The Rediscovery of Human Nature and Human Diversity

Charles Murray American Enterprise Institute

When this conference was organized, I was asked to prepare a lecture on the implications of evolutionary theory for sociology, which put me at a disadvantage on three counts. I have never formally studied evolutionary theory, never formally studied sociology, and my partner in this session is one of the worlds leading authorities specifically on the evolution of sociality. He will be followed by leading experts in the evolution of altruism and cooperation, morality, religion and politics. What, precisely, might I have to contribute? Nothing. I was trained as an analyst of public policy, and that is how I have made my living for forty-six years. So I asked myself, how does the analysis of public policy relate to evolutionary psychology? The answer is that I am in a profession whose practitioners almost universally believe that evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to the questions they ask or answers they get. Evolution did not produce inborn human nature and evolution did not produce human diversity that separates groups of people in any meaningful way. Since both of these positions are wrong, and yet my profession also has great impact on the kinds of laws and regulations that are enacted, I thought it might be useful to devote my time to discussing this peculiar situation. My thesis in this lecture is that growing knowledge about evolutionary psychology and its genetic foundations is going to lead to the rediscovery of human nature and the rediscovery of human diversity among groups. In the long run, both of these reversions to age-old understandings about the human animal are going produce much better public policy than has been produced in the last half century. In the short run, they are going to cause turmoil. I will first briefly recount how human nature and human diversity came to be eclipsed, then turn to some of the areas in which the received wisdom is going to have to change, and conclude with some speculations about what will follow in the wake of these changes. I should note that my presentation will refer only to 1

the experience of the United States. My impression is that many of the same forces have been at work throughout Western Europe, but I will leave those of you who are from Europe to evaluate that possibility for yourselves. How Human Nature and Human Diversity Were Eclipsed Human nature began to be unpopular with the French Enlightenment and fell further out of fashion during the 19th century as sociology developed. It is appropriate that Karl Marx was the intellectual founder not only of communism but (at least in Isaiah Berlins view 1) of sociology. The very slogan of communism, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, betrays a starry-eyed idealism about how the unimportance of inborn human nature. But even among the moderates of the Left, the constraints of human nature could not count for much. For them, reform of social institutions was the way to a better world. If that is the case, it is essential that social institutions be malleable. If it is essential that they be malleable, it is also essential that the constraints of human nature be unimportant. There is one conspicuous oddball in this historyHerbert Spencerbut otherwise the rise of sociology and of socialist thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries went hand in hand. The built-in hostility toward the importance of human nature within sociology and socialist politics found support from developments in psychology during the first half of the 20th century. B.F. Skinners operant conditioning was only the most extreme form of the view that human behavior can be shaped at will by properly constructed environmental influences. At least through the first two-thirds of the 20th century and continuing to some extent to this day, psychologists were comfortable with the role of the unconscious and of childhood experiences in shaping human behavior, but considered even those to be malleable through the right psychotherapy. The most prominent psychologists of that era did not dwell on the proposition that humans in large numbers will always and forever tend to behave in certain ways no matter how hard one tries to change them. The concept of human diversity fared better during the 19th century than the concept of human nature. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists accepted the concept of race with little dissension, and it was

taken for granted that the physical differences were accompanied by personality and cognitive differences as well. Carleton Coons magnum opus, The Origin of Races, was published in 1962, and provoked no outrage when it appeared. Then came two developments that above all others led to the intellectual eclipse of human nature and human diversity in the United States: the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the triumph of the Feminist Movement in the 1970s. These two developments working in combination led to what I have elsewhere called the Equality Premise: the belief that people are equal not just in the way that the American Declaration of Independence meantequal in the eyes of God and before the lawbut equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. 2 The Equality Premise applies only rhetorically to individuals. People say things like everybody should go to college, but I suspect that few of them really believe that all children have the cognitive ability to handle college-level material. The strict interpretation of the Equality Premise applies to groups of people. In a fair society, it is believed, different groups of peoplemen and women, blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the children of poor people and the children of rich peoplewill naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life in a fair society. When that doesnt happen, it is because of societys unfairnesses and imperfect institutions. The Equality Premise demands that groups may differ only in purely physiological ways such as possession of a uterus or epicanthic folds. Differences in groups cannot possibly embrace important personality and cognitive characteristics. The Equality Premise also has sweeping implications for the permissible role of human nature. For example, the constellation of role differences based on sex are all suspect under the Equality Premise. Why dont men take an equal role in child-rearing? Because culture has socialized men and women into accepting this sexist arrangement. Why do little girls, given toy trucks to play with, arrange them in a circle so they can talk to each other, while little boys, given dolls to play with, point them at each other and say bang bang? Same reason. The triumph of the Civil Rights movement also indirectly led to the eclipse of human nature. Many of the social and educational programs of the 1960s were

