"If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great be our sin."      -  Charles Darwin,  The Voyage of the Beagle

Maybe it's not the size of our brains, but what's in them?!
 
 

Alfred Binet
 
 

Sorbonne psychology laboratory studying crainiometry

 

In 1904, commissioned by the minister of public education in France : devise a way of identifying children whose difficulties in normal classrooms suggested some need for special education.

Created a test consisting of  simple problem solving involving

"direction (ordering), comprehension, invention and censure (correction)" (Binet, 1909).

 The second edition added an age level to each task, defined as the youngest age at which a child of normal intelligence should be able to complete the task successfully.  This provided a "mental age" into  which the chronological age could be divided to provide an Intelligence Quotient (IQ).

Binet did not speculate on the meaning of the IQ he assigned to children.  The value is empirical and practical, and not meant to capture the complexity of intelligence.

"It is the intelligence alone that we seek to measure, by disregarding in so far as possible, the degree of instruction which the child posesses....We give him nothing to read, nothing to write, and submit him to no test in which he might succeed by means of rote learning" (1905, p.42)

 "self-fulfilling prophesy", where a label might set a teacher's attitude and divert a child's education.  (1905, p.37)

"Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.  We should therefore study his condition at the time and that only.""As to that which concerns his future, we shall exercise the same abstinence;  we do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable.  We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state."

•  Antihereditarian:   tested in order to enhance potential through education.

• The misuse of mental tests resides in two fallacies:

•   Reification :  reducing the concept of intelligence to an abstract number

• Hereditarianism : 'heritable' means 'inevitable'.
• if a percentage of variation exists within a group, it must also explain a similar percentage in the difference between groups (i.e. Whites and Blacks).

 

H. H. Goddard
 

• Director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey

• popularized reification by dividing defectives into three groups:
1. 1 Idiots = those who could not develop full speech; mental age < 3
2. 2 Imbeciles = could not master written language; mental age 3-7
3. 3 Morons = could be trained to function in society; mental age 8-12

Popularized IQ testing in America;  Translated Binet's articles into english, applied the tests in his school, and agitated for their general use in identifying below normal intelligence.

•  used the values to recognize limits,
• segregate,
• curtail breeding to prevent further reproduction of the feeble minded.

"Stated in its boldest form, our thesis is that the chief determiner of human conduct is a unitary mental process which we call intelligence: .... mental level for each individual is determined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with union of the germ cells: that it is but little affected by any later influences except such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism."

Defended  biological determinism and extended the range of social phenomena to differences in innate intelligence until it encompassed virtually everything:

• Eugenically linking morality to intelligence; uncontrolled emotions = uncontrolled actions =  criminality, alcoholism, prostitution, and mischieviousness

• The lower classes are biologically determined;

"Now the fact is, that workmen may have a 10 year intelligence while you have a 20.  To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd ....... How can there be a thing such as social equality whith this wide range of mental capacity?" - Goddard, before a group of Princeton undergraduates, 1919

"Democracy is a method for ariving at a truly benevolent aristocracy."


 

Popular Eugenic themes (derived from biological determinism) and the resurgance of Mendelian Inheritance:

traced feeble-mindedness in his students at the Vineland School, determined that it followed Mendelian inheritance patterns.

"If both parents are feeble-minded all the children will be feebleminded.  It is obvious that such matings should not be allowed......It is obvious that if this rule is to be carried out the intelligent part of society must enforce it." (1914, p.561)

Since immorality and stupidity are genetically linked, society must step in for society's sake:

Colonization:  Morons could live in institutions where they could live in contentment at their biologically appointed level, and denied only their sexuality.

Sterilization:  Goddard considered this impractical because of the current society's sensibilities

published hundreds of pedigrees of feeble-minded who were wards of the state;

Kallikak Pedigree:  pseudonym Martin Kallikak (kallos=beautiful, kakos=bad),

paupers in the New Jersey Pine barrens and traced their ancestry to the illict union of an upstanding man with a moronic tavern wench;  he later married a worthy Quakeress and started another upstanding line.  Using the Goddard created the primal myth of the eugenics movement.

Using intuitive women to recognize morons by sight, they examined the Kakos family

Immigration was also considered as a method of controlling the feeble-minded menace;  since moronacy was a result of a single gene the cure was as simple as to keep native morons from breeding and foreign morons out.

