Biological_Determinism

Biological Determinism The ideology of biological determinism has often been misconstrued by scholars, scientists, philosophers, and the average uninformed individual. As time goes on, the understanding of biological determinism gets better and better. Richard Lewontin does an excellent job in presenting examples of ideology of biological determinism in his book “It Ain’t Necessarily So; The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions”. Lewontin’s book provides different examples of beliefs about biological determinism, including the ideology of smaller heads and the relation of brain size and the ideology of IQ tests. In the beginning of Lewontin’s book, he discusses different ideologies. One quite interesting ideology was the subject of cranial capacities, and how they are limited. Lewontin says, “Thus one should be able, by the appropriate physical measurements, to characterize the mental, moral, and social attributes of individuals and groups”. What people thought was the size of one’s head determines that person’s mental capacity. As Lewontin later points out, there is a couple of problems with this theory. First, there is no difference in brain size or shape between races, classes, or sexes that are “not the simple consequence of different body size, nor is there any correlation between brain size and intelligence, size, one, lewontin, shape, iq, ideology, determinism, brain, biological, person, mental, book, tests, moral, examples, different, time, thus, things, theory, testing, someone, scientists, rectitude, one’s, nor, necessarily, make, lewontin’s, intelligent, individual, ideologies, historically, heads, head, goes, genes, exam, discusses, culturally, cranial, capacity, between, better, been, attributes, acquisitiveness, about, work, words