undertaken to narrow the large observed differences between blacks and whites in educational attainment, employment, income, imprisonment, and other outcomes. The Equality Premise not only prohibited discussion of group differences that might account to some degree for these differences in outcomes; it also prohibited discussion of elements of human nature that might account for them. For example, the family headed by a never-married woman was much more common among African Americans than among whites in the 1960s. In an earlier era, it would have been natural to treat family structure as a causal variable by arguing, for example, that it is part of human nature for little boys to adopt male role models, and the absence of fathers importantly impedes the socialization of little boys into adult roles as workers and spouses. But to argue that would be to say that the intact two-parent family (which was the norm among whites) was superior to the lone-mother family (which was much more prevalent among blacks), and that became impermissible. The triumphs of the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements were not the only forces at work. For reasons that are hard to unravel, a kind of Rousseau-ian naivet took hold during the 1960s. How else are we to explain, for example, that the number of persons in American prisons was lower in 1974 than it had been in 1961, even though violent crime had tripled during the same period? I am unable to give you a full explanation for this national intellectual daze. It is as if a very high percentage of American policy analysts got hold of some exceptionally good weed in 1965 and stayed high for a decade, with many of them remaining in that state in perpetuity. How Will the Elite Received Wisdom Change? In 1975, two men named Wilson published books that, in retrospect, were landmark events. One of them was the biologist Edward O. Wilson, and his book was called Sociobiology. He opened the way within academia for the work in evolutionary psychology that has brought us to the Galapagos in 2013. The other was the political scientist James Q. Wilson, and his book was Thinking About Crime. Here is the sentence with which he began the book: A common theme of the essays that make up this book is that the proper design of public policies requires a clear and sober understanding of the nature of man and, in particular, of the extent to which that nature can be changed by

plan. 3 In 1975, that position was revolutionary in the policy world, and the success of Thinking About Crime opened the way within public policy analysis for people like me to bring new perspectives to our inquiries. The two books did not change the academic or public policy zeitgeists, however. The scholars who followed in the wake of the two Wilsons were typically isolated within their professional communities, and have not infrequently suffered professional and social penalties for pursuing their work. Some of the speakers at this conference can testify to that reality from their own experience. The Equality Premise still rules. Just how powerfully it still rules is illustrated by the fates of Larry Summers and James D. Watson. In 2005, Summers was the president of Harvard University when he made some mild, empirically well-founded comments about male-female differences at a conference that was supposedly seeking innovative thinking. Those comments started a firestorm that culminated in his resignation. James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is the worlds most famous living biologist. But when in 2007 he made empirically accurate remarks to a British journalist about IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa, he was forced to resign as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. No one, no matter how eminent, can safely question the Equality Premise in a public setting. Fortunately, an article in a technical journal does not qualify as a public setting. Even highly provocative findings go unnoticed by the media unless the authors deliberately publicize them. That lack of interest has enabled a minority of intrepid scholars to pursue and publish their inquiries. So even though Larry Summers got fired for breaching the rules on public discussion of sex differences, David Gearys second edition of Male, Female has a bibliography of more than 2,000 titles, most of them articles in peer-reviewed technical journals. 4 A great deal of high-quality work has been done, and it is eating away at the foundations of the received wisdom. Human nature. Let me begin with human nature. Over the course of the next two decades, I expect that the accumulation of discrete, specific findings will transform the way that policy analysts think about the malleability of human beings. Ill illustrate with a simple example. It has been well documented for years that child abuse is much higher in single-parent homes than in intact families. The most recent

