7 - Conclusion

Summary

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

At the end of this book many a reader may feel that my approach should have been more balanced. Even if I am right in pointing out many weaknesses of environmentalist criticisms of heritability, doesn't fair scholarship require that problematic aspects of hereditarianism be addressed as well? Surely, bad arguments cannot be a “privilege” of one side in the debate.

In my defense, let me remind you that my goal was not to offer a comprehensive discussion of the nature–nurture problem. I focused just on a small segment of that controversy. As a philosopher of science, I found it interesting to scrutinize very general methodological arguments that are often used to short-circuit the debate in the attempt to undermine one of the rival positions, without going into empirical details at all. And precisely here is the source of the disparity. It is only environmentalists who want to use this kind of methodological shortcut. Hereditarians are quite happy to let the empirical evidence decide the matter. So the imbalance of my approach is the result of an existing asymmetry, not of my partiality.

Whereas methodological arguments purported to prove that heritability claims are meaningless, confusing, or causally uninterpretable, a completely opposite criticism is that they are trivial.