Always a Good Excuse

Studying pea plants during the years around 1860, Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, suggested the presence of discrete inheritable units in nature. He studied inheritance patterns in 8000 varieties, tracking the transfer of identifiable physical characteristics passed down from the parent plants to next generations. Almost 50 years later Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene.” After almost another 50 years Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins use X-ray crystallography to try to detect these inheritable units, leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-stranded helix DNA molecule.

Today we hear references to genes every day, but the science is still developing. Regardless of that, many people know just enough about genetics and inherited traits to use it as an easy excuse for any fault they don’t want to correct. Genes represent the hand nature has dealt us, and there is nothing we can do to change them – no diet, no exercise, no vitamin, nothing.

This point was made in a book I recently read, The Cure for Everything by Timothy Caulfield. In the introduction to the chapter about genes as health factors, he lists several headlines telling not of the scientific advances in the field, but of how the field has become popularized by promising cures for these immutable factors through some type of gene technology. (These are another variant of the news philosophy that I described back in early March when I wrote Stoking the Fear.)

His list of popular headlines included:

• Is Laziness Gene to Blame for Couch Potatoes?
• The God Gene, Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?
• Always Lost? : It May Be in Your Genes
• Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes
• Marriage Problems?: Husband’s Genes May Be the Problem
• Genes May Affect Popularity, Researchers Say.

Since the book was published in 2012, I thought I could go on line and add to the list of handy  excuses:

• Pity the poor murderer, his genes made him do it
• "Mom gene" discovered in mice: Do you have it?
• "Binge-drinking gene" discovered
• Intelligence genes discovered by scientists
• Sweet-tooth Gene Discovered
• Obesity gene Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
• Anxiety, Aggression Gene Discovered

So if you are not too bright, overweight due to your sweet tooth, tend to binge drink, are lazy, unfaithful to your spouse, a bad parent, unpopular and may be prone to anxiety or aggression or even more brutal forms of violence, not to worry. It's not your fault; you're not responsible. You can blame it all on your genes, sit back and wait for science to fix you! Of course if the headline, “First 'placebo gene' discovered” applies to you, you don’t even have to wait. With your increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, you can look up the first charlatan or natural medicine guru selling a sham treatment or a miracle cure and talk your self into getting better.

Gene research is important and may lead to some significant progress toward real cures, but so far all these somewhat outrageous health-related headlines are just a distraction. Responsible people don’t go looking for easy excuses.

Are People Getting Dumber?

It might be easy to pass off all the examples I give of poor choices by saying that people are just not as intelligent as they used to be.  College entrance scores on the SAT have been trending downward since the 1970s.  The time it takes to earn a college degree, once assumed to be four years, now is over five.  Last year the authors of Academically Adrift reported that nearly half of college students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during their first two years.  We frequently hear about kids graduating from high school unable to read or do simple arithmetic without a calculator.  The government finds it necessary to pass consumer protection laws to combat the "deceptive" practices of businesses and advertisers.  And how else would you explain more than 20,000 children hurt each year in shopping-cart incidents? – Shopping carts!

Instead there is good evidence that people are actually getting smarter from one generation to the next.  It’s called the Flynn Effect.  As summarized in “Explaining the Flynn Effect” a paper by Jariel Rendell: “In the United States between 1932 and 1978, mean IQ scores rose 13.8 points, or approximately 0.33 points each year (Flynn, 1984), and IQ scores continued to increase at least into the mid 1990s (Rowe & Rodgers, 2002).”

Despite ongoing research, the reasons for the increase in pure intelligence are unclear, and opinions vary considerably.  Some think that, having gotten more exposure to these types of tests in recent years, Americans are just getting better at test taking.  Some say that people today have an advantage from the technological advancements and have developed the ability to think more abstractly.  Others attribute the improvement to better nutrition.

So if everyone is getting smarter, why do so many agree that America is headed in the wrong direction, going to hell in a hand basket?  One theory is that poor time management in a rushed society leads to poor results despite increased intelligence.  My contention, which I think my previous posts bear out, is that it has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather with the misapplication of that intelligence due to incorrect assumptions promoted by our society.  This leads to problematic behavior in the areas of Critical Thinking, Perspective, Discipline, Economic Understanding, and Responsibility.  It’s a behavior problem when intelligent people make poor choices.

It’s incorrect to write poor choices off as the result of stupid people doing stupid things.  Look at the current news.  No one can say John Edwards is not intelligent.  He earned multiple degrees and didn’t just squeak by, graduating with honors.  He had a successful law practice before being elected to the Senate.  Now he is at risk of going to prison.  Haven’t we all known intelligent people who made bad decisions:  doctors who continued to smoke long after the dangers were well-known; people who spent money they didn’t have to impress others; teachers and priests seducing young people?  The problems we face as a nation are related to behavior, not intelligence.  The sooner we learn this, the quicker solutions will come.