One thing in the millennium's favour was that it provided the perfect opportunity to discharge the irrationalist head of steam which had been building up in the west over the last 25 years. Can we now, perhaps, look forward to a new era of reason? We certainly seem to be entering a period where reason in its most productive form, science, will enjoy an intellectual ascendancy, thanks to its own spectacular dynamism and to the lack of conviction for other ways of changing the world. But reason and good sense are not the same thing.
Charles Murray's essay, published in Prospect last month under the title "Genetics of the Right," illustrates what may be in store. By the end of this century, Murray predicts, we will pretty much know it all. As he puts it, "we will be approaching biological truth" about "many aspects of human nature and their social implications." Referring to EO Wilson's book Consilience, he anticipates the dawn of joined-up knowledge in which neuroscientists understand the brain, molecular biologists understand "which genes do what," and a new, scientifically rigorous analysis of human behaviour will explain the shape of culture and society.
In Consilience, Wilson himself foresees that the social sciences will split: one part fusing with the humanities; and the other "folding into biology." In other words, the useful part will be absorbed by natural science; the rest will be mere literary criticism. The philosophers have interpreted the world-the scientists, however, will explain it.
To support his 100-year timescale, Murray points to the pace at which scientific knowledge is being gathered. It is true that knowledge is being generated in large quantities: tools now exist for examining the genome, or imaging the brain, whose potential is only beginning to be tapped. But scientific progress can be very uneven. If fusion power research had gone as well as gene sequencing technologies, we would now have electricity too cheap to meter. The 1990s, designated by the US Congress as the Decade of the Brain, did not produce a neuroscientific counterpart of cloning. And the thousands of neuroscience research papers have to be set against the billions of neurons in the brain.
Data for the human genome have proved easy to gather. For Murray's confidence to be well-placed, however, there will have to be steady progress on the difficult part: turning data into knowledge. So far, progress has been faltering. Murray acknowledges the history of "false pronouncements which will be revised a year later, as new data come to light." He also acknowledges that the neural and hormonal processes which affect behaviour are "unimaginably complicated." But you are left with the feeling that for Murray, as for many scientists engaged in the study of behaviour genetics-personality and differences between individuals-the basic truth is simple. Human personality can be resolved into a few dimensions (some researchers speak of the "big five") such as extraversion or conscientiousness. Psychological traits generally show significant degrees of heritability. Intelligence, in particular, is considered to be highly heritable, with estimates ranging up to 80 per cent. (At the other end of the heritability range, a Swedish study of sociability in twins raised apart found a correlation level of only 0.2, on a scale from 0 to 1.)
This picture has been drawn without direct access to the genes. But it has convinced a significant layer of scientific opinion that when (not if) the genes are revealed, the findings will confirm what they already believe: that whatever the psychologists are measuring, it is substantially heritable. But the question is not whether psychological qualities are affected by how each individual deck of genes has been shuffled-clearly they are. Rather it is whether the human constructs-such as conscientiousness-that are imposed on the data tell us more about the structure of the mind or the social and moral values that the scientists bring to their theories. (Consider the recent modishness of a construct like self-esteem.)
It is quite plausible that natural selection has produced mechanisms underpinning a quality we call conscientiousness. The propensity to persist with an activity, and to review it to make sure that all its elements have been completed, would seem to be an evolutionarily adaptive one (successful from the point of view of maximising descendants). It might have to be balanced, however, by mechanisms deterring an individual from persisting in hopeless tasks, or allocating excessive effort to fulfilling them. Randolph M Nesse, an evolutionarily-minded psychiatrist, has speculated that there may be a connection between such mechanisms and the phenomenon of depression.
The trouble with behaviour genetics, on the other hand, is not that it is too concerned with evolution. It is that it does not take evolution seriously enough. If, like most behaviour geneticists, you start from social science data showing that African-Americans have an average IQ score substantially lower than that of whites, and you discount environmental differences, you are likely to arrive at a racial explanation for IQ differences in a divided society. If, on the other hand, like most scientists interested in human evolution, you consider that the driving force behind intelligence was the selective pressure of life in groups of intelligent hominids, you will assume that these pressures were similar in all groups. You will therefore find it hard to see how differences in intelligence could have arisen between populations.
