A Most Human Enterprise by Granberg Donald O.;Galliher John; & John F. Galliher

Author:Granberg, Donald O.;Galliher, John; & John F. Galliher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE FALLOUT

In a limited sense, a constructive response to the Burt scandal was that of Thomas Bouchard and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota, who launched a new series of twin studies.17 Based on better, for example, real, data from over 100 pairs of identical twins reared apart, they estimated the heritability of performance on IQ tests to be about 70 percent. (There are still questions about what “reared apart” means, as well as questions about the correlation of the homes.)

Given the fact that Burt’s estimate was fairly close to that, does this exonerate him from the allegation of committing academic fraud?

No, it does not. It has now been shown that Burt was an eccentric with an ax to grind. Trust in academic circles is a fragile thing. It starts at a high level, but it can plummet when there is strong evidence of malfeasance.

Eysenck laments the fact that in this controversy, people have taken on the role of adversary rather than the role of seeker after truth.18 However, one of the questions to ponder is why, with the evidence so clear and available, did no one notice it before 1974? Why did it take a psychologist, Leon Kamin, working outside his area of specialization, to discover that there were problems, to put it mildly, with Burt’s methods and his data? Kamin’s answer is instructive:

The heritability of IQ area was one in which all the investigators shared the same basic assumptions. I didn’t share those assumptions. I was able to see patterns in the data that they didn’t look for.19

Kamin also wrote about the “politics of intelligence testing as well as the science of intelligence testing. To pretend that the two are separate is either naïve or dissembling.”20 Kamin did a masterful job of tracing the spread of intelligence testing historically. In the U.S. the impact of Louis Terman of Stanford University, Henry Goddard of the Vineland Training School, and Robert Yerkes of Harvard University, was very important in paving the way for the widespread use of intelligence testing in the early part of the twentieth century. Kamin goes on to offer a cautionary note by this historical analogy:

There is probably no living psychologist who would view the World War I Army data as relevant to the heritable I.Q. of European “races.” There are few who now seem much impressed by the data on “Italians in America” summarized by Rudolf Pintner in his 1923 text, Intelligence Testing. Professor Pintner had called attention to the ‘remarkable agreement’ in the median I.Q. for the Italian children in six separate studies. That median I.Q. was 84, a full 16 points below the average American. There is probably no psychometrician today to assert that that 16 point deficit was produced by inferior Italian I.Q. genes. That does not prevent the same mental testers from pointing gravely to the possible genetic significance of Professor [Arthur] Jensen’s recent survey of the contemporary I.Q. literature.21

One anomaly in the field of intelligence testing is that in several countries, the average score on an IQ test has increased significantly across decades.

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