Word: jensenism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...continually attack those who dispute her brand of ideological orthodoxy with being "unscientific." She seems to posit some grand conspiracy advocating "immigration restriction, eugenics, imperialism, and anti-communism," originating in Spenser's Social Darwinism, continuing with the actions of "Nazi biologist[s]," and exhibiting itself today in "Arthur Jensen's revival of the doctrine of black genetic inferiority, thereby initiating a new wave of academic racism." She then tries to advance Professor E.O. Wilson's recent book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, as the culmination of this supposed trend, hoping to discredit it with guilt by association. Even though Ms. Rosenthal...
Strong rebuttals quickly came forth from anti-racist faculty and students, who sensed that the Jensen-Herrnstein doctrines would soon be used to justify sweeping attacks on open admissions, affirmative action, and school integration, and drastic cutbacks in health care, education, and welfare spending. Thus, the Committee Against Racism (CAR) was formed in 1972. A multiracial organization, CAR recognized that this new wave of racism would first attack minorities but soon would hurt whites as well. CAR circulated a resolution condemning the new I.Q. theories as unscientific and racist. CAR defined as racist a doctrine which legitimates racial oppression...
...Jensen, Herrnstein, and 47 colleagues published a resolution in American Psychologist, July, 1972, comparing themselves to Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein, and attacking the "orthodox environmentalism" of their critics. They declared that "hereditary influences... in human abilities and behaviors... are very strong"; strongly encouraged "research into the biological hereditary bases of behavior"; and said they "deplore[d] the evasion of hereditary reasoning in current textbooks and the failure to give responsible weight to heredity in disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, psychological measurement, and many others...
Meanwhile, Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin, inspired by the vehemence of the opposition to Jensen and Herrnstein, thoroughly reexamined all the data and studies on which the hereditarians had based their I.Q. evaluations. He discovered that the lynchpin of the Jensen-Herrnstein argument, the studies of identical twins reared apart, was utterly worthless. Absence of appropriate controls meant that the correlations could just as easily be attributed to environmental as to hereditary influences. The only study of identical twins which claimed to have controlled for environmental factors, that of English psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, proved to be a classic scientific fraud...
Unlike the more narrowly focused doctrines of Jensen and Herrnstein, Wilson's Sociobiology serves a much broader function of promoting biological and hereditary thinking throughout the academic world. For example, Allan Mazur, reviewing Sociobiology in the American Journal of Sociology, frankly states: "Wilson, with his brilliant scholarly reputation and Harvard credentials, has both the visibility and credibility to legitimate the biological approach to sociology. For me that is his major contribution...