History of the race and intelligence controversy
Encyclopedia
The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate, primarily in the United States, concerning possible explanations of group differences in intelligence. Although it has never been disputed that there are systematic differences between average scores in IQ tests of different population groups, sometimes called "racial IQ gaps", there has been no agreement on whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or whether some inherent genetic factor is at play.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, group differences in intelligence were assumed to be due to race and, apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1930s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role. In 1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen
published a long article reviving the older hereditarian point of view, with the suggestion that there might be genetic reasons why compensatory education
had failed. His work, publicized by the Nobel laureate William Shockley
, sparked controversy amongst the academic community and even led to student unrest. A similar debate amongst academics followed the publication in 1994 of The Bell Curve
, a book by Richard Herrnstein
and Charles Murray
which argued in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint. It not only provoked the publication of several interdisciplinary books on the environmental point of view, some in popular science
, but also led to a public statement from the American Psychological Association
acknowledging a gap between average IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic. The hereditarian line of research continues to be pursued by a group of researchers, mostly psychologists, some of whom are supported by the Pioneer Fund
, an organization often described as racist organization.
In the 18th century, philosophers and scientists, such as Voltaire
, David Hume
, Immanuel Kant
, and Carl Linnaeus, proposed the existence of different mental abilities among the races. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the idea that there are differences in the brain structures and brain sizes of different races, and that these differences explained the different intelligences, was much advocated and studied.
Through the publication of his book Hereditary Genius in 1869, polymath
Francis Galton
spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity
and eugenics
. Lacking the means to directly measure intellectual ability, Galton attempted to estimate the intelligence of various racial and ethnic groups based on observations from his and others' travels, on the number and quality of intellectual achievements of different groups, and on the percentage of "eminent men" in each of these groups. He argued that intelligence was normally distributed in all racial and ethnic groups, and that the means of the distributions varied between the groups. In Galton's estimation ancient Attic Greeks
had been the people with the highest average intelligence, followed by contemporary Englishmen, with black Africans at a lower level, and Australian Aborigines lower still. He did not specifically study Jews
, but remarked that "they appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds".
In 1895, R. Meade Bache of the University of Pennsylvania
published an article in Psychological Review
claiming that reaction time increases with evolution. Bache supported this claim with data demonstrating increased reaction times among White Americans when compared with those of Native Americans and African Americans, with Native Americans having the shortest reaction time. He hypothesized that the long reaction time of White Americans was to be explained by their possessing more contemplative brains which did not function well on tasks requiring automatic responses. This was one of the first examples of modern scientific racism
, in which science was used to bolster beliefs in the superiority of a particular race.
In 1912 the Columbia psychology graduate Frank Bruner reviewed the scientific literature on auditory perception in black and white subjects in
Psychological Bulletin
, characterizing, "the mental qualities of the Negro as: lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, untruthful, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy, and similarly in industrial pursuits, the Negro shows a woeful lack of power of sustained activity and constructive conduct."
In 1916 George O. Ferguson conducted research in his Columbia Ph.D. thesis on "The psychology of the Negro", finding them poor in abstract thought, but good in physical responses, recommending how this should be reflected in education. In the same year Lewis Terman
, in the manual accompanying the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, referred to the higher frequency of morons
among non-white American racial groups stating that further research into race difference on intelligence should be conducted and that the "enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence" could not be remedied by education.
In 1916 a team of psychologists, led by Robert Yerkes
and including Terman and Henry H. Goddard
, adapted the Stanford-Binet tests as multiple choice group tests for use by the US army. In 1919, Yerkes devised a version of this test for civilians, the National Intelligence Test, which was used in all levels of education and in business. Like Terman, Goddard had argued in his book, Feeble-mindedness: Its causes and consequences (1914), that "feeble-mindedness" was hereditary; and in 1920 Yerkes in his book with Yoakum on the Army Mental Tests described how they "were originally intended, and are now definitely known, to measure native intellectual ability." Both Goddard and Terman argued that the feeble-minded should not be allowed to reproduce. In the USA, however, independently and prior to the IQ tests, there had been political pressure for such eugenic policies, to be enforced by sterilization; in due course IQ tests were later used as justification for sterilizing the mentally retarded.
It was also argued that the IQ tests should be used to control immigration to the USA. Already in 1917 Goddard reported on the low IQ scores of new arrivals at Ellis Island
; and Yerkes argued from his army test scores that there were consistently lower IQ levels amongst those from Eastern and Southern Europe, which could lead to a decline in the national intelligence. In 1923, in his book A study of American intelligence, Carl Brigham
wrote that on the basis of the army tests, "The decline in intelligence is due to two factors, the change in races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of sending lower and lower representatives of each race." He concluded that, "The steps that should be taken to preserve or increase our present mental capacity must of course be dictated by science and not by political expediency. Immigration should not only be restrictive, but highly selective." The Immigration Act of 1924
put these recommendations into practice, introducing quotas based on the 1890 census, prior to the waves of immigration from Poland and Italy. As Franz Samelson has pointed out, however, "the eventual passage of the 'racist' immigration law of 1924 was not crucially affected by the contributions of Yerkes or other psychologists."
In the 1920s psychologists started questioning underlying assumptions of racial differences in intelligence; although not discounting them, the possibility was considered that they were on a smaller scale than previously supposed and also due to factors other than heredity.
In 1924 Floyd Allport wrote in his book
"Social Psychology" that the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon
was incorrect in asserting "a gap between inferior and superior species" and pointed to "social inheritance" and "environmental factors" as factors that accounted for differences.
Nevertheless he conceded that "the intelligence of the white race is of a more versatile and complex order than that of the black race. It is probably superior to that of the red or yellow races."
In 1929 Robert Woodworth in his textbook "Psychology: a study of mental life" made no claims about innate differences in intelligence between races, pointing instead to environmental and cultural factors. He considered it advisable to "suspend judgment and keep our eyes open from year to year for fresh and more conclusive evidence that will probably be discovered".
In the 1930s the English psychologist Raymond Cattell
wrote three tracts, Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937) and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938). The second was published by the Eugenics Society
, of which he had been a research fellow: it predicted the disastrous consequences of not stopping the decline in the average intelligence in Britain by one point per decade. In 1933 Cattell wrote that, of all the European races, the "Nordic race was the most evolved in intelligence and stability of temperament." He argued for "no mixture of bloods between racial groups" because "the resulting re-shuffling of impulses and psychic units throws together in each individual a number of forces which may be incompatible." He rationalised the "hatred and abhorrence ... for the Jewish practice of living in other nations instead of forming an independent self-sustained group of their own", referring to them as "intruders" with a "crafty spirit of calculation." He recommended a rigid division of races, referring to those suggesting that individuals be judged on their merits, irrespective of racial background, as "race-slumpers". He wrote that in the past "the backward branches of the tree of mankind" had been lopped off as "the American Indians, the Black Australians, the Mauris and the negroes had been driven by bloodshed from their lands", unaware of "the biological rationality of that destiny." He advocated a more enlightened solution: by birth control, by sterilization and by "life in adapted reserves and asylums," where the "races which have served their turn [should] be brought to euthanasia."
He considered blacks to be naturally inferior, on account of "of their small skull capacity." In 1937 he praised the Third Reich for their eugenic laws and for "being the first to adopt sterilization together with a policy of racial improvement." In 1938, after newspapers had reported on the segregation of Jews into ghettos and concentration camps, he commented that the rise of Germany "should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed ... to adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution." In late 1937 Cattell moved to the US on the invitation of the psychologist Edward Thorndike
from Columbia University
, also involved in eugenics. He spent the rest of his life there as a research psychologist, devoting himself after retirement to devising and publicising a refined version of his ideology from the 1930s that he called Beyondism.
In 1935 Otto Klineberg
wrote two books "Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration" and "Race Differences", dismissing claims that African Americans in the northern states were more intelligent than those in the south. He argued that there was no scientific proof of racial differences in intelligence and that this should not therefore be used as a justification for policies in education or employment.
The hereditarian view began to change in the 1920s in reaction to excessive eugenicist claims regarding abilities and moral character, and also due to the development of convincing environmental arguments. In the 1940s many psychologists, particularly social psychologists, began to argue that environmental and cultural factors, as well as discrimination and prejudice, provided a more probable explanation of disparities in intelligence. According to Franz Samelson, this change in attitude had become widespread by then, with very few studies in race differences in intelligence, a change brought out by an increase in the number of psychologists not from a "lily-white ... Anglo-Saxon" background but from Jewish backgrounds. Other factors that influenced American psychologists were the economic changes brought about by the depression and the reluctance of psychologists to risk being associated with the Nazi claims of a master race. The 1950 race statement
of UNESCO
, prepared in consultation with scientists including Klineberg, created a further taboo
against conducting scientific research on issues related to race. Adolf Hitler
banned IQ testing for being "Jewish" as did Joseph Stalin
for being "bourgeois".
