about human problems, and at other times it misdirects our attention. At the same time, this doctrine is terribly seductive. Much of our everyday experience seems to correspond with its basic tenets, and observations that have previously defied explanation suddenly make sense. This seductive aspect is most important to us as educators. As teachers, we tend to become students of human behavior. Who among us has not speculated on what might be the underlying reasons for that elementary school student's inability to grasp the concept of the union of sets? Who among us has not said, "Frank just doesn't seem to have what it takes to be a doctor"? Such a conjecture reveals an underlying desire to understand the nature and limitations of those with whom we must work. But the human behavior student" is only one side of a professional educator. We are professionals in a field that might be called applied human behavior. As educators we are in a position to influence the development of behavior and to facilitate the full learning potential in our students. We might be likened to engineers. As an engineer facilitates the movement of a space capsule from earth to moon, we facilitate the development of human beings from childhood to maturity. The space engineer has a body of well-developed theory to depend upon, but we are largely operating in a pre-Newtonian era of human behavior. Indeed, our spaceship frequently winds up crashing into the sun despite our having aimed it at Jupiter. Nevertheless, every practitioner must at times guide his or her practice by referring to some underlying theoretical framework: the physician to biology, the space engineer to physics. To what theoretical framework is the teacher able to turn? To what theoretical framework does the teacher turn? Imagine yourself as a teacher in a school recently integrated through busing. As you gain experience in this setting, you cannot long ignore the fact that black children learn more slowly than white children. Of course there will be numerous exceptions to this basic rule, but it seems that, on the average, blacks learn more slowly than whites in your classroom. Having empirically established the relationship between skin color and learning, what might you do with such information? As an intellectual you will probably attempt to couch it in some larger framework. In 1969, such a framework was proposed. In his widely read paper, Arthur Jensen purported to show that the average difference between the I.Q. scores of blacks and whites was due mostly to genetic factors. If the genetics and I.Q. argument seems anachronistic to you, consider the following scenario. Suppose you are teaching assertiveness training in a business college. After applying every technique you know of, the women in the class are less able to develop the aggressive, confident mannerisms, the personal positiveness, and the self-reliance that you are trying to teach. Just as blacks might seem to be slow learners compared to whites, females might seem less able than males to benefit fully from an assertiveness training program. Again, you will probably attempt to couch this information into some larger framework. And, indeed, a seemingly scientific dogma has recently emerged, a brand of biological determinism called sociobiology. This branch of biology seeks to explain human behavior patterns as the natural outgrowth of organic evolution, so that, ". even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in political life, business, and science. " (Wilson 1975b) Numerous similar scenerios could could be constructed. The basic pattern is that observations that seem to defy analysis, yet frequently originate from difficult social prob-