federal survey of child neglect and abuse confirmed the standard pattern: the lowest level of physical abuse, 1.9 per thousand, was experienced by children living with both biological parents, while the highest rate was experienced by children living with an unmarried mother and a live-in boyfriend19.5 per thousand, a ratio of 10 to 1. For sexual abuse, the ratio was 20 to 1. 5 But though the pattern is known among specialists, it is not well publicized in todays world. Sociologists strive earnestly to explain child abuse by looking at variables such as parental education, poverty, and other forms of deprivation. Those explanations dont work very well. Evolutionary psychologists do not have to strive to explain the pattern. There are strong, well-documented evolutionary reasons why human males tend to invest in offspring they believe to be their own but not in children that they know are not their own. The results of that evolutionary pressure is to produce human males who value their biological offspring. Theres nothing subtle about it. I bet that just about every male in this room who has children was as startled as I was upon seeing our firstborn and realizing that we would unhesitatingly die to save the life of this wrinkled, red, and screaming little creature. Men who feel like that upon seeing their newborn children are more likely to have descendants than men who shake babies violently to try to get them to shut up. So even right now, evolutionary psychology has a powerful and coherent explanation for lower child abuse in intact families. Eventually it is also going to possess knowledge of the detailed genetic foundation for that explanation. At that point, the elite received wisdom about the family will develop cracks. Now think of the dozen other ways in which we already know that children in intact families tend to do better than children of single-parent families, and imagine how the cracks will spread as one after another of those advantages of intact families are understood as products of evolution, and can be documented at a genetic level. I am sometimes told that such scientific knowledge will not have any effectsocial scientists will ignore it. That has not been true of any other of the great advances in scientific knowledge. Within decades after Copernicus, there were no more theologians who believed in a geocentric universe.

Sooner or later, truth trumps ideology. In his 1998 book Consilience, E.O. Wilson predicted that the 21st century would see the social sciences transformed by the findings of biology. 6 Everything we have seen since the book was published increases my conviction that Wilson was right. I have given just one example of the rediscovery of human nature. I am sure that other lectures here will give other examples involving the functioning of societys major institutions besides the family. But let me turn now to the much more fraught issue, the rediscovery of human diversity along the two main divisions of humanity, sex and race. Human Diversity by Sex. Evolutionary psychology is often accused of telling just so storiesevolutionary psychologists observe an attribute of humans today and concoct a plausible scenario that explains how this attribute came about, which leaves us with a reasonable suspicion that the observed attribute is overdetermined, and that other equally plausible scenarios could be concocted. Why, for example, did human beings evolve with an apparently hard-wired attraction to art? I have read some ingenious explanations, and they might even be correct, but they do not have the ring of inevitability. 7 When it comes to the major sex differences, I think that evolutionary psychology is on much stronger ground. For example, paleontologists have established that the males of Homo sapiens have always been substantially larger and physically stronger than the females. A second factor is that the females of Homo sapiens have always been tied to newborns by breastfeeding not just for a few months (as among other mammals) but for a few years. A third factor is that human children take an extraordinarily long time to mature. Just these three things about the earliest humans make some important outcomes seem inevitable. I realize that nature has exceptionslions, for examplebut when thinking about the requirements of raising humans that pass on their genes, humans, it seems foreordained that the males would become the hunters and women would become the primary nurturers of children. These most basic first-order outcomes are enough to lead us to expect major sex differences in personality. Consider some of the other implications of the greater size and strength of the male. The Pleistocene was a world with predators, both animal and

human. The stronger, larger males were the natural candidates to fight these predators. Ceteris paribus, men who were good not just at hunting but at physical combat had a survival advantage over those who werent good at it. Being good at physical combat brings a variety of traits with it, including aggressiveness and a willingness to take risks. Nothing in womens lives rewarded those same qualities with anything approaching the same increments in reproductive fitness. Instead, women were rewarded with greater fitness for such things as being able to attract and choose men who were likely to provide food, shelter, and protection for her and her children; and for being such good nurturers of children that they were likely to survive. After these kinds of outcomes, some other differences have more complex causal chains, but they continue to be extremely plausible ones. For example, consider the implications of different sex roles during the Pleistocene for the evolution of cognitive repertoires in men and women. Pleistocene hunters were more likely to be successful if they had good visuospatial skills for two obvious reasons. First, hunting trips among many tribes could mean traveling long distances over many days. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensionsthe trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammalalso had a survival advantage. 8 Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locationsdifferences that show up on tests of these abilities today. 9 You may also recognize them from everyday life. At least in the Murray family, it is always the male who cant find the car keys and always the female who knows where they are. The logic for these explanations of differences in male and female cognitive repertoires are more complex and therefore more vulnerable to charges of being a just-so story than the reasons the males became hunters and females became child nurturers. But evolutionary psychology is increasingly able to link up with supporting evidence from other disciplines. 8