In 1965 William Shockley
, Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Stanford University
, made a public statement at the Nobel conference on "Genetics and the Future of Man" about the problems of "genetic deterioration" in humans caused by "evolution in reverse". He claimed social support systems designed to help the disadvantaged had a regressive effect and subsequently claimed the most competent population group were the original European settlers in America which he claimed superior by virtue of the extreme selective pressures
imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism. Speaking of the "genetic enslavement" of African Americans, owing to an abnormally high birth rate, Shockley discouraged improved education as a remedy, suggesting instead sterilization and birth control. In the following ten years he continued to argue in favor of this position, claiming it was not based on prejudice but "on sound statistics". Shockley's outspoken public statements and lobbying brought him into contact with those running the Pioneer Fund
who subsequently, through the intermediary Carleton Putnam
, provided financial support for his extensive lobbying activities in this area, reported widely in the press. With the psychologist and segregationist R. Travis Osborne
as adviser, he formed the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED). Although its stated purpose was "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems," FREED mostly acted as a lobbying agency for spreading Shockley's ideas on eugenics.
The Pioneer Fund
had been set up by W.P. Draper in 1937 with one of its two charitable purposes being to provide aid for "study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race ... and ... into the problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States". From the late fifties onwards, following the 1954 Supreme Court Decision
on segregation in schools, it supported psychologists and other scientists in favour of segregation. All of these ultimately held academic positions in the Southern States, notably Henry E. Garrett (head of psychology at Columbia University
until 1955), Wesley Critz George
, Frank C.J. McGurk
, R. Travis Osborne
and Audrey Shuey, who in 1958 wrote The Testing of Negro Intelligence, demonstrating "the presence of native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests." In 1959 Garrett helped to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics
, an organisation promoting segregation. In 1961 he blamed the shift away from hereditarianism, which he described as the "scientific hoax of the century", on the school of thought—the "Boas cult"— promoted by his former colleagues at Columbia, notably Franz Boas
and Otto Klineberg
, and more generally "Jewish organizations", most of whom "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proved." He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation; fact and hokum, that "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of equalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess. Equalitarianism is good Marxist doctrine, not likely to change with gyrations in the Kremlin line." In 1951 Garrett had even gone as far as reporting Klineberg to the FBI for advocating "many Communistic theories", including the idea that "there are no differences in the races of mankind."
One of Shockley's lobbying campaigns involved the educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen
, from the University of California, Berkeley
. Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during the year 1966-1967 spent at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
in Stanford. Here Jensen got to know Shockley and through him eventually received support for his research from the Pioneer Fund
. Although Shockley and Jensen's names were later to become linked in the media, Jensen does not mention Shockley as an important influence on his thought in his subsequent writings; rather he describes as decisive his work with Hans Eysenck
. He also mentions his interest in the behaviorist
theories of Clark Hull
which he says he abandoned largely because he found them to be incompatible with experimental findings during his years at Berkeley.
In a 1968 article published in Disadvantaged Child, Jensen questioned the effectiveness of child development and antipoverty programs, writing "As a social policy, avoidance of the issue could be harmful to everyone in the long run, especially to future generations of Negroes, who could suffer the most from well-meaning but misguided and ineffective attempts to improve their lot." In 1969 Jensen wrote a long article in the Harvard Educational Review
, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor
, first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman
in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white
intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors." He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the USA was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while at the same time there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that eugenic reform would prevent this more effectively than compensatory education, surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage": although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Level I" ability), they had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Level II" ability). He felt that it in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities."
Later, writing about how the article came into being, Jensen said that the editors of the Review had specifically asked him to include his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published. He also maintains that only five percent of the article touched on the topic of race difference in IQ. also gave a detailed account of how the student editors of Harvard Educational Review commissioned and negotiated the content of Jensen's article.
Many academics have given commentaries on what they considered to be the main points of Jensen's article and the subsequent books in the early 1970s that expanded on its content. According to , in his article Jensen had argued "that educational programs for disadvantaged children initiated as the War on Poverty had failed, and the black-white race gap probably had a substantial genetic component." They summarised Jensen's argument as follows:
According to , Jensen's article defended 3 claims:
According to , the article claimed "a correlation between intelligence, measured by IQ tests, and racial genes". He wrote that Jensen, based on empirical evidence, had concluded that "black intelligence was congenitally inferior to that of whites"; that "this partly explains unequal educational achievements"; and that, "because a certain level of underachievement was due to the inferior genetic attributes of blacks, compensatory and enrichment programs are bound to be ineffective in closing the racial gap in educational achievements." Several commentators mention Jensen's recommendations for schooling: according to Barry Nurcombe,
Jensen had already suggested in the article that initiatives like the Head Start Program were ineffective, writing in the opening sentence, "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." Other experts in psychometrics
, such as and , have given accounts of Jensen's theory of Level I and Level II abilities, which originated in this and earlier articles. As the historian of psychology
William H. Tucker
comments, Jensen's leading question,"Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans," repeating Shockley's phrase "genetic enslavement", proved later to be one of the most inflammatory statements in the article.
Shockley conducted a widespread publicity campaign for Jensen's article, supported by the Pioneer Fund. Jensen's views became widely known in many spheres. As a result there was renewed academic interest in the hereditarian viewpoint and in intelligence tests. Jensen's original article was widely circulated and often cited; the material was taught in university courses over a range of academic disciplines. In response to his critics, Jensen wrote a series of books on all aspects of psychometrics. There was also a widespread positive response from the popular press — with The New York Times Magazine
dubbing the topic "Jensenism" — and amongst politicians and policy makers.
In 1971 Richard Herrnstein
wrote a long article on intelligence tests in The Atlantic for a general readership. Undecided on the issues of race and intelligence, he discussed instead score differences between social classes. Like Jensen he took a firmly hereditarian point of view. He also commented that the policy of equal opportunity would result in making social classes more rigid, separated by biological differences, resulting in a downward trend in average intelligence that would conflict with the growing needs of a technological society.
Jensen and Herrnstein's articles were widely discussed. Hans Eysenck
defended the hereditarian point of view and the use of intelligence tests in "Race, Intelligence and Education" (1971), a pamphlet presenting Jensenism to a popular audience, and "The Equality of Man" (1973). He was severely critical of anti-hereditarians whose policies he blamed for many of the problems in society. In the first book he wrote that, "All the evidence to date suggests the strong and indeed overwhelming importance of genetic factors in producing the great variety of intellectual differences which [are] observed between certain racial groups", adding in the second, that "for anyone wishing to perpetuate class or caste differences, genetics is the real foe".
Although the main intention of the hereditarians had been to challenge the anti-hereditarian establishment, they were unprepared for the level of reaction and censure in the scientific world. Militant student groups
at Berkeley and Harvard conducted disruptive campaigns of harassment on Jensen and Herrnstein with charges of racism, despite Herrnstein's refusal to endorse Jensen's views on race and intelligence.
Two weeks after the appearance of Jensen's article, the Berkeley chapter of the militant student organization Students for a Democratic Society
staged protests against Arthur Jensen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley
, chanting "Fight racism. Fire Jensen!" Jensen himself states that he even lost his employment at Berkeley because of the controversy. Similar campaigns were waged in London against Eysenck and in Boston against Edward Wilson
, the founding father of sociobiology
, the discipline that explains human behavior through genetics. The attacks on Wilson were orchestrated by the Sociobiology Study Group
, part of the left wing organization Science for the People
, formed of 35 scientists and students, including the Harvard biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin
, who both became prominent critics of hereditarian research in race and intelligence. In 1972 50 academics, including the psychologists Jensen, Eysenck and Herrnstein as well as five Nobel laureates, signed a statement entitled "Resolution on Scientific Freedom Regarding Human Behavior and Heredity", criticizing the climate of "suppression, punishment and defamation of scientists who emphasized the role of heredity in human behavior". In October 1973 a half-page advertisement entitled "Resolution Against Racism" appeared in the New York Times. With over 1000 academic signatories, including Lewontin, it condemned "racist research", denouncing in particular Jensen, Shockley and Herrnstein.
This disruption was accompanied by a high level of commentaries, criticisms and denouncements from the academic community. Two issues of the Harvard Educational Review
were devoted to critiques of Jensen's work by psychologists, biologists and educationalists. As documented by , the main commentaries involved: population genetics
(Richard Lewontin
, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Walter Bodmer); the heritability of intelligence (Christopher Jencks
, Mary Jo Bane, Leon Kamin
, David Layzer); the possible inaccuracy of IQ tests as measures of intelligence (summarised in ); and sociological assumptions about the relationship between intelligence and income (Jencks and Bane). More specifically, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin
commented on Jensen's use of population genetics, writing that, "The fundamental error of Jensen's argument is to confuse heritability of character within a population with heritability between two populations." The political scientists Christopher Jencks
and Mary Jo Bane, also from Harvard, recalculated the heritability of intelligence as 45% instead of Jensen's estimate of 80%; and they determined that only about 12% of variation in income was due to IQ, so that in their view the connections between IQ and occupation were less clear than Jensen had suggested.
Ideological differences also emerged in the controversy. The circle of scientists around Lewontin and Gould, some of them self-admittedly motivated by a Marxist
ideology, rejected the research of Jensen and Herrnstein as "bad science". While not objecting to research into intelligence per se, they felt that this research was politically motivated and objected to the reification
of intelligence: the treatment of the numerical quantity g as a physical attribute like skin colour that could be meaningfully averaged over a population group. They claimed that this was contrary to the scientific method, which required explanations at a molecular level, rather than the analysis of a statistical artifact in terms of undiscovered processes in biology or genetics. In response to this criticism, Jensen later wrote that, "'reification' is neither more nor less than the common practice in every science of hypothesizing explanatory models or theories to account for the observed relationships within a given domain." He asked why psychology should be denied "the common right of every science to the use of hypothetical constructs or any theoretical speculation concerning causal explanations of its observable phenomena?"
