The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (28 page)

    
After Darwin published
On the Origin of Species
in 1859, Galton immediately sought to further define natural selection
:
Galton,
Hereditary Genius
, p. 2.

Galton also wrote:

Biographies show [eminent men] to be haunted and driven by an incessant instinctive craving for intellectual work. They do not work for the sake of eminence, but to satisfy a
natural craving
for brain work, just as athletes cannot endure repose on account of their muscular irritability, which insists upon exercise. It is very unlikely that any conjunction of circumstances should supply a stimulus to brain work commensurate with what these men carry in their own constitutions. (Galton,
Hereditary Genius
, p. 80.)

    
In 1869, he published
Hereditary Genius
, arguing that smart, successful people were simply “gifted” with a superior biology
:
Galton,
Hereditary Genius
, p. 39.

“The range of mental power between the greatest and least of English intellects is enormous,” Galton wrote. “There is a continuity of natural ability reaching from one knows not what height, and descending to one can hardly say what depth.” (Galton,
Hereditary Genius
, p. 26.)

    
In 1874, he introduced the phrase “nature and nurture” (as a rhetorical device to favor nature)
.

“The phrase ‘nature and nurture’ is a convenient jingle of words,” Galton wrote, “for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world. Nurture is every influence from without that affects him after his birth.” (Galton,
English Men of Science
, p. 112.)

Galton probably got the phrase from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
.

Prospero: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick.

Judith Rich Harris suggests that Shakespeare may have gotten it from British writer Richard Mulcaster, who, thirty years earlier, had written, “Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward.” (Harris,
The Nurture Assumption
, p. 4.)

    
In 1883, he invented “eugenics,” his plan to maximize the breeding of biologically superior humans and minimize the breeding of biologically inferior humans
.

   Galton was an epic figure in the history of science. In his
New Yorker
review of Martin Brookes’s recent Galton biography, Jim Holt eloquently explains his importance in two fields: eugenics and statistics.

Jim Holt on Galton’s eugenics:

In his long career, Galton didn’t come close to proving the central axiom of eugenics: that, when it comes to talent and virtue, nature dominates nurture. Yet he never doubted its truth, and many scientists came to share his conviction. Darwin himself, in “The Descent of Man,” wrote, “We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius … tends to be inherited.” Given this axiom, there are two ways of putting eugenics into practice: “positive” eugenics, which means getting superior people to breed more; and “negative” eugenics, which means getting inferior ones to breed less. For the most part, Galton was a positive eugenicist. He stressed the importance of early marriage and high fertility among the genetic elite, fantasizing about lavish state-funded weddings in Westminster Abbey with the Queen giving away the bride as an incentive. Always hostile to religion, he railed against the Catholic Church for imposing celibacy on some of its most
gifted representatives over the centuries. He hoped that spreading the insights of eugenics would make the gifted aware of their responsibility to procreate for the good of the human race. But Galton did not believe that eugenics could be entirely an affair of moral suasion. Worried by evidence that the poor in industrial Britain were breeding disproportionately, he urged that charity be redirected from them and toward the “desirables.” To prevent “the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism,” he urged “stern compulsion,” which might take the form of marriage restrictions or even sterilization.

Galton’s proposals were benign compared with those of famous contemporaries who rallied to his cause. H. G. Wells, for instance, declared, “It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” Although Galton was a conservative, his creed caught on with progressive figures like Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In the United States, New York disciples founded the Galton Society, which met regularly at the American Museum of Natural History, and popularizers helped the rest of the country become eugenics-minded. “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle—and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to ‘blind’ sentiment?” asked a placard at an exposition in Philadelphia. Four years before Galton’s death, the Indiana legislature passed the first state sterilization law, “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” Most of the other states soon followed. In all, there were some sixty thousand court-ordered eugenically unfit. It was in Germany that eugenics took its most horrific form. Galton’s creed had aimed at the uplift of humanity as a whole; although he shared the prejudices that were common in the Victorian era, the concept of race did not play much of a role in his theorizing.

German eugenics, by contrast, quickly morphed into
Rassenhygiene
—race hygiene. Under Hitler, nearly four hundred thousand people with putatively hereditary conditions like feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia were forcibly sterilized. In time, many were simply murdered. The Nazi experiment provoked a revulsion against eugenics that effectively ended the movement. (Holt, “Measure for Measure,” p. 90.)