For example, neuroscientists have known for decades that men have larger brains than women even after adjusting for body size. Yet most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean IQ. One hypothesis for explaining this paradox is that three-dimensional processing absorbs the extra male capacity. In the last few years, magnetic-resonance imaging has refined the evidence for this hypothesis, revealing that parts of the brains parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women. The observed phenomenon that men have on average higher visuospatial skills than women has both an evolutionary rationale and a physiological basis. This is just one example among dozens. For those who want to pursue the topic, the best source is David Gearys Male Female mentioned earlier. The short statement is that we have ample reasons for thinking that important differences in contemporary behavior and personalities of men and women have evolutionary origins, are in our genes, and are going to persist no matter how relentlessly we try to raise our children in gender-neutral ways. Since were only thirty-odd years from the 1970s, this conclusion may seem premature. But consider the fascinating findings of a study of 2,000 men and women who were born in the first half of the 1960s who were identified at age thirteen as extraordinarily talented in math, and were followed up 20 years later. 10 The women in the sample did not grow up unaware of their talent. On the contrary, that they participated in the gifted and talented program at age 13 means they were well aware of their ability from a young age, and probably had parents who actively encouraged and celebrated their math ability. These 13-year-old girls then grew to womanhood in the 1970s and early 1980s, the apogee of radical feminism on college campuses, where they were actively socialized to resist gender stereotypes. In many ways, these talented women did resist those stereotypes. By their early thirties, both the men and women in the study had become exceptional achievers, receiving advanced degrees in roughly equal proportions. Only about 15 percent of the women were full-time housewives. Among the women, those who did and those who did not have children were equally satisfied with their careers.

And yet the women with careers were four-and-a-half times more likely than men to say they preferred to work fewer than 40 hours per week. The men placed greater importance on being successful in my line of work and inventing or creating something that will have an impact, while the women found greater value in having strong friendships, living close to parents and relatives, and having a meaningful spiritual life. As the authors concluded, these men and women appear to have constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took somewhat different forms. 11 The different forms are consistent with the constellation of differences between men and women that go back to our earliest ancestors. Human Diversity Across Races. Until the 1960s, it seemed natural to both biologists and to the lay public that evolution would have produced differences among populations that had lived for thousands of years in different environments. Climate is the most obvious source of selection pressure. In climates with long, cold winters, humans will not survive unless they can figure out how to remain warm and securely sheltered and provide for food during the months when the trees are bare of fruit and the plains are bare of plant life. The physiological, cognitive and personality adaptations fostered by such an environment are obviously different from those fostered by the demands of surviving in a blistering hot climate where food is readily available year round but parasitic and viral diseases abound. No one is surprised that humans in cold climates evolved physiologically so that they could store body fat more lavishly than humans in hot climates. Why should we be surprised if their cognitive and personality characteristics evolved in response to the special survival challenges that they faced? Over the course of the 1960s, that intuitively plausible view about the reality of racial differences in cognitive and personality profiles came under attack. The new elite received wisdom was promulgated most influentially by geneticist Richard Lewontin and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. In 1972, Lewontin was one of the early and most influential voices in proclaiming that race is a social construct, arguing that the genetic differences across races were so trivial that no scientist working exclusively with genetic data would sort people into groups such as blacks, whites, and Asians. He observed that 85.4 percent of human genetic diversity is explained by differences within human populations and an additional 8.3 percent is explained by the differences between 10

populations within a race, leaving only 6.3 percent accounted for by racial classification. He concluded that racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance. 12 Gould argued that important racial differences were impossible because evolution had not had time to create themmodern paleontology had established that the separation of humans into Carleton Coons taxonomy of caucasoid, mongoloid, australoid, congoids, and capoids had not occurred during the time of Homo erectus, but quite recently, at most tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and hence must be accompanied by small genetic separations. Equality [of the races] is not given a priori, he wrote in his column for Natural History magazine, it just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas) of enormous magnitude. They just didnt happen. 13 Both of these confidently stated positions, still taken as gospel by just about everybody in the mainstream media except Nicholas Wade, have turned out to be wrong. Within the academic community, Lewontins conclusion that 6.3 percent of the total variation must necessarily be trivial has since been labeled Lewontins Fallacy, the title of an influential article published in 2003. 14 But the definitive refutation of Lewontins assertion that genetic information does not naturally sort people into racial groups came about through the development of techniques using cluster analysis of genetic markers. To describe genetic markers, I must introduce one piece of jargon: SNP, pronounced snip and standing for single-nucleotide polymorphism. About 99.9 percent of the three billion base pairs in human beings are identical across all human beings. But the other 3,000,000SNPsarent. SNPs are what keep us from being identical. If a SNP can take on two forms, it is said to have two alleles; three forms, three alleles, and so on. Genetic markers are sometimes single SNPs and sometimes combinations of SNPs. The function of the DNA sequence that makes up a given genetic marker is seldom known. A genetic marker simply marks the genetic location of a bit of DNA that varies among people. Genetic distance analysis and genetic cluster analysis can combine

