The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Read Online Free PDF

Sunday Times
that seemed to confirm Kamin’s thesis with a sensational revelation: The recently deceased Cyril Burt, Britain’s most eminent psychometrician, author of the largest and most famous study of the intelligence of identical twins who grew up apart, was charged with fraud. 29 He had made up data, fudged his results, and invented coauthors, the
Sunday Times
declared. The subsequent scandal was as big as the Piltdown Man hoax. Cyril Burt had not been just another researcher but one of the giants of twentieth-century psychology. Nor could his colleagues find a ready defense (the defense came later, as described in the box). They protested that the revelations did not compromise the great bulk of the work that bore on the issue of heritability, but their defenses sounded feeble in the light of the suspicions that had preceded Burt’s exposure.
    For the public observing the uproar in the academy from the sidelines, the capstone of the assault on the integrity of the discipline occurred in 1981 when Harvard paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of several popular books on biology, published
The Mismeasure of Man. 32
Gould examined the history of intelligence testing, found that it was peopled by charlatans, racists, and self-deluded fools, and concluded that “determinist arguments for ranking people according to a single scale of intelligence, no matter how numerically sophisticated, have recorded little more than social prejudice.” 33
The Mismeasure of Man
became a best-seller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
    The Burt Affair
    It would be more than a decade before the Burt affair was subjected to detailed reexamination. In 1989 and 1991, two accounts of the Burt allegations, by psychologist Robert Joynson and sociologist Ronald Fletcher, written independently, concluded that the attacks against Burt had been motivated by a mixture of professional and ideological antagonism and that no credible case of data falsification or fictitious research or researchers had ever been presented. 30 Both authors also concluded that some of Burt’s leading critics were aware that their accusations were inaccurate even at the time they made them. An ironic afterword centers on Burt’s claim that the correlation between the IQs of identical twins reared apart is +.77. A correlation this large almost irrefutably supports a large genetic influence on IQ. Since the attacks on Burt began, it had been savagely derided as fraudulent, the product of Burt’s fiddling with the data to make his case. In 1990, the Minnesota twin study, accepted by most scholars as a model of its kind, produced its most detailed estimates of the correlation of IQ between identical twins reared apart. The procedure that most closely paralleled Burt’s yielded a correlation of +.78. 31
    Gould and his allies had won the visible battle. By the early 1980s, a new received wisdom about intelligence had been formed that went roughly as follows:
    Intelligence is a bankrupt concept. Whatever it might mean—and nobody really knows even how to define it—intelligence is so ephemeral that no one can measure it accurately. IQ tests are, of course, culturally biased, and so are all the other “aptitude” tests, such as the SAT. To the extent that tests such as IQ and SAT measure anything, it certainly is not an innate “intelligence.” IQ scores are not constant; they often change significantly over an individual’s life span. The scores of entire populations can be expected to change over time—look at the Jews, who early in the twentieth century scored below average on IQ scores and now score well above theaverage. Furthermore, the tests are nearly useless as tools, as confirmed by the well-documented fact that such tests do not predict anything except success in school. Earnings, occupation, productivity—all the important measures of success—are unrelated to the test scores. All that tests really accomplish is to label youngsters,