Letters to the Editor

Friday, April 22, 2005

Big Green Bile

Sir—

Like The Review, I have some serious questions and qualms about the Student Assembly's latest bike program. Unfortunately, though, when asked by Frank Glaser '08 to clarify its position on the program, the Review passed on the opportunity.

In his letter, Glaser asks The Review to provide factual evidence for several claims in the original story. Glaser contests statements that "students see no particular reason to take care of the equipment" and that Assembly upperclassmen universally opposed the bike program, among other allegations. Although I have reservations about Glaser's wisdom in reintroducing the bike program, I admit that he has valid concerns about The Review's reporting.

Instead of dealing with Glaser's objections, however, the Review employed a derisive attack to sidestep the issue. Furthermore, The Review avoided admitting the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims in its initial article by chalking up the author's assertions to "common sense." This tactic is bogus, as common sense cannot possibly constitute a legitimate basis for making such broad claims about popular opinion. Carefully refuting Glaser's points would have been far more persuasive, and as a reader, I was left with the feeling that the Review does not have the stomach for substantive debate. If The Review wishes to continue to enjoy its national reputation for credible intellectual discourse, it must learn to cope with objections and, if necessary, admit failures and mistakes.

No matter how true The Review's writer's views may have been, it is not responsible to have an opinion article citing support "mainly based on common sense" in an area where "common sense" remains mostly ambiguous, nor is it responsible to include personal attacks in response to a reasonable letter to the Editor. Next time, I hope the Editor will take the time to thoroughly examine outside criticism and reply with a sincere intellectual response. That being said, The Review should have known better in the first place.

James Seidman '06
Hanover, NH

The Editors respond: We at The Review find it difficult to engage in "credible intellectual discourse" on a subject as trivial as Big Green Bikes. That being said, we have fired our Letters Editor in response to your complaints and will only make personal attacks regarding issues that matter.

A Lack of Faculty Leadership

Sir—

Jeff Hart's letter to the Editor in the March 11 issue is a clear statement of the greatest national importance. With the clarity that made Jeff such an excellent teacher and enjoyable faculty colleague, he focuses on the deceptions, double-talk, and spinning that have become habitual in Washington. Beyond the many current examples he provides, one could easily add others from the recent past. This isn't a problem of one party or one administration, but an increasingly dangerous national habit on both sides of the aisle.

I think, however, that there is a rarely noticed answer to Jeff's question: "why not just level with the American people about just what information is solid, what less so, and let them make up their mind?" Thinking back to when I joined the Dartmouth faculty (1967), politicians had the same temptations but there was one thing that limited excesses but is no longer effective. Frequently, the most visible counterweight to the "astonishing patterns of deception" Jeff describes wasn't the media (which often didn't initiate investigative reporting to reveal the gaps between truth and rhetoric). And it wasn't in Washington, Wall Street, or corporate boardrooms. Nope: it was right here on the Dartmouth campus as well as at other colleges and universities.

The big difference is that, in the old days, Professors were more interested in the public interest and what was happening in the "real world." That meant that—whether for partisan or altruistic reasons—faculty members would occasionally take strong positions on matters of government policies, attacking deception or flagrantly self-serving optimism about doubtful information. Students typically had diverse reactions: for any specific issue, some were ready to demonstrate, others preferred to stay out of activism. But whether left or right was the target, both faculty and students detached themselves from books or computers and actually talked to each other before making their views known. It wasn't always marching around the Green either. Sometimes there were letters to the editor or contacts with Congressmen or administrative officials.

Nowadays, my faculty colleagues seem wedded to their narrow professional interests (and their e-mail) to a far greater degree than in the past. During the period I'm remembering, the direct personal involvement had a warmth and richness that went well beyond partisanship and political preference. Whether talking with Jonathan Mirsky (probably the leading critic of the war in Vietnam on campus) or Dinesh D'Souza, I was part of a community in which debate and action on how our country should govern itself was combined with hard work in the classroom.

The problems with faculty leadership are not limited to matters of public policy. Over the last 50 years, more has been learned about human nature than was known in all prior history. Key findings include hominid evolution (from fossil evidence to theories of inclusive fitness), human genetics and decoding the human genome, cognitive neuroscience, innate features of our behavioral repertoire (including emotional displays and responses), group behavioral dynamics, etc. This isn't a full list, but it's enough to show that the biology of human behavior has been a central focus of many exceptional discoveries. Unfortunately, for many academicians it isn't politically correct to say the words "human nature," which might limit the prevailing belief in the "social construction of reality." And for undergraduates, the result is educational deception not unlike the doings in our nation's capitol.