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information on dozens, hundreds, or thousands of genetic markers and look for interrelationships among the genetic markers that identify statistically distinct entities. If Lewontin had been correct, then cluster analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels. The test of Lewontins assertion became feasible in the early 2000s, and the opposite happened. In one of the first largescale studies, published in 2005, 99.9 percent of the 3,636 subjects fell into a cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group. 15 When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9 percent of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary. Since then, analysis of the genetic distinctiveness of groups has gone far beyond the basic groupings of whites, blacks, and Asians. It turns out that dozens of distinguishable groups are identifiable within native-born populations of Europe alone. We still dont know what these genetic differences mean, whether they are trivial or important, but we know that they are so numerous that any large set of genetic markers chosen at random will reveal them. Goulds belief that races havent had time to evolve important differences since they spread out of Africa about 50,000 years ago also turned out to be wrong. Modern genetics is able to study genes under selective pressure at a high level of detail. One of the capabilities allows geneticists to determine the age of genetic adaptations. We now know that many important adaptations are quite recentfor example, lactose tolerance emerged among the cattle-herding peoples of northern Europe only about 5,000 years ago. 16 Resistance to malaria is also recent. One provocative analysis argues that the elevated IQ of Ashkenazi Jews occurred over just a few centuries from 800 to 1600. 17 Evolution did not just continue after Gould thought that important changes had ceased, it probably accelerated. Evidence is mounting that the advent of agriculture in Asia Minor sometime around 8000 BCE triggered a new burst of human evolution. 18 The 50,000 years that have elapsed since humanity spread out of Africaand 50,000 is at the low end of the latest estimatesprovide lots of time for all sorts of important differences to have evolved not only between races but between ethnic groups within races.

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Another finding of the analyses of genes under selective pressure is that they are local. Genes that are under selective pressure in one geographic area are typically specific to that area. This too has implications for race differences. In one study at the University of Chicago, the researchers searched for genes under natural selection in Africans, East Asians, and European. They succeeded in finding about 200 such genes for each group. But there was almost no overlap. Each group was responding to a different set of selection pressures. 19 A third recent finding, still controversial but steadily gaining new evidence, is that the members of Homo sapiens who left Africa interbred with Neanderthals. The current estimate is that the DNA of todays Europeans and Asians is 2.5 percent Neanderthal, whereas Sub Saharan Africans do not carry any Neanderthal genes. 20 We dont know whether the interbreeding produced hybrid vigor or added important new capabilities to Homo sapiens, but it certainly points to another potential source of race differences. Just to make things still more complicated, paleontologists now have discovered another line of humans, dubbed the Denisovans, whose DNA can apparently be found in the DNA of living New Guineans, Australian Aborigines, and a few other Pacific ethnic groups. 21 Pulling these strands together, it may be said that the intuitively plausible view that prevailed from Darwin himself through the beginning of the 1960sthat people living for thousands of years in different environments will evolved differentlyhas not only been resuscitated but has been strengthened by recent developments. We are still at the bottom of the learning curve about what these differences are. Some genetic differences apart from skin color and physiognomy have been known for a long time because they manifest themselves in diseases known to be genetic, even though we dont know what the specific genes arethe higher incidence of sickle cell anemia among blacks and Tay-Sachs syndrome among Ashkenazi Jews, for example. But in the last few years, for the first time, we are beginning to get direct links: specific SNPs or clusters of SNPs that are associated with outcomes involving personality and cognitive diversity across races. So far, we have only a handful, and even those are subject to all sorts of caveats, including the need for replication to make sure that the findings are valid.