The academic debate also became entangled with the so-called "Burt Affair", because Jensen's article had partially relied on the 1966 twin studies
of the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt
: shortly after Burt's death in 1971, there were allegations, prompted by research of Leon Kamin, that Burt had fabricated parts of his data, charges which have never been fully resolved. Franz Samelson documents how Jensen's views on Burt's work varied over the years: he was his main defender in the USA during the 1970s; in 1983, following the publication in 1978 of Leslie Hearnshaw's official biography of Burt, he changed his mind, "fully accept[ing] as valid ... Hearnshaw’s biography" and stating that "of course [Burt] will never be exonerated for his empirical deceptions"; however, in 1992 he wrote that "the essence of the Burt affair ... [was] a cabal of motivated opponents, avidly aided by the mass media, to bash [Burt’s] reputation completely", a view repeated in an invited address on Burt before the American Psychological Association
, when he called into question Hearnshaw's scholarship.
Similar charges of a politically motivated campaign to stifle scientific research on racial differences, later dubbed "Neo-Lysenkoism
", were frequently repeated by Jensen and his supporters. bemoaned the fact that "a block has been raised because of the obvious implications for the understanding of racial differences in ability and achievement. Serious considerations of whether genetic as well as environmental factors are involved has been taboo in academic circles," adding that, "In the bizarre racist theories of the Nazis and the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we have seen clear examples of what happens when science is corrupted by subservience to political dogma."
After the appearance of his 1969 article, Jensen was later more explicit about racial differences in intelligence, stating in 1973 "that something between one-half and three-fourths of the average IQ differences between American Negroes and whites is attributable to genetic factors." He even speculated that the underlying mechanism was a "biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence" linked to their joint development in the ectoderm of the embryo. Although Jensen avoided any personal involvement with segregationists in the US, he did not distance himself from the approaches of journals of the far right in Europe, many of whom viewed his research as justifying their political ends. In an interview with Nation Europa
, he said that some human races differed from one another even more than some animal species, claiming that a measurement of "genetic distance" between blacks and whites showed that they had diverged over 46,000 years ago. He also granted interviews to Alain de Benoist's
French journal Nouvelle École and Jürgen Rieger's
German journal Neue Anthropologie of which he later became a regular contributor and editor, apparently unaware of its political orientation owing to his poor knowledge of German.
The debate was further exacerbated by issues of racial bias that had already intensified through the 1960s due to civil rights concerns and changes in the social climate. In 1968 the Association of Black Psychologists
(ABP) had demanded a moratorium on IQ tests for children from minority groups.
After a committee set up by the American Psychological Association
drew up guidelines for assessing minority groups, failing to confirm the claims of racial bias, wrote the following as part of a response on behalf of the ABP:
Other professional academic bodies reacted differently to the dispute. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a division of the
American Psychological Society, issued a public statement in 1969 criticizing Jensen's research, declaring that, "To construct questions about complex behavior in terms of heredity versus environment is to oversimplify the essence and nature of human development and behavior." The American Anthropological Association
convened a panel discussion in 1969 at its annual general meeting, shortly after the appearance of Jensen's paper, where several participants labelled his research as "racist". Subsequently the association issued an official clarification, stating that, "The shabby misuse of IQ testing in the support of past American racist policies has created understandable anxiety over current research on the inheritance of human intelligence. But the resulting personal attacks on a few scientists with unpopular views has had a chilling effect on the entire field of behavioral genetics and clouds public discussion of its implications." In 1975 the Genetics Society of America
made a similarly cautious statement: "The application of the techniques of quantitative genetics to the analysis of human behavior is fraught with human complications and potential biases, but well-designed research on the genetic and environmental components of human psychological traits may yield valid and socially useful results and should not be discouraged."
James Flynn
compared the results of groups who took both older and newer versions of specific IQ tests. His research led him to the discovery of what is now called the Flynn effect
: a substantial increase in average IQ scores over the years across all groups tested. His discovery was confirmed later by many other studies. While trying to understand these remarkable test score increases, Flynn had postulated
in 1987 that "IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence". By 2009, however, Flynn felt that the IQ test score changes are real. He suggests that our fast-changing world has faced successive generations with new cognitive challenges that have considerably stimulated intellectual ability. "Our brains as presently constructed probably have much excess capacity ready to be used if needed. That was certainly the case in 1900." Flynn notes that "Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence was anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot."
From the 1980s onwards, the Pioneer Fund
continued to fund hereditarian research on race and intelligence, in particular the two English-born psychologists Richard Lynn
of the University of Ulster
and J. Philippe Rushton
of the University of Western Ontario
, its president since 2002. Rushton returned to the cranial measurements of the nineteenth century, using brain size as an extra factor determining intelligence; in collaboration with Jensen, he most recently developed updated arguments for the genetic explanation of race differences in intelligence.
Lynn, long time editor of and contributor to Mankind Quarterly
and a prolific writer of books, has concentrated his research in race and intelligence on gathering and tabulating data about race differences in intelligence across the world. He has also made suggestions about its political implications, including the revival of older theories of eugenics
, which he describes as "the truth that dares not speak its name".
announced the results of a survey conducted in 1984 on a sample of over a thousand psychologists, sociologists and educationalists in a multiple choice questionnaire, and expanded in 1988 into the book The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy. The book claimed to document a liberal bias in the media coverage of scientific findings regarding IQ. The survey included the question, "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" 661 researchers returned the questionnaire, and of these, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was purely "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely due to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation".
have pointed out that those who replied "both" did not have the opportunity to specify whether genetics played a large role. There has been no agreement amongst psychometricians
on the significance of this particular answer. Scientists supporting the hereditarian point of view have seen it as a vindication of their position.
In 1989 J. Philippe Rushton was placed under police investigation by the Attorney General of Ontario
, after complaints that he had promoted racism in one of his publications on race differences. In the same year, Linda Gottfredson
of the University of Delaware
had an extended battle with her university over the legitimacy of grants from the Pioneer Fund, eventually settled in her favour.
Both later responded with an updated version of Henry E. Garrett's "equalitarian dogma", labelling the claim that all races were equal in cognitive ability as an "egalitarian fiction" and a "scientific hoax". spoke of a "great fraud", a "collective falsehood" and a "scientific lie", citing the findings of Snyderman and Rothman as justification. wrote that there was a "taboo on race" in scientific research that had "no parallel... not the Inquisition, not Stalin, not Hitler." In his 1998 book "The g Factor: The science of mental ability
", Jensen reiterated his earlier claims of Neo-Lysenkoism
, writing that "The concept of human races [as] a fiction" has various "different sources, none of them scientific," one of them being "Neo-Marxist philosophy," which "excludes consideration of genetic or biological factors ... from any part in explaining behavioral differences amongst humans." In the same year the evolutionary psychologist
Kevin B. MacDonald
went much further, reviving Garrett's claim of the "Boas cult" as a Jewish conspiracy, after which "research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists like Madison Grant
and Charles Davenport
."
In 1994 the debate on race and intelligence was reignited by the publication of the book
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
by Richard Herrnstein
and Charles Murray
. The book was received positively by the media, with prominent coverage in Newsweek
, Time
, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Although only two chapters of the book were devoted to race differences in intelligence, treated from the same hereditarian standpoint as Jensen's 1969 paper, it nevertheless caused a similar furore in the academic community to Jensen's article. Many critics, including Stephen J. Gould and Leon Kamin, asserted that the book contained unwarranted simplifications and flaws in its analysis; in particular there were criticisms of its reliance on Lynn's estimates of average IQ scores in South Africa
, where data had been used selectively, and on Rushton's work on brain size and intelligence, which was controversial and disputed. These criticisms were subsequently presented in books, most notably The Bell Curve Debate
(1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
(1996) and an expanded edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man
(1996).
In 1994 a group of 52 scientists, including Rushton, Lynn, Jensen and Eysenck, were cosignatories of an op-ed
article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence
". The article, supporting the conclusions of The Bell Curve, was later republished in an expanded version in the journal Intelligence
. The editorial included the statements:
Another early criticism was that Herrnstein and Murray did not submit their work to academic peer review before publication. There were also three books written from the hereditarian point of view: Why race matters: race differences and what they mean (1997) by Michael Levin
; The g Factor: The science of mental ability
(1998) by Jensen; and Intelligence; a new look by Hans Eysenck
. Various other books of collected contributions appeared at the same time, including The black-white test gap (1998) edited by Christopher Jencks
and Meredith Phillips, Intelligence, heredity and environment (1997) edited by Robert Sternberg
and Elena Grigorenko. A section in IQ and human intelligence (1998) by Nicholas Mackintosh
discussed ethnic group
s and Race and intelligence: separating science from myth (2002) edited by Jefferson Fish presented further commentary on The Bell Curve by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, biologists and statisticians.