The discoveries quickly summarized above mean that the traditional dichotomy of "nature versus nurture"—on which the rigid division of our college/university faculties into natural sciences and social sciences rests—is false. Simply false. Doubt it? Consider ADHD. Some cases are hereditary (we all know families in which for generations someone has been "hyperactive"), and some cases are due to lead toxicity. It's been suggested that the hereditary version may be related to a mutant dopamine D2 receptor gene (interfering with the function of the neurotransmitter dopamine). Environmental factors can have the same effect because lead is a toxic heavy metal that down-regulates dopamine. But some individuals may have both factors, which helps explain why ADHD is a "spectrum disorder" (that is, a matter of "more or less" and not an all or nothing "disease"). And American blacks are more vulnerable than whites to exposures to lead due to lactose intolerance.

The evidence says it's time to climb over the wall separating nature and nurture in our classrooms. Unfortunately, in their courses most social scientists have broadly refused to pay attention to such fundamental changes in our understanding of human nature and behavior. The few of us who work in this area (e.g., in my field, members of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences) can tell lots of stories. But a better case is illustrated by going back to the example of ADHD.

ADHD can apparently be heritable, but note that educators and social scientists never seem to ask why a serious "learning disability" would result from natural selection. Can the puzzle be solved? To explain why ADHD could be a genetic trait, all the associated behavioral/cognitive traits of ADHD need to be considered together. Briefly, these traits seem to include: stimulus hypersensitivity (what Ken Blum of San Antonio—who studies nutrition and genetics—examines in a book called Overload); "Reward Deficiency Syndrome" (again explained in Blum's work), special reliance on visual images for memory, and poor behavioral inhibition along with exceptionally high energy. Taken together, Blum has remarked that an individual with these traits was probably the most valuable member of the early hominid hunter-gatherer band. In short, ADHD is probably not a "serious learning disability" at all—rather, it seems to be a set of response patterns that's ill suited to a bureaucratic school environment. This matters greatly for those with the trait, who need to learn how to benefit from their special abilities.

My point? The crisis in a public understanding of science is most serious in the area of human nature and behavior because of the anti-scientific bias of academicians in the social sciences (who put pseudo-scientific "methodology" and their individual "theories" ahead of interdisciplinary cooperation). Few seem to consider that, especially when a Professor gets tenure, he/she has a moral responsibility to reach out to cooperate with others in order to understand and apply discoveries in the sciences to problems of human behavior and public policy.

The point is illustrated by an example in my own work after retiring from full-time teaching. Under a grant from the EPA, I began to study how pollution with either lead or manganese (either of which affects brain chemicals that control aggressive behavior) was associated with higher rates of violent crime. A chemical engineer in Natick, Mass. (the retired Vice President of a chemical engineering firm, not a professor) called me to ask if I knew about the effects of either hydrofluorosilic acid or sodium silicofluoride. As a result, for almost eight years Mike Coplan and I have jointly researched the side-effects of using these untested silicofluorides to treat public water supplies delivered to 45% of the American population. One thing leads to another: thanks to working with a brilliant scientist and friend who'll tell me to "shut up" if I make a mistake, I've found myself called an "expert witness" at hearings in State legislatures in California and Arkansas.

Based on such research, I was pleased to join two members of Dartmouth's Medical School faculty in teaching a course in the College's Human Biology Program. This course, with Professors Ann Flood and Harold Swartz, focused on making medical decisions when the scientific facts are in doubt (an issue our society's leaders will need to understand). Then to save a relatively small amount of money, President Wright abolished the entire Human Biology Program, thus destroying innovative and valuable courses linking the college and Medical School. Complaint didn't make a dent. Similarly, after my retirement, it was agreed I'd teach a course in the Department of Government (at less cost than an average Professor). I sought to continue giving an offering in my specialty ("Biology and Politics") that no one else could teach and many students appreciated. No dice, and while I enjoyed giving a Freshman seminar (on Machiavelli), that course involved teaching something the Department supposedly had to cover anyway after my retirement. Worst of all, the department chairman never bothered to explain why students shouldn't have a chance to take an approved course exploring the political importance of revolutionary scientific findings.

It may seem odd for a professor of political theory to study the behavioral effects of toxic chemicals in water supplies—and teach such things to undergraduates. But the biology of the brain teaches us not only something about human nature: it also explains how well-meaning public policies can harm innocent people, add to learning disabilities, or increase rates of violent crime. Excellence in education should make inter-disciplinary cooperation and exploration of new areas commonplace—and where appropriate, encourage participating in political dialogue and governmental decision-making. When the faculty doesn't go beyond narrow specialized subfields, students miss out. Worse, the bureaucrats and politicians get away with "astounding deception" because those with the time and perspective to ask the right questions are too busy scanning the web for another footnote.

Professor Roger D. Masters
Hanover, NH

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