Abstract
In August 2013, a few months after resigning from the conservative Heritage Foundation, Jason Richwine took to the pages of the Politico to defend himself against charges of racism. In his op-ed, entitled ‘Why can’t we talk about IQ?’, he framed himself as the latest victim of ‘media firestorms’ directed against scholars that ‘speak publicly about IQ differences’. Controversy erupted when the contents of his 2009 Harvard dissertation came to light in the middle of intense public and legislative debates about immigration reform. His dissertation had concluded that Latino immigrants have, on average, lower IQs than whites, and that this difference was to some extent genetically based and would likely persist for generations.
Richwine made no apologies, maintaining that his claims about group (i.e., racial) differences in ‘mental ability’ rest on a ‘scientific consensus, based on an extensive and consistent literature’. He painted the science as settled and blamed the media for, once again, making a controversy out of nothing. But contrary to his false portrayal, controversies about the relationship between race, intelligence and genetics are neither entirely settled nor external to science. Rather as we learn in Aaron Panofsky’s fascinating book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics, such controversies have deep intellectual histories and contemporary lives, particularly in the field of behaviour genetics, upon which Richwine bases his work.
In Misbehaving Science, Panofsky, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Institute for Society and Genetics, provides a rich intellectual history of the formation and development of behaviour genetics. The book not only provides a context for understanding events like ‘The Richwine Affair’, it also presents a theoretical framework for explaining how perpetual, often public, scientific controversies can become—in some cases—engines for, rather than obstacles to, knowledge production and the acquisition of scientific capital.
Drawing on archival material, scholarly production and interviews with scientists, Panofsky’s account begins with the origins of behaviour genetics. In the 1950s, a group of scientists concerned with the role of genetics in animal and human behaviour began to articulate and assemble a broad, transdisciplinary field. A growing, but short-lived, consensus emerged that sought to avoid past controversies and associations with eugenics and racial supremacy. This ‘golden era’, as Panofsky describes it, would come to a close in less than two decades. Beginning in the mid-1960s, following the work of William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Arthur Jensen, a Berkeley educational psychologist, and a small group of others, the young field would become ensnared in a bitter controversy about race and IQ. The controversy would dramatically transform the field as behaviour geneticists drew their wagons around these controversial scientists. Rather than the broad, encompassing field that the first generation envisioned, behaviour genetics became fragmented, assuming an ‘archipelagic’ form. Panofsky shows how the controversy and its structural effects shifted epistemic, conceptual and methodological proclivities, reconfigured the relationships between scientists in proximate fields, shaped styles of presentation and exchange and generated an insular, ‘hunker mentality’ antagonistic to ‘external’ critiques. During this period, the field would—in Panofsky’s assessment—become ‘monopolized by a small set of possible intellectually and practical positions’ (p. 100). For instance, behaviour geneticists that studied humans became dominant over those that studied animals and topically, research on racial IQ differences became ‘reasonable’ and the estimation of heritability became hegemonic in the field. In our current genomic or post-genomic era, behaviour geneticists continue to profit, intellectually and professionally, from controversy and the kind of notoriety capital it produces. Throughout, Panofsky stresses that it was field dynamics rather than political ideology that influenced how behaviour geneticists responded and participated in controversies over race. Even though this point, in my opinion, is somewhat overstated, the narrative complicates simplistic depictions of the field and its actors.
Panofsky uses the case of behaviour genetics to reflect and theorise upon the role of controversy in the production of knowledge. He pushes against work in science and technology studies that treats the controversy as necessarily a temporary moment. This assumption does not hold up with behaviour genetics and potentially other domains. For Panofsky, behaviour genetics is an example of a ‘misbehaving science’—a science in which ‘controversy is persistent and ungovernable’ (p. 9). He postulates that this condition is a consequence of a scientific field with unsettled epistemic boundaries and marked ‘confusion or irreconcilable conflict about definitions of good science, scientific recognition, field membership, or scientific responsibility’ (p. 10). Or, in other words, a field that suffers from anomie. For many fields, these problems are momentary, but for some they are ongoing and productive. Controversies can transform fields, both in how they are organised but also how they are imagined. In the case of behaviour genetics, they caused intellectual agendas to narrow and alternative paths to be abandoned.
The book is theoretically anchored on Bourdieu’s concept of fields (although several other Bourdieuisan concepts make appearances). Panofsky states that a field approach has several benefits. It transcends the internal/external distinction that mars much research, calls for the historicisation of field dynamics and gives analytic priority to relationships and struggles over scientific recognition. While these points are well taken, I am not fully convinced that Bourdieu is needed for these moves. More crucially, is the fact that the field in question is very unfield-like. To reconcile this, Panofsky insists that field theory is ‘an analytic theory for understanding the shifting boundaries and structures governing a social space and not as a substantive image of a particular kind of social space’ (p. 21). Yet, Bourdieu himself was somewhat inconsistent on this point. Accordingly, Panofsky is forced to stretch Bourdieu, a tactic that somewhat dulls the original contributions of the book. I wish that Panofsky had challenged the field concept more and seized the opportunity to theorise his notion of a scientific archipelago further. It implies a kind of decentred messiness that escapes Bourdieu’s project.
Nonetheless, Misbehaving Science is full of insights and invitations to reflect on the ethics and politics of science. Even scholars uninterested in behaviour genetics will find much value in its normative punch and theoretical conclusions.