WANT to know how to make a homosexual? Hey presto, here鈥檚 a gene that will do
it. The causes of male aggression? It鈥檚 all in this potion of testosterone.
Brain damage alone will spawn serial killers. And schizophrenia? We鈥檝e got a
gene for that, as well.

Heard any of this before? You can hardly avoid it: it鈥檚 the litany of a band
of magicians who wander the mass media, masquerading as popularisers of science.
I see them daily claiming to reveal wondrous secrets that explain all the
mysteries of the psyche. But what they do relies on the same trick: reducing the
complexities of human activities and experience to relatively simple, apparently
straightforward biological mechanisms. The true nature of this simplistic
intellectual manoeuvre is hidden, however, by the intoning of sacred spells from
the Gospel of Darwinism.

So far, these media psycho-scientists have had a comparatively easy ride.
Only now does Ken Richardson鈥檚 The Making of Intelligence confront the
area that has been most consistently subjected to today鈥檚 Darwinist
sleight-of-hand鈥攊ntelligence. And he promises to do for this piece of
received bio-evolutionary wisdom what Brian Goodwin did for biology with his
book on the evolution of complexity, How the Leopard Changed its Spots
(New 杏吧原创, 7 January 1995, p36, reviewed by Alan Rayner).

An axiom of much modern psychology is that intelligence is inherited. Claims
abound for the localisation of its supposedly measurable aspect, IQ, in genes
and areas of the brain.

If these conceptual conjuring tricks were laid on merely for the amusement of
other scientists, I think it might be appropriate to allow them to indulge
themselves in the confident knowledge that they would eventually grow out of
it. But, as Richardson argues in his book, notions of what intelligence is, and
how it comes about, lie at the core of political ideologies.

In a society increasingly devoted to the processing of information rather
than the manufacturing of goods, we regard intelligence, rather than strength or
stamina, as the measure of human worth. Assumptions about what intelligence is,
how it should be assessed and why there is such individual variation underpin
the value we assign to individuals and our debates on the future of
education.

Richardson investigates accounts of intelligence in a carefully and clearly
argued whodunnit. He ropes in all the usual suspects鈥擨Q tests, genetic
makeup, brain structures鈥攁nd looks at propositional logic and
鈥渃onnectionist鈥� computing as well in order to interrogate them closely on what
they can reveal about intelligence or whether they might be responsible for
it.

As in the best detective stories, not only are the obvious suspects found to
be innocent (of intelligence in this instance, not culpability), but we also
come to see how na茂ve we were to think that they could be implicated at all
in anything so exotic.

The huge qualitative differences between human beings and any other animal is
one of Richardson鈥檚 subplots. In such a short book he does not have room to
explore all the crucial differences language, for example, makes. He does manage
to touch on just about every claim of parallels between human and animal
intelligence, showing in the process how different we are from even the nearest
neighbour in the phylogenetic tree.

It is out of this qualitative leap from the animal brain to the human mind
that Richardson fashions his own definition of intelligence. He emphasises what
sociologists, anthropologists and even some social psychologists have always
taken for granted: that the essence of humanity is the interations between
people in groups. The problem of human organisations requires what he calls
鈥渟ensitivity to hyperstructural information鈥�, that is, knowledge of how
knowledge is organised, of how knowledge of knowledge organisation is organised,
and so on. Intelligence is a sophisticated creation of social interactions
embedded in particular cultures, not the genetic endowment of any
individual.

The ideological implications of this notion are enormous, and in The
Making of Intelligence Richardson shows clearly where he thinks they should
take us. He calls for a ban on all IQ testing, a call that has been echoing
through the corridors of psychology since the inception of IQ tests nearly a
century ago.

It is still not at all clear what IQ tests are actually measuring or what
they predict other than results of similar sorts of tests. By default,
intelligence has come to be defined as 鈥渨hat IQ tests measure鈥�. By banning them
it would require much more in-depth thinking about what we are actually looking
at when we are attempting to determine the complex influences of genes and
cultures processes on intelligence. Most importantly, it would require a
determined examination of what evolutionary theory really has to tell us about
being human.

The dominant trend in all evolution, as Darwin pointed out and as many
political thinkers from Prince Kropotkin onwards have emphasised, is cooperation
within a species. Species are actually defined as groups having productive
transactions between their members. In the complex societies that have
characterised human beings since their earliest days, survival depends on
effective interaction between people, and recognising this is what makes human
beings intelligent.

Richardson is certainly no slouch at one such transaction鈥攃ommunication鈥�
and his book is an intelligent look at the issues.

ONE day in 1989, Joseph Wesbecker stormed into his former workplace, the
Standard Gravure printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, and shot twenty of his
erstwhile colleagues with an AK47 assault rifle. Eight died and twelve were
seriously wounded.

Wesbecker, a disturbed and disgruntled man, had just begun a course of
Prozac. Five years later, Eli Lilly, the drug鈥檚 manufacturers, faced the
distressed ranks of the maimed victims and bereaved relatives to defend itself
against their claim that Prozac had been a direct cause of Webecker鈥檚 murders
and his suicide. By then, Prozac had acquired a reputation as a wonder drug,
able to heal many of the ailments of modern living.

In The Power to Harm, an account that weaves elegantly between the
drama of the small-town courtroom and the details of Wesbecker鈥檚 tragic life,
John Cornwell shows that the legal battle was fought over territory central to
today鈥檚 debates in neuroscience about the nature of consciousness and human
identity. Can the thoughts of human beings鈥攁nd the outrageous or benign
acts that follow thought鈥攂e reduced to biochemical processes? If our ideas
and intentions are merely a product of these processes, can we blame any potions
that alter those cognitions for what we do?

