The Race-Intelligence Controversy: A Sociological Approach II — 'External' Factors

As I argued in the predecessor to this paper (referred to below as 'Part I'),1 one cannot understand the recent phase of the race-intelligence controversy without considering the professional backgrounds and disciplinary allegiances of the protagonists. In general, those adopting the hereditarian position have been either behaviourist psychologists or scientists from biologically-oriented research areas. The environmentalists, in contrast, tend to come from the social sciences (see Table 1).2 According to such a 'boundary dispute' hypothesis, then, hereditarians and environmentalists differentially recruit their adherents from, respectively, the disciplines of the biological and the social sciences. This is because membership of either discipline implies certain vested interests in the explanatory success of that discipline, as well as a particular way of conceptualizing (human) behaviour. Nevertheless I also argued the insufficiency of the boundary-dispute hypothesis on the grounds that several of the prominent environmentalists are biologists, and that two of the hereditarians were originally trained in 'soft' and/or environmentalist research traditions. Given the controversy's political dimension, and the facts that the hereditarian and environmentalist positions are (a) constructed upon such different assumptions, and (b) can be characterized in terms of Mannheim's distinction between 'natural-law' and 'conservative' styles (as shown in Part 1), it is reasonable to ask to what extent hereditarianism and environmentalism can be considered as scientific reflections of contrasting 'world-views'. In order to pursue this possibility, one would ideally like to have detailed biographical information about the major disputants. Because of the contemporary