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“Mental Retardation: Challenge to Mental Advance
Presentation by Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D.
Dedication Ceremony - Mental Retardation Center, UCLA
October 15, 1969

Thank you Jolly, George, friends. I felt like I was being dedicated
the last two or three minutes. That's not what we're here for. In fact,
my wife asked me why I was coming down to L.A. today, and I told her something
of the deep bonds of friendship and admiration for George Tarjan, and for
Jolly West and my other friends here that made it impossible for me to
refuse the opportunity to join in this celebration. But she said, "That
isn't what I mean -- why do they want you?" And I was a little nonplussed,
not to have thought of asking that question myself. And I guess I thought
that some tribal ritual is usual and necessary in the nature of human
psychology at events of this kind. A great many efforts have gone into
the beginning of a laboratory. But that didn't answer the question entirely
why they wanted me. I'm not reputed for giving empty praise or making
fullsome speeches, and I very rarely dedicate anything. I think Dr. West
_ knows me well enough to know that I would take an opportunity of this
sort for candid criticism, some of it, I hope, positive. And having said
that, let me state my profound admiration and respect for the work that
is going on here, for the team of scientists and the ideals and the
focus that are established here today. I haven't looked at the quarters --
and I'm not sure I'd want to take very much time to . It's the opportunity
for the working together on some of the most important problems that face
medicine and society that buildings of these kind afford. That's the
central issue and this is one noble group of men and scientists,

I should turn to first things first and I will impose on you the remark

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that the Asian war has been so pervasively disgenic, has done so much to
disrupt the integrity of Western culture that I have made it part of my
usual business to reflect upon it as part of my job as academic critic and
teacher, and I don't propose to make an exception today in the name of the
moratorium,

! Robert S. McNamara will surely go down in history as the prototype of
the modern rational statesman. He is a man of great human feeling, as well
as tight logic. The trouble with a rational approach to politics is that
you have to get every detail of your argument just right - - and this is
“not easy in a complicated world inhabited by capricious and imperfect
people. I have been re-reading Robert McNamara's book, The Essence of Security,
where he refers to the aims of the United States in Asia. After remarking
- on the conflict between the Soviet Union and China, he points out, "Our
real concern is not over which of the two rivals will emerge dominant.

Qur concern is that no great power dominate the area. The United States
has no desire to compete with either the Soviet Union or Red China or
Ho Chi Minh in Southeast Asia or either to achieve any special positon
there." These remarks have a cetain degree of persuasion to them. Rather
than quarrel with them, I would accept them for the moment. But I must

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say, that I'm left with a nagging doubt as a conclusion from these premises
whether there was just one small flaw in our policy in Southeast Asia and
that is whether we intervened on the correct side. Not the most implausible
summary of the tragic events of the last years is to say that the Kremlin
has cuzzened us into it by every act of positive and negative policy that
they have displayed in respect to our position in that arena, Much has

been said about the morality of war, of this war. I have to dismiss most

such remarkes with the thought that no war is moral and the fact no action

of any state can be fundamentally moral. There is nothing in politics more
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immoral than failure unless it is the unwillingness to recognize it.

I hope you will not judge me sternly for my performance on the remaining
and more modest aims of my presentation today.

My credentials are not very well formulated and possibly lack something
in relevance for an occasion of this kind. I'm not a specialist in mental
retardation. I can claim very little expert knowledge of this field. My
own professional discipline is molecular genetics and I have rarely strayed
away from the use of microrganisms as the subject of my own personal experimental
interests. It's hard to make much of a case for mental retardation research
in bacteria, although when they don't behave one may call them stupid.

But in fact, as is the case for our view of mental retardation of the
individual, mental retardation is not just a private deficit of a single
unfortunate human being. It is also our collective ignorance about producing
the appropriate responses to the failure in normative development that we
observe in these individuals. My main interest in mental retardation and
my qualification as a somewhat detached observer is still for the humane
care of afflicted and unfortunate human beings, the sufferings that their
families undergo which, in many respects, far exceed what are perceived by
mentally retarded children themselves. And I would not be very patient with
any view of our present prospect that minimizes the importance of humane |
care of our existing load.

