Word: iq
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...electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians--an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike...
...human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...
...country embraced the IQ--and the application of IQ testing to restructure society--more thoroughly than the U.S. Every year millions of Americans have their IQ measured, many with a direct descendant of Binet's original test, the Stanford-Binet, although not necessarily for the purpose Binet intended. He developed his test as a way of identifying public school students who needed extra help in learning, and that is still one of its leading uses...
...broader and more controversial use of IQ testing has its roots in a theory of intelligence--part science, part sociology--that developed in the late 19th century, before Binet's work and entirely separate from it. Championed first by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, it held that intelligence was the most valuable human attribute, and that if people who had a lot of it could be identified and put in leadership positions, all of society would benefit...
Terman believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great sorting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell...