Human Intelligence

J. McVicker Hunt, J. McV. Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138525450
• eBook ISBN: 9781000677515
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What determines human intelligence? What is its relationship to creativity? Its potential for change? To illuminate some of these questions, J. McVicker Hunt has gathered together a number of essays. This volume contains some of the answers that have been found, but emphasizes that we still need to learn a great deal about developing ways to assess our human resources. We remain. for example, uncertain about what abilities pinpoint intelligence, and the extent to which intellectual ability can predict classroom successw-even the ability to perfrom a job well., Articles in this book show that indications of heritability have nothing to say about the educability of individuals or classes w races. Investigations indicate that there is a great deal more plasticity in the development of behavior and abilities than was presumed by those who believe in predetermined intelligence. They also indicate that knowledge and ability both grow during the early years; knowledge grows throughout life: but the ability to acquire new knowledge and skill declines over time., These areas of developing knowledge are of political as well as social significance. Any attempts to upgrade the abilities of the poor or the disadvantaged must necessarily be concerned with manipulation of the environment. These articles represent the most advanced available information about the relationship of experience, environment and heredity to the development of measurable intelligence.

BACKGROUND FACTORS

Part I.

Genetics and Competence: Do Heritability Indices Predict Educability?

JERRY HIRSCH

Over the past two decades the case against extreme behaviorism has been spelled out in incontrovertible detail. The behaviorists committed many sins: they accepted the mind at birth as Locke’s tabula rasa, they advocated an empty-organism psychology, they asserted the uniformity postulate of no prenatal individual differences; in short, they epitomized typological thinking. Many times we have heard quoted the famous boast by the first high priest of behaviorism, John B. Watson:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, race of his ancestors.

However, it is only when we read the next sentence, which is rarely, if ever, quoted, that we begin to understand how so many people might have embraced something intellectually so shallow as radical behaviorism. In that all-important next sentence Watson explains: “I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”

Who were the advocates of the contrary, and what had they been saying? It is difficult to establish the origins of racist thinking, but certainly one of its most influential advocates was Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who published a four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in the mid-1850s. De Gobineau preached the superiority of the white race, and among whites it was the Aryans who carried civilization to its highest point. In fact, they were responsible for civilization wherever it appeared. Unfortunately, de Gobineau’s essay proved to be the major seminal work that inspired some of the most perverse developments in the intellectual and political history of our civilization. Later in his life, de Gobineau became an intimate of Richard Wagner. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who emigrated to the Continent, became a devoted admirer of both de Gobineau and Wagner. In 1908, after Wagner’s death, Chamberlain married Wagner’s daughter during World War I, becoming a naturalized German citizen in 1916.

In the summer of 1923, an admirer of Chamberlain’s writings, Adolf Hitler, visited Wahnfried, the Wagner family home in Bayreuth where Chamberlain lived. After their meeting, Chamberlain wrote to Hitler: “My faith in the Germans had never wavered for a moment, but my hope … had sunk to a low ebb. At one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul!” We all know the sequel to that unfortunate tale. I find that many of my scientific colleagues, whether they be biological or social scientists, for the most part, do not know the sad parallel that exists for the essentially political tale I have so far recounted. The same theme can be traced down the mainstream of biosocial science.

Today not many people know the complete title of Darwin’s most famous book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. I find no evidence that Darwin had the attitudes we now call racist. Unfortunately, many of his admirers, his contemporaries and his successors were not as circumspect as he. In Paris in 1838, J.E.D. Esquirol first described a form of mental deficiency later to become well known by two inappropriate names unrelated to his work. Unhappily, one of these names, through textbook adoption and clinical jargon, puts into wide circulation a term loaded with race prejudice. Somewhat later (1846 and 1866), E. Seguin described the same condition under the name “furfuraceous cretinism,” but his account has only recently been recognized as “the most ingenious description of physical characteristics,” as C.E. Benda puts it.

This most promising scientific beginning was ignored, however, and in 1866, John Langdon Haydon Down published the paper entitled “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots.”

…making a classification of the feeble-minded, by arranging them around various ethnic standards—in other words, framing a natural system to supplement the information to be derived by an inquiry into the history of the case.

I have been able to find among the large number of idiots and imbeciles which comes under my observation, both at Earlswood and the outpatient department of the Hospital, that a considerable portion can be fairly referred to one of the great divisions of the human family other than the class from which they have sprung. Of course, there are numerous representatives of the great Caucasian family. Several well-marked examples of the Ethiopian variety have come under my notice, presenting the characteristic malar bones, the prominent eyes, the puffy lips, and retreating chin. The woolly hair has also been present, although not always black nor has the skin acquired pigmentary deposit. They have been specimens of white negroes, although of European descent.

