Word: geneticists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These provocative opinions appear in The Evolution of Man and Society (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London), the latest book by Cyril Dean Darlington, 65, a British geneticist, Fellow of the Royal Society and Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford. None of these academic credentials describe Darlington's true vocation. He is an intellectual maverick, dedicated to setting the scientific Establishment on its ear. His new book is the culmination of the author's long assault on the complacent conviction, still defended by many social scientists, that man represents a kind of dead end on the evolutionary trail...
...mind. The third is crisis intervention: a radical and still experimental attempt to try emotional first aid on someone who seems headed straight for a mental institution. Says Dr. Edward Stainbrook, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Southern California's medical school: "The geneticist figures you're done for when you're born. The psychoanalyst figures you're done for when you're six. But the crisis intervener says you're not done for until you're dead...
Jensen's more thoughtful critics concede some validity to this point. "Our educational systems," writes Geneticist Lederberg, "often neglect a child's strongest capabilities, and hold him back while focusing on his weaknesses." J. McVicker Hunt, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, agrees with Jensen that the child's first exposure to formal education is confining when it should be expanding. Says Hunt: "I am among those few who are inclined to believe that mankind has not yet developed and deployed a form of early childhood education (from birth to age five) which permits...
Mischievous Tests. But behavioral scientists are less willing to define with Jensen's confidence the comparative roles of heredity and environment in human intelligence. "I agree that it is foolish to deny the possibility of significant genetic differences between races," writes James F. Crow, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, in a response to the Jensen article commissioned by Harvard's Review. "But this is not to say that the magnitude and direction of genetic racial differences are predictable." In American society, he adds, the environmental difference between being black and being white could of itself...
...about their contribution to the intelligence of mankind at large, much less to any division of mankind. The suspicion that there are genetically determined differences at birth, and that these may contribute to the enormous diversity of the human intellect, is at least as old as Plato. But, as Geneticist Lederberg observes, "it remains just a hypothesis, and we are not much better equipped than Plato was to assess...