Opinion: Richardson flunks a genetics test
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Poor Bill Richardson. The governor of New Mexico gave the wrong answer Thursday at a presidential debate sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group. Asked whether he believes people are born gay or whether it’s a choice, Richardson replied: ‘It’s a choice,” adding: “I’m not a scientist.” Nor does he play one on TV.
Richardson’s comment was widely pronounced a gaffe, and he later retracted it, saying that that he had misunderstood the question and that he does not believe people choose to be gay. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with it,” he could have added.)
This episode recalls Timothy Noah’s witty observation that liberals believe everything is caused by environmental factors except sexual orientation, and conservatives believe everything is called by genetics except sexual orientation.
OK, it’s not that simple. But it’s a fact that genetic explanations of other factors — such as intelligence or aptitude at math — are anathema to liberals but intriguing to conservatives like Charles “Bell Curve” Murray. Yet, as Noah noted, some Christian conservatives believe that sexual orientation can be altered through prayer or therapy — and PDQ, if Ted Haggard is any guide. Just don’t call it ‘social engineering.’
It isn’t just sexuality and IQ that can be explained genetically. So can world-historical events. Recently Nicholas Wade, a New York Times science writer, offered this precis of a new book called “A Farewell to Alms”:
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.
Clark, according to Wade, says these values could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But the genetic explanation seems to appeal to Wade, who notes that “geneticists, with information from the human genome now at their disposal, have begun to detect ever more recent instances of human evolutionary change like the spread of lactose tolerance in cattle-raising people of northern Europe just 5,000 years ago.” Of course, just because you can digest ice cream doesn’t mean you should spend your hard-earned wages on it!
The idea that genes gave us the Protestant work ethic is likely to creep out both liberals (who will see it as a rationalization of income inequality), and conservatives (who like to preach in reference to the so-called underclass that “it’s the culture, stupid”). My hunch is that, except perhaps as a defense of tolerance for gays, “they were born that way” is an argument most politicians, left and right, will want to avoid, since most political platforms involve behavior modification. If genes rule, why bother voting?