Evolutionary psychologists have been criticised for claiming that "our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind." The mind, they argue, is a system of adaptations to ancient circumstances, which are significantly different from modern ones. Just how different they are can be debated; but at least the evolutionary psychologists have reminded us that to understand human nature, we must start at the beginning. If, however, we start from where we are now, tangled up in racial politics, in ideology, in the western obsession with individuals and their psyches, and in the stout exertions of a Christian morality trying to reassert itself, we are likely to remain stuck.
Those of a liberal disposition can also thank evolutionary psychology for promoting two other important ideas about our innate nature. First, the universal elements in human nature are extensive. Evolutionary psychologists generally define their project as the study of these universal traits, and have thereby counterbalanced the behaviour geneticists' emphasis on differences. Second, the mind's flexibility arises from the possession of large numbers of specialised systems-a mosaic of instincts which allows an appropriate mental tool to be selected for a particular situation. This model supports the view that people behave differently in different circumstances. Murray notes a selection of traits associated with social problems: "low IQ, impulsiveness, short time-horizons, sociopathy, indolence." Nobody who has ever observed cats, large or small, can be in any doubt that there is a gene for indolence. But from an evolutionary psychologist's perspective, these human traits might be seen as "conditional strategies," which could be adaptive under certain circumstances. Inactivity may be an appropriate response if none of the immediately possible activities are worth doing.
Behaviour geneticists, with their emphasis on heredity, think statistically. They do not believe that the combination of qualities Murray mentions will invariably result in crime or other social problems. On the other hand, they are not concerned with how impulsiveness or indolence might have played in the Stone Age. Drawing data from contemporary social science and psychology, they are preoccupied with how their clusters of putative inherited traits are expressed in industrialised societies. They trade on the widespread assumption that the environment is basically constant: however prosperous a society becomes, there will always be people who live in varying degrees of wretchedness, violence and poverty. For much of the 20th century, this was seen as a problem to be solved by social engineering. Today, the preferred option is to provide opportunities for those who wish to escape by bettering themselves. We are back to the Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
murray confidently predicts that the new sciences of behaviour will reveal human nature to be conservative in its political shape. At the same time, he admits that no Republican presidential candidate would declare in public that one of the reasons for poverty in the US is that "a lot of poor people are born lazy." This may reflect, as he suggests, the continuing power of the idea that all people are born equal. But conservatives have not generally been confounded by the idea that some people are born with flaws of temperament. On the contrary, they have taken it for granted. In the past, however, they favoured vigorous environmental interventions to sort the slackers out: military service was one possibility; muscular Christianity another. These were solutions for mass societies, depending on the acceptance of state coercion in one case and of a dominant religion in the other. They also require a sense of the collective that is problematic in American traditions, and is declining in Britain too.
Nevertheless, Murray feels that it is "obvious" that the new science of behaviour will provide a cause for the left. Casting a selective eye over the British eugenics movement of the earlier 20th century, he recalls its popularity among socialist intellectuals. But for these thinkers, socialism and eugenics were both forms of progress, based on reason and science. And no Briton was more passionate about eugenics than Ronald Fisher, a geneticist and statistician who helped lay the foundations of modern evolutionary theory; yet his belief coexisted with a conservative political outlook and a conventional religious faith.
Behaviour genetics might appeal to a new left, argues Murray, by offering to replace a generalised target, "the lower classes," with a precisely specified subset, "people with the following genetic profiles." It is not obvious how this left might spring up. Deprived of its economic leg by the triumph of the market, the left will lose its social leg (according to Murray) to the sciences of brains and genes. It is hard to see what the new left will stand on. But of course the right is looking forward to its advent, in the same way that it can't wait for China to replace the Soviet Union as a serious enemy.
Murray suggests that the left will warm to a eugenics which requires the lower classes not "to stop having children, only to start having better children." But better children sound like more expensive children. Their parents will still need state assistance to rear them. And the eugenic interventions themselves will not come cheap, festooned as they will be with royalties and patent rights established by the kind of scientific entrepreneurs who are even now laying claim to swathes of the human genome. They will also be expensively inefficient, because they will in most cases only promise a possibility of improvement. (Affirmations of the power of the environment will live on in the manufacturers' liability disclaimers.) On the other hand, the public authorities should enjoy savings in the criminal justice area. Either the new improved offspring will not be inclined to crime, or they will be clever enough to avoid getting caught.
Maybe the left will have been reborn, as a result of unforeseen circumstances, by the time science reaches the degree of understanding Murray anticipates. But consistency requires that, if scientific progress is predicted from extrapolation, the society in which the science will be applied should likewise be imagined by projecting today's dominant themes into the future. Murray's hypothetical left would be taking up a notion of eugenics favoured in the 1930s which belonged to an era of the big state, of progress through planning. We are in the era of the outsourcing state, of consumer choice, and of progress through competition. These are the new forces which will shape eugenics.
