Professor Bill Amos helps us make sense of controversial scientific research with reference to eugenics.
Download a PDF about Interpreting Science.
Unlike sport and music, science is difficult to appreciate by non-specialists and often even by other scientists. The problem is that science is full of difficult concepts and nuances that are lost or distorted as a message passes from researcher to journalist to sound-bite to public.
Scientific papers usually have several authors: for example a free thinker who has the original idea, someone who conducts the actual experiments and a statistician to handle the numbers. The end product may be good science, but each person may understand only part what their colleagues are doing. To explore how science can get misinterpreted I use the controversial area of racism and eugenics.
Eugenic thinking was most prevalent during the early to mid 1900s and formed the backbone of Hitler’s ambition to produce a ‘superior race’ by selective breeding and killing. Despite widespread disgust, elements of eugenic theory are sound. Thus, genetic disorders can be made rarer through genetic testing followed by counseling or selective abortion, and artificial selection, though unethical, could be used to change simple traits like height. Misinterpretations appear when eugenics is taken further, for example to try to improve intelligence. Such ‘complex traits’ often have low heritability (the child does not resemble its parents) and respond poorly to selection. Moreover, strong selection can result in inbreeding that in turn causes genetic problems.
A good example is pedigree dogs, where cancer, bone defects and early death are commonplace.
Even if the science is solid, the version seen by the public is often garbled. In the search for a simple take-home message, nuances and words of caution are stripped out, often along with half the results. What is left is a biased picture that may not merely tell part of the story, it might actually say the exact opposite of what the study really tells us. For example, a piece of rather bad science suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Largely uninformed discussion in the media was so widespread that many a confused parent clearly felt ‘no smoke without fire’ and refused to vaccinate their child. The potentially lethal disease of measles is commoner now than for decades.
Perhaps the biggest misconceptions involve the word ‘race’ itself, and its connotation that humans comprise groups that vary in ‘quality’, often taken as ‘intelligence’. However, when a racist claims to be from a more intelligent population, they invariably confuse two elements: the brain and how the brain is used. The brain confers an ability to learn and its ‘quality’ depends in part on genes.
What is perceived as intelligence is what we do with our brains, and this depends on a complicated and poorly understood interaction between the brain and our life experience. The problem of disentangling these two components in anything other than newborn babies is like trying to work out which of two cars from the same production line performed better when it left the factory, based on what the cars look like after 100,000 miles with different drivers and different quality of servicing. Impossible!
Interestingly, although we struggle to measure innate intelligence, theory indicates that some aspects probably do vary among races. In time, further study should help us understand why and how mixing is beneficial, but for the moment it is comforting to see the pendulum swing back: instead of being exploited as a source of evidence that populations differ, science now seems set to describe what could be seen as the hardened racist's worst nightmare!
Professor Bill Amos, Evolutionary Geneticist, Cambridge.
Download a PDF about Interpreting Science.
Discover more about the Race: Science's Last Taboo season.
Your Comments
Post your comment
Please note: In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in to Channel 4:
Sign In Here or Register Here
Comments closed
Comments are closed at the present time
Comments
Thank you for your comment!
Your message will be reviewed and the best ones will be published below.
If you intended to make an official comment to Channel 4 please contact us.
Comments