From the Sunday Times Flawed science that lets underclass take the rap

You can talk about some things, it seems, only if you hold "acceptable" views. A number of people got hot under the collar last week when Charles Murray, the controversial American social scientist, appeared on a Sunday Times platform to debate his theories about the underclass.

The disquiet, however, concerned different ideas that he had expressed with Richard Herrnstein in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. This said there was a genetic component in intelligence. Asians and Chinese were said to be at the top of the IQ scales, whites in the middle and black people at the bottom. It said that low intelligence was a factor behind illegitimate births.

Murray has accordingly been denounced as a racist and eugenicist by people who claim that he says intelligence is genetically predetermined and cannot be altered by environmental influences. In fact, The Bell Curve was careful not to say this.

The authors said, rather, that environment and genes worked together and that nobody knew how much was due to one or the other; that all races were represented across the range of intelligence; that people should be treated as individuals, not as groups; and that everyone had equal human rights. In the furore, these caveats have been ignored. Yet they bring Herrnstein and Murray close to what many unblemished researchers are saying.

For as research into the human genome races ahead, a fundamental tenet of post-war social science is in retreat. This view, that all behaviour is due to environmental factors, was itself a reaction against the discrediting of innate characteristics by the Nazi racial extermination programmes. Now, though, the nature/nurture distinction is being replaced by a much more complex picture.

The problem with The Bell Curve, however, was that Herrnstein and Murray presented as incontrovertible findings on race and intelligence that have been furiously challenged by other academics. It seems demonstrably true that differences between people in the same ethnic group are greater than differences between groups and that IQ tests are utterly flaky. They are inherently biased towards certain types of minds and do not allow for cultural or environmental differences. If "g", the theory of general intelligence on which IQ tests are based, is bogus then the entire edifice of The Bell Curve collapses.

However, it is not just Murray who believes in it. In his book Genome, the evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley acknowledges the inherent absurdity of "g" but then proceeds to accept it as true. Like Murray, Ridley purports not to understand why genetic determinism is considered such a bad thing. Disingenuously, he declares that it poses no special threat to freedom. Eugenics, from which he delicately distances himself, is conveniently dismissed as the product of politics, not science.

Yet despite inhabiting the same intellectual space as The Bell Curve, Genome has been widely acclaimed as "elegant", "lucid" , "exhilarating" and "perceptive". Both Murray and Ridley are libertarians. The difference in reception is surely because Ridley is best known as a science writer while Murray is famous for saying the welfare state should be abolished altogether. Ostensibly, this is to force people into responsible behaviour; but his separate prediction that gene research will eventually prove innate differences in behaviour creates the suspicion that he is promoting the survival of the fittest.

Yet Murray is correct to predict also that eugenics is more likely to be taken up by those very people on the left who most despise his ideas. Don't they denounce opponents of cloning or genetic screening as fundamentalist reactionaries? Indeed, eugenics was always associated with progressive intellectuals.

In the late 19th century, fear of the masses led to the promotion of selective breeding to eliminate degeneration of the race. After Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, invented eugenics in the 1880s, the idea was embraced by the English leftist intelligentsia: people such as George Bernard Shaw, who wanted to exterminate those who did not fit into civilisation, H G Wells, who wanted to put down inferior breeds, or Sidney Webb, who said eugenicists had to "interfere, interfere, interfere".

For such progressives, science enabled society to be organised on rational principles. Their successors can be seen today in the followers of Richard Dawkins, inventor of the theory of the selfish gene, or in the fashionable crowds who have come to worship at the shrine of socio-biology at the London School of Economics Darwin seminars.

It is certainly useful to have a corrective against the previous doctrine that human nature is entirely malleable and that everything is caused by environmental factors: the belief that sex roles are interchangeable, for example. But we do not need genes to explain that these beliefs are wrong. Women may choose to stay at home to look after young children because of the physiological and psychological changes that occur around motherhood.

Yet socio-biology, which dismisses such explanations in favour of the iron law of reproductive gene theory, is gathering respectable steam. Undoubtedly this is largely due to the momentum of the human genome project. Yet that alone does not explain why so many people across the political spectrum expect that this project will explain what it is to be human: that we are truly no more than the sum of our genes.

The explanation surely lies in the collapse of both Freudianism and Marxism as deterministic creeds, which told us that we were all at the mercy of vast forces outside ourselves. Genetic determinism is filling that gap. The connection that links left and right is the desire to remove moral responsibility for individual actions.

The left wants such freedom in the sexual sphere; the libertarian right wants a market free-for-all in which the fittest will win all the prizes. It is an excuse for personal irresponsibility, illustrated by Ridley when he writes that full responsibility for one's actions is a fiction.

It is this selfishness, however, that is the solvent of our society. That is why Murray's "underclass" theories are flawed. Licensed fatherlessness, the right to form any relationship and call it a family, amounts to a cultural and moral breakdown that is not just an underclass phenomenon. The very poor, however, are the most damaged by it. They have the most need of strong cultural and legal signals and boundaries because they have fewer resources to cope with such problems.

Yet the government's social exclusion policies target the very poor alone, creating the impression that they are a breed apart. Problems such as drug abuse, family breakdown or educational failure are seen not as elements of a general cultural slide but as the problems of the poor.

Murray said in Prospect magazine that he foresaw a new, insidious form of eugenics, "one which does not require the lower classes to stop having children, only to start having better children". What better way to describe the government's policies on parenting which, despite protests to the contrary, are all about telling poor people what to do?

Melanie Phillips