Just as the invisible hand of a myriad individual decisions is believed to produce the most efficient economy, the invisible hand of decisions made by individuals and families is felt to be a better means of shaping society than command from above. Murray is optimistic about the individual decisions that will be made over gene manipulation. He thinks that parents will not want to interfere much with their children's genes, because after all those are their genes too.
This is possibly the most dubious of his claims. Some parents will certainly opt for their children to remain "naturals"-in the term coined by the biologist Lee M Silver, author of Remaking Eden: Cloning And Beyond In A Brave New World. In some cultures, perhaps ones in which grandparents and other family members make decisions about marriage partners, parents may have the choice made for them. Others, as Silver emphasises, will not have the choice because they don't have the money.
It is true that parents want their children to be like them. But there is no reason to suppose that they will be any less anxious to improve their children than they are anxious to improve themselves. Murray suggests that parents will opt for manipulations which prevent congenital defects. He adds that they will also seek those which promote physical and mental abilities, as if these were merely touching up the paintwork on the genome. But if it ever comes about, genetic enhancement will enable much more than taking the edge off nature. It will become the core technology of personal competition, and the most valuable of inheritances.
The people of the late 21st and the 22nd centuries will be different from us in many respects, but you don't have to be a paid-up evolutionary psychologist to agree that they will feel the same as we do about many aspects of their lives. Above all, they will want the best sexual partners they can find, especially for relationships which lead to children. Many of the qualities they find attractive in potential sexual partners will be those that they hope to encounter in friends and colleagues. They will like good-looking, happy, pleasant people. They may admire assertive, dominant or aggressive people, within limits set by their culture and by the need for go-getters to be team players. As for intelligence, it will command its own premium in a knowledge economy.
Even today, personal qualities are not optional extras. Developments in economic and social life are increasing the importance of appearance and personality. Where employees interact with the public, competition between consumer products favours individuals who find it easy to look pleasant and behave agreeably. Within organisations, the flattening of hierarchies both increases competitive pressure, since Buggins no longer gets his turn, and heightens the importance of demeanour, since interactions are less formal. And a world based on information will be a world ever more full of images. By the nature of the market, these will be dominated by images relating to physical attractiveness: athletic perfection, sexual allure, wholesome vigour, or pleasant smiles.
Already, for many professionals, qualifications are not sufficient for success. They need looks and personality to thrive in the social networks which underpin their status. A telegenic appearance is now deemed vital to the achievement of political power through elected office; so much so that it has been suggested that bald men, like Churchill or Attlee, could not become prime minister today. In Brazil, plastic surgery is as essential an investment for politicians as it is for starlets.
Brazil's enhanced politicians may start to set an example for their counterparts elsewhere. Other competitive enhancements already have a global reach. Cosmetic surgery for women has become a key tool for advancement in the US entertainment industry. The result is that surgically enhanced looks set the standard for female appearance around the world. In the US, the numbers of cosmetic surgical procedures performed last year (on both sexes) were roughly eight times higher than in 1990. The industry will develop new markets overseas based on norms established by US entertainment products.
This will change our understanding of what surgery is for. Ironically, the idea of surgery to enhance, rather than to cure, resonates with the message of "alternative" medicine; that orthodox medicine is too negative in its emphasis on illness, and should treat the whole person. It also mirrors a tendency likely to develop in medicine, as new psychoactive drugs are marketed as mood or personality enhancers. There were early ventures in that direction during the Prozac and Valium eras, but they sat uneasily with an institutional framework which expected drugs to cure diseases. One way of getting round this might be to exploit the grey area between drugs and food supplements.
Another way would be to insist that cosmetics are not trivial. The stakes are high in a competitive economy with large income differentials, flexible labour and spartan social security. In a global economy, the global becomes personal. Enhancements which improve people's personal presentation are as important as their company's brand image. Brands are particularly important when products are similar-or indistinguishable, like petrol or cola drinks. Intangible qualities are likewise important when employees are trained and qualified to the same standard.