In 1999 the same journal Intelligence reprinted as an invited editorial a long article by the attorney Harry F. Weyher Jr.
defending the integrity of the Pioneer Fund
, of which he was then president and of which several editors, including Gottfredson, Jensen, Lynn and Rushton, were grantees. In 1994 the Pioneer-financed journal Mankind Quarterly
, of which Roger Pearson
was the manager and pseudonymous contributor, had been described by Charles Lane
in a review of The Bell Curve in the New York Review of Books as "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race"; he had called the fund and its journal "scientific racism's keepers of the flame." Gottfredson had previously defended the fund in 1989-1990, asserting that Mankind Quarterly was a "multicultural journal" dedicated to "diversity ... as an object of dispassionate study" and that Pearson did not approve of membership of the American Nazi Party
. had himself defended the fund in his book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe.
In response to the debate on The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association
set up a ten-person taskforce, chaired by Ulrich Neisser, to report on the book and its findings. In its report, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
", published in February 1996, the committee made the following comments on race differences in intelligence:
Jensen commented:
Rushton found himself at the centre of another controversy in 1999 when unsolicited copies of a special abridged version of his 1995 book Race, Evolution and Behavior, aimed at a general readership, were mass mailed to psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists in North American universities. As a result Transaction Publishers
withdrew from publishing the pamphlet, financed by the Pioneer Fund, and issued an apology in the January 2000 edition of the journal Society
. In the pamphlet Rushton recounted how black Africans had been seen by outside observers through the centuries as naked, insanitary, impoverished and unintelligent. In modern times he remarked that their average IQ of 70 "is the lowest ever recorded", due to smaller average brain size. He explained these differences in terms of evolutionary history: those that had migrated to colder climates in the north to evolve into whites and Asians had adapted genetically to have more self-control, lower levels of sex hormones, greater intelligence, more complex social structures, and more stable families. He concluded that whites and Asians are more disposed to "invest time and energy in their children rather than the pursuit of sexual thrills. They are 'dads' rather than 'cads.'" J. Philippe Rushton has not distanced himself from groups on the far right in the US. He has been a regular contributor to the newsletters of American Renaissance
and has spoken at many of their biennial conferences, in 2006 sharing the platform with Nick Griffin
, leader of the British National Party
.
is the low average intelligence among sub-Saharan Africans. Following an interview with Kuukausiliite, a monthly magazine supplement of Helsingin Sanomat
, Lynn's coauthor Tatu Vanhanen
, a political scientist
and father of the then Prime Minister of Finland
Matti Vanhanen
, was investigated by the Finnish police between 2002 and 2004. In 2007 James D. Watson
, Nobel laureate in biology, gave a controversial interview to the Sunday Times Magazine during a book tour in the United Kingdom
. This resulted in the cancellation of a Royal Society
lecture, along with other public engagements, and his suspension from his administrative position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
. He subsequently cancelled the tour and resigned from his position.
In 2005 the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law of the American Psychological Association
(APA) published a review article by Rushton and Jensen, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability". The article was followed by a series of responses, some in support, some critical. Richard Nisbett, another psychologist who had also commented at the time, later included an amplified version of his critique as part of the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009). Rushton and Jensen in 2010 made a point-for-point reply to this and again summarized the hereditarian position in "Race and IQ: A theory-based review of the research in Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It".
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, group differences in intelligence were assumed to be due to race and, apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1930s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role. In 1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.He is a major proponent...
published a long article reviving the older hereditarian point of view, with the suggestion that there might be genetic reasons why compensatory education
Compensatory Education
Compensatory education offers supplementary programs or services designed to help children at risk of cognitive impairment and low educational achievement reach their full potential.-Children at risk:...
had failed. His work, publicized by the Nobel laureate William Shockley
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...
, sparked controversy amongst the academic community and even led to student unrest. A similar debate amongst academics followed the publication in 1994 of The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray...
, a book by Richard Herrnstein
Richard Herrnstein
Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....
and Charles Murray
Charles Murray (author)
Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian political scientist, author, columnist, and pundit working as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC...
which argued in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint. It not only provoked the publication of several interdisciplinary books on the environmental point of view, some in popular science
Popular science
Popular science, sometimes called literature of science, is interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is broad-ranging, often written by scientists as well as journalists, and is presented in many...
, but also led to a public statement from the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
acknowledging a gap between average IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic. The hereditarian line of research continues to be pursued by a group of researchers, mostly psychologists, some of whom are supported by the Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
, an organization often described as racist organization.
Early history
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
, David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, and Carl Linnaeus, proposed the existence of different mental abilities among the races. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the idea that there are differences in the brain structures and brain sizes of different races, and that these differences explained the different intelligences, was much advocated and studied.
Through the publication of his book Hereditary Genius in 1869, polymath
Polymath
A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable...
Francis Galton
Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...
spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity
Heredity
Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...
and eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. Lacking the means to directly measure intellectual ability, Galton attempted to estimate the intelligence of various racial and ethnic groups based on observations from his and others' travels, on the number and quality of intellectual achievements of different groups, and on the percentage of "eminent men" in each of these groups. He argued that intelligence was normally distributed in all racial and ethnic groups, and that the means of the distributions varied between the groups. In Galton's estimation ancient Attic Greeks
Attica
Attica is a historical region of Greece, containing Athens, the current capital of Greece. The historical region is centered on the Attic peninsula, which projects into the Aegean Sea...
had been the people with the highest average intelligence, followed by contemporary Englishmen, with black Africans at a lower level, and Australian Aborigines lower still. He did not specifically study Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, but remarked that "they appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds".
In 1895, R. Meade Bache of the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
published an article in Psychological Review
Psychological Review
Psychological Review is a scientific journal that publishes articles on psychological theory. It was founded by Princeton psychologist James Mark Baldwin and Columbia psychologist James McKeen Cattell in 1894 as a publication vehicle for psychologists not connected with the Clark laboratory of G....
claiming that reaction time increases with evolution. Bache supported this claim with data demonstrating increased reaction times among White Americans when compared with those of Native Americans and African Americans, with Native Americans having the shortest reaction time. He hypothesized that the long reaction time of White Americans was to be explained by their possessing more contemplative brains which did not function well on tasks requiring automatic responses. This was one of the first examples of modern scientific racism
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
, in which science was used to bolster beliefs in the superiority of a particular race.
In 1912 the Columbia psychology graduate Frank Bruner reviewed the scientific literature on auditory perception in black and white subjects in
Psychological Bulletin
Psychological Bulletin
Psychological Bulletin is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in literature reviews. It was founded by Johns Hopkins psychologist James Mark Baldwin in 1904 immediately after he had bought out James McKeen Cattell's share of Psychological Review, which the two had founded ten years...
, characterizing, "the mental qualities of the Negro as: lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, untruthful, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy, and similarly in industrial pursuits, the Negro shows a woeful lack of power of sustained activity and constructive conduct."
Lewis Terman
Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford University School of Education. He is best known as the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test...
, in the manual accompanying the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, referred to the higher frequency of morons
Moron (psychology)
Moron is a term once used in psychology to denote mild mental retardation. The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological...
among non-white American racial groups stating that further research into race difference on intelligence should be conducted and that the "enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence" could not be remedied by education.
In 1916 a team of psychologists, led by Robert Yerkes
Robert Yerkes
Robert Mearns Yerkes was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology....
and including Terman and Henry H. Goddard
Henry H. Goddard
Henry Herbert Goddard was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century...
, adapted the Stanford-Binet tests as multiple choice group tests for use by the US army. In 1919, Yerkes devised a version of this test for civilians, the National Intelligence Test, which was used in all levels of education and in business. Like Terman, Goddard had argued in his book, Feeble-mindedness: Its causes and consequences (1914), that "feeble-mindedness" was hereditary; and in 1920 Yerkes in his book with Yoakum on the Army Mental Tests described how they "were originally intended, and are now definitely known, to measure native intellectual ability." Both Goddard and Terman argued that the feeble-minded should not be allowed to reproduce. In the USA, however, independently and prior to the IQ tests, there had been political pressure for such eugenic policies, to be enforced by sterilization; in due course IQ tests were later used as justification for sterilizing the mentally retarded.
It was also argued that the IQ tests should be used to control immigration to the USA. Already in 1917 Goddard reported on the low IQ scores of new arrivals at Ellis Island
Ellis Island
Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States. It was the nation's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. The island was greatly expanded with landfill between 1892 and 1934. Before that, the much smaller original island was the...
; and Yerkes argued from his army test scores that there were consistently lower IQ levels amongst those from Eastern and Southern Europe, which could lead to a decline in the national intelligence. In 1923, in his book A study of American intelligence, Carl Brigham
Carl Brigham
Carl Campbell Brigham was a professor of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and pioneer in the field of psychometrics. His early writings influenced the eugenics movement and anti-immigration legislation in the United States, but he later disowned these views...
wrote that on the basis of the army tests, "The decline in intelligence is due to two factors, the change in races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of sending lower and lower representatives of each race." He concluded that, "The steps that should be taken to preserve or increase our present mental capacity must of course be dictated by science and not by political expediency. Immigration should not only be restrictive, but highly selective." The Immigration Act of 1924
Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, and Asian Exclusion Act , was a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already...
put these recommendations into practice, introducing quotas based on the 1890 census, prior to the waves of immigration from Poland and Italy. As Franz Samelson has pointed out, however, "the eventual passage of the 'racist' immigration law of 1924 was not crucially affected by the contributions of Yerkes or other psychologists."
