IN MY student days, I had a friend who wore the densest,
chunkiest glasses that money could buy. The joke went that he must
have had superb eyesight to be able to see through those thick
lenses. It is a line that came back to me as I listened to
Intelligence: Born smart, born equal, born different
(Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), in which Adam Rutherford attempted
to pick his way through the political history of genetics and
intelligence.
Amid the hand-wringing that accompanies any assertion by
scientists that intelligence is passed on from parent to child, it
is important to stop and think what such an assertion actually
means. Does it mean that the genetically stupid are damned to lives
of mediocrity? By what name should we identify that quality by
which the genetically unintelligent might rise to lead fulfilling
lives? Could it, perhaps, be named . . . intelligence?
To take an example quoted from the programme: the UK is
supposedly 26th in the global intelligence league. You do not need
to be a jingoist to believe that, in many areas of research,
technology, and artistic achievement, the UK does pretty well. We
are good, it seems, at punching above our genetic weight: applying
some kind of cunning or intelligence to overcome our natural
deficiency in intelligence.
This was an exasperating programme: one in which Rutherford,
announcing himself as a scientist, failed to negotiate even the
most basic disciplinary problems. What, for starters, is
"intelligence"? He declared that, by whatever criterion it is
defined, studies of the hereditability of intelligence came out the
same. That is hardly satisfactory: without hard and fast
definitions, we can substitute for intelligence only the vaguest of
synonyms - "aptitude" perhaps, or the Darwinist "fitness".
And without these, what are we to make of Professor Robert
Plomin's recent study, which tells us that intelligence is 50 per
cent hereditable? (That, incidentally, is "hereditable", not
"inherited".)
There was a tantalising moment in the programme when Steve Jones
tried to explain that this was a statistic that related to averages
within a population, not individuals. Had he been allowed to
continue, we might have learned something about how such studies
should be read more like census reports than the genetic mechanics
of inheritance. Instead, Rutherford weighed in with the kind of
executive summary that overrides all those nuances he himself
avowedly wished to present.
Nuance and perspective are things that one does not readily
associate with Jeremy Clarkson, who, it is alleged, used the
"n-word". British phone-in shows have been reverberating with
opinions over the past few days; but the place to get a truly
global kicking is World Have Your Say (World Service,
Friday), in which contempt is harvested from Tobago to
Timbuktu.
In this instance, however, it was the studio guests, from Russia
and India, who were wielding the boot. The international callers
were prepared to give Clarkson a break. "But it's not just the fact
that he used that word," the studio journalists protested: Clarkson
has form. Or, put another way, he's a plonker, and the world knows
it.