INTELLIGENCE BEGINS IN THE WOMB

To the Editors of the Crimson:

In the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly a number of members of the Harvard faculty have praised the scientific merit of Herrnstein's I.Q. article. A brief comment: At this time, there is no proper, scientific basis for disentangling the relative contributions of heredity and environment to intelligence. A large body of data shows that the nutrition of the fetus and young infant is very important in determining its later mental and physical traits. The structure of our health care delivery system is such that poor mothers and their infants, in general, get inadequate pre-natal and peri-natal care. Many more infants of poor mothers than of well-to-do mothers are stillborn, born prematurely, ill, or prone to peri-natal infections. After birth, many of them continue not to get proper food and medical care. No one can assess their genetic potential, because their pre-natal and peri-natal environments preclude its expression and may do so irreversibly. It is a gross over-simplification to think of the infant at birth as the product of its genes. By that time, it has spent the nine developmentally most crucial months of its life in an environment that is not nearly as sheltered from the social impact of the outside world as some seem to think. As long as the social discrepancies in our society are reflected in, the health care and nutrition of our pregnant women, our infants at birth already bear the marks of the social environment into which they are born. Ruth Hubbard   Lecturer on Biology