In the 1920s psychologists started questioning underlying assumptions of racial differences in intelligence; although not discounting them, the possibility was considered that they were on a smaller scale than previously supposed and also due to factors other than heredity.
In 1924 Floyd Allport wrote in his book
"Social Psychology" that the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist...
was incorrect in asserting "a gap between inferior and superior species" and pointed to "social inheritance" and "environmental factors" as factors that accounted for differences.
Nevertheless he conceded that "the intelligence of the white race is of a more versatile and complex order than that of the black race. It is probably superior to that of the red or yellow races."
In 1929 Robert Woodworth in his textbook "Psychology: a study of mental life" made no claims about innate differences in intelligence between races, pointing instead to environmental and cultural factors. He considered it advisable to "suspend judgment and keep our eyes open from year to year for fresh and more conclusive evidence that will probably be discovered".
In the 1930s the English psychologist Raymond Cattell
Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British and American psychologist, known for his exploration of many areas in psychology...
wrote three tracts, Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937) and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938). The second was published by the Eugenics Society
Eugenics society
A eugenics society is a society formed to promote the idea of eugenics. In particular, the two best-known were the British Eugenics Society and the American Eugenics Society, though smaller ones were also at universities such as the Cambridge Eugenics Society...
, of which he had been a research fellow: it predicted the disastrous consequences of not stopping the decline in the average intelligence in Britain by one point per decade. In 1933 Cattell wrote that, of all the European races, the "Nordic race was the most evolved in intelligence and stability of temperament." He argued for "no mixture of bloods between racial groups" because "the resulting re-shuffling of impulses and psychic units throws together in each individual a number of forces which may be incompatible." He rationalised the "hatred and abhorrence ... for the Jewish practice of living in other nations instead of forming an independent self-sustained group of their own", referring to them as "intruders" with a "crafty spirit of calculation." He recommended a rigid division of races, referring to those suggesting that individuals be judged on their merits, irrespective of racial background, as "race-slumpers". He wrote that in the past "the backward branches of the tree of mankind" had been lopped off as "the American Indians, the Black Australians, the Mauris and the negroes had been driven by bloodshed from their lands", unaware of "the biological rationality of that destiny." He advocated a more enlightened solution: by birth control, by sterilization and by "life in adapted reserves and asylums," where the "races which have served their turn [should] be brought to euthanasia."
Edward Thorndike
Edward Lee "Ted" Thorndike was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on animal behavior and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology...
from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, also involved in eugenics. He spent the rest of his life there as a research psychologist, devoting himself after retirement to devising and publicising a refined version of his ideology from the 1930s that he called Beyondism.
In 1935 Otto Klineberg
Otto Klineberg
Otto Klineberg was a Canadian psychologist.He held professorships in social psychology at Columbia University and the University of Paris...
wrote two books "Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration" and "Race Differences", dismissing claims that African Americans in the northern states were more intelligent than those in the south. He argued that there was no scientific proof of racial differences in intelligence and that this should not therefore be used as a justification for policies in education or employment.
The hereditarian view began to change in the 1920s in reaction to excessive eugenicist claims regarding abilities and moral character, and also due to the development of convincing environmental arguments. In the 1940s many psychologists, particularly social psychologists, began to argue that environmental and cultural factors, as well as discrimination and prejudice, provided a more probable explanation of disparities in intelligence. According to Franz Samelson, this change in attitude had become widespread by then, with very few studies in race differences in intelligence, a change brought out by an increase in the number of psychologists not from a "lily-white ... Anglo-Saxon" background but from Jewish backgrounds. Other factors that influenced American psychologists were the economic changes brought about by the depression and the reluctance of psychologists to risk being associated with the Nazi claims of a master race. The 1950 race statement
The Race Question
The Race Question is the first of four UNESCO statements about issues of race. It was issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II and Nazi racism. The statement was an attempt to clarify what was scientifically known about race and a moral condemnation of racism...
of UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
, prepared in consultation with scientists including Klineberg, created a further taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
against conducting scientific research on issues related to race. Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
banned IQ testing for being "Jewish" as did Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
for being "bourgeois".
1960-1980
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...
, Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, made a public statement at the Nobel conference on "Genetics and the Future of Man" about the problems of "genetic deterioration" in humans caused by "evolution in reverse". He claimed social support systems designed to help the disadvantaged had a regressive effect and subsequently claimed the most competent population group were the original European settlers in America which he claimed superior by virtue of the extreme selective pressures
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism. Speaking of the "genetic enslavement" of African Americans, owing to an abnormally high birth rate, Shockley discouraged improved education as a remedy, suggesting instead sterilization and birth control. In the following ten years he continued to argue in favor of this position, claiming it was not based on prejudice but "on sound statistics". Shockley's outspoken public statements and lobbying brought him into contact with those running the Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
who subsequently, through the intermediary Carleton Putnam
Carleton Putnam
Carleton Putnam b. 19 Dec 1901 in New York City, New York, USA; d. 5 Mar 1998: was an American airline pioneer, writer, and biographer. He was educated at Princeton and Columbia University. He was a founder and president of Chicago & Southern Airlines, which was merged with Delta Air Lines. He was...
, provided financial support for his extensive lobbying activities in this area, reported widely in the press. With the psychologist and segregationist R. Travis Osborne
R. Travis Osborne
Robert Travis Osborne is a professor emeritus of psychology at University of Georgia.He began at University of Georgia in 1946 and was appointed Director of the University's Counseling and Testing Center in 1947. He was interested in psychometrics and counseling...
as adviser, he formed the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED). Although its stated purpose was "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems," FREED mostly acted as a lobbying agency for spreading Shockley's ideas on eugenics.
The Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
had been set up by W.P. Draper in 1937 with one of its two charitable purposes being to provide aid for "study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race ... and ... into the problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States". From the late fifties onwards, following the 1954 Supreme Court Decision
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
on segregation in schools, it supported psychologists and other scientists in favour of segregation. All of these ultimately held academic positions in the Southern States, notably Henry E. Garrett (head of psychology at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
until 1955), Wesley Critz George
Wesley Critz George
Wesley Critz George was a professor of histology and embryology at the medical school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he chaired the anatomy department. He was an internationally-recognized researcher on the genetics of race...
, Frank C.J. McGurk
Frank C.J. McGurk
Frank C.J. McGurk was an American psychologist who was noted for his claims about race and intelligence. McGurk taught at Lehigh University, West Point, and Alabama College....
, R. Travis Osborne
R. Travis Osborne
Robert Travis Osborne is a professor emeritus of psychology at University of Georgia.He began at University of Georgia in 1946 and was appointed Director of the University's Counseling and Testing Center in 1947. He was interested in psychometrics and counseling...
and Audrey Shuey, who in 1958 wrote The Testing of Negro Intelligence, demonstrating "the presence of native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests." In 1959 Garrett helped to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics
International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics
The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics was a prominent group in the promotion of eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.-History:...
, an organisation promoting segregation. In 1961 he blamed the shift away from hereditarianism, which he described as the "scientific hoax of the century", on the school of thought—the "Boas cult"— promoted by his former colleagues at Columbia, notably Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
and Otto Klineberg
Otto Klineberg
Otto Klineberg was a Canadian psychologist.He held professorships in social psychology at Columbia University and the University of Paris...
, and more generally "Jewish organizations", most of whom "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proved." He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation; fact and hokum, that "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of equalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess. Equalitarianism is good Marxist doctrine, not likely to change with gyrations in the Kremlin line." In 1951 Garrett had even gone as far as reporting Klineberg to the FBI for advocating "many Communistic theories", including the idea that "there are no differences in the races of mankind."
One of Shockley's lobbying campaigns involved the educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.He is a major proponent...
, from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during the year 1966-1967 spent at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an American interdisciplinary research body in Stanford, California focusing on the social sciences and humanities . Fellows are elected in a closed process, to spend a period of residence at the Center, released from other duties...
in Stanford. Here Jensen got to know Shockley and through him eventually received support for his research from the Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
. Although Shockley and Jensen's names were later to become linked in the media, Jensen does not mention Shockley as an important influence on his thought in his subsequent writings; rather he describes as decisive his work with Hans Eysenck
Hans Eysenck
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-British psychologist who spent most of his career in Britain, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas...
. He also mentions his interest in the behaviorist
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
theories of Clark Hull
Clark L. Hull
Clark Leonard Hull was an influential American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Born in Akron, New York, Hull obtained bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan, and in 1918 a PhD from the University of...
which he says he abandoned largely because he found them to be incompatible with experimental findings during his years at Berkeley.
Harvard Educational Review
The Harvard Educational Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal of opinion and research dealing with education, associated with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and published by the Harvard Education Publishing Group. The journal was established in 1930.Since 1945, editorial decisions...
, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor
General intelligence factor
The g factor, where g stands for general intelligence, is a statistic used in psychometrics to model the mental ability underlying results of various tests of cognitive ability...
, first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman
Charles Spearman
Charles Edward Spearman, FRS was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient...
in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white
intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors." He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the USA was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while at the same time there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that eugenic reform would prevent this more effectively than compensatory education, surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage": although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Level I" ability), they had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Level II" ability). He felt that it in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities."
