History of The Race and Intelligence Controversy - History - 1960-1980

1960-1980

In 1965 William Shockley, Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Stanford University, made a public statement at the Nobel conference on "Genetics and the Future of Man" about the problems of "genetic deterioration" in humans caused by "evolution in reverse". He claimed social support systems designed to help the disadvantaged had a regressive effect. Shockley subsequently claimed the most competent American population group were the descendants of original European settlers, because of the extreme selective pressures imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism. Speaking of the "genetic enslavement" of African Americans, owing to an abnormally high birth rate, Shockley discouraged improved education as a remedy, suggesting instead sterilization and birth control. In the following ten years he continued to argue in favor of this position, claiming it was not based on prejudice but "on sound statistics". Shockley's outspoken public statements and lobbying brought him into contact with those running the Pioneer Fund who subsequently, through the intermediary Carleton Putnam, provided financial support for his extensive lobbying activities in this area, reported widely in the press. With the psychologist and segregationist R. Travis Osborne as adviser, he formed the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED). Although its stated purpose was "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems," FREED mostly acted as a lobbying agency for spreading Shockley's ideas on eugenics.

The Pioneer Fund had been set up by W.P. Draper in 1937 with one of its two charitable purposes being to provide aid for "study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race ... and ... into the problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States". From the late fifties onwards, following the 1954 Supreme Court Decision on segregation in schools, it supported psychologists and other scientists in favour of segregation. All of these ultimately held academic positions in the Southern States, notably Henry E. Garrett (head of psychology at Columbia University until 1955), Wesley Critz George, Frank C.J. McGurk, R. Travis Osborne and Audrey Shuey, who in 1958 wrote The Testing of Negro Intelligence, demonstrating "the presence of native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests." In 1959 Garrett helped to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organisation promoting segregation. In 1961 he blamed the shift away from hereditarianism, which he described as the "scientific hoax of the century", on the school of thought—the "Boas cult"— promoted by his former colleagues at Columbia, notably Franz Boas and Otto Klineberg, and more generally "Jewish organizations", most of whom "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proved." He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation; fact and hokum, that "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of equalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess. Equalitarianism is good Marxist doctrine, not likely to change with gyrations in the Kremlin line." In 1951 Garrett had even gone as far as reporting Klineberg to the FBI for advocating "many Communistic theories", including the idea that "there are no differences in the races of mankind."

One of Shockley's lobbying campaigns involved the educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen, from the University of California, Berkeley. Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during the year 1966-1967 spent at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. Here Jensen got to know Shockley and through him eventually received support for his research from the Pioneer Fund. Although Shockley and Jensen's names were later to become linked in the media, Jensen does not mention Shockley as an important influence on his thought in his subsequent writings; rather he describes as decisive his work with Hans Eysenck. He also mentions his interest in the behaviorist theories of Clark Hull which he says he abandoned largely because he found them to be incompatible with experimental findings during his years at Berkeley.

In a 1968 article published in Disadvantaged Child, Jensen questioned the effectiveness of child development and antipoverty programs, writing "As a social policy, avoidance of the issue could be harmful to everyone in the long run, especially to future generations of Negroes, who could suffer the most from well-meaning but misguided and ineffective attempts to improve their lot." In 1969 Jensen wrote a long article in the Harvard Educational Review, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"

In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor, first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors." He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the USA was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while at the same time there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that eugenic reform would prevent this more effectively than compensatory education, surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage": although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Level I" ability), they had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Level II" ability). He felt that it in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities."

Later, writing about how the article came into being, Jensen said that the editors of the Review had specifically asked him to include his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published. He also maintains that only five percent of the article touched on the topic of race difference in IQ. Cronbach (1975) also gave a detailed account of how the student editors of Harvard Educational Review commissioned and negotiated the content of Jensen's article.

Many academics have given commentaries on what they considered to be the main points of Jensen's article and the subsequent books in the early 1970s that expanded on its content. According to Jencks & Phillips (1998), in his article Jensen had argued "that educational programs for disadvantaged children initiated as the War on Poverty had failed, and the black-white race gap probably had a substantial genetic component." They summarised Jensen's argument as follows:

1. "Most of the variation in black-white scores is genetic"
2. "No one has advanced a plausible environmental explanation for the black-white gap"
3. "Therefore it is more reasonable to assume that part of the black-white gap is genetic in origin"

According to Loehlin, Lindzey & Spuhler (1975), Jensen's article defended 3 claims:

1. IQ tests provide accurate measurements of a real human ability that is relevant in many aspects of life.
2. Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly (about 80%) heritable and parents with low IQs are much more likely to have children with low IQs
3. Educational programs have been unable to significantly change the intelligence of individuals or groups.

According to Webster (1997), the article claimed "a correlation between intelligence, measured by IQ tests, and racial genes". He wrote that Jensen, based on empirical evidence, had concluded that "black intelligence was congenitally inferior to that of whites"; that "this partly explains unequal educational achievements"; and that, "because a certain level of underachievement was due to the inferior genetic attributes of blacks, compensatory and enrichment programs are bound to be ineffective in closing the racial gap in educational achievements." Several commentators mention Jensen's recommendations for schooling: according to Barry Nurcombe,

Jensen's own research suggests that IQ tests amalgamate two forms of thinking which are hierarchically related but which become differentially distributed in the population according to SES: level 1 and level 2, associative learning and abstract thinking (g), respectively. Blacks do as well as whites on tests of associative learning, but they fall behind on abstract thinking. The educational system should attend to this discrepancy and derive a more pluralistic approach. The current system puts minority groups at a marked disadvantage, since it overemphasizes g-type thinking.