In the Louisville court, these profound questions were reduced to arguments
about the warning the manufacturer had placed on the bottle. But did Eli Lilly
have evidence that Prozac could make some depressed people agitated to the point
of violent despair? And if it did, should this have been made clear in the
information sent to doctors?

To me, the most horrific revelation of this important book was the extent to
which doctors, even specialists such as psychiatrists, rely upon the information
given to them by companies that not so many generations ago were selling
worthless nostrums. In my academic naivety, I thought that doctors understood
the science behind their prescriptions by reading the scholarly literature, not
a leaflet supplied by sales staff. As a social psychologist, I was aghast that
this man鈥攚ho had been brought up away from his family in an institution,
was twice divorced, had a teenage son who regularly exposed himself, and worked
double shifts on a dangerous machine in a factory riven by vicious infighting
and fear of redundancy鈥攕hould be given antidepressants as if his problems
were merely a product of his pharmacological make-up.

Curiously, in a thoughtful book that does not avoid the awkward questions,
Cornwell does not comment on the role of the psychiatrist as the dispenser of
chemical palliatives that deaden people to the social decay in which they have
to survive. But this was never raised in the court case around which The
Power to Harm is built. Instead, the legal parties intended to establish
whether or not Eli Lilly knew how Prozac produced its effects and whether those
effects were significant when Wesbecker had his AK47 repaired and drove down to
the printing plant.

Such a narrow focus allowed the detailed examination鈥攚hich lawyers and
scientists delight in鈥攖o develop to the stage where a legal point was
notched up when it was established that it is not possible, at present, to
determine directly the impact, in vivo, of Prozac on a particular individual鈥檚
serotonin receptors. This apparent ignorance could then be used to imply that
Eli Lilly is allowing a drug on the market without really knowing what it
does.

Indeed, the clash of cultures between law and science is one of the subplots
of this book. And perhaps the friction was aggravated by the fact that the
lawyers were civil lawyers gambling on the huge financial stakes, and the
scientists were neuroscientists, with all the hubris of a discipline that
believes it has made discoveries that are the 20th-century equivalent of seeing
Jupiter鈥檚 moons. For, although both professions grapple with central issues of
human agency, they approach the task from very different perspectives.

The law has to assume agency as a fact of life, otherwise no one would ever
be guilty. Those at the biochemical end of neuroscience have to put the issues
of agency on the back burner while they make their assays. It is only in this
type of legal battle that the chemical determinists are forced to defend their
stance on the issue of individual choice and intention. A sad revelation of this
book is that their stance does depend to some extent on who pays them. That
said, the scientists come out of this case with rather more of their ethics
intact than the lawyers.

In court, there was a bitter irony in the way experts were used. Take Eli
Lilly鈥檚 psychopharmacological experts. Their successes are based on the
conviction that the mind can be controlled by drugs and in some circumstances
should be; but in this case they argued that Wesbecker鈥檚 murderous rage was
solely the creation of his background and experience. As Cornwell emphasises,
they were never required to indicate why someone with symptoms which Prozac was
presumably intended to alleviate should be so immune to its effects. But then, a
legal liability case is not the setting in which to explore the growth in
workplace murder or discover where neurotransmitters stop and the mind begins.
It does, however, highlight the ways in which any discovery that illuminates
human actions and experiences may swiftly become part of the armoury we use to
control each other or to seek redress in law. Especially, it seems, if those
discoveries get close to what we consider peculiar to being human鈥攐ur
thoughts and feelings.

The case also encouraged a reductionist approach to science. The processes of
law regard complication and caveat as indications of weakness. They seek instead
to reduce science to primary and direct implications. Simple, preferably
concrete, mechanical models that do not require any abstract symbols to describe
them are greatly preferred. In the near-metaphysical world of neuroscience,
where receptors are part of a dynamic process that is itself embedded in a
shifting set of electrical and associated chemical states, the lawyer who talks
about impulses being controlled by the levels of serotonin at the synapses will
get a better hearing than the neuropharmacologist who describes this as a
dynamic system which we do not yet fully understand.

This means that the courts give life to simplistic generalisations about
human nature. Any research that can bolster such simplicities will be seized on
by whichever side sees it as supporting its case. So the reductionist view that
human thought and feelings can be explained away as molecular transactions will
always find a readier hearing by one side or the other in court.

Indeed, scientists who aspire to give expert testimony in court will find
that this book provides many useful warnings in its clear documentation of the
cut and thrust of the legal debate. Cornwell provides nail-biting examples of
how it is not the quality of the science that is being tested in court, but the
credibility of the person describing that science. But when the financial stakes
are so high, a trial by jury is a drama in which no one is invulnerable, not
even the judge.

With the pace and clarity that we might expect of this award-winning writer,
Cornwell shows how what began as a tragic culmination of a life distressingly
spiralling into despair, destroying the lives of others with it, became a
courtroom squabble over some of the most challenging questions thrown up by late
20th-century science. With a twist that any novelist would be proud to have
invented, the case was brought to a surprising conclusion. I do not think it
steals Cornwell鈥檚 considerable thunder to say that the conclusion of The
Power to Harm tells us little about the impact of serotonin uptake on
mental states, but much about age-old human vices.