The Flamingo’s Smile (30 page)

In arguing that Prime Minister Lee has based his fears for Singapore’s intellectual deterioration upon a false reading of some dubious Western data, I emphatically disclaim any right to pontificate about Singapore’s problems or their potential solutions. I am qualified to comment on Mr. Lee’s nation only by the first criterion of the old joke that experts on other countries have lived there for either less than a week or more than thirty years. Nonetheless, buttinsky that I am, I cannot resist two small intrusions. I question, first, whether a nation with such diverse cultural traditions among its Chinese, Malay, and Indian sectors can really expect to even out all environmental influences in just one generation of educational opportunity. Second, I wonder whether the world’s most densely populated nation (excluding such tiny city-states as Monaco) should really be encouraging a higher reproductive rate in any segment of its population. Despite my allegiance to cultural relativism, I still maintain a right to comment when other traditions directly borrow my own culture’s illogic.

The greatest barrier to understanding the real issue in this historical debate may best be expressed by exposing the false approach encouraged by that euphonious contrast of supposed opposites—
nature
and
nurture
. (How I wish that English did not contain such an irresistible pair—for language channels thought, often in unfortunate directions. In previous centuries, the felicity of phrase underscoring a comparison between God’s
words
and his
works
encouraged a misreading of nature as a mirror of biblical truth. In our times, an imagined antithesis of nature and nurture provokes a compartmentalization quite foreign to our world of interactions.) All complex human traits are built by an inextricable mixture of varied environments working upon the unfolding of a program bound in inherited DNA. Interaction begins at the moment of fertilization and continues to the instant of death; we cannot neatly divide any human behavior into a part rigidly determined by biology and a portion subject to change by external influence.

The real issue is
biological
potentiality versus
biological
determinism. We are all interactionists; we all acknowledge the powerful influence of biology upon human behavior. But determinists, like Arthur Jensen and Prime Minister Lee (at least in his August speech), use biology to construct a
theory of limits
. In Mr. Lee’s version, lack of schooling implies ineradicable want of intelligence since the fault (or at least four-fifths of it) does indeed lie not in our stars but in ourselves if we are underlings. Potentialists acknowledge the importance of biology but stress that complexities of interaction, and the resultant flexibility of behavior, preclude rigid genetic programming as the basis for human achievement.

Biological determinism has a long-standing (and continuing) political use as a tool for justifying the inequities of a status quo by blaming the victim—as John Conyers, Jr., one of our few black congressmen, states in a powerful Op-Ed piece in the
New York Times
on December 28, 1983. Conyers begins:

Conyers then analyzes a growing literature that seeks genetic causes for high mortality rates among blacks, particularly for various forms of cancer. “In the workplace,” Conyers writes,

Susceptibility to disease may be influenced by genetic constitution, and racial groups may vary in their average propensities. But if we focus on unsupported speculations about inheritance, we neglect the immediate root in racism and economic disadvantage—for these pervasive problems are surely major causes of the discrepancy, which could then be reduced or eliminated by social reform. (As an obvious political comment, location of the cause in intractable biology decreases pressure for the same reforms.) Conyers continues:

As an example, Conyers notes that black steelworkers in coke plants display twice the cancer death rate of white workers, with eight times the white rate for lung cancer, in particular. “This disparity,” Conyers argues,

Shall we strive directly to improve working conditions or speculate about inherent racial differences? Even if we prefer genetic hypotheses, we could only test them by equalizing (and improving) our workplaces, and then assessing the impact upon mortality. Similarly, should we proclaim that women with little schooling must be intractably stupid or should we remove social and economic obstacles, push universal education a little bit harder, and see how well these women do? In the midst of Singapore’s great marriage debate, the
Jakarta Post
peeked in on its neighbor’s brouhaha and commented: “It would be more sensible and less controversial to build more schools.”

Postscript

The situation in Singapore has become, in Alice’s immortal words, “curiouser and curiouser” since I wrote this essay. Some reports seem almost comical, but we laugh at our peril (as I shall soon document). Soon after Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew’s speech and the resulting furor described in my original essay, Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Goh Keng Swee unveiled his first package of countermeasures to the public. They included the establishment of computer dating services to foster eugenically appropriate matches and instructions to the National University of Singapore that undergraduate courses on courtship be introduced in order to hone the skills of shy but able potential breeders. According to the
New York Times
(February 12, 1984), Singapore’s state-owned television “is planning to run a drama series that will seek to show that unmarried career women are incomplete and that their lives are void.”

More seriously, and verging on the insidious, Prime Minister Lee has now instituted the first official measures of preference and incentive. The Family Planning Board of Singapore has reversed its long-standing campaign of persuasion for restriction of families to two children—but only in propaganda directed towards the well educated. The Board is now pursuing a “dual-message” campaign: “Graduates and professionals will be told to go forth and multiply; the less educated will be urged to have no more than two children” (
New York Times
, February 12, 1984).

