What this summary of and expansion upon behavior genetics indicates is that, although parents may have a relatively low IQ or suffer from serious mental vulnerabilities factors that may place them in the category of the poor-their children will not necessarily inherit these negative characteristics. They may inherit them to a lesser degree or may simply inherit a different configuration of characteristics altogether. Given an appropriate enviromnent, such children can move out of poverty, and as many do so as do not. Therefore, it is quite unlikely that on the basis of genetic "inferiority" alone, multiple generations within a family will remain trapped in poverty. In fact, multiple generations of the same family are snore likely to remain trapped in poverty because of environmental rather than personal inferiority factors.

For instance, some people live in rural areas and small towns that, for decades and even centuries, have experienced little economic development, in part because their region depends on a single industry with low wages (C.M. Duncan, 1996). Other rural communities are relatively isolated from the rest of the country. Unless these people move away, all members of their families will remain poor for several generations. Moreover, this intergenerational poverty may contribute to innate 18 but not hereditary intellectual deficits via malnutrition of pregnant women and their small children -a phenomenon occurring on a large scale in various parts of the world. Currently, as inner cities become poorer and more socially isolated, there is the reasonable fear that a greater proportion of youth than before will remain locked in the same poverty they were brought up in. This is because there are no opportunities available at the educational and economic levels, and these individuals are cut off from persons who could help them find jobs. Their poverty has little to do with their genes.

Entire societies lack the means, the political will, or even the physical environment to prosper, and 90 percent of their populations may be poor, as described in Chapter 1. It would certainly be foolish to conclude that 90 percent of these societies' citizens are congenitally mentally delayed or genetically inferior. Iraq, for instance, provides a recent and drastic example of a country's rapid descent into poverty among the general population. The sanctions imposed against Iraq by the United Nations, and the fact that Iraqis are cheated by a regime that builds palaces and rebuilds an expensive army instead of feeding its people, have contributed to creating a nation of indigents. It would certainly be preposterous to conclude that Iraqis have suddenly lost their IQ and other abilities and that their genes have deteriorated!

What is important to understand is that the development of positive characteristics that are partly genetic, such as a normal IQ and a prosocial personality, requires a favorable environment (see Bronfenbrenner, 1996). An analogy is the proverbial perfect seed falling into barren soil with no rainfall and no fertilizer. Basically, a child's genetic endowment is akin to a seed: it will flower only when there is adequate nutrition, a minimum of social and affective stimulation, opportunities to learn, and a reasonably safe environment. In contrast, poor nutrition, lack of social and learning stimulation, overcrowding, noise, pollution, detrimental media exposure, and a high rate of dangerous incidents and illegal activities in the neighborhood substantially diminish the chances that a child's positive inheritance will be actualized. In fact, such environments, typical of poor neighborhoods, often stunt intellectual, affective, and moral growth.

Poverty as a multifaceted environment severely limits the actualization of abilities, good character, normal IQ, and motivation; it limits the range of available opportunities (O'Connor and Rutter, 1996). Therefore, even though it is not an acceptable situation, it makes sense that the IQs of children who have spent all their lives in poverty are lower than nonpoor children's IQs or than that of disadvantaged children living in a nonpoor neighborhood which provides them with compensatory resources (Crane, 1994; Ogbu, 1978). What is rather amazing is that at least half of the children in poverty environments overcome their disadvantages. But there is more to this line of reasoning than meets the eye. A deprived, unstimulating, and even criminogenic environment produces another negative effect: it exacerbates a child's negative predispositions. Let's again take the example of aggressiveness, which is partly genetic, and imagine a child predisposed to aggressiveness born into a family where the parents fight constantly, are irritable and harsh because of daily stressors, are too busy making ends meet and don't supervise him. He is allowed to watch violent television programs, and is left to roam a neighborhood where kids fight and engage in criminal activities. The child also attends school with a large number of aggressive peers. This child, already predisposed to aggression, is "seeded" into an environment that encourages his aggressive tendencies at every turn or, at the very least, does nothing to control them. In fact, such an environment contributes to the development of aggressive behavior even in children who have no predisposition to it: they simply learn it or are pressured into it by peers.

What this example illustrates is the principle that a detrimental environment prevents or, at the very least, discourages the development of socially valued characteristics such as academic abilities, good work habits, and prosociability. Instead, it encourages the development of negative traits, such as impulsivity, aggressiveness, low attention span, laziness, and "attitudes" against authority. The combination of positive characteristics that are never actualized and negative characteristics that are encouraged by the environrnent may well result in a low-IQ youth who is impulsive, aggressive, not interested in school, who fights, joins a gang, gets a criminal record, has a child whom he can't support, and so on. And if these negative chains of events are multiplied by the number of inhabitants who may be at risk, we can understand how some poor neighborhoods have a concentration of low IQ persons and school dropouts, as well as elevated rates of teenage childbearing, delinquency, criminality, unemployment, and hostile attitudes against authority and education.

