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Chapter 4Disadvantage: The Genetic CaseIntroductionDisadvantaged children’s characteristic ways of dealing with theworld often appear inappropriate or, at least, ineffective, in social arenaswhere different values and behavior are found and encouraged. Coulddifferences here imply real deficits? Could we say that some varieties ofknowledge, skill and attitude are inherently better than others? With itsassertion that the underpinnings of disadvantage are ones of difference,and not of either environmental or genetic deficiency, the previousoverview has anticipated the answers to these questions. But meaningfulassertions require evidence, which is why in this chapter and the next I shall go into some detail about deficit arguments and their flaws. (Thisdiscussion will also frame the subsequent and more specific treatment ofthe relationship between language and disadvantage.) I turn first togenetic matters.An appropriate introduction here involves the realization that anymeaningful argument about group variation between black and whitepopulations, for instance must rest upon firm definitional footings.Over the last two or three generations, not only have politicalconsiderations made discussion of genetic differentiation disreputable,the scientific community has increasingly rejected the very idea ofdifferent human ‘races’ (see Aldhous, 2002; Ossorio & Duster, 2005).Schwartz’s (2001) characterization of race as a ‘biologically meaningless’concept may be taken as typical here. However, a recent special issueof Nature Genetics (2004) shows that the matter is hardly a settled one.Some contributors argue, like Schwartz, that human ‘racial’ categoriesare not discrete, and are essentially socially defined, but others claim thatobvious markers (skin color, hair formation and so on) suggest a smallnumber of basic classifications. Furthermore, developments in ourknowledge of matters at the level of DNA that is, at the level of thehuman genome make the picture more interesting still; for some criticalcomments about what might be termed the sociology of this new geneticresearch, see Carter (2007) and Tutton (2007). On this most elementaldimension, human beings show very little genetic variation. Ossorio and52