Life in the modern economy has generally come to resemble that of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, who had to keep running just to stay in the same place. This is true for the captain of industry and for the call centre telephonist. For the call centre employee, the penalties of failure are higher than the rewards of success. For the captain of industry, the rewards may be astronomical. At many levels in between, both the penalties and the rewards may be considerable. For many middle class people, the pay can be very good, but career failure can entail significant loss of status. One of the distinctive features of the new business architecture is that, whatever floor you are on, you can see through the boards to the inferno of the underclass below.
Such a fate-or the fear of it-can cause ill health: stress symptoms; emotional disorders; physical illnesses which threaten life. And then there is the properly personal, partner-seeking side of life. Here too the stakes are being raised by the various pressures to compete on appearance and personality. All in all, there is a reasonable case to be made that, in a market-based society which is highly competitive, personal enhancements may be critically important to personal well-being. Once the roles of medicine and surgery have been amended to incorporate personal enhancement, the cultural and institutional framework will be in place for any future genetic enhancement procedures. Smart drugs and plastic surgery will seem like crude interim fixes pending genetic engineering, the ultimate enhancement technology.
Genetic intervention is likely to begin as an unequivocally medical procedure, and work outwards. The first targets will be genes associated with rare hereditary diseases, because these are the simplest scientifically and ethically. Although exercises like these will initially be carried out on families with a history of inherited illness, they could in principle be applied to the entire population, because we all carry harmful genes buried in our genomes. Attempts may also be made to develop "genetic vaccines," transferring genes which confer natural resistance to pathogens such as HIV.
Next may be genes influencing mood, already the subject of extensive research. These have unarguable medical legitimacy, because the effects of serious mood disorders can be incapacitating or even fatal. No parent who has suffered severe depression would wish their child to do so. But the implications may be much wider. It may become possible not only to reduce the likelihood of severe emotional disorder, but to increase the chances that a child will meet life's challenges in a positive, happy frame of mind. What does a loving parent want, if not that their child should be happy?
Some aspects of appearance, such as height or fat distribution, might prove easier to manipulate than others, such as facial symmetry, which is thought to reflect a healthy constitution. The visible signs of a modified genotype may turn out to be a healthy glow, rather than any designed features. Greater efforts are likely to be made in the search for genes affecting intelligence. The reception of The Bell Curve, in which Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that the IQ gap between blacks and whites may be partly genetic in origin, shows that such projects will be controversial. It also shows that the controversy will probably not be so great as to stifle research. In its early stages, studies may concentrate on severe deficits, thus securing a base within mainstream medicine.
Sceptics will argue that, except in cases where a single gene causes a single disease, these ventures are doomed to fail because of the complexity of the relationship between genes and environment. Results cannot be guaranteed, and even the statistical likelihood of success may fluctuate wildly according to the path that the modified individual takes through life. Whether this uncertainty spells failure depends, however, on who is paying. It would probably be unacceptable for a publicly-funded health service. For individuals in a market economy, though, the uncertainty might add to the value of the investment. The proof of wealth is the ability to spend money profligately, whether on luxury goods or on charity. For this reason, prices of luxury items tend to increase exponentially as the scale is ascended. The most expensive eugenic interventions would be those with the most slender prospects of success.
By virtue of their cost and associated status, such procedures would create an image of an ultimate eugenic goal, raising aspirations across the social scale in the same way that Ferraris shape the aspirations of Mondeo Man. They would also act to maximise the gap between the genetic haves and have-nots. If market eugenics became a reality, the lower classes would be more visibly different from the wealthy than they are today: more unhealthy, less intelligent and even less likely to escape from their situation because they would be less able to compete with their modified betters.
And the results of eugenic choice among the upper classes might not be quite so attractive as they appeared at first. There would be more than an overtone of Stepford about them, with the lower registers of the mood scale muffled, and a somewhat creepy air of emotional uniformity. Dispensing with the usual polite qualifications about how bell curves overlap and how people should be treated as individuals, Murray predicts that "we will learn some things for certain, for example that women innately make better nurturers of small children than men do and that men innately make better soldiers." In our present world, some men care for children better than some women, and some women make better warriors than some men. In a eugenically manipulative society, the manipulators might regard androgyny as a deviation from a design ideal. Procedures offering to reduce the likelihood of homosexuality would prove popular. Even if parents of future generations are free from homophobic prejudice, they are still going to want grandchildren.
The idea that the truth about human nature is just over the horizon, along with the prospect of altering it, does tell us something about the present. The less we believe in the power of politics, the more we believe in the power of science. We seem to be approaching the point where altering the genes of the poor looks like a more realistic project than transforming the environments in which they live.
