Word: herrnsteins
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...publication two years ago of Professor Richard Herrnstein's Atlantic Monthly article about I.Q. testing and genetic-racial differences in human intelligence carried the discussion of these issues into the political arena. The article by Joseph Alsop (the Globe, August 27) and some comments in the September 3 issue of Time magazine have focused new attention on the subject...
...Herrnstein's article was embarrassingly misinformed on several counts; I would like to remark here on contravening evidence from the substantial scientific research about these matters extending over many decades...
Hopefully, this clears the confusion between what an I.Q. test does and what it does not do. But Herrnstein is even more confused about the relation between human intelligence and heredity. My own extensive studies on the factors which produce retardation have demonstrated beyond doubt that extremely low I.Q.s among children (below 55) are due to neuro-psychiatric disorders, the large collection of developmental disorders and illnesses which interfere with mentation. These are to a limited extent of a genetic nature (metabolic errors) and to a larger extent due to external influences which have operated upon the embryo...
Thus if men and women of superior intelligence intermarried only among themselves, the dire consequence would be indeed as Herrnstein predicts--a hereditary, intelligent elite far removed from a much larger pool of undistinguished and anonymous persons. However Herrnstein ignores entirely the known history and scientific studies showing that highly intelligent persons usually mate with persons with other qualities and that consequently intelligence tends constantly to equalize in the population. As is well known, successive generations of once-outstanding families return, sometimes gradually but sometimes quite abruptly, into the anonymity of the general pool; conversely, outstanding individuals regularly emerge from...
...these objections to Herrnstein's claims is this. Human intelligence is composed of many diverse personality faculties, the interaction of which is not ascertainable, and demonstrably not tested by I.Q. tests, which measure only development rates among children and do this only in terms of certain faculties which may be desirable and needed under certain conditions but are quite useless in other situations. The genetics of human intelligence is not scientifically well enough established to be used as a political weapon; the propagation of intelligence through generations obeys sociological, psychological and biological laws which override completely the possibility of political...