Some arrange themselves around the Malay variety, and present in their soft, black, curly hair, their prominent upper jaws and capacious mouths, types of the family which people the South Sea Islands.

Nor have there been wanting the analogues of the people who with shortened foreheads, prominent cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly apish nose, originally inhabited the American Continent.

The great Mongolian family has numerous representatives, and it is to this division, 1 wish, in this paper, to call special attention. A very large number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols. So marked is this, that when placed side by side, it is difficult to believe that the specimens compared are not children of the same parents. The number of idiots who arrange themselves around the Mongolian type is so great, and they present such a close resemblance to one another in mental power, that I shall describe an idiot member of this racial division, selected from the large number that have fallen under my observation.

The hair is not black, as in the real Mongol, but of a brownish colour, straight and scanty. The face is flat and broad, and destitute of prominence. The cheeks are roundish, and extended laterally. The eyes are obliquely placed, and the internal canthi more than normally distant from one another. The palpebral fissure is very narrow. The forehead is wrinkled transversely from the constant assistance which the levatores palpebrarum derive from the occipitofrontalis muscle in the opening of the eyes. The lips are large and thick with transverse fissures. The tongue is long, thick, and is much roughened. The nose is small. The skin has a slight dirty yellowish tinge and is deficient in elasticity, giving the appearance of being too large for the body.

The boy’s aspect is such that it is difficult to realize that he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt that these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.

And he means degeneration from a higher to a lower race. The foregoing represents a distasteful but excellent example of the racial hierarchy theory and its misleadingly dangerous implications. That was how the widely used terms “mongolism” and “mongolian idiocy” entered our “technical” vocabulary. For the next century, this pattern of thought would persist and occupy an important place in the minds of many leading scientists.

In 1884, Francis Galton, Darwin’s half cousin, founder of the eugenics movement and respected contributor to many fields of science, wrote to the distinguished Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle: “It strikes me that the Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations, and that there is need of evidence that they are capable of fulfilling the varied duties of a civilized nation by themselves.” Karl Pearson, Galton’s disciple and biographer, echoed this opinion 40 years later during his attempt to prove the undesirability of Jewish immigration into Britain: “for such men as religion, social habits, or language keep as a caste apart, there should be no place. They will not be absorbed by, and at the same time strengthen the existing population; they will develop into a parasitic race.”

Beginning in 1908 and continuing at least until 1928, Karl Pearson collected and analyzed data in order to assess “the quality of the racial stock immigrating into Great Britain.” He was particularly disturbed by the large numbers of East European Jews, who near the turn of the century began coming from Poland and Russia to escape the pogroms. Pearson’s philosophy was quite explicitly spelled out:

Let us admit. …that the mind of man is for the most part a congenital product, and the factors which determine it are racial and familial; we are not dealing with a mutable characteristic capable of being moulded by the doctor, the teacher, the parent or the home environment …. The ancestors of the men who pride themselves on being English today were all at one time immigrants; it is not for us to cast the first stone against newcomers, solely because they are newcomers. But the test for immigrants in the old days was a severe one; it was power physical and mental to retain their hold on the land they seized. So came Celts, Saxons, Norsemen, Danes and Normans in succession and built up the nation of which we are proud. Nor do we criticize the alien Jewish immigration simply because it is Jewish; we took the alien Jews to study, because they were the chief immigrants of that day and material was readily available.

His observations led him to conclude: “Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population.” Pearson proclaimed this general Jewish inferiority despite his own failure to find any differences between the Jewish and non-Jewish boys when comparisons (reported in the same article) were made for the sexes separately.

Quite recently there has appeared a series of papers disputing whether or not black Americans are, in fact, genetically inferior to white Americans in intellectual capacity. In 1969 a discussion of heredity, race and intelligence reasserting the old fallacious white supremacist point of view was published in the Harvard Educational Review by the notorious A.R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley. The claims and counterclaims have been given enormous publicity in the popular press in America. Some of those papers contain most of the fallacies that can conceivably be associated with this widely misunderstood problem.

This dispute leads to an intellectual cul-de-sac, and a series of steps marked by fallacious assumptions that can be listed as follows: 1) a trait called intelligence is defined, and an instrument for measuring the expression of this trait is devised and used; 2) the heritability of the trait is estimated; 3) races (populations) are compared with respect to their performance on the test of trait expression; 4) when the races (populations) differ on the test whose heritability has now been measured, the one with the lower score is genetically inferior, Q.E.D.

The foregoing argument can be applied to any single trait or to as many traits as one might choose to consider. Therefore, analysis of this general problem does not depend upon the particular definition and test used for this or that trait. For my analysis I shall pretend that an acceptable test exists for some trait, be it height, weight, intelligence or anything else. For without an acceptable test, discussion of the “trait” remains unscientific.