I must confess, however, that a more cerebral side of my concerns has
to do with the expectations that mental retardation research is the essential
avenue for an understanding of the human intellect -- in both the normative
sense, and in the sense of our own evolutionary and individual progress.

That in studying the aberrations of the development of thought that are
observed in the pathology of mental retardation, we should, in the long run,
have the most incisive approach to understand how we think well and how we

might think better. I try to be exuberant in laying out the prospects for
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approaching this horizon. I try to think of the particular, wonderful ways

in which these laboratories over the space of the next three or four or
five years are going to revolutionalize our outlook on human mentation, but
I cannot honestly do so. I think I must, instead, point to the very grave
difficulties that face us in any direct attack on the multitude of different
problems (which is the collective problem of mental retardation) and on the
deficiencies of our instruments and of our understanding of the details. We
face here what is, if not the largest challenge in medicine, one that stands
right next to it - next to the general field of mental health and the
aberrations of thought and personality. And we have only very feeble tools,
indeed, to do more than scratch the surface of what is apparent to us at

the present time. Now, it's fair to say that the purposes of mental retardation
research, or of an attack on mental retardation, have indeed already inspired
a great deal of the most important work on fundamental aspects of human
biology. One need merely point to the discovery of the chromosome diseases

in man which followed (in Lejeune's hands) just a few years ago the elucidation
of the correct chromosome number as being 46 - only about 15 years ago. The
first discovery of a chromosome disease - that Down's syndrome was a
consequence of an accident in the distribution of chromosomes in the formation
of the egg -- has been followed by a large number of the richest kinds of
observations on the chromosome complement of normal man, and in a number of
the cruder deviations that arise from a large set of comparable kinds of
accidents. I could not overestimate the importance of this line of research
as an entry into the objective analysis of man as an organism. But I think
it's still fair to say that even this work has given us very little of
substantial value and insight into the fundamental processes of the
development of mentation, Even knowing the Down's syndrome, which has

an outcome of a very serious deformation in the development of the brain

functions, and that we can pin this down to one object that can be seen
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under the microscope (an extra small 22nd chromosome, in the most usual
circumstances), tells us nothing, and we have so far learned virtually
nothing about the pathway of action of that excess of chromosome material,

I can think of almost nothing new in our understanding of mentation that

has derived from that, or, in fact, from any other avenue of research along
these lines. This is a discouraging outcome, but it's not an unreasonable
one when we ponder how uniquely complex the human mental function is. It's
at the end of the longest road both in evolution and in development. It is
subject to interference from innumerable sources, any one of which can result
in the continued ramification of difficulty and failure. And when we see
the Down's infant, or any other example of severe retardation, we can be sure
that we're looking at a process that has had wheels within wheels within wheels
before we can come to its ultimate genetic mechanism. It is of the utmost
importance that we unravel such mechanisms, and we're at the stage now where
we are spending most of our time in beginning to build the tools to be able
to do so. And here, of course, is where research in molecular genetics is

of the utmost relevance.

It is then, generally true that the direct observation of mentally retarded
children, while absolutely essential for developing the most appropriate and
the most humane means of management of the diseases that are collectively
lumped together here, has not often reached to the fundamental issues. I
will posit one large exception to this and, if I were to be asked to help
map out a research strategy, I would perhaps give it even more emphasis than
the very large emphasis that it receives in the stated program of the Research
Institute here. And this has to do with maternal and fetal nutrition.

I asked myself what new outlooks have appeared during the last six or
seven years of the burst of energy and enthusiasm about mental retardation
research and, in my view, this stands out above everything else. Not a

totally new observation, not very surprising, not very profound in terms of
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fundamental mechanisms ~- but the realization that, from a global point of

view, the deprivation in the feeding of the pregnant mother and of the

early newborn can have the most profound consequences for the development

of that child's brain is critical. From the point of view of the whole planet,
I think that there can be no quibble with the assertion that this is the
outstanding problem of mental retardation. It's very difficult to do controlled
.experiments in a field of this kind. Obviously, one does not wish to do so.

