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by DougHolland
1635 days ago
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I never met the guy. It's entirely possible he was a raging racist. I've read some of the papers in question, though, and while it's been some years and maybe I missed the white pointy hoods, I don't remember the racism in his writing, and I think the author at Scientific American has misread the work. E O Wilson never said anything like "genes determine who's smart and who's dumb," which would be racist. He said something like "genes are a contributing factor," and fuckall, if that's racist then just pull the plug on science. |
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We have reason to believe that some such "smart genes" are inherited. That's not very egalitarian, but it is also not racist. The implication is that these smart genes are rare not only in your dispossessed underclass, but rare everywhere. In any place where their promise fails to be nurtured and cultivated, humanity is the poorer for it. By the numbers, if the genes are more-or-less equally distributed, the dispossessed include absolutely many more stewards of these genes than the privileged. Then, it is a crime against society for the privileged to have failed to nurture them wherever possible.
But of course it is not only carriers of "smart genes" who could provide a strong net benefit society as a whole by being well nurtured. Arguably, for every "smart gene" carrier who would give back more than the cost of the nurturing, there are many others who would also effloresce. The only way we know to identify and nurture them all is to nurture everybody and see who blooms. But that would cost money.