Jim Holt on Galton’s statistical inventions:

After obtaining height data from two hundred and five pairs of parents and nine hundred and twenty-eight of their adult children, Galton plotted the points
on a graph, with the parents’ heights represented on one axis and the children’s on the other. He then penciled a straight line though the cloud of points to capture the trend it represented. The slope of this line turned out to be two-thirds. What this meant was that exceptionally tall (or short) parents had children who, on average, were only two-thirds as exceptional as they were. In other words, when it came to height children tended to be less exceptional than their parents. The same, he had noticed years earlier, seemed to be true in the case of “eminence”: the children of J. S. Bach, for example, may have been more musically distinguished than average, but they were less distinguished than their father. Galton called this phenomenon “regression toward mediocrity.”

Regression analysis furnished a way of predicting one thing (a child’s height) from another (its parents’) when the two things were fuzzily related. Galton went on to develop a measure of the strength of such fuzzy relationships, one that could be applied even when the things related were different in kind—like rainfall and crop yield. He called this more general technique “correlation.” The result was a major conceptual breakthrough. Until then, science had pretty much been limited to deterministic laws of cause and effect—which are hard to find in the biological world, where multiple causes often blend together in a messy way. Thanks to Galton, statistical laws gained respectability in science. His discovery of regression toward mediocrity—or regression to the mean, as it is now called—has resonated even more widely. (Holt, “Measure for Measure,” pp. 88–89.)

    
“[the word] ‘intelligence’ has become a mere vocal sound
”:
Spearman,
The Abilities of Man, Their Nature and Measurement
, cited in Schönemann, “On models and muddles of heritability.”

This was still the case in the 1980s. From the American Psychiatric Association report: “Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen somewhat different definitions.” (Hertzig and Farber, eds.,
Annual Progress in Child Psychiatry and Child Development 1997
, p. 96.)

    
there must be a single “general intelligence” (
g
for short)
:
Spearman, “General intelligence, objectively determined and measured,” pp. 201–93; Green, Classics in the History of Psychology Web site.

    
“
G
is, in the normal course of events, determined innately,” Spearman declared
.
“A person can no more be trained to have it in higher degree than he can be
trained to be taller”: Deary, Lawn, and Bartholomew, “A conversation between Charles Spearman, Godfrey Thomson, and Edward L. Thorndike,” p. 128.

   In the absence of any persuasive alternative, Spearman’s
g
resonated with the psychological community and proved quite resilient throughout the twentieth century. His
g
was further refined in the 1970s and ’80s by Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen and gained considerable traction in the psychological community.

That’s not to say that Jensen won over a clear majority of academic psychologists. But he clearly won over at least a large plurality. “Of the 60 papers in our sample, 29 cited Jensen’s article negatively. This number includes articles that took exception to almost every point presented in the paper. It also includes those in which the authors debated specific points Jensen made. Eight of the articles cited Jensen’s paper as an example of a controversy. Eight more used the article as a background reference. Only fifteen of the articles cited Jensen in agreement with his positions, and seven of them only on minor points. Further readings have confirmed that our sample is typical of the way authors have cited the Jensen work.” (“High Impact Science and the Case of Arthur Jensen,” pp. 652–62.)

In 1971, Raymond Cattell divided
g
into two independent subcomponents—fluid intelligence (
g
F) and crystallized intelligence (
g
C). Fluid intelligence was thought to be a fixed, innate ability to reason and conceptualize; crystallized intelligence was the school-influenced ability to draw on knowledge and experience.

Throughout the twentieth century, psychologists supporting general intelligence became naturally allied with the psychologists supporting “heritability” from twin studies, and together they painted a formidable neo-Galtonian portrait of humans with preset genetic capabilities. Collectively, these modern Galton disciples became known as “behavior geneticists.” In the 1980s and ’90s, they published a slew of studies aiming to solidify their position and influence policy. In short, they wanted to steer resources toward the innately superior and not waste much on the genetically inferior.

Kenneth A. Dodge writes: “The naïve hope that early environmentalists could be easily manipulated to alter long-term outcomes inspired a backlash of behavior-genetic studies in the 1980s and 1990s that championed the high percent of variance in behavior that is accounted for by genes. The legacy of this backlash is the argument that public and private resources (e.g., the best schools and highest
incomes) should be administered according to the selection of those with the highest (presumably, genetically based) potential to achieve, rather than to compensate for biological or environmental disadvantage. The scholarly anchor or the policy conclusion was exemplified in the essays by Scarr (1992), Lytton (1990), and Harris (1995, 1998) which claimed that the environment accounts for very little influence on human behavior. After 50 years of study, it seemed that little had been learned.” (Dodge, “The nature-nurture debate and public policy,”. pp. 418–27)