Helpful hints for biological determinism

In the final stage of my intro course my students and I read “Jonathan Marks’s”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/ “What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9172.html. Marks has pretty much decided to be the post-genome Stephen J Gould (or perhaps Richard Lewontin) and produce the updated version of the anthropological critique of race. I like the book because it is easy to disagree with, but even when you disagree with it it is still an interesting and worthwhile read. At any rate the book sells itself as being about genetics but its really a sort of a crypto-introduction to science and technology studies.

In my last class I discussed the way that the media portrays science, and often presents complex and ambiguous findings as clear proof of ‘genetic determination’ of whatever traits its audience want or expect to be told are genetic. In order to keep the class current (and since this is constantly happening), I always get online before class, print up a couple of articles, and ask my students to imagine what Jonathan Marks would say about them. It’s a nice lesson in critical reading.

Well if you are like me and need a steady diet of overly-simplistic, prejudice-reinforcing reportage, look no further because yesterday I discovered “livescience.com”:http://livescience.com/humanbiology. The site’s section on human biology does a masterful job of producing article after article demonstrating how not to report on science.

Thus while _Science_ publishes articles with titles like “A ‘his’ or ‘hers’ brain structure?”:http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/407/1 Livescience reports on similar studies with the headline “Men and women really _do_ think differently”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050120_brain_sex.html. And while the article in Science quotes scientists saying things like “No one knows quite what it all means, but the findings are food for thought.” you get no such consideration in the LiveScience article.

LiveScience also excels in running headlines which explain how something or other is genetically determined (or predicted) but then producing data to the contrary in their articles themselves (typically in the penultimate paragraph). Thus we get a headline which says “Genetic basis for increased risk of impulsive violence”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060320_genetic_aggression.html about a study whose author says “By itself, this gene is likely to contribute only a small amount of risk in interaction with other genetic and psychosocial influences; it won’t make people violent” Similarly we get an article entitled “Fingerlength predicts aggression in men”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050203_finger_length.html in which the scientist interviewed says “Finger lengths explain about 5 percent of the variation in these personality measures, so research like this won’t allow you to draw conclusions about specific people. For example, you wouldn’t want to screen people for certain jobs based on their finger lengths.” I particularly liked this quote because in our readings for that day Marks quips that “behavioral genetics is the only science in the world where you can make headlines by leaving 95% of a phenomenon unexplained.”

Anthropologists are notorious for being overly-critical of anything that smacks of a biological explanation of human behavior, so I am sure that there are many readers out there who are ready to defend the research described above from the evil anthropologist who Wants To Hold Back Real Research because of a blind commitment to a politically correct cultural relativism. But my point here is about the way science is reported in the press, and to get my students thinking critically about reading popular sources. For that purpose I found LiveScience to be great. And of course LiveScience’s willingness to quote scientists to the effect that their results are merely suggestive of directions for further research does the website credit — in fact its what makes the website so literally edifying.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org