As a first explicit act, the Government proclaimed in January, 1984, that women with university degrees will be awarded priority for enrolling children in the primary schools of their choice. The less educated—now get this and shudder—will get next preference if they agree to sterilization after birth of their first or second child (
New York Times
, February 12, 1984).

Prime Minister Lee’s plans have not met with universal approbation, either in Singapore or in neighboring countries. Warren Y. Brockelman of Mahidol University in Bangkok joined Yongyuth Yuthavong and ten other members of the Faculty of Science in a vigorous protest (published in the
Bangkok Post
for February 16, 1984. I thank Dr. Brockelman for sending, via David Woodruff, the documents that I used to write this postscript). They write:

In neighboring Malaysia, Chee Heng Leng and Chan Chee Khoon have published a series of critiques inspired by Singapore’s renewal of eugenics (
Designer Genes, IQ Ideology and Biology
, INSAN, Selangor, Malaysia—the cover features a photo of a pair of denims—Lee brand, natch. I am pleased that they were able to include an essay of mine, from
Ever Since Darwin
, in their collection). Drs. Chee and Chan point out that similar ideas are afoot in Malaysia (though not yet translated into official policy), where Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has argued that native Malays have inherited a weak and easygoing character as a result of their genial physical environment combined with inbreeding (while ethnic Chinese are a hardier lot bred in a tougher land). Chee and Chan sum up the situation in Singapore admirably:

IN HIS ESSAY
“Technical Education,” written in 1877, Thomas Henry Huxley proclaimed that “the great end of life is not knowledge but action.” Since Huxley was no intellectual slouch, we may be confident that he was not advocating thoughtless exertion, but arguing that hard-won knowledge only gains its highest value in utility. As Marx wrote in his last thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Pristine originality is an illusion; all great ideas were thought and expressed before a conventional founder first proclaimed them. Copernicus did not reverse heavenly motion single-handedly, and Darwin did not invent evolution. Conventional founders win their just reputations because they prepare for action and grasp the full implication of ideas that predecessors expressed with little appreciation of their revolutionary power.

All scholars know that several prominent scientists—Lamarck in particular—developed elaborate systems of evolutionary thought before Darwin. Many, however, suppose that Darwin was the true originator of his own particular theory about
how
evolution occurred—natural selection. Yet, by his own belated admission (in the historical preface added to later editions of the
Origin of Species
), Darwin allowed that two authors had preceded him in formulating the principle of natural selection. He also argued, at least by implication—and I heartily agree—that neither of these anticipations diluted his claim to fame or originality. He had not initially disregarded them through ill will, but simply because he had never heard about them, despite his thoroughly omnivorous habits of reading and correspondence. The reasons for this justifiable ignorance reinforce Darwin’s status and help us to understand the difference between merely stating an idea and understanding what it can do and mean.

One of Darwin’s predecessors, the Scottish naturalist and fruit grower Patrick Matthew, published his version of natural selection in 1831 as an appendix to a work entitled
Naval Timber and Arboriculture
. And there it languished, unnoticed in its odd context, until Darwin published in 1859. Matthew then wrote a letter to the
Gardeners’ Chronicle
asserting his priority not only for natural selection but also for

Darwin responded to the
Gardeners’ Chronicle
on April 21, 1860 (I thank W.J. Dempster for sending me copies of this correspondence and for urging my attention to Matthew’s views):

The second, and earlier, anticipation of natural selection was not presented in so obscure a context. In 1813, William Charles Wells, another Scottish scientist and physician (though born in Charleston, South Carolina), delivered a paper before the Royal Society of London, England’s preeminent institution of science. It bore one of those wonderfully extended titles so common at the time:
Account of a female of the white race of mankind, parts of whose skin resembles that of a negro, with some observations on the causes of the differences in color and form between the white and negro races of men
.

The essay made no recorded impact at its presentation, and Wells did not print it at the time. As he lay dying of heart disease five years later, Wells prepared for publication a single volume of his more important essays. This volume, published posthumously in 1818, included the short 1813 address almost as an afterthought at the very end. Wells’s volume was well enough received, for it featured the two essays that had won his secure, if limited, fame—one on the formation of dew (a problem solved definitively by Wells, who proved that dew is neither invisible rain nor an exudation of plants, but a result of condensation from surrounding air), and another on why our two eyes see but a single image. Ironically, and as testimony to the total obscurity of Wells’s short essay on the origin of human skin color, when Hugh Falconer proposed Darwin for the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1864, he praised Darwin by comparing his methods of research with those followed in Wells’s excellent treatise on dew: “It may be compared with Dr. Wells’s ‘Essay on Dew’ as original, exhaustive and complete—containing the closest observation with large and important generalization.” Falconer apparently never realized that the volume he had consulted to read Wells’s “Essay on Dew” also contained an anticipatory statement about natural selection itself.