One wishes to apply whatever remedies are available immediately in pursuit

of any direct observations. It's also rare to find clinical situations in
which populations that are nutritionally deprived are not also subject to many
other kinds of environmental insults, And one could quibble whether the
malnutrition has directly affected the development of the brain of the deprived
fetus, or has done so indirectly by making it more vulnerable to virus infections,
and so on and so forth. But it is probably a conservative estimate that one
tenth of the children born today are seriously afflicted in the arena of

mental retardation as a consequence of their malnutrition. We tend to think

of this as a problem mainly of the other world, of the third world. We have

a great deal of that resonant in our own country, and its total magnitude

-is something we do not properly understand except that we know it is much

larger than we had ever thought possible, even a few years ago.

There are some other avenues of clinical investigation that have given
some yield, but not very much. We know that virus infections influence the
normal development of the brain. We know that early rubella is a particular
hazard and we've begun to do something about it. But I don't think it could
be honestly said that we're in any better position today than we were 10
years ago in elucidating the actual mechanism by which this virus infection,
differing from others, impairs brain development. We have simply not reached
fundamental issues in this field although, through such a straightforward

development as the development of vaccines, we may be in a position to achieve
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considerable practical progress in prevention,
Now I don't suggest that we just sit and wait while the experimental
laboratorians develop their tools. A great deal of factoring out of rare
but specific and identifiable syndromes has been done in the field of
mental retardation, and we can approach these at a phenomenological level
even if we don't understand the exact mechanisms of action. And new
syndromes, new amino acid metabolic failures, and other biochemical alterations
are and should be picked up and examined -- and examined closely -- new ones,
every few weeks. They are statistically individually not very important.
“None of the new ones is likely to represent more than a very small percentage
of the inmates of a hospital for mental retardation. But each syndrome
that we begin to understand at its biochemical roots gives us some hope
for some fundamental knowledge of the entire process of mental development.
Some of you may quibble that I'm mixing in a bag of neurological
syndromes together with those of mental retardation. If I were to bring
in a Tay-Sach's disease, and the recent discovery that a specific enzyme
deficit is involved in the accumulation of storage materials in the nerve
cells of these infants, some of you may say, "well, that's a neurological
problem -- not one of mental retardation." So be it, if you wish. But that,
I think, is going to be characteristic of every advance that's made in this
particular field - - that when we begin to understand the mechanism of
a failure in mental development it will clearly always have to do with the
development and function of a particular organ in the brain that belongs
to the nervous system. And it's very much our job to continue the translation
of the problems of mental retardation into those of neurology. And one
of the creative aspects of the organization of this Mental Retardation
Center is the unification of disciplines -- the bringing together of
neurology, biochemistry, pediatrics, and psychiatry under some common
leadership and intense communication, which is a very positive trend and,

+t end tn cay a little different than what has been going on in the last
years.

What are some of the tools that the basic scientist, myself speaking
in a defensive mode, might point to as in the pipeline? I have to give
the greatest emphasis to the means for studying the protein metabolism
of the brain. And this has to do with every stage from the assimilation
of amino acids and their metabolism as low molecular weight metabolites, to
the mechanisms of assembly into the formation of proteins, and, particularly,
to the regulatory mechanisms that determine when which aspect of the genetic
code are going to be translated into specific: protein products.

Ten years ago we knew there was a genetic code but we didn't know what
it was. We had a rough idea that proteins were assembled under the impetus
of information from the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA. During that
10 years we have worked out, in very considerable detail, what that process
cpnsists of -- and we now have one important piece of the armament in examining
the operation of this process in the brain itself. It's important to further
research on the culture of brain cells, and I won't quibble with whether
they're neuroglia or neurons. Each of these classes themselves may have
greater importance in some mental retardation syndromes. It's important that
we pursue the study of the morphogenetic factors that determine the growth
of the brain as morphogenetic factors determine the growth of every other
organ in the body. Recent studies on a rather specialized hormone, the
nerve growth factor, are not less interesting for mental retardation research
because they happen to affect mainly the development of sympathetic ganglia
and have no very obvious function in the later development of the central
nervous system itself. They represent a model system that's the best we
have at the present time for the regulation of the growth of nervous tissue
and, believe me, a mental retardation syndrome is going to be found, if
it has not been already, that reflects some aberrations in just this factor,