Later, writing about how the article came into being, Jensen said that the editors of the Review had specifically asked him to include his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published. He also maintains that only five percent of the article touched on the topic of race difference in IQ. also gave a detailed account of how the student editors of Harvard Educational Review commissioned and negotiated the content of Jensen's article.
Many academics have given commentaries on what they considered to be the main points of Jensen's article and the subsequent books in the early 1970s that expanded on its content. According to , in his article Jensen had argued "that educational programs for disadvantaged children initiated as the War on Poverty had failed, and the black-white race gap probably had a substantial genetic component." They summarised Jensen's argument as follows:
- "Most of the variation in black-white scores is genetic"
- "No one has advanced a plausible environmental explanation for the black-white gap"
- "Therefore it is more reasonable to assume that part of the black-white gap is genetic in origin"
According to , Jensen's article defended 3 claims:
- IQ tests provide accurate measurements of a real human ability that is relevant in many aspects of life. Second,
- Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly (about 80%) heritableHeritabilityThe Heritability of a population is the proportion of observable differences between individuals that is due to genetic differences. Factors including genetics, environment and random chance can all contribute to the variation between individuals in their observable characteristics...
and parents with low IQs are much more likely to have children with low IQs - Educational programs have been unable to significantly change the intelligence of individuals or groups.
According to , the article claimed "a correlation between intelligence, measured by IQ tests, and racial genes". He wrote that Jensen, based on empirical evidence, had concluded that "black intelligence was congenitally inferior to that of whites"; that "this partly explains unequal educational achievements"; and that, "because a certain level of underachievement was due to the inferior genetic attributes of blacks, compensatory and enrichment programs are bound to be ineffective in closing the racial gap in educational achievements." Several commentators mention Jensen's recommendations for schooling: according to Barry Nurcombe,
Jensen had already suggested in the article that initiatives like the Head Start Program were ineffective, writing in the opening sentence, "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." Other experts in psychometrics
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...
, such as and , have given accounts of Jensen's theory of Level I and Level II abilities, which originated in this and earlier articles. As the historian of psychology
History of psychology
The history of psychology as a scholarly study of the mind and behavior dates back to the Ancient Greeks. There is also evidence of psychological thought in ancient Egypt. Psychology was a branch of philosophy until the 1870s, when psychology developed as an independent scientific discipline in...
William H. Tucker
William H. Tucker
William H. Tucker is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and the author of several books critical of race science.Tucker received his bachelor's degree from Bates College in 1967, and his master's and doctorate from Princeton University...
comments, Jensen's leading question,"Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans," repeating Shockley's phrase "genetic enslavement", proved later to be one of the most inflammatory statements in the article.
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
dubbing the topic "Jensenism" — and amongst politicians and policy makers.
In 1971 Richard Herrnstein
Richard Herrnstein
Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....
wrote a long article on intelligence tests in The Atlantic for a general readership. Undecided on the issues of race and intelligence, he discussed instead score differences between social classes. Like Jensen he took a firmly hereditarian point of view. He also commented that the policy of equal opportunity would result in making social classes more rigid, separated by biological differences, resulting in a downward trend in average intelligence that would conflict with the growing needs of a technological society.
Hans Eysenck
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-British psychologist who spent most of his career in Britain, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas...
defended the hereditarian point of view and the use of intelligence tests in "Race, Intelligence and Education" (1971), a pamphlet presenting Jensenism to a popular audience, and "The Equality of Man" (1973). He was severely critical of anti-hereditarians whose policies he blamed for many of the problems in society. In the first book he wrote that, "All the evidence to date suggests the strong and indeed overwhelming importance of genetic factors in producing the great variety of intellectual differences which [are] observed between certain racial groups", adding in the second, that "for anyone wishing to perpetuate class or caste differences, genetics is the real foe".
Although the main intention of the hereditarians had been to challenge the anti-hereditarian establishment, they were unprepared for the level of reaction and censure in the scientific world. Militant student groups
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
at Berkeley and Harvard conducted disruptive campaigns of harassment on Jensen and Herrnstein with charges of racism, despite Herrnstein's refusal to endorse Jensen's views on race and intelligence.
Two weeks after the appearance of Jensen's article, the Berkeley chapter of the militant student organization Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
staged protests against Arthur Jensen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, chanting "Fight racism. Fire Jensen!" Jensen himself states that he even lost his employment at Berkeley because of the controversy. Similar campaigns were waged in London against Eysenck and in Boston against Edward Wilson
E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher , theorist , naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants....
, the founding father of sociobiology
Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
, the discipline that explains human behavior through genetics. The attacks on Wilson were orchestrated by the Sociobiology Study Group
Sociobiology Study Group
The Sociobiology Study Group was academic organization formed to specifically counter sociobiological explanations of human behavior, particularly those expounded by the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...
, part of the left wing organization Science for the People
Science for the People
Science for the People is a left-wing organization that emerged from the antiwar culture of the United States in the 1970s. A similar organization of the same name was founded in 2002....
, formed of 35 scientists and students, including the Harvard biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin
Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to...
, who both became prominent critics of hereditarian research in race and intelligence. In 1972 50 academics, including the psychologists Jensen, Eysenck and Herrnstein as well as five Nobel laureates, signed a statement entitled "Resolution on Scientific Freedom Regarding Human Behavior and Heredity", criticizing the climate of "suppression, punishment and defamation of scientists who emphasized the role of heredity in human behavior". In October 1973 a half-page advertisement entitled "Resolution Against Racism" appeared in the New York Times. With over 1000 academic signatories, including Lewontin, it condemned "racist research", denouncing in particular Jensen, Shockley and Herrnstein.
This disruption was accompanied by a high level of commentaries, criticisms and denouncements from the academic community. Two issues of the Harvard Educational Review
Harvard Educational Review
The Harvard Educational Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal of opinion and research dealing with education, associated with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and published by the Harvard Education Publishing Group. The journal was established in 1930.Since 1945, editorial decisions...
were devoted to critiques of Jensen's work by psychologists, biologists and educationalists. As documented by , the main commentaries involved: population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
(Richard Lewontin
Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to...
, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Walter Bodmer); the heritability of intelligence (Christopher Jencks
Christopher Jencks
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.-Career:Jencks is currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian,...
, Mary Jo Bane, Leon Kamin
Leon Kamin
Leon J. Kamin is an American psychologist who chaired Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1968....
, David Layzer); the possible inaccuracy of IQ tests as measures of intelligence (summarised in ); and sociological assumptions about the relationship between intelligence and income (Jencks and Bane). More specifically, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin
Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to...
commented on Jensen's use of population genetics, writing that, "The fundamental error of Jensen's argument is to confuse heritability of character within a population with heritability between two populations." The political scientists Christopher Jencks
Christopher Jencks
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.-Career:Jencks is currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian,...
and Mary Jo Bane, also from Harvard, recalculated the heritability of intelligence as 45% instead of Jensen's estimate of 80%; and they determined that only about 12% of variation in income was due to IQ, so that in their view the connections between IQ and occupation were less clear than Jensen had suggested.
Ideological differences also emerged in the controversy. The circle of scientists around Lewontin and Gould, some of them self-admittedly motivated by a Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
ideology, rejected the research of Jensen and Herrnstein as "bad science". While not objecting to research into intelligence per se, they felt that this research was politically motivated and objected to the reification
Reification (fallacy)
Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea...
of intelligence: the treatment of the numerical quantity g as a physical attribute like skin colour that could be meaningfully averaged over a population group. They claimed that this was contrary to the scientific method, which required explanations at a molecular level, rather than the analysis of a statistical artifact in terms of undiscovered processes in biology or genetics. In response to this criticism, Jensen later wrote that, "'reification' is neither more nor less than the common practice in every science of hypothesizing explanatory models or theories to account for the observed relationships within a given domain." He asked why psychology should be denied "the common right of every science to the use of hypothetical constructs or any theoretical speculation concerning causal explanations of its observable phenomena?"
The academic debate also became entangled with the so-called "Burt Affair", because Jensen's article had partially relied on the 1966 twin studies
Twin study
Twin studies help disentangle the relative importance of environmental and genetic influences on individual traits and behaviors. Twin research is considered a key tool in behavioral genetics and related fields...
of the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt
Cyril Burt
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics....
: shortly after Burt's death in 1971, there were allegations, prompted by research of Leon Kamin, that Burt had fabricated parts of his data, charges which have never been fully resolved. Franz Samelson documents how Jensen's views on Burt's work varied over the years: he was his main defender in the USA during the 1970s; in 1983, following the publication in 1978 of Leslie Hearnshaw's official biography of Burt, he changed his mind, "fully accept[ing] as valid ... Hearnshaw’s biography" and stating that "of course [Burt] will never be exonerated for his empirical deceptions"; however, in 1992 he wrote that "the essence of the Burt affair ... [was] a cabal of motivated opponents, avidly aided by the mass media, to bash [Burt’s] reputation completely", a view repeated in an invited address on Burt before the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
, when he called into question Hearnshaw's scholarship.
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...
", were frequently repeated by Jensen and his supporters. bemoaned the fact that "a block has been raised because of the obvious implications for the understanding of racial differences in ability and achievement. Serious considerations of whether genetic as well as environmental factors are involved has been taboo in academic circles," adding that, "In the bizarre racist theories of the Nazis and the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we have seen clear examples of what happens when science is corrupted by subservience to political dogma."