Spring 1913 send two women to Ellis Island, New York, and instructed them to pick out the feeble-minded by sight.

They tested 35 Jews, 22 Hungarians, 50 Italians, and 45 Russians: over 80% of all four groups tested below age 12

Reasons?

• Goddard's original translation was abnormally harsh in judgement (later testing showed up to 50% classed morons were inadequately tested)
• speak no English
• just endured an exhausting overseas voyage
• never gone to school
• many have never held a pencil or pen before.

Because of Goddard's work, deportation for mental deficiency increased 350 percent in 1913, and 570 percent in 1914;

this occuring at the onset of WWI

Lewis Terman and R.M. Yerkes

Lewis Terman
 

1906 PhD dissertation, Stanford-Binet IQ tested 7 'bright' and 7 'stupid' boys:

"we have only to compare the negro with the Eskimo or Indian, and the Austrailian native with the Anglo-Saxon, to be struck by an apparent kinship  between general intellectual and inventive ability" (1906, p.14)

popularized IQ testing; Stanford-Binet was the standard for all written/verbal tests that followed

mass-testing = multimillion dollar business

 

emphasized heritability and eugenics:

"The forty-minute test has told more about the mental ability of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily and hourly observation.  For X is feeble-minded;  he will never complete the grammar school;  he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen (1916). - Terman crushing the hopes of two "well-educated" parents with a child of IQ 75.

Robert M. Yerkes
 

Harvard psychologist, presided over IQ tesing of 1.75 million recruits during WWI

Great psychometric minds collaborated  to create Alpha and Beta tests : Goddard, Terman and Yerkes at Goddard's Training School in Vineland, NJ

Proclaimed mental testing "....helped win the war."

 

first mass produced IQ tests;  used commercially, Results?

1. 1  Average mental age of white american males = 13.08
• Yerkes :  Unconstrained morons breeding!  Spread of Negro blood through race mixing!  Pollution of native stock with immigrant dregs!

1. 2  Immigrants can be graded by country of origin:

 

Origin	Average Mental Age
American	13.01
Russian	11.34
Italian	11.01
Pole	10.74
Negro	10.41

     # 3  Other social prejudices? Prositutes (criminals):  53 percent (44 % white, 68 % black) = 10.00, 3 years below the average!

Alpha and Beta Testing: Problems?

 "Attention!  Look at 4.  When I say "go" make a figure 1 in the space which is in the circle but not in the triangle or square, and also make a figure 2 in the space which is in the triangle and circle, but not in the square. Go!" - Instructions yelled for question 4 of Alpha test, 5 seconds allotted

• many recruits could not see or hear the examiner
• never taken a test before (correct answers which could not be written down are wrong)
• never held a pencil

scores were abysmal:  zero mode often soared above all other values, sometimes greater than 40%

 

bent every statistical observation to biological determinism.  Strong correlations found between intelligence and:

hookworm infestation

poor schooling

native language (less nordic the native tongue, the poorer the score)

residency in America

• psychologist and statistician

• noticed correlation coefficient was similar for two different mental tests for the same group of subjects

• small set of independant attributes?
• or a single underlying general factor?????

• Two - Factor Theory: many different intelligence tests together give
• general intelligence = g(first principal component)
• residual variance remained = s (specific information), or many different variances (tertiary principal components)
• Factor Analysis :  determining whether the common variance in a matrix of correlation coefficients could be reduced to a single factor (g) or only several independant group factors (s).
• plot all s values for many individuals into a matrix; distance of S from G line shows relative relation, right?

Ok...if you really wanna know about principal component analysis, you can read about it on Dr. Carr's Evolution Page.
•  Spearman's g= the common variance in mental tests, that which unifies all other tests and removes the  inadequacies of poor testers, unfair test questions, language problems.....the hot knife to cut through the rancid butter of ignorance.....well not quite

• Result :  The Bell Curve  (Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, 1994) 

• IQ is approximately 60% 'heritable'
• inner city kids (predominantly black) score low on IQ tests (low G) = less intelligent (due to poor gene pool)
• massive cuts to education, tax breaks for wealthy, increase in military and political spending

• Errors?!
• within sample variance is not causal of between sample variance (sound familiar?)
• Heritability cannot be expressed with a single percentile