not to mention thirty or forty thousand similar factors that will be found

when we get around to looking for them. The typing of RNA, particularly of
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messenger RNA, is in it's infancy, but these are the immediate products
of the genes and they represent the most incisive approach that one can
visualize for determining the actual content of the DNA neuron (or of
a other kind of cell) in scanning for genetic deviances the source of
various syndromes.

I don't want to neglect grosser physiology. There are very complicated
issues of the regulation of fetal blood supply. They are patently of the
greatest importance in actual outcome of pregnancy and they pr issues
about which we understand very, very little. If you dispute that please
explain for me such a simple phenomenon as the fact that the birth weight
increases with further pregnancies in man. It is a very common observation,
indisputable on a clinical basis, and to which no really satisfactory
explanation has been produced so far. Second and third babies are heavier
than the first one.

Well, I'11 come back again to the issue of maternal nutrition in
biochemistry as being the most vulnerable point of application of a large
ensemble of already available biochemical knowledge that's just crying
‘out to be applied in more detail for prognostic, diagnostic, and
therapeutic advantage --~ and about which we know surprisingly little,
once you start getting into it. I'm particularly provoked by an observation
(which I must make some apologies for because it is not very well documented)
that John Churchill, now at the NINDB, made in testimony before Senate
committee. He's probably published it again since, elsewhere. This
comes from the very productive and very extensive eurvey of perinatal a
..diseases that has been conducted as a cooperative project under the auspices
of that institution for the last six or seven years and which has involved
a prospective study of up to about 50 thousand pregnancies. Unselected

‘with respect to the liklihood of a deleterious outcome, these prenancies

were rather closely monitored. The children were watched closely as they
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came out and they have been examined serially ~- and, of course, 3% of them
have come out definably in the category of mental retardation. He has verified
that there is, indeed, a correlation between intellectual outcome measured
in early tests for IQ and the mother's blood amino acid levels. Again,
corraborating that part of the story which can be contributed to maternal
nutrition. But the provacative observation is that they were surprised to
. find these variations in blood amino acid levels. They were not obviously
correlated with dietary problems, or with deficiencies in dietary intake as
perceived by rather crude observations of this point. This suggests that
there may be more insidious and more subtle variations in the ability

of diverse people, particularly in combination with other environmental
insults, for the utilization of their diets than is customarily recognized.
It very much needs to be followed up. If it's true, we have to shake out
our whole conception of adequate nutrition from top to bottom.

There may be genetic factors involved in the efficiency of assimilation.

‘I'm going to make a few remarks about some problems of race genetics in a
few moments and I must say that my own general outlook on this question was
very profoundly shaken by the observations that were first reported three

or four years ago which have been amply confirmed by a variety of others
about racial differences in the utilization of lactose by adults. It looks
as if Caucasians are rather unique -- and a minority of the peoples in the
world in being able to use milk sugar as a source of caloric energy as
adults. There are a number of rather rare genetic diseases that afflict
infants -- and the pediatricians have known about for a long time -- that

are manifest as deficiencies in intestinal enzymes and disaccharides including
those for lactose. But this is not what I'm referring to. I'm referring

to the fact that most blacks, most Orientals, and,I was told by an avid
digger of Science News, Mr. Nelson from the L.A, Times, most American Indians

are incapable as adults of utilizing milk sugar. This has some obvious
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consequences for just how much good one does by distributing surplus milk powder
to peoples of non-white races,when they suffered rather poorly. This is surprising
for two reasons. One, that an observation of this kind, as elementry as this,
“that adult black and adult Chinese will often get diarrhea from a large dose
of milk, as contrasted to whites, should have lain unobserved for such a very
long time. I have not done my own investigations to the point, and every now
and then I wonder whether it can really be true. But here have been four or
five independent studies on this point, and there have been enzyme assays

for the production of intestinal lactose of a very direct kind, It's very

easy to do indirect tests by lactose tolerance tests and no one has reported

a deviant result. It's something like 90%-95% of American Negros have this
failure of assimilation and fewer than five percent of American whites do so.
Besides my surprise at it's having lain fallow for so long, I'm also surprised
that there can be, with respect to a gene of serious biochemical consequence,
something more than a merely statistically significant difference along racial
lines. I think we have to start from this observation to ask again a number

of objective questions about biochemical differences among racial groups.