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Even assuming they are valid, each individual SNP explains only a tiny part of the variance, much less than one percent. It is now clear that even comparatively simple hereditary characteristics such as height will eventually be explained by adding up small effects of dozens or hundreds of bits of DNA. The explanation of any complex cognitive or personality trait is likely to require hundreds or thousands. The revolution in understanding will unfold slowly, but on an accelerating curvean assertion I make because everything else about our understanding of the genome seems to have been following an accelerating curve. In preparing this lecture, I found studies that have reasonably persuasive evidence of association of eight individual SNPs or clusters of base pairs with important personality and cognitive outcomes. 22 I did not conduct a comprehensive literature search of a literature that is not my specialty, so my list of eight is probably incomplete. Whatever the exact number may be, it is still very small. In 2014, we will get perhaps a few dozen new ones, and researchers will make progress in figuring out how they interact with each other and with the environment. By the latter part of the decade, I expect we will be getting at least hundreds of new associations per year, perhaps lots more, and major progress will have been made in understanding their links and interactions. But most geneticists expect that we will have to wait until at least the 2020s and perhaps considerably longer until we have anything resembling a full story. What do we know about the eight that I found? One is a cluster of 30 base pairs in the widely publicized warrior genethe MAOA gene that encodes the enzyme monoamine oxidase Athat has versions tentatively associated with aggression and antisocial behaviors, 23 another is a SNP associated with IQ in studies of both adults and children, 24 three others are SNPs associated with educational attainment, 25 two others are SNPs associated with a measure of openness to experience, and one is a SNP associated with a measure of conscientiousness. 26 Of the eight, all but one, show substantially different distributions among races and ethnicities. I am not going describe those differences in detail, except to say that the differences relating to the MAOA gene and the SNPs for IQ and educational attainment conform to observed differences in the phenotype. In the case of the openness to experience and conscientiousness SNPs that show race differences, I am not aware of strong a priori expectations based on observations of the phenotype. 27 14

My point is not that the differences found so far are substantively important in themselves. They are not. Rather, imagine a jar with 100,000 marbles in it, divided in an unknown proportion between purple ones and blue ones. Blindfolded, someone reaches into the jar and pulls out eight marbles. Seven of them are purple. A prudent person will expect to find a lot more purple marbles among the remaining 99,992. We dont know whether the number of SNPs that affect personality and cognitive characteristics is 100,000 or 10,000 or 500,000. But whatever the number is, the fact that seven out of the first eight that have been identified also have substantial differences in their racial distributions does not bode well for the Equality Premise. Scenarios for the Future What about the future? If we are talking about the views of the general population, I am an optimist. Regarding sex differences, I think America has made remarkable progress since the 1960s in increasing equality of opportunity for women, and more recently we have been making progress in accepting and enjoying the ways in which men and women are different. I would argue that there have been bad side effects, but on balance, young women today seem to be much more relaxed about the tradeoffs associated with career and children than their Boomer mothers werethey dont feel compelled to try to have it alland men are a lot more likely than their grandfathers to think brains in women are sexy and to help with the dishes. Regarding race differences, my experience with my own children and their friends in a rural blue-collar part of Maryland is the same as my experience with college students in elite universities, with the twenty- and thirty-somethings working at AEI, and with my day-to-day experience of life in America: Generation X and the Millennials are unconcerned about race and ethnicity in ways that the Baby Boomers couldnt possibly be. To what extent is my experience generalizable? I find the current academic studies on sexism and racism, which are increasingly focused on two extremely dicey constructs known as ambivalent sexism and implicit bias, to be so politicized that they are uninterpretable. I choose to rely on my anecdotal observations and to be optimistic. But Im talking about the general population. What about the public policy elites and their academic allies? I just dont know. The ferocity of the keepers of the elite

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received wisdom continues to startle me. Just seven weeks ago, a young researcher at a conservative American think tank was forced to resign because it was discovered that his Ph.D dissertation at Harvards Kennedy School said that the mean IQ score of Latino Americans is significantly lower than that of non-Latino white Americans. He was empirically correct. But saying so provoked an outcry that was sufficient to make him lose his job. That continued ferocity in the defense of the Equality Premise against even the most well documented empirical statements would ordinarily lead me to expect the worst. But the work I have done in the preparation of this lecture has led me to hope for a more benign way in which the Equality Premise may slowly just fade away. In the past I have always foreseen a process based on pitched battles, with scholars writing articles that showed genetic sex or race differences and the defenders of the Equality Premise denouncing them. But now I dont think thats what will happen. Recall those six examples of individual SNPs that show substantial race differences. None of the three articles in which those results were presented even mentioned race. How do I know that there were race differences? Because any study that reports a link between genetic locations and personality or cognitive characteristics gives the identification code for the relevant SNPs. Its essential that the authors do so, to allow other researchers to replicate and build on their findings. Given the identification code, it takes a matter of seconds for anyone with a computer and Internet access to go to the website for the International HapMap project, enter that identification code into a search box, and bring up a table showing the percentage of different racial and ethnic populations that carry the different configurations of that SNP. 28 So we are not necessarily going to have pitched battles. Researchers do not need to risk professional suicide by writing about sex and race differences. Rather, we have thousands of geneticists who are trying to decode the genome, to understand what causes what. They will make progress. And as the number of individual SNPs known to be involved in personality and cognitive characteristics rises from a handful into the dozens and then the hundreds and then the thousands, our knowledge about sex and race differences will increase in an unobtrusive way. With luck, it will start be taken as a