In order even to consider comparisons between races, the following concepts must be recognized: 1) the mosaic nature of the genome or hereditary endowment of the species; 2) development as the expression of one out of many alternatives in the norm of reaction (see below) of the genotype or hereditary endowment of the individual; 3) a population as a gene pool or reservoir of possible genetic combinations; 4) heritability (a measure of the amount of genetic variation in a population associated with variation in the expression of some trait) is not instinct (an inherited stereotyped behavior pattern like the nest-building activities of a bird); 5) traits as distributions of scores; and 6) distributions as moments or the mathematical descriptions of their major features, such as average, scatter, asymmetry and peakedness.

Since genetic inheritance comes to us in bits and pieces, as it were, not in a lump, the hereditary endowment of each individual is a unique mosaic—an assemblage of factors many of which are independent. Because of the lotterylike nature of fertilization and even of the way egg and sperm are formed, no two individuals other than identical twins share the same genotypic mosaic.

The ontogeny of an individual’s phenotype (the observable outcome of development) has a norm or range of reaction not predictable in advance. In most cases the norm of reaction remains largely unknown, but the concept is nevertheless of fundamental importance, because it saves us from being taken in by glib and misleading textbook cliches such as “heredity sets the limits, but environment determines the extent of development within those limits.” Even when, as in plants and some animals, an individual genotype can be replicated many times and its development studied over a range of environmental conditions, we can only get an approximate estimate of what the range of the genotype’s reaction might be. The more varied the conditions, the more varied might be the end product. Of course, different genotypes should not be expected to have the same norm of reaction (the same seed develops into quite a different plant at sea level and above the timberline). Unfortunately, psychology’s attention was diverted from appreciating this basic fact of biology by a half century of misguided environmentalism. Just as we see that, except for twins born of the same egg, no two human faces are alike, so we must expect norms of reaction to show genotypic uniqueness. That is one reason why the heroic but ill-fated attempts of experimental learning psychologists to write the “laws of environmental influence” were grasping at shadows. Those “limits set by heredity” in the textbook cliche can never be specified. They are plastic within each individual and differ between individuals. Extreme environmentalists were wrong to hope that one law or set of laws would be found that could describe universally how genetic endowment is modified. Extreme hereditarians were wrong to ignore the norm of reaction.

Individuals occur in populations, and then only as temporary attachments, so to speak, each to particular combinations of genes. The population, however, can endure indefinitely as a pool or reservoir of genes, maybe forever recombining to generate new individuals.

What is heritability? How is heritability estimated for intelligence or any other trait? Is heritability related to instinct? In 1872, Douglas Spalding demonstrated that the ontogeny of a bird’s ability to fly is simply maturation and not the result of practice, imitation or any demonstrable kind of learning. He confined immature birds and deprived them of the opportunity either to practice flapping their wings or to observe and imitate the flight of older birds; in spite of this, they developed the ability to fly. For some ethologists this deprivation experiment became the paradigm for proving the innateness or instinctive nature of a behavior by demonstrating that it appears despite the absence of any opportunity for it to be learned. Remember two things about this approach: first, the observation involves experimental manipulation of the conditions of experience during development, and second, such observation can be made on the development of one individual. For some people the results of a deprivation experiment now constitute the operational demonstration of the existence (or nonexistence) of an instinct in a particular species.

Are instincts heritable, that is, are they determined by genes? But what is a gene? A gene is an inference from a breeding experiment. It is recognized by the measurement of individual differences—the recognition of the segregation of distinguishable forms of the expression of some trait among the progeny of appropriate matings. For example, when an individual of blood type AA mates with one of type BB, their offspring are uniformly AB. If two of the AB offspring mate, it is found that the A and B gene forms, or alleles as they are called technically, have segregated during reproduction and recombined in their progeny to produce all combinations of A and B: AA, AB and BB. Note that the only operation involved in such a study is breeding of one or more generations and then, at an appropriate time of life, observation of the separate individuals born in each generation—controlled breeding with experimental material or pedigree analysis of the appropriate families. In principle, only one (usually brief) observation is required. Thus we see that genetics is a science of differences, and the breeding experiment is its fundamental operation. The operational definition of the gene, therefore, involves observation in a breeding experiment of the segregation among several individuals of distinguishable differences in the expression of some trait from which the gene can be inferred; that is, in contrast to the study of instinct, a genetic study requires more than one subject, whose development is studied. Moreover, all discussions of genetic analysis presuppose sufficiently adequate control of environmental conditions so that all observed individual differences have developed under the same environmental conditions—conditions never achieved in any human studies.

How does heritability enter the picture...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Background Factors
• Part II. Of Social Class and Education
• Part III. Creativity and Intelligence
• Part IV. The Development and Utilization of Competence
• About the Authors