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| Death | 3 May 2008 |
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Biography
Jerome Edwin "Jerry" Hirsch (September 20, 1922 in New York City–May 3, 2008 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American geneticist known for his pioneering work in behavior genetics, and for his advocacy for social justice. He has been described as "the pioneer who brought quantitative genetic analysis to the study of behavior."
Biography
Hirsch began his interest in behavior genetics in the 1950s, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Edward C. Tolman and Robert Tryon. From 1956 to 1960, he was an assistant professor at Columbia University, where he worked alongside Theodosius Dobzhansky. He later conducted multiple influential studies on the genetic origins of behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster, Dobzhansky's favorite species. He subsequently continued this research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he became an associate professor of psychology and zoology in 1960. He became a full professor of psychology there in 1963, of zoology in 1966, and of ecology, ethology, and evolution in 1976. He retired from the University of Illinois in 1993, and remained an active emeritus professor there until 2004.
Criticism of hereditarians
Hirsch was an early and vocal critic of the work of Arthur Jensen, who argued that group differences in educational ability were heritable. Hirsch argued that Jensen's work was a misuse and misrepresentation of behavior genetics. In the mid-1960s, William Shockley tried to convince Hirsch to support his views on the heritability of racial differences in IQ. This attempt was unsuccessful, and Hirsch subsequently called the nature-nurture debate a "pseudo-question".