I do not suggest that they are necessarily all important and I certainly do

not suggest that they necessarily all point to an advantage for one racial
group versus another, But I think the lactose story cannot be denied as a
rather neutral example and I think we simply have to look into it again or
we'll be applying the wrong kind of medicine, the wrong kind of nutrition,

and the wrong kind of public health to the majority of the peoples on the

earth based on the wrong premises with respect to some of the biochemical
differences that may be distributed among such peoples. If a difference in

the utilization of lactose can have been buried for all this time, there

is no other dogma about nutrition that I do not suspect on very similar grounds
until is has been explicitly and directly examined. There is a surprising

dirth of information about such matters as daily nutrient requirements for
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other than standard WASPS as experimental subjects in our nutritional studies.

Well, plainly for mental retardation research to continue in an
intellectually inspired and productive way it must maintain the closest
and aggressive contact with other surrounding fields. I was very glad
to see Dr. Zamenhof in the audience, hi Steve, It reminded me of an
experiment I remember hearing about at the time it was done in 1941 and
I remember very well thinking, and it was rather arrogant, (I was a
Freshman in college at the time), that was really mad. Dr. Zamenhof's
experiment was to look for the possibilities of a hormonal influence in
the rate or extent of brain development in rats and what a foolish thing
to do. He injected human pituitary growth hormones into pregnant rats
and claimed the report that the rats from the treated mothers had larger
brains and behaved more intelligently than did the controls. Except for
the fact that two or three other groups have repeated and corroborated
this experiment, and he has done it again himself 25 years later, and has
been building the technical apparatus needed to document this sort of
result in an extremely objective way, I would never have believed it. But
I think it's true, and I think it's an extremely important finding, and
I think it's one that ought to be a lesson to those who require a detailed
rationale for the examination of the effects of substances of high biological
potency when in fact we don't know very much about what they're doing in
the first place.

The other zone of confrontation with other disciplines, as represented
here, is the use of quantitative measures of DNA content of a brain, in
verifying that the nuclei have the expected normal DNA level as a method
of being very sure that you know how to count brain cells. This, by itself,
is a technical advance of the utmost importance. I find it difficult to
overestimate how important it will be, and I can do so only in the light

of the awareness that I hope I can share with you of how little we know
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about the most elementary parameters of brain growth in the normal human being.
I do not know within a factor of 30% how many brain cells I have -- and I do
not know within a factor of 50% what the relationship of that number is to
the ones that I had when I was born. And I certainly do not know which ones
were important, and where they are, and how this can be distributed among
' different individuals. It's often said that most mental retardation syndromes
are associated with no morphological changes in the brain whatsoever -- that
they must, therefore, represent functional differences. I'1l be willing to
bet a dollar with any or all of you that we're going to find numerical counts
of neurons, when it can be properly done, as a productive method of finding
organic differences in brain defects in a large number of such syndromes.
We just don't have the tools to do it at the present time. When we say there
is no structural difference, the statement is really that we have not built
the tools to find it.

Now of course one of the most serious impediments to serious research
in mental retardation is that we do not have a good animal model. We cannot
compare the intellectual function of the human brain with that of any other
animal. We are born more plastic, less mature, and less differentiated than
any other species that we can refer to, and there is, therefore, only a
limited relevance to those effects that can be demonstrated in animals. I
think it works mostly in one direction, an influence that can, in fact, be
shown in an animal brain is very unlikely not to have an even more pervasive
influence in man. But we can be confident that since human intelligence has
represented a further evolutionary step (and I say that without blushing) and
is, therefore, also a further developmental step over the development of the
brains of lower animals, that there are many new processes involved in human
mentation subject to interference in ways that we will have no way of examining
in the mouse. We see very good examples of this in other fields which may

be more familiar to many of you. For example, it is difficult to set up a good
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model for the effects of marijuana or LSD on animals other than man.

