Recomendaciones en materia de transparencia pasiva

Arbitrary agglomeration carries reification a step further, lumping together many different reified interactions as if they were all exemplars of the one character. Thus aggression becomes the term used to describe processes as disparate as a man abusing his lover or child, fights between football fans, strikers resisting police, racist attacks on ethnic minorities, and civil and national wars. Agglomeration proceeds by assuming each of these social processes to be merely a reified manifestation of some unitary underlying property of the individuals,

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so that identical biological mechanisms are involved in, or even cause, each. This is well illustrated by a research paper, published in Science in 1993, by a team led by Han Brunner. 20 It described a Dutch family (pedigree is the technical term), some of whose menfolk were reported as being abnormally violent; in particular, eight men 'living in different parts of the country at different times' across three generations showed an 'abnormal behavioural phenotype'. The types of behaviour included 'aggressive outbursts, arson, attempted rape and exhibitionism'. Can such widely differing types of behaviour, described so baldly as to isolate them from their social context, legitimately be subsumed under the single heading of aggression? It is unlikely that such an assertion, if made in the context of a study of non-human animal behaviour, would pass muster (I certainly couldn't get away with reporting a study involving such varied behaviour in eight chicks!). Yet Brunner's paper was published in one of the world's most prestigious journals, with considerable attendant publicity. (Parenthetically, it is

interesting how many of these rather sensationalist and often scientifically dubious papers claiming the identification of specific genebased causes for human problems have been published in Science. The journal's rival, Nature, has been much more circumspect.)

The paper attracted much attention by reporting that each of these 'violent' individuals also carries a mutation in the gene coding for the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAOA) which, among other functions, is associated with the metabolism of a particular neurotransmitter and is believed to be site of action of a number of psychotropic drugs. Could this mutation then be the 'cause' of the reported violence? Brunner himself subsequently disclaimed the direct link, and indeed, dissociated himself from the public claims that his group had identified a 'gene for aggression', claiming that this was merely a journalistic distortion. 21 Yet the claim is now widely cited in the research literature, in which what Brunner's paper described in its title as 'abnormal' now becomes 'aggressive' behaviour. Thus a paper whose title commenced with these two words, describing mice lacking the monoamine oxidase A enzyme, appeared in Science two years after the Brunner paper. The authors, a primarily French group headed by Olivier Cases, described the mouse pups as showing 'trembling, difficulty in righting,

and fearfulness . . . frantic running and falling over . . . [disturbed] sleep . . . propensity to bite the experimenter . . . hunched posture . . .'. 22 Of all these features of disturbed development, the authors chose to include only 'aggression' in their paper's title, and to conclude their account by claiming that these results support 'the idea that the particularly aggressive behavior of the few known human males lacking MAOA . . . is a more direct consequence of MAO deficiency'. When I pointed out, in a letter to Science, that what the Cases paper headlined as aggression was a minor and scarcely surprising aspect of this grossly disturbed developmental pattern, one of the authors telephoned me to explain that they had highlighted aggression this way because it seemed the best way of drawing attention to their results.

More disturbingly, this type of evidence, slight though it may seem, has become part of the arsenal of argument employed, for example, by the US Federal Violence Initiative, aimed at identifying inner city children regarded as 'at risk' of becoming violent in later life as a result of predisposing biochemical or genetic factors. This programme, proposed originally by the then director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, Frederick Goodwin, originally ran into a hostile barrage of publicity over its

potentially racist overtones, with its repeated coded references to 'high-impact inner city' youth. Not long afterwards Goodwin left his directorship, and plans to hold a meeting to discuss his proposals were several times abandoned. 23 None the less, parts of the research programme have been

implemented in the USA, particularly in Chicago. 24

As with each step in the reductionist cascade I am describing, the problem does not lie in the fact that, as researchers, within the methodology available to us, we need to classify -- to group together different types of observation as having something in common. These are not inevitably illegitimate steps, as I argued previously in terms of my own studies of chick pecking as exemplifying memory. Science seems often to proceed by alternately grouping together different phenomena as aspects of the same (lumping) and recognizing differences between them (splitting). However, lumping arson and exhibitionism together in the same category as both examples of the

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'natural kind' called 'violence' is not likely to make much sense to either a criminologist or a judge and jury in court.

