Prologue

While Lashley established his political point of view early in his career, and was never able or willing to shake it, the significance of maintaining such beliefs did change radically during the first half of the century. In the first few decades, through the 1920s, racist beliefs, even virulently racist, would hardly have been surprising. Racism was the expected and constant concomitant of the study of human biology, psychology, and anthropology. By the 1930s, however, this accepted norm had begun to erode; and by the early 1940s, for a variety of reasons, an atmosphere of antiracism had arisen in the biological and social sciences. It had become distinctly unfashionable to express racist views publicly or in one's science; life scientists were trying furiously to distance themselves from the notion that certain races were inferior to others.

In this chapter I will argue that even amid this shift toward the apolitical, the hereditarian assumptions that historically had always marked scientific studies of human differences persisted even after 1940. Lashley's work, particularly his participation in the NRC Committee on Human Heredity and his late interest in behavior genetics, conforms to this broader trend: a surface of neutrality, undergirded by an unshaken belief in the power of heredity.