I'm not advocating that we leok into brain biopsy as an experimental
approach, although I suspect that there is more horror than objective
consideration might warrant on this. We cannot get the patients' permission
to perform an operation of this sort when we're dealing with mentally
retarded children -- and we must give the utmost respect to those considerations
of human dignity and human rights. But I do want to point to another resource
which is only partially utilized at the present time and that is fetal
material from abortions. Both from abortions for therapeutic indications,
having nothing to to with mental retardation that can provide some of
the baselines for the development of the normal human brain and, in the
present context even more particularly, those abortions that can be done
legally in this state because of the impact on the mental health of the
mother of the foreknowledge that a baby will be born deformed. But there
is a side advantage to the performance of therapeutic abortions on this
indication and that is access to the fetus itself at a prehuman stage of its
existence but where there may still be some promontory signs of what will
go wrong. For example, it is a tragedy to let any Down's syndrome fetus
go down the drain when it has been aborted on the basis of a prenatal
diagnosis of chromosome defect. That brain, and there are not going to be
very many of them available in condition for experimental investigation, can
_be absolutely invaluable for learning what it is that goes wrong under the
impact of this chromosome defect, and in a way which respects our concerns
for human rights and human dignity, as is not possible after birth. This
“opens up a rather general territory of very great interest and concern, the
establishment of banks or libraries for the preservation of crucial genetic
information. . These are easily preserved in liquid nitrogen, cold storage,
well enough that one can resuscitate tissue cultures from tissue specimens,

I do not lay out the hope of resuscitating the intact organism, but a few
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cells do survive and well enough to be able to be used as seed inocula for
growing out examples of a wide variety of genetic defects. And it's particularly
those defects about which genetic basis we do not yet know that we need the
widest repertoire of material for further experimental investigation. So I

do put it as one charge to a Genter of this kind, which should have extra-
ordinarily good facilities for this type of tissue work, to look to the
organization of that kind of repertoire.

Our tools are very crude. We don't want to wait. But mischief is often
the work of idle hands. I think we can see what is possibly a good example
of this in the speculations that have become very newsworthy in the last
year or two about genetic differences with respect to intelligence among the
races. This is an issue, let me say at the outset, about which I believe .
it is impossible to make a scientific decision. We simply do not have the
objective scientific tools by which we can unravel the possible, that's
even plausible, genetic differences among races that might bear i brain
‘development for better or for worse, on the one hand, and the environmental
impact, which is something not plausible, but actual, that's sitting right

in front of our eyes and one has to be multiply blind not to see it. The

fact remains that there are pretty good statistics about performance on IQ tests,

about reading. accomplishment in schools, and we do face an extremely serious
national and, very often personal problem, about the acculturation of black
groups into our society through the most vital route of teaching in the schools,
of learning to read effectively, of staying on the ladder of academic actomphish«
ment, of being able to compete within the framework of a white-dominated society,
at least for such a-period of time as society has to offer the economic and
material goods that are necessary for the further upbui lding of all people.

That, I think, we have to take as a fact and there's no blinking at it. We are
“in serious trouble in our academic systems if we're talking about population