After the appearance of his 1969 article, Jensen was later more explicit about racial differences in intelligence, stating in 1973 "that something between one-half and three-fourths of the average IQ differences between American Negroes and whites is attributable to genetic factors." He even speculated that the underlying mechanism was a "biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence" linked to their joint development in the ectoderm of the embryo. Although Jensen avoided any personal involvement with segregationists in the US, he did not distance himself from the approaches of journals of the far right in Europe, many of whom viewed his research as justifying their political ends. In an interview with Nation Europa
Nation Europa
Nation Europa is a monthly magazine, published in Germany, that was originally established in support of Pan-European nationalism...
, he said that some human races differed from one another even more than some animal species, claiming that a measurement of "genetic distance" between blacks and whites showed that they had diverged over 46,000 years ago. He also granted interviews to Alain de Benoist's
Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist is a French academic, philosopher, a founder of the Nouvelle Droite and head of the French think tank GRECE. Benoist is a critic of liberalism, free markets and egalitarianism.-Biography:...
French journal Nouvelle École and Jürgen Rieger's
Jürgen Rieger
Jürgen Rieger was a Hamburg lawyer, and deputy chairman of the National Democratic Party of Germany , known for his Holocaust denial....
German journal Neue Anthropologie of which he later became a regular contributor and editor, apparently unaware of its political orientation owing to his poor knowledge of German.
The debate was further exacerbated by issues of racial bias that had already intensified through the 1960s due to civil rights concerns and changes in the social climate. In 1968 the Association of Black Psychologists
Association of Black Psychologists
The Association of Black Psychologists is a professional association of African American psychologists founded in 1968 in San Francisco, with regional chapters throughout the United States. It publishes the Journal of Black Psychology. Its main offices are in Washington, DC.-Beginnings of the...
(ABP) had demanded a moratorium on IQ tests for children from minority groups.
After a committee set up by the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
drew up guidelines for assessing minority groups, failing to confirm the claims of racial bias, wrote the following as part of a response on behalf of the ABP:
Other professional academic bodies reacted differently to the dispute. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a division of the
American Psychological Society, issued a public statement in 1969 criticizing Jensen's research, declaring that, "To construct questions about complex behavior in terms of heredity versus environment is to oversimplify the essence and nature of human development and behavior." The American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
convened a panel discussion in 1969 at its annual general meeting, shortly after the appearance of Jensen's paper, where several participants labelled his research as "racist". Subsequently the association issued an official clarification, stating that, "The shabby misuse of IQ testing in the support of past American racist policies has created understandable anxiety over current research on the inheritance of human intelligence. But the resulting personal attacks on a few scientists with unpopular views has had a chilling effect on the entire field of behavioral genetics and clouds public discussion of its implications." In 1975 the Genetics Society of America
Genetics Society of America
The Genetics Society of America is a scholarly membership society of more than 4000 genetics researchers and educators, established in 1931...
made a similarly cautious statement: "The application of the techniques of quantitative genetics to the analysis of human behavior is fraught with human complications and potential biases, but well-designed research on the genetic and environmental components of human psychological traits may yield valid and socially useful results and should not be discouraged."
1980-2000
In the 1980s, the political scientistPolitical science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
James Flynn
James R. Flynn
James Robert Flynn PhD FRSNZ , aka Jim Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, researches intelligence and has become well known for his discovery of the Flynn effect, the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores in all parts of the...
compared the results of groups who took both older and newer versions of specific IQ tests. His research led him to the discovery of what is now called the Flynn effect
Flynn effect
The Flynn effect is the name given to a substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world. When intelligence quotient tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100...
: a substantial increase in average IQ scores over the years across all groups tested. His discovery was confirmed later by many other studies. While trying to understand these remarkable test score increases, Flynn had postulated
Axiom
In traditional logic, an axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not proven or demonstrated but considered either to be self-evident or to define and delimit the realm of analysis. In other words, an axiom is a logical statement that is assumed to be true...
in 1987 that "IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence". By 2009, however, Flynn felt that the IQ test score changes are real. He suggests that our fast-changing world has faced successive generations with new cognitive challenges that have considerably stimulated intellectual ability. "Our brains as presently constructed probably have much excess capacity ready to be used if needed. That was certainly the case in 1900." Flynn notes that "Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence was anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot."
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
continued to fund hereditarian research on race and intelligence, in particular the two English-born psychologists Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial and ethnic differences. Lynn argues that there are hereditary differences in intelligence based on race and sex....
of the University of Ulster
University of Ulster
The University of Ulster is a multi-campus, co-educational university located in Northern Ireland. It is the largest single university in Ireland, discounting the federal National University of Ireland...
and J. Philippe Rushton
J. Philippe Rushton
Jean Philippe Rushton is a Canadian psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario who is most widely known for his work on racial group differences, such as research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and the application of r/K selection theory to humans in his book Race,...
of the University of Western Ontario
University of Western Ontario
The University of Western Ontario is a public research university located in London, Ontario, Canada. The university's main campus covers of land, with the Thames River cutting through the eastern portion of the main campus. Western administers its programs through 12 different faculties and...
, its president since 2002. Rushton returned to the cranial measurements of the nineteenth century, using brain size as an extra factor determining intelligence; in collaboration with Jensen, he most recently developed updated arguments for the genetic explanation of race differences in intelligence.
Lynn, long time editor of and contributor to Mankind Quarterly
Mankind Quarterly
The Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to physical and cultural anthropology and is currently published by the Council for Social and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. It contains articles on human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology,...
and a prolific writer of books, has concentrated his research in race and intelligence on gathering and tabulating data about race differences in intelligence across the world. He has also made suggestions about its political implications, including the revival of older theories of eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
, which he describes as "the truth that dares not speak its name".
announced the results of a survey conducted in 1984 on a sample of over a thousand psychologists, sociologists and educationalists in a multiple choice questionnaire, and expanded in 1988 into the book The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy. The book claimed to document a liberal bias in the media coverage of scientific findings regarding IQ. The survey included the question, "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" 661 researchers returned the questionnaire, and of these, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was purely "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely due to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation".
have pointed out that those who replied "both" did not have the opportunity to specify whether genetics played a large role. There has been no agreement amongst psychometricians
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...
on the significance of this particular answer. Scientists supporting the hereditarian point of view have seen it as a vindication of their position.
In 1989 J. Philippe Rushton was placed under police investigation by the Attorney General of Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, after complaints that he had promoted racism in one of his publications on race differences. In the same year, Linda Gottfredson
Linda Gottfredson
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S...
of the University of Delaware
University of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...
had an extended battle with her university over the legitimacy of grants from the Pioneer Fund, eventually settled in her favour.
Both later responded with an updated version of Henry E. Garrett's "equalitarian dogma", labelling the claim that all races were equal in cognitive ability as an "egalitarian fiction" and a "scientific hoax". spoke of a "great fraud", a "collective falsehood" and a "scientific lie", citing the findings of Snyderman and Rothman as justification. wrote that there was a "taboo on race" in scientific research that had "no parallel... not the Inquisition, not Stalin, not Hitler." In his 1998 book "The g Factor: The science of mental ability
The g Factor
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability is a book by Arthur Jensen on the general factor of human mental ability .-External links:* , Psycoloquy, Volumes 10, 1999 and 11, 2000...
", Jensen reiterated his earlier claims of Neo-Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...
, writing that "The concept of human races [as] a fiction" has various "different sources, none of them scientific," one of them being "Neo-Marxist philosophy," which "excludes consideration of genetic or biological factors ... from any part in explaining behavioral differences amongst humans." In the same year the evolutionary psychologist
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
Kevin B. MacDonald
Kevin B. MacDonald
Kevin B. MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, best known for his use of evolutionary psychology to inform his study of Judaism as being a "group evolutionary strategy."...
went much further, reviving Garrett's claim of the "Boas cult" as a Jewish conspiracy, after which "research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists like Madison Grant
Madison Grant
Madison Grant was an American lawyer, historian and physical anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist...
and Charles Davenport
Charles Davenport
Charles Benedict Davenport was a prominent American eugenicist and biologist. He was one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, which was directly involved in the sterilization of around 60,000 "unfit" Americans and strongly influenced the Holocaust in Europe.- Biography :Davenport was...
."
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray...
by Richard Herrnstein
Richard Herrnstein
Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....
and Charles Murray
Charles Murray (author)
Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian political scientist, author, columnist, and pundit working as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC...
. The book was received positively by the media, with prominent coverage in Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Although only two chapters of the book were devoted to race differences in intelligence, treated from the same hereditarian standpoint as Jensen's 1969 paper, it nevertheless caused a similar furore in the academic community to Jensen's article. Many critics, including Stephen J. Gould and Leon Kamin, asserted that the book contained unwarranted simplifications and flaws in its analysis; in particular there were criticisms of its reliance on Lynn's estimates of average IQ scores in South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, where data had been used selectively, and on Rushton's work on brain size and intelligence, which was controversial and disputed. These criticisms were subsequently presented in books, most notably The Bell Curve Debate
The Bell Curve Debate
The Bell Curve Debate is a response to The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It includes 81 articles by 81 authors including K. Anthony Appiah, Gregg Easterbrook, Howard Gardner, Eugene D. Genovese, Nathan Glazer, Stephen Jay Gould, Bob Herbert, Christopher Hitchens, Irving...
