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Article: The heredity-environment controversy.
- Article from:
- The American Prospect
- Article date:
- September 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 The American Prospect, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When the U.S. Army launched America's first large-scale mental testing program in 1917, whites scored substantially higher than blacks. Biological determinists immediately cited these findings as evidence that whites had more innate ability than blacks, but cultural determinists quickly challenged this interpretation. Neither side had a convincing way of separating the effects of heredity from the effects of culture, so the debate was an empirical standoff.
After 1945, the horrors of the Holocaust made all genetic explanations of human differences politically suspect. Once the U.S. Supreme Court declared de jure racial segregation unconstitutional in 1954, ...