comparisons of the blacks in this country, as a whole, with the whites in this
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country, as a whole. I will allude to Professor Arthur Jensen of the
University of California at Berkeley who has worked very hard to bring the
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issues to the attention of educators and psychologists, and has, undoubtedly,
played into the hands of the oe into making an explosive issue out of these
kinds of genetic attributions and investigations. What I have to recommend
to you is that you read not Joe Alsop or Newsweek, nor be content with my
comment on what he has had to say. Let those of you who have enough interest
in this question to react to the issues as they have been raised in the
newspapers, read what he himself wrote in an extremely interesting, some-
times irritating article in the Harvard Educational Review, for winter of
this year. There's further comment in the Spring issue. It has been
reissued as a separate publication by the Harvard University Press, and
should be rather readily available to you. In many respects, Dr. Jenson
personally is a victim of the commentators who have read much more into his
_, writings than he himself is willing to admit to. But I think he's also a
| victim of his own academic objectivity and aloofness, and I think he's a
victim of his sense of need to react to the essential total neglect of
the issue of genetic differences by psychologists and by educators, In
the course of that reaction I believe he has made a number of overstatements.
There are, in fact, a number of inconsistencies -- and when he's in a reactive
mode, I think you'll readily recognize it. I think that when you see him in
his more thoughtful paragraphs that you'll find a great deal that he has of
interest to say.

The main thrust of Jensen's discussion has had directly very little to
do with the question of race difference. And he himself has done no work
on the genetics of race difference. In fact, he has done no genetic

investigations at all. But he has made what I must state to be a very

penetrating and articulate and beautifully summarized review of the existing

literature on the heritability of intelligence among whites. He is the first
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to stress that we cannot casually or correctly transfer any of the conclusions
that have been reached about heritability within the white cultures to the
question of the difference between the races. But he comes back to that

again later, and I will too. He also spends a great deal of time in what

I think should not be necessary, namely, that there is some possible apriori
plausability to the idea of genetic differences among races. I think this

is an issue about which one has to look for evidence and there's been no

good evidence one way or the other on this particular matter. It's exactly as
plausible as any hypothesis is when it enters an arena where there is no
evidence one way or the other.

Racial differences in physiognomy and pigmentation -- the trouble is

we don't have the tools for an objective investigation and one may correctly
ask why you bring up the question at that stage. The studies of heritability
of intelligence depend very largely on examination of twins and correlation
between twins. The paradigm is to find a pair of twins, these are monozygotic
twins which, by definition have identical heredity, and to look for twin

pairs which have been separated at birth, or soon after birth, into presumably
randomized environments, and to look into the question of the difference it
makes when one can compare the similarity of twins reared together in what

is presumably a common environment with the disparity of twins reared apart

in what is presumably a randomized difference in environments. One can, if |
one assumes that a pair of twins shares their common heredity but shares
nothing else in common (any more than any randomly chosen pair of individuals)
calculate a statistical parameter called the heritability. And the
heritability in studies on white populations is, I must say, extraordinarily
high. It varies in different studies from being something like 55% to something
ro
_ like 75%, and that is to say that, if the assumptions are correct, that about
55-75% of the variance in IQ performance among whites can be attributed to

differences in their hereditary endowment, and the remaining percentage can
-18~

be allocated to differences in their environmental exposure or the interactions
between the two. The geneticists have been aware of these studies for the
last 20 or 30 years. They all agree with one another. There has been very
little doubt in geneticists' minds about these issues as facts. What's
new in the present situation is simply that Jensen is a psychologist and he's
talking in a very different arena to people who have been accustomed to
a very different view of the origins of human development. Geneticists
have also criticized these findings. There is one major premise, namely
that the twin pair is subject to nothing else common in its experience
besides its heredity and we know that there are aspects of the prenatal
envi roament that it also shares. We know that if one of a twin pair has
been exposed to a virus infection, the other one is likely to have been;
if the maternal nutrition is bad for one twin, it's likely to be bad for
the other; if the mother is producing an RH antibody reaction to one twin
she surely will be against the other; if her uterine blood supply is
“constricted, they're likely to be correlated between the two. And the
more we look, the more we see that which we had not perceived earlier --
prenatal influences, and the possibility of a considerable element of
common prenatal environment, rather than genes, have to be factored into
your definition of what you mean by heritability.

