Term Papers on Biological Determinism

Term Paper Title	Biological Determinism
# of Words	2739
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	10.96

Biological Determinism

1.      According to the author of  the article "All in the Genes?", there is no
intrinsic causality between genetics and intelligence. The author analyses
different aspects of  biological determinism, and supplies many examples, which
illustrate  aspects of this problem  that are being discussed since  the time
when these ideas became popular. He does not agree with  biological determinist
that the intellectual performance of  a person depends on genes inherited from
his parents. There are a lot of different theories about intellectual
capabilities. All these theories reflect different points of views, depending on
the period of time the authors of these theories lived.
     The author argues for  the theory that in the nineteenth  century ,
artificial barriers in social hierarchy prevented people from achieving higher
intellectual performance. In the end of XX century, in most places these
barriers were removed by the democratic processes, and nothing artificial can
stand between the natural sorting process and social status of the people. These
changes can not be considered as historical because the age of democracy is just
two hundred years , and the time when inequality between classes and between
people was a natural situation is almost as long as the history of the world .
     The author insists that there is no connection between environmental
differences and genetics. In support of his idea the author state that any
Canadian student can perform better in mathematics than some ancient professors
of mathematics. The author comes to the conclusion that changes in a cultural
environment are the main factor that determines level of intellectual
performance, not inherited combination of parent's genes .    He argues that
genetic differences that appear in one environment may easily disappear in
another. A  theory that  twins were raised in  different social conditions will
have the same level of intellectual performance because  identical genetics
constitution was used by the ideologist of biological determinism. The author
rejects this theory because from his point of view, all these cases cannot be
considered as always reliable on  a close look, in  most cases,  twins were
raised by the members of the same family or in other words, not in a diametrical
opposite level of society. The author believes that  there is no convincing
measure of the role of genes in influencing human behavioural variation.
     During the argumentation of questions of biological determinism, the
author supports his idea with numerous examples. He gives examples of supporters
of bio determinism and outlines that these examples are not reliable. One of the
fallacies of biological determinism is the result of  IQ testing. According to
some scientist only 20% of performance depend on environment and other 80%
depend on genetic variations. The author state that this is completely
fallacious  because there is  no connection  between the variation  that can be
ascribed as genetic differences and whether an  IQ performance was affected by
environment and by how much.   IQ measures  little more than a person' s ability
to take a test. Scores increase dramatically as a person is trained or
familiarised with a test. It means that an IQ  level does not depend on the
intellectual abilities of parents but on the manner of studying and preparation
that can be considered as environmental changes.
     For the author, there is a casual relationship between genetic and
environmental differences. He gives us an example of a fruitflies with more
bristles under the wing on the left  side than on the right side. He says that
these differences are caused  by random chances of cell during  growth and
development and that every organism is a unique combination of genes and
environmental random chances. Another fallacy can be illustrated by the
statement provided by the author, which is built on the ideology of biological
determinism: ". . . if  most of the variation in, say, intelligence among
individual...

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