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matter of course that a lot of the SNPs show sex and race differences. Nobody will have to set out to prove it. It will just be so obvious, so routine, that we will reach a tacit truce. Genetic researchers will not focus on sex and race differences, trying to prove precisely what percentage of a difference in the phenotype is owed to genes, and the defenders of the Equality Premise will be muted when the topic occasionally does come up in public discourse, because by that time they will be aware that they dont have a leg to stand on. Talk about optimistic. At this point, Im channeling Pollyanna. But theres an underlying reality behind the optimism. In a rational world, sex and race differences in personality and cognitive profiles truly would not be a big deal. Is there a genetic reason that no woman has ever won the Fields Medal in mathematics? Probably yes, but that still means that 99.999999 percent of males also cant win the Field Medal. I estimated the number of decimal places, but you get the point: Who cares, as long as women with talent in mathematics get full opportunity to realize their talent? Who cares that there are probably genetic reasons that Ashkenazi Jews constitute a disproportionate number of chess grandmasters? Magnus Carlsen, pure Nordic, nonetheless has the highest chess rating of any player in the world and is about to compete for the world championship against the reigning champion, Viswanathan Anand, pure Indian. Sex and race differences are differences in means, leaving huge overlap in the distributions, whether those distributions consist of measures of intelligence, marathon times, or conscientiousness. Thats not Pollyanna-ish. Thats reality. Genetic sex and race differences become a big deal only when policy tries to pretend they dont exist. And therein lies the policy implication. Stop basing policy on the Equality Premise. Start basing policy on other kinds of equality. Among those who have been willing to think about the future, there is near unanimity on what those other kinds of equality are. Here is one of the great geneticists of the last half of the 20th century, James F. Crow, associating himself with the views of a great evolutionist of the same era: To achieve political and social equality it is not necessary to maintain a fiction that important human differences do not exist. The great evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky said it well: People need not be identical twins to be equal before God, before the law, and in their rights to equality of opportunity. 29 Here is the eminent neuroscientist Steven Pinker writing in The Blank Slate:

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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. 30 Here is geneticist Bruce Lahn, whose work on the evolutionary expansion of brain size aroused such opposition that he gave it up, but still, writing with economist Lanny Ebenstein, managed to get this statement into the preeminent natural science journal, Nature: Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankinds common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. 31 It is all so extremely obvious, and it so perfectly fits with the ideals of the United States. The people of the United States have a profound obligation to treat all of their fellow citizens as their equals in human worth and human dignity. The government at all levels, from local to federal, has a profound obligation to treat everyone as individuals who are equal before the law. It is my belief that the overwhelming majority of Americans are readier to live in harmony and moral equality will all their fellow citizens than at any previous point in our history. Perhaps when the politicians finally realize that, they will manage to do their duty as well.