Wells was an austere, intensely private, idiosyncratic man. He had, by his own account, few friends, fewer patients, and very little cash (largely because he spent most of his life repaying loans to his few good friends). He lived his adult life alone in London. He never married, socialized little, and published less. The autobiography prefixed to his volume of essays bemoans his persistent financial straits, particularly his inability to maintain a carriage, thereby foreclosing most social activity and access to potential patients (in those happy but bygone days when home visits by physicians were practically mandatory).

Although born in America, Wells was the son of intense British loyalists. Wells recorded his father’s anxiety that a young man might be won to the republican cause in an agitated prerevolutionary America:

Wells had little good to say for America, for he attributed to his early life in South Carolina virtually all the faults of his later days, including this embarrassed admission:

Wells was therefore happy to leave America for an education in Britain. He returned to Carolina (then in Royalist hands) in 1781 to look after his father’s affairs; but he ended up in jail after the overturn of political power and was only too happy to win repatriation, this time permanently, to Britain. He moved to London and was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1788. His 1792 essay on single vision with two eyes secured his election to the Royal Society, while his 1814 essay on dew won him the society’s coveted Rumford Medal. Despite the quality and renown of these works, Wells published little else. His autobiography does not even mention the 1813 essay on human skin color, and we have no indication that he afforded it any significance in his own mind or that he recognized any furtherranging implications for its ideas.

Like so many general statements written by physicians, Wells’s 1813 essay on natural selection begins with a description of an unusual medical case history. Hannah West, a young woman from Sussex and the daughter of “a footman in a gentleman’s family,” visited him for observation of her peculiar skin. Her parents and all relatives were conventional Caucasians, but Hannah West, although appropriately pale skinned everywhere else, was “as dark as any negro” on her left shoulder, arm, forearm, and hand. In deference to the venerable theory, then still prevalent, of “maternal impressions” (see last essay in
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
), West’s family and neighbors attributed her affliction to the following peculiar event:

Wells observed Hannah West carefully, noted the sharp transition between her unusual dark and expected white skin, and marveled at the blackness of her left arm—“darker than the corresponding part in any negro whom I have seen; for the palm of her hand and inside of her fingers are black, whereas these parts in a negro are only of a tawny hue.” But, in truth, Wells never transcended the purely descriptive and reported nothing of general interest. Even the basic premise of his account was erroneous; whites with large patches of melanic skin bear no meaningful resemblance, genealogical or otherwise, to black people. Had Wells not appended seven pages of speculation on the origin of human skin colors to his report, it would surely have fallen into total and permanent oblivion, rather than mere obscurity (with later resurrection as a curiosity). These seven pages, the afterthought to an essay published as an afterthought, include a two- to three-page section on natural selection, the first clear and recognized statement of Darwin’s great principle.

Wells begins diffidently, fearful perhaps that too much speculation will dilute the value of his sober observations on Hannah West’s unusual skin:

Wells invokes natural selection to explain the success of black people in hot climates. Beginning with the usual and unstated racist assumption that white skin is proper and primary, Wells imagines that the original inhabitants of Africa were lighter than their current descendants. He explains the change by natural selection and even invokes Darwin’s favorite argument of analogy with artificial selection as practiced by animal breeders:

This statement has been cited in several previous works (it is the “standard” quote from Wells), but I do not think that any previous commentator has recognized the decidedly unorthodox character of Wells’s presentation. Curiously, its unusual features presage some of the arguments now being presented by many evolutionists against the strict construction of Darwinism that has been so popular during the past twenty years or so.

The conventional, strictly Darwinian, argument would feature direct adaptation of skin color and evolutionary change driven by competition among individual organisms. In other words, we would argue that black skin offered direct advantages in hot climates and that it arose by differential survival and propagation of darker individuals within a population. Wells explicitly denies both parts of this scenario.

For adaptation, Wells rebuts the idea that black skin provides any benefit in itself (he was probably wrong) and claims instead that some other physiological feature adapts black people to hot climates by conferring resistance to tropical diseases. Wells speculates that this feature may be subtle and not manifested in evident morphology. Black skin may be correlated with this feature for some unknown developmental reason and may therefore serve as a signpost of advantage, while providing no direct benefit itself:

Darwin puzzled over these “correlations of growth” and recognized that many features may offer no direct benefit, yet still characterize large groups by their forced physiological relationship with other traits. Extreme versions of Darwinism have forgotten this subtlety and have tried to find direct adaptive advantages, often by purely speculative argument, for nearly every widespread feature.

Wells’s theme of “nonadaptive consequences” has been reasserted of late in an atmosphere of renewed attention to developmental patterns and the integrity of organization (animals cannot be analyzed as an amalgam of independent parts). Wells’s treatment of color follows these recent criticisms.

For selection, the usual argument would propose a human population with considerable variation in skin color among its members. People with dark skin would, on average, be more successful in raising offspring and, slowly but surely, skin color within the population would shift toward darker hues. In other words, evolutionary change occurs by competition among individuals
within
a population (the “struggle for existence”).