Skin Deep by Gavin Evans

Author:Gavin Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Race science;Racism;Race;Genes;Inequality;Discrimination;Bad science;Quackery;Sam Harris;Jordan Peterson;Ben Goldacre;Genetics;Evolution;Nature vs Nurture;IQ
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2019-07-08T10:43:19+00:00

Cyril Burt and the imaginary twins

The other method of studying twins to determine heritability – finding separated identical twins – started in the UK in the 1950s under Charles Spearman’s errant disciple, Cyril Burt. When Sir Cyril died of cancer in 1971 his reputation in his profession was unmatched, but it soon collapsed. In retrospect, the clues might have been picked up earlier, when he made the false claim that he, not Spearman, was the father of factor analysis in IQ testing. Burt first tried this claim before Spearman’s death in 1945 but apologised after being put down by the older man. Once Spearman died, however, Burt campaigned to undermine his mentor’s influence, and stopped citing his publications. Also, he was in the habit of writing letters, under various aliases, to his own journal, and shortly before his death he ordered that all his notes and records be burnt. But this was small potatoes compared to what was to come.

Burt made his claims about the heritability of IQ in a series of academic papers reporting studies of separated identical twins that he claimed to have conducted. Unlike in China, where the one-child policy led to many cases of separated identical twins, in the UK these were and are notoriously hard to find, for the simple reason that parents and adoption agencies keep twins together. Yet somehow, Burt found fifty-three sets. Initial queries were raised by the psychologist Leon Kamin, of Princeton, whose team investigated Burt’s work, publishing their study in 1974.16 Kamin noted that Burt had increased his claimed twins’ sample from twenty-one in 1955 to fifty-three in 1966, yet the average correlation in their IQs remained unchanged, down to the third decimal place. In the 1950s Burt claimed a correlation in the IQs of separated identical twins of 0.771; in the 1960s a paper published under the name of his supposed assistant, Margaret Howard, also cited a correlation of 0.771. Later, Burt and another supposed assistant, J. Conway, published a paper with the same correlation, 0.771. Kamin’s Princeton team deemed this coincidence so unlikely as to fit into the category of impossible.

Some of the details of the separated twins Burt claimed to have found were more suggestive of a fertile imagination than real life. They included a pair of illegitimate identical twins from a well-to-do birth mother; one twin grew up on the Scottish country estate of a prosperous family, the other was brought up by a shepherd, a case that sounds as if it emerged from a reading of Perdita’s story in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.17 What is even more curious is the close correlation in their reported IQs (118 and 121).18 As we have seen, when separated identical twins are brought up in different class and educational backgrounds their IQs tend to vary considerably, by twenty-nine IQ points in one case.

Two years after Kamin’s exposé, the medical correspondent of the Sunday Times, Oliver Gillie, made the direct accusation that Burt had faked his data. He also wrote that Burt’s two collaborators, Margaret Howard and J.

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