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References Beaver, K. M., Wright, J. P., Boutwell, B. B., Barnes, J. C., DeLisi, M., & Vaughn, M. G. (2012). Exploring the association between the 2-repeat allele of the MAOA gene promoter polymorphism and psychopathic personality traits, arrests, incarceration, and lifetime antisocial behavior. Personality & Individual Differences, 54(2), 164168. Benbow, C. P., Lubinski, D., Shea, D. L., & Eftekhari-Sanjani, H. (2000). Sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability at age 13: Their status 20 years later. Psychological Science, 11(6), 474-480. Benyamin, B., Pourcin, B., Davis, O. S., & al., e. (2013). Childhood intelligence is heritable, highly polygenic and associated with FNBP1L. Molecular Psychiatry(29 Jan). Berlin, I. (1937). Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1978 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, T. A. (2010). Stranger from Siberia. Nature, 464, 838839. Callaway, E. (2009). First draft of Neanderthal genome is unveiled. New Scientist(12 Feb). Cochran, G., Hardy, J., & Harpending, H. (2005). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science, 38(5), 659693. Cochran, G., & Harpending, H. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books. Crow, J. F. (2002). Unequal by nature: A geneticist's perspective on human differences. Daedalus(Winter), 8188. Davies, G., Tenesa, A., Yang, P. A., & al., e. (2011). Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic. Molecular Psychiatry, 16(10), 9961005. de Moor, M. H. M., Costa, P. T., Terracciano, A., & al., e. (2012). Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for personality. Molecular Psychiatry, 17, 337 349. Dutton, D. (2009). The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, A. W. F. (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. BioEssays, 25, 798801. Geary, D. C. (2010). Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (2nd ed.). Washington: American Psychological Association. Gould, S. J. (1984, November). Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Natural History, 26-33. Lahn, B. T., & Ebenstein, L. (2009). Let's celebrate human genetic diversity. Nature, 461(8 October), 726728. Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381398. Murray, C. (2005, September). The inequality taboo. Commentary, 120, 1322. Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Penguin. 19

Rietveld, C. A., Medland, S. E., Derringer, J., & al., e. (2013). GWAS of 126,559 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment. Sciencexpress(20 May), 6. Sedlak, A. J., Mettenburg, J., Baesena, M., Petta, I., McPherson, K., Greene, A., & Li, S. (2010). Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect. Washington, DC: Administration for Children and Families. Voight, B. F., Kudaravalli, S., Wen, X., & Pritchard, J. K. (2006). A map of recent positive selection in the human genome. PLos Biology, 4(3), e72. Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wilson, J. Q. (1983). Thinking About Crime, rev. ed. New York: Basic Books.

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Notes
(Berlin, 1937) Portions of this lecture are adapted from (Murray, 2005). 3 (J. Q. Wilson, 1983) 4 (Geary, 2010) 5 (Sedlak et al., 2010): Figure 5.2 6 (E. O. Wilson, 1998) 7 (Dutton, 2009) 8 For a review of studies about sex differences in throwing ability, see Geary (1998): 21314, 28485. For a presentation of the evolutionary explanation, see Jones, Braithwaite, and Healy (2003) and Kimura (1999): 1130. It has also been argued that spatial skills were an advantage in tool-making. See Wynn, Tierson, and Palmer (1996). 9 Geary (1998): 28690; Kimura (1999): 4366. 10 Benbow, Lubinski, Shea et al. (2000). 11 (Benbow, Lubinski, Shea, & Eftekhari-Sanjani, 2000): 479. 12 (Lewontin, 1972) 13 (Gould, 1984) 14 (Edwards, 2003) 15 Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. (2005). The self-identified ethnic groups consisted of nonHispanic black, non-Hispanic white, East Asian, and Hispanic. 16 (Cochran & Harpending, 2009) 17 (Cochran, Hardy, & Harpending, 2005) 18 10000 year revolution 19 (Voight, Kudaravalli, Wen, & Pritchard, 2006) 20 (Callaway, 2009) 21 (Brown, 2010) 22 In this discussion, I include only SNPs from GWAS surveys that survived tests for validity. 23 (Beaver et al., 2012) 24 (Davies, Tenesa, Yang, & al., 2011), (Benyamin, Pourcin, Davis, & al., 2013) 25 (Rietveld, Medland, Derringer, & al., 2013), 26 (de Moor, Costa, Terracciano, & al., 2012). 27 If youre curious: on the openness to experience SNP that did show substantial differences across races, Africans were different from everyone else; on the SNP for conscientiousness, Asians and Mexicans were different from everyone else. 28 In the current version of the Hapmap Genome Browser, such percentages are available for samples of Han Chinese in Beijing, Chinese in metropolitan Denver, Japanese in Tokyo, Luhya in Kenya, Maasai in Kenya, Yoruban in Nigeria, people of African ancestry in the Southwest of the United States, people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles, Gujarati Indians in Houston, Tuscans in Italy, and people with Northern and Western European ancestry in Utah. Sample sizes and the diversity of groups will both expand rapidly. 29 (Crow, 2002): 87. 30 (Pinker, 2002): 340. 31 (Lahn & Ebenstein, 2009): 726.
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