Nevertheless, these figures are extremely impressive. You can't do
another thing with them besides say this is the heritability. We're not
in a position to identify specific genes, and it's not at all obvious what
particular useful element of social policy has been or is likely to be
influenced by this information. Professor Jensen is so impressed by the
statistics of difference in IQ performance among groups, and he is the first:
to stress the group difference as against the issues, moral and political and
social and scientific. and individual difference, that he is easily willing to

attribute the one standard deviation of depression of average IQ among blacks
-19-

as a genetic difference of the same sort for which there is some evidence
operating between social classes in the white culture. He puts this forward
as a speculation and he says that once. I think what's confusing about

_ Jensen's presentation is that the emotional thrust of his argument is not
congruent with the intellectual. He has a number of carefully specified
reservations about the validity of this extrapolation, and one must read
those reservations, and one must respect them when he points to them in
the course of argument. But the rhetoric and the overall drama of his
presentation is directed in another direction. And you have to be careful
to read exactly what he says, not what you think he might have said as a
hasty impression of the total output.

The fact is that this speculation is a legitimate one, scientifically
viewed. It's not supported by any particular evidence and it would seem to
be contradicted by the evidence of our eyes in the examination of environmental
differences between groups of blacks and whites. He has attempted to repair
'. that, and I think one must respect these efforts to factor out specific
components of environmental differences, although I think he has reached the
wrong conclusions, And he has asserted, as his only personal research
contribution on this subject, that, even after normalizing control and
experimental, or control and black groups, with respect to socio-economic
Status, with respect to indicators based on income and fathers! occupations
and fathers’ educations, he still finds striking differences in school
performance. I think that's an extremely interesting datum, and I think it's
one we have to ponder about a great deal. But it doesn't begin to prove its
point. All it does is say that there ‘again it. should be manifest to anyone who
has looked at it at all, that there are still many environmental insults that
are correlated with the black subculture that are not controllable by a

superficial examination of income, education, and occupation.
-20-

Then the challenge begins to be on the other foot, and I think this is
an arena to turn the question right around for the most interesting social
investigations to some very useful and relevant purpose. What is it
exactly -- not in general, not the total picture (we know it's bad), but
what are the specific components of the black environment that are retarding
the intellectual development of so many black kids so that the average
performance is a year behind at the starting of reading and two and three
years behind when it's finished. One way to look at it is to look at
the black genius of which we have many examples. What made the difference
in the production of these extraordinary individuals so different from
the kind of picture that's painted by the broad statistics that are established
here, Now one might say, "let's not horse around with that."' One might
be very impatient, and say, "let us wipe out all social and economical
differentials immediately and that will be the answer to the problem." Of
course, I advocate doing it -- but I don't know how and I don't know which
of the first steps to take until we can factor out the critical considerations
so that programs like Head-Start can be translated into something about which
there will be absolute unanimity as to their effectiveness, instead of the
general ambiguity that there is at the present time.

My own personal view, and it is just a speculation that I can support from
no evidence, is that the central issue is alienation. That it is the conflict
between the races; that it is the disparagement of white for black, and now of
black for white; that it is the closing-off of opportunity by that whole
apparatus that we call institutional racism; that it is the discouragement
before you even get started, by the unwillingness to truckle to white society
and all the rest. This should not be misunderstood, as it sometimes is, as
a lack of motivation to take a test. This might be understood as a lack of

motivation to attempt to learn the things that are relevant to passing the

test that admits one into our advanced society.
-2i-

‘The action that we can see, again very plainly, (1 don't see how there
could be any doubt about this) is to stop dropping out, and to stop it by
any means whatsoever. For whatever reason, the child has dropped out of
school, whether actually by having left it, or defacto, by not being really

!
part of! the educational process because of his and his teachers! mutual
alienation, represents, an enormous cost to soctety. And I can think of no place to
better “begin a program of the guaranteed floor on income than with the student.
If we are to channel resources that are not infinite in availability, we have
to make some priority decisions. Keeping the child in school, in some way
directed towards some productive outcome, has to be our firm aim. That's a
philosophy very similar .to that which has pervaded approaches to humane care
of the institutionalized mentally retarded. We have learned that the sheltered
workshop is a step in that direction. We have learned that every struggle
to keep the retarded and the handicapped in some contact with the mainstream

of society pays. back many times any investment that we can give.

Thank you for your time.