Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The doctrine or school that regards heredity as more important than environmental influences in determining intelligence and behavior.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun the school of thought that
heredity is more important thanfactors such asenvironment in determiningintelligence andbehaviour
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the philosophical doctrine that heredity is more important than environment in determining intellectual growth
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Rowling... has simply updated feudal hereditarianism for the Mendelian Age.
Race and Inheritance elena maria vidal 2009
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He argues in favor of hereditarianism by attacking critics.
Heritability Downes, Stephen M. 2009
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Rowling... has simply updated feudal hereditarianism for the Mendelian Age.
Archive 2009-08-01 elena maria vidal 2009
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People were also already aware of the predictable demographic effects of differential reproduction between the ruling and “lower” classes, and of course hereditarianism with respect to human qualities that were perceived to be associated with socio-economic status was prevalent at the time.
Dr. West, meet Dr. Tinkle, Creationist eugenicist - The Panda's Thumb 2007
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In addition, the rise of eugenics was fed by traditional views on “bloodlines” and hereditarianism, Victorian ideas on class and aristocracy, conservative socio-economic theories, positivist philosophy, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, etc.
Dr. West, meet Dr. Tinkle, Creationist eugenicist - The Panda's Thumb 2007
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In his great work An American Dilemma (1944), Gunnar Myrdal praised the effort made by 'a handful of social and biological scientists 'to combat racism and hereditarianism — cultural prejudices once so pervasive that white intellectuals throughout the world had portrayed the inferiority of blacks as a self-evident truth.
Utopia (Limited) Gould, Stephen Jay 1983
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Consistent with this hereditarianism, Clark believed in the gradual upward tendency of humanity, slowly erected on the equivocal and painfully accumulated achievements of past struggles.
Pioneers of Alienation and 50s Sci-Fi at Thing Street Asylum 8
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Critics of sociobiology and hereditarianism over IQ included biologists, philosophers and many social scientists as well as many left-leaning political and social activists (See Gould (1981),
Heritability Downes, Stephen M. 2009
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Critics of the HGP saw it as placing “the seal of approval from mainstream science” on hereditarianism, favoring nature over nurture like the eugenics of the early to mid-20th century, to promote a “technological fix” for social problems (Allen
The Human Genome Project Gannett, Lisa 2008
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The same article's author wrote that "the fund's hereditarianism forms a kind of dogma that leads it to venture well away from strictly scientific topics to shape the larger debate over policy implications.
'The Bell Curve' and Its Sources Weyher, Harry F. 1995
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