A Question of Intelligence

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by Richard Herrnstein

IN THE MOOD for something really subversive? If so, read A Question of Intelligence, by Daniel Seligman, a regular columnist and former senior editor at Fortune magazine. What we have here is a book on IQ tests--what they are, what they measure, and what they mean for everyday life. Seligman, it is no secret, had trouble finding a publisher. That is part of the story of intelligence testing, too. One explanation of his troubles may be that prospective publishers discovered that the book was too clearly written for so rich a lode of forbidden facts.

Seligman starts with an engaging introduction to the modern intelligence test. In preparing to write this book, he had himself professionally tested. I assume it is modesty that keeps him from telling us his score, but, as a device for explaining tests, his description of the experience works well. And it rapidly disposes of two common, and bogus, charges that you run into in the popular media-- namely that an IQ test is just a test of academic knowledge, and that it is loaded with things you are taught by virtue of being a white, middle-class American. Seligman skillfully shows that an intelligence test is more nearly a way to cut through those things, to get at the core of the individual's capacity, to measure something plausibly called intelligence.

Moving on, the book reviews some well-established findings: for example, that intelligence has hereditary, as well as environmental, roots; that East Asians earn higher scores than whites; and that blacks and whites have differed on the average by about 15 points (i.e., one standard deviation) for generations. It discusses the higher scores of Asians living in the vibrantly successful Pacific Rim economies, largely run by the ethnic Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. High Chinese scores in Communist China foreshadow rapid economic growth as Communism disappears, for, as Seligman shows, the link between a country's economic success and its average IQ echoes data at the individual level. The book summarizes evidence showing that national IQ rises when a country modernizes, for reasons that are net fully understood.

Looking to a more distant horizon, Seligman considers the possibility of declining scores from generation to generation, if people with high scores continue to reproduce at low rates. This is highly controversial, and Seligman concedes that talking about differential fertility harks back to eugenics. But before eugenics was perverted by the Nazis, it was seen by such respectable and upright people as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as a matter of designing public policies to improve human hereditary endowment in humane and voluntary ways, such as disseminating information about birth control. It now takes a rare person to discuss publicly, let alone advocate, anything that sounds like eugenics. But one can detect eugenic thinking in the widespread support for Planned Parenthood and "abortion rights." If that is so, it would be better for such reasoning to be openly discussed rather than allowed to influence public policy covertly and thus probably more crudely. Still one senses that not many will join Seligman in getting out front here.

The facts that Seligman summarizes are as unknown to the general public as they are familiar to experts. Here are some examples of frequently mistold tales, with particular relevance to concerns of the day:

Miracle in Milwaukee: In the mid 1970s, we all heard repeatedly about what the media liked to call an educational miracle. IQs had been raised by about thirty points, the story went, in two to three dozen inner-city youngsters in Milwaukee who, by virtue of their backgrounds, appeared destined for mental retardation. Instead of growing up retarded, the media reported, the kids were scoring high average or superior, thanks to the educational enrichments contrived by the project's director, a well-connected University of Wisconsin professor named F. Rick Heber. Confronted with so momentous a discovery, who would cavil at the cost of this rederally funded project, which was about $14 million?

Seligman provides an update. The "miracle" quickly faded from view, because little was getting published where scholars could evaluate it. But then, to the amazement of critics and boosters alike, Heber and some of his top associates were convicted of various crimes, including embezzling institutional funds. Of course, it could still have been a miracle (even felons can do science), but when the results of the study were finally published a couple of years ago, it was arguable whether they showed any educational benefits at all.

L'affaire Burt: Sir Cyril Burt, a much acclaimed British psychologist during the first half of the century, suddenly showed up in 1976 in our daily papers and on evening network news, after the London Sunday Times insinuated that Burt had faked data showing that identical twins growing up in separated homes have

similar IQs, and that he invented research assistants to lend credibility to his hoax. Burt's fraud has been enshrined in the media pantheon next to Piltdown man. Inasmuch as the similarity between separated twins is a significant piece of evidence that there is a heritable ingredient in intelligence, discrediting Burt seemed to many commentators to discredit the theory of heritable intelligence.