One also has to consider that, at the genetic level, there are children who have inherited a configuration of good genes which makes them resilient to many adversities in their environments and allows them to escape poverty more easily than others (Garmezy and Masten, 1994). A sunny temperament may shield such children from quarrelsome siblings, aggressive peers, and material deprivation (see Tschann et al., 1996). That same easy temperament may even get them to be noticed favorably by one adult, whether a parent, a relative, or a teacher. The relationship then becomes a resource that helps the child overcome some or all of the negative aspects of his or her environment. 19 Traits that are not valued in our society, such as shyness, may also serve a protective function20 against the development of behavioral problems in criminogenic areas or families.21 In contrast, an outgoing and independent child (traits that are valued in North America) may be propelled into socializing with criminogenic elements in his or her district, thus placing the child at risk.

In addition, a high IQ, although it might be somewhat dampened by poverty, combined with a curious and sunny predisposition, may help a child cope, solve problems, remain out of trouble, persist in school, and acquire work habits that lead to a well-remunerated job and subsequent exit out of poverty. In contrast, small children who have difficult personality characteristics react more stressfully to noise, overcrowding, and even the birth of a sibling (Wachs, 1987). When older, these same children are more vulnerable to the stressors of poverty (Elder, Caspi, and Nguyen, 1994), thus more likely to remain disadvantaged into adulthood.

There are other environmental reasons why many children do get out of poverty, even though they may never become affluent. For one, not all poor families are dysfunctional and not all live in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Even very dysfunctional families in deprived neighborhoods may have one member who is competent and who nurtures the child. Second, some children may attend an early preschool program that compensates to some extent for the deprived -home and neighborhood environments (Campbell and Ramey, 1994). Finally, few children spend their entire lives in poverty; as their family's economic condition improves, so do their lives and family environment. They may, however, if they belong to a minority group, remain locked within inner-city poverty so that their new familial advantage is counterbalanced by the perpetuation of neighborhood deficits.

POVERTY CREATES INFERIORITY

The question that some people may now raise is this: obviously, not all poor people have low IQs, are deviant or criminal, or produce babies at age fourteen. Does this not mean that those who do are inferior? Here as well, the answer is no and lies in the same interaction between environment and genetics described above. To begin with, the quality of the gene pool in a population does not change within a twenty-five year span, which is the time it has taken for- the spectacular rise in single parenting. 22 Nor can the gene pool have deteriorated during the tern to twenty years during which all manners of negative outcomes among the poor have increased, including violent delinquency. Therefore, one has to look to environmental factors for an answer to this apparent "inferiority."

The point is that poverty creates individuals who think, behave, and even look as if they were genetically inferior. Many may indeed be constitutionally disadvantaged, but the reason lies in povertyrelated prenatal risks and early infancy malnutrition, as well as trauma and deprivation. Given a favorable environment, such persons' children will not inherit this constitutional disadvantage because it is not genetic but is environmentally caused. Even though most poor people will never be affluent, some of their children or grandchildren will be. Moreover, subnormal individuals are not as likely to reproduce themselves; therefore their genes are not perpetuated.

One must establish a distinction between (1) poverty that is created or perpetuated by severely flawed genetic characteristics that are transmitted from generation to generation to a certain proportion of children in each generation (but not to all); (2) poverty perpetuated by lower abilities resulting from a lack of opportunities to actualize positive potential, and from environmental deficits that encourage the development of negative behaviors; and (3) the learning by each deprived generation of behaviors conducive to remaining in poverty, maintaining abilities at their lowest common denominator, and engaging in deviant behaviors.

As pointed out earlier, outcome (1) above is the least common as there are very few families that are consistently inferior genetically over several generations, whether in terms of a subnormal IQ or other severe mental or psychiatric deficits. (At the other end of the spectrum, the correlate is that there are few families that are consistently superior: some of their members may be, but not all.) Despite a great deal of assortative mating, there is too much geographic mobility in a large urban society for the formation of a solid block of inferior genes. This would require that individuals consistently intermarry and remain poor as a result of their inherited deficiencies. Moreover, both at the superior and inferior ends of the spectrum of abilities, including IQ, there are too many genetic permutations possible and too many combinations of competencies possible, as well as too many environmental influences to produce a persistent pattern of intergenerational heredity. The only viable conclusion is that poverty creates inferiority and perpetuates it once it has been created.