To get round this difficulty, some researchers have recently relabelled such cases so that they no longer appear as examples of 'violence', but of a different category, of 'antisocial behaviour' now also regarded as a natural kind. 25 Far from solving the problem, such relabelling only makes it worse. Just as

agglomeration lumps together disparate activities, so the identical act may be regarded as socially acceptable or unacceptable depending on the circumstances in which it is carried out. Bombing a government building in enemy territory if you are a pilot and your nation is at war is socially

praiseworthy; on the other hand, if you are a member of the society whose buildings you bomb you are guilty of the antisocial behaviour called terrorism. Contrast the medals given to US pilots during the Gulf War with the criminal charges against the bombers of the Federal office building in Oklahoma City. Perhaps the clearest-cut example comes from an episode in Northern Ireland in 1990. A British soldier, Lee Clegg, was on duty at an army checkpoint when a stolen car crashed through the

roadblock. Private Clegg lifted his rifle and shot dead one of the occupants of the car, a teenage girl who had been joyriding. He was charged, and convicted of murder, perhaps the ultimate in antisocial behaviour. The army, supported vociferously by the English tabloid press, was outraged and waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign for his release and reinstatement. He was, they argued, doing his duty, the car might after all have held IRA terrorists, not joyriding teenagers -- in which case

he might even have been given a medal. By 1997 he had been promoted to lance-corporal, and was seeking compensation for wrongful arrest and imprisonment. So the identical act can be defined either as socially approved or antisocial, depending now not on the act itself but on the perception of those who observe it. How can this conceivably form the basis for a biological, individually based

categorization, in which we look for unusual genes for neurotransmitter enzymes in Lee Clegg's brain to explain what has happened? Antisocial behaviour is clearly not a natural kind.

-283- IMPROPER QUANTIFICATION

Improper quantification argues that reified and agglomerated characters can be given numerical values. If a person is violent, or intelligent, one can ask how violent, how intelligent, in comparison with other people. This assumption, that any phenomenon can be measured and scored, reflects the belief, to which I have already referred, that to mathematicize something is in some way to capture and control it. The best-known example is the use of the IQ (intelligence quotient) scale to describe and measure intelligence. Along with many others, I have written previously about the history of this scale and some of the fallacies embedded within its use, and there is no need to repeat these arguments in detail here. 26 The first steps involve reifications and agglomerations which parallel those described above for

violence. 'Intelligent behaviour', essentially an interactive process between an individual and others, or with the social, living and inanimate worlds, becomes fixed as a unitary character. Many different examples of such behaviour are then all taken to be manifestations of something called, as if finally to freeze dynamics into statics, 'crystallized intelligence', and given a special symbol, g, originally introduced by the psychologist Charles Spearman in the 1920s (is it only coincidence that this is also the symbol for one of the most hallowed of physical forces, that of gravity?). Tests are then devised to measure this inferred hidden constant. Subjects are asked a series of questions, supposedly not

dependent on school education, class or culture, but instead assessing underlying absolute skills, such as matching patterns or identifying logical sequences of numbers or words. The subject's score on these tests is then compared with that for the general population (or, for children, others of the same age group), and the resulting comparative figure is called the IQ. Of all the assumptions built into this process, for the moment I want to consider only one: the extraordinary belief that the multiple aspects of behaviour (even reified and agglomerated behaviour) that contribute to what we may recognize as intelligence -- speed and accuracy of responding to new information, skill at deriving meanings

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from ambiguous social situations, capacity to innovate in novel environments, and many others as well -- can all be reduced to a single number, so that the entire human population can be ranked by it, just as they might be if we were to line them all up by height.

Of course, to achieve this type of mathematical reduction it is necessary to discount many of these richly interacting human capacities, despite the fact that to most people they would seem to be among the most salient aspects of what is called intelligence. Instead, such psychometricians retreat into a private world inhabited only by like-minded devotees of the art of counting. Indeed, they find it difficult to relate to other brain and behavioural scientists, who mostly look askance at psychometry's commitment to arbitrary numerology. (In practice this means that the only other discipline to which they can relate, and with which psychometry has historically been linked, is a certain subarea of behaviour genetics. Indeed the two, psychometry and behaviour genetics, are the twin offspring of the

eugenic movements of the early twentieth century. 27 ) To see this cavalier rejection of anything other than the reduction of intelligence at its most arbitrary, one need go no further than the first chapter of Herrnstein and Murray The Bell Curve, which, faced with the voluminous critiques, from many different perspectives, of such reduction of intelligence to a single score, sweeps aside all opposition. Intelligence, they insist, is not to be confounded with talent, insight, creativity, or capacity to find or solve problems or resolve difficulties, any more than it has anything to do with musical, spatial, mathematical or kinaesthetic ability, sensitivity, charm or persuasiveness: 28

There is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ.

All standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this ability to some degree, but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately.

IQ scores match, to a first degree, whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligent or smart in ordinary language.

Thus intelligence is what intelligence tests measure and if other tests, constructed on different principles, fail to conform by providing a

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measure compatible with this unitary view of g, they are simply dismissed as being beneath consideration.