Word: iq
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wilson is a professor of government and author of Thinking About Crime (1975). Herrnstein, a psychologist, has been a controversial figure since his 1971 article in the Atlantic stressing the role of genetic factors in producing differences in IQ scores. The two professors have jointly taught a course on crime at Harvard since 1977. Says Wilson: "There is overwhelming evidence first that crime runs in families and second that early childhood precursors of crime seem clear." One study of adoptions in Denmark from 1924 to 1947 found that chronically criminal biological parents were three times as likely to produce...
Criminologists acted rashly in the 1930s, the authors say, by deciding to ignore low IQ as a significant factor in crime. "For four decades," they write, "large bodies of evidence have consistently shown about a ten-point gap between the average offender and nonoffender in Great Britain and in the U.S." Though the authors make much of this difference, it may mean only that low-IQ criminals tend to get caught more often than their smarter colleagues. But for the authors, the important finding is that low IQ is associated with a particular kind of crime: impulsive acts with...
Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist who has long opposed Herrnstein in the IQ debate, thinks the Wilson-Herrnstein material is based on unsound studies. "Fashions change in the social sciences," he says. "Sometimes the environmentalists are in the saddle, so they will look at fatally flawed data and say, 'Look, these suggest an environmental interpretation,' and other times the hereditarians are in the saddle and say, 'Look, these suggest a genetic interpretation.' The data are fundamentally ambiguous, and, in fact, scientists have no basis to come to any conclusions with data of this sort...
Others in the field are more impressed by Wilson and Herrnstein. Dr. Frank Elliott, emeritus professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, though a bit dubious about the conclusions on IQ, says of the authors, "Theirs is the philosophy of this subject which is going to stand. Most of the work done on criminality by sociologists never mentions heredity. For either political or philosophical reasons, they don't like the feeling that your temperament or your personality is in any way influenced by heredity. That's nonsense...
Talking Heads, a rhythmically deft and enterprising band led by David Byrne, swings through a new album of high-IQ rock...