Nelson Rockefeller would have wound up pumping gas was pretty close to

zero.
If we live in a meritocracy, in which each person can rise to the status
allowed by his or her innate capacities, how do we explain this passage of
social power from parent to offspring? Are we really just back in an old
aristocratic situation? The naturalistic explanation is to say that not only do
we differ in our innate capacities but that these innate capacities are
themselves transmitted from generation to generation biologically. That is to
say, they are in our genes. The original social and economic notion of
inheritance has been turned into biological inheritance. But even the claim
that the intrinsic ability to win success is inherited in the genes is not
sufficient to justify an unequal society. After all, we might assert that there
ought not to be any particular relationship between what one can accomplish
and what social and psychic rewards are given. We might give the same
material and psychic rewards to house painters and picture painters, to
surgeons and to barbers, to professors who give lectures, and to the janitors
who come in and clean up the classroom afterward. We might create a
society on whose banners are inscribed, "From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need. "
To meet this objection to an unequal society there has been developed a
biological theory of human nature that says that while the differences
between us are in our genes, there are certain inborn similarities among us
all. These similarities of human nature guarantee that differences in ability
will be converted into differences in status, that society is naturally
hierarchical, and that a society of equal reward and status is biologically
impossible. We might pass laws requiring such equality, but the moment the
vigilance of the state was relaxed we would return to "doing what comes
naturally. "
These three ideas-that we differ in fundamental abilities because of innate
differences, that those innate differences are biologically inherited, and that
human nature guarantees the formation of a hierarchical society-when taken
together, form what we can call the ideology of biological determinism.
The idea that blood will tell was not invented by biologists. It is a dominant
theme of nineteenth-century literature, and one can hardly appreciate the
most praised and popular writers of the last century without seeing how a