(1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth is a book by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss...
(1996) and an expanded edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man
The Mismeasure of Man
The Mismeasure of Man , by Stephen Jay Gould, is a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that “the social and economic differences between human groups — primarily races, classes, and sexes — arise from inherited,...
(1996).
In 1994 a group of 52 scientists, including Rushton, Lynn, Jensen and Eysenck, were cosignatories of an op-ed
Op-ed
An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite the editorial page , is a newspaper article that expresses the opinions of a named writer who is usually unaffiliated with the newspaper's editorial board...
article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence
Mainstream Science on Intelligence
Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields allied to intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community...
". The article, supporting the conclusions of The Bell Curve, was later republished in an expanded version in the journal Intelligence
Intelligence (journal)
Intelligence is a peer-reviewed academic journal of psychology that covers intelligence and psychometrics. It is published by Elsevier and the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research.The journal was established in 1977 and the editor in chief is Douglas K. Detterman...
. The editorial included the statements:
Another early criticism was that Herrnstein and Murray did not submit their work to academic peer review before publication. There were also three books written from the hereditarian point of view: Why race matters: race differences and what they mean (1997) by Michael Levin
Michael Levin
Michael Levin is a philosophy professor at City University of New York. He has published on metaphysics, epistemology, race, homosexuality, animal rights, the philosophy of archaeology, the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science.Levin's central research interests...
; The g Factor: The science of mental ability
The g Factor
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability is a book by Arthur Jensen on the general factor of human mental ability .-External links:* , Psycoloquy, Volumes 10, 1999 and 11, 2000...
(1998) by Jensen; and Intelligence; a new look by Hans Eysenck
Hans Eysenck
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-British psychologist who spent most of his career in Britain, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas...
. Various other books of collected contributions appeared at the same time, including The black-white test gap (1998) edited by Christopher Jencks
Christopher Jencks
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.-Career:Jencks is currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian,...
and Meredith Phillips, Intelligence, heredity and environment (1997) edited by Robert Sternberg
Robert Sternberg
Robert Jeffrey Sternberg , is an American psychologist and psychometrician and Provost at Oklahoma State University. He was formerly the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and the President of the American Psychological...
and Elena Grigorenko. A section in IQ and human intelligence (1998) by Nicholas Mackintosh
Nicholas Mackintosh
Nicholas John Mackintosh, FRS is a British experimental psychologist and author, specializing in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning.-Career:...
discussed ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
s and Race and intelligence: separating science from myth (2002) edited by Jefferson Fish presented further commentary on The Bell Curve by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, biologists and statisticians.
In 1999 the same journal Intelligence reprinted as an invited editorial a long article by the attorney Harry F. Weyher Jr.
Harry F. Weyher Jr.
Harry F. Weyher Jr. was an American lawyer and president of the Pioneer Fund from 1958 to 2002.Born in Wilson, North Carolina, Weyher attended the University of North Carolina. After serving in World War II, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1949, where he was an editor of...
defending the integrity of the Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
, of which he was then president and of which several editors, including Gottfredson, Jensen, Lynn and Rushton, were grantees. In 1994 the Pioneer-financed journal Mankind Quarterly
Mankind Quarterly
The Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to physical and cultural anthropology and is currently published by the Council for Social and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. It contains articles on human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology,...
, of which Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, conservationist, eugenics advocate, founder of the Neo Nazi organization Northern League, and publisher of several journals.-Life and work:...
was the manager and pseudonymous contributor, had been described by Charles Lane
Charles Lane (journalist)
Charles "Chuck" Lane is an American journalist and editor who is a staff writer for The Washington Post. His articles are concerned chiefly with the activities and cases of the Supreme Court of the United States and judicial system. He was the lead editor of The New Republic from 1997 to 1999...
in a review of The Bell Curve in the New York Review of Books as "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race"; he had called the fund and its journal "scientific racism's keepers of the flame." Gottfredson had previously defended the fund in 1989-1990, asserting that Mankind Quarterly was a "multicultural journal" dedicated to "diversity ... as an object of dispassionate study" and that Pearson did not approve of membership of the American Nazi Party
American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party was an American political party founded by discharged U.S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists , but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in...
. had himself defended the fund in his book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe.
In response to the debate on The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
set up a ten-person taskforce, chaired by Ulrich Neisser, to report on the book and its findings. In its report, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns was a 1995 report issued by a Task Force created by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association.- Background :...
", published in February 1996, the committee made the following comments on race differences in intelligence:
Jensen commented:
Rushton found himself at the centre of another controversy in 1999 when unsolicited copies of a special abridged version of his 1995 book Race, Evolution and Behavior, aimed at a general readership, were mass mailed to psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists in North American universities. As a result Transaction Publishers
Transaction Publishers
Transaction Publishers is a New Jersey-based publishing house that specializes in social sciences books. Some of its books have been published with the imprint "Transactions Publishers".-Overview:...
withdrew from publishing the pamphlet, financed by the Pioneer Fund, and issued an apology in the January 2000 edition of the journal Society
Society (journal)
Society is a scientific journal that publishes discussions and research findings in the social sciences and public policy.It was founded as Transaction: Social Science and Modern SOCIETY by Irving Louis Horowitz in 1962. It was published by Transaction Publisher for decades before being purchased...
. In the pamphlet Rushton recounted how black Africans had been seen by outside observers through the centuries as naked, insanitary, impoverished and unintelligent. In modern times he remarked that their average IQ of 70 "is the lowest ever recorded", due to smaller average brain size. He explained these differences in terms of evolutionary history: those that had migrated to colder climates in the north to evolve into whites and Asians had adapted genetically to have more self-control, lower levels of sex hormones, greater intelligence, more complex social structures, and more stable families. He concluded that whites and Asians are more disposed to "invest time and energy in their children rather than the pursuit of sexual thrills. They are 'dads' rather than 'cads.'" J. Philippe Rushton has not distanced himself from groups on the far right in the US. He has been a regular contributor to the newsletters of American Renaissance
American Renaissance (magazine)
-Cancellation of 2010, 2011 conferences:In February 2010, following protests to hotel management of several hotels, which Jared Taylor claimed included some death threats, American Renaissance's biennial conference was canceled...
and has spoken at many of their biennial conferences, in 2006 sharing the platform with Nick Griffin
Nick Griffin
Nicholas John "Nick" Griffin is a British politician, chairman of the British National Party and Member of the European Parliament for North West England....
, leader of the British National Party
British National Party
The British National Party is a British far-right political party formed as a splinter group from the National Front by John Tyndall in 1982...
.
2000-present
In the 2000s two public figures generated controversy by repeating in interviews the claim of Lynn and Rushton that one of the main causes for poverty in AfricaAfrica
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
is the low average intelligence among sub-Saharan Africans. Following an interview with Kuukausiliite, a monthly magazine supplement of Helsingin Sanomat
Helsingin Sanomat
Helsingin Sanomat is the largest subscription newspaper in Finland and the Nordic countries, owned by Sanoma. Except after certain holidays, it is published daily. In 2008, its daily circulation was 412,421 on weekdays and 468,505 on Sundays...
, Lynn's coauthor Tatu Vanhanen
Tatu Vanhanen
Tatu Vanhanen is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tampere in Tampere, Finland...
, a political scientist
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
and father of the then Prime Minister of Finland
Prime Minister of Finland
The Prime Minister is the Head of Government of Finland. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President, who is the Head of State. The current Prime Minister is Jyrki Katainen of the National Coalition Party.-Overview:...
Matti Vanhanen
Matti Vanhanen
Matti Taneli Vanhanen is a Finnish politician. He is a former Prime Minister of Finland and a former Chairman of the Centre Party. In the second half of 2006 he was President of the European Council. In his earlier career he was a journalist...
, was investigated by the Finnish police between 2002 and 2004. In 2007 James D. Watson
James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick...
, Nobel laureate in biology, gave a controversial interview to the Sunday Times Magazine during a book tour in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. This resulted in the cancellation of a Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
lecture, along with other public engagements, and his suspension from his administrative position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neurobiology, plant genetics, genomics and bioinformatics. The Laboratory has a broad educational mission, including the recently established Watson School of Biological Sciences. It...
. He subsequently cancelled the tour and resigned from his position.
In 2005 the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law of the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
(APA) published a review article by Rushton and Jensen, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability". The article was followed by a series of responses, some in support, some critical. Richard Nisbett, another psychologist who had also commented at the time, later included an amplified version of his critique as part of the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009). Rushton and Jensen in 2010 made a point-for-point reply to this and again summarized the hereditarian position in "Race and IQ: A theory-based review of the research in Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It".
See also
- Race and intelligenceRace and intelligenceThe connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of intelligence testing in the early 20th century...
- Henry GarrettHenry GarrettHenry Edward Garrett was an American psychologist and segregationist. Garrett was President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955...
- Robert YerkesRobert YerkesRobert Mearns Yerkes was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology....
- The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy
- Cyril BurtCyril BurtSir Cyril Lodowic Burt was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics....