POLITICALLY CORRECT BIOLOGY: MARILYN PENN
PC Biology
By Marilyn Penn http://politicalmavens.com/
In our politically correct lexicon, many forms of behavior that used to be considered character-driven are now accepted as biologically based. This includes most forms of addiction – drugs, alcohol, sex, food; many types of mental illness; anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder; hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder to select just a few examples. People who manifest any of these behavior patterns will be treated pharmacologically as well as psychologically and many of these patterns are known to express a significant hereditary factor. What used to be individual aberration deserving correction or punishment is now classified as ingrained aberration that controls the individual and requires therapeutic, not punitive, care.
Interestingly, the one brain function that seems to have the largest hereditary component – intelligence – is the one we are not allowed to claim as true. The fact that Asians and Jews are statistically over-represented at top schools, score highest on standardized tests, earn more honors and awards – despite often learning English as a second language – is seldom attributed largely to heredity. Instead, we are told that their cultures transmit the values which allow these traits to flourish, implying that random ethnic and racial populations would be as productive if they were only raised in these families. According to conventional wisdom, Blacks, American-Indians and Hispanics would be the majority at Stuyvesant High School if their parents prized education and hard work as much as Asians and Jews. Our culture demands that we downplay the immutable genetic endowments that confound our PC standards of equality and imagine that all people come into the world with equal capacity for intelligence. Those who haven’t achieved have been deprived mainly of environmental enrichment, not of basic brain power.
The thinking goes that if you’re an alcoholic, there’s a 50% chance that one or both of your parents were drinkers too; if you’re a bright student, there’s a 50% chance that your parents checked your homework. The taboo against admitting that being born smart is the salient factor in academic achievement has eclipsed our experiential observations of this truism. Without gainsaying that inherited traits require an environment that permits their expression, the assumption that those traits matter most is a blunter admission of the limitations of aspiration and compensation, certainly for educational goals.
If you’re a tall, athletic, red-haired schizophrenic or a short, musical, bald alcoholic, everyone will admit that your genes have greatly affected your description. If you’re a yellow or white-skinned, hard-working A student, people will say out loud that your parents ate dinner with you most nights, read to you at bedtime and went to parent/teacher conferences religiously. Disparities in hereditary racial predilections for athletic accomplishment are undeniable; the same disparities for intellectual accomplishment are still un-speakable.
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