Volume 31, Number 13 · August 16, 1984
Between You and Your Genes
By Stephen Jay Gould
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature
by R.C. Lewontin, by Steven Rose, by Leon J. Kamin
Pantheon, 322 pp., $21.95
Cat Island in the Bahamas maintains a declining population of one thousand or so by slash-and-burn agriculture. Few of the one-room houses have electricity; none has plumbing. The local teacher, a British expatriate, told me that in seven years only one child had managed to win entrance into the two-year program at the College of the Bahamas in Nassau—and that she had flunked out. When I asked why, he gave a perfectly obvious and reasonable answer: how can Cat Island children maintain any interest or time for studies? They come home late in the afternoon; they have to haul water, care for the goats, help to prepare food. After dinner, they have no place (or light) for doing homework. I nodded in evident agreement, but his next statement startled me (this, I should add, was a casual barroom conversation; he knew me only as a peculiar snail collector, not as author of The Mismeasure of Man). We now know, he said, that only 20 percent of mental ability is environmental; 80 percent is inherited, so these immediate factors can explain, at most, one-fifth of the under-achievement. The rest must be genetic, probably caused (he opined) by inbreeding among the few families that inhabit Cat Island.
Review, 3029 words
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