Jensen had already suggested in the article that initiatives like the Head Start Program were ineffective, writing in the opening sentence, "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." Other experts in psychometrics, such as Flynn (1980) and Mackintosh (1998), have given accounts of Jensen's theory of Level I and Level II abilities, which originated in this and earlier articles. As the historian of psychology William H. Tucker comments, Jensen's leading question,"Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans," repeating Shockley's phrase "genetic enslavement", proved later to be one of the most inflammatory statements in the article.

Shockley conducted a widespread publicity campaign for Jensen's article, supported by the Pioneer Fund. Jensen's views became widely known in many spheres. As a result there was renewed academic interest in the hereditarian viewpoint and in intelligence tests. Jensen's original article was widely circulated and often cited; the material was taught in university courses over a range of academic disciplines. In response to his critics, Jensen wrote a series of books on all aspects of psychometrics. There was also a widespread positive response from the popular press — with The New York Times Magazine dubbing the topic "Jensenism" — and amongst politicians and policy makers.

In 1971 Richard Herrnstein wrote a long article on intelligence tests in The Atlantic for a general readership. Undecided on the issues of race and intelligence, he discussed instead score differences between social classes. Like Jensen he took a firmly hereditarian point of view. He also commented that the policy of equal opportunity would result in making social classes more rigid, separated by biological differences, resulting in a downward trend in average intelligence that would conflict with the growing needs of a technological society.

Jensen and Herrnstein's articles were widely discussed. Hans Eysenck defended the hereditarian point of view and the use of intelligence tests in "Race, Intelligence and Education" (1971), a pamphlet presenting Jensenism to a popular audience, and "The Inequality of Man" (1973). He was severely critical of anti-hereditarians whose policies he blamed for many of the problems in society. In the first book he wrote that, "All the evidence to date suggests the strong and indeed overwhelming importance of genetic factors in producing the great variety of intellectual differences which observed between certain racial groups", adding in the second, that "for anyone wishing to perpetuate class or caste differences, genetics is the real foe". "Race, Intelligence and Education" was immediately criticized in strong terms by IQ researcher Sandra Scarr as an "uncritical popularization of Jensen's ideas without the nuances and qualifiers that make much of Jensen's writing credible or at least responsible."

Although the main intention of the hereditarians had been to challenge the anti-hereditarian establishment, they were unprepared for the level of reaction and censure in the scientific world. Militant student groups at Berkeley and Harvard conducted campaigns of harassment on Jensen and Herrnstein with charges of racism, despite Herrnstein's refusal to endorse Jensen's views on race and intelligence. Two weeks after the appearance of Jensen's article, the Berkeley chapter of the militant student organization Students for a Democratic Society staged protests against Arthur Jensen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, chanting "Fight racism. Fire Jensen!" Jensen himself states that he even lost his employment at Berkeley because of the controversy. Similar campaigns were waged in London against Eysenck and in Boston against Edward Wilson, the founding father of sociobiology, the discipline that explains human behavior through genetics. The attacks on Wilson were orchestrated by the Sociobiology Study Group, part of the left wing organization Science for the People, formed of 35 scientists and students, including the Harvard biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin, who both became prominent critics of hereditarian research in race and intelligence. In 1972 50 academics, including the psychologists Jensen, Eysenck and Herrnstein as well as five Nobel laureates, signed a statement entitled "Resolution on Scientific Freedom Regarding Human Behavior and Heredity", criticizing the climate of "suppression, punishment and defamation of scientists who emphasized the role of heredity in human behavior". In October 1973 a half-page advertisement entitled "Resolution Against Racism" appeared in the New York Times. With over 1000 academic signatories, including Lewontin, it condemned "racist research", denouncing in particular Jensen, Shockley and Herrnstein.

This was accompanied by a high level of commentaries, criticisms and denouncements from the academic community. Two issues of the Harvard Educational Review were devoted to critiques of Jensen's work by psychologists, biologists and educationalists. As documented by Wooldridge (1995), the main commentaries involved: population genetics (Richard Lewontin, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Walter Bodmer); the heritability of intelligence (Christopher Jencks, Mary Jo Bane, Leon Kamin, David Layzer); the possible inaccuracy of IQ tests as measures of intelligence (summarised in Jensen 1980, pp. 20–21); and sociological assumptions about the relationship between intelligence and income (Jencks and Bane). More specifically, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin commented on Jensen's use of population genetics, writing that, "The fundamental error of Jensen's argument is to confuse heritability of character within a population with heritability between two populations." The political scientists Christopher Jencks and Mary Jo Bane, also from Harvard, recalculated the heritability of intelligence as 45% instead of Jensen's estimate of 80%; and they determined that only about 12% of variation in income was due to IQ, so that in their view the connections between IQ and occupation were less clear than Jensen had suggested.

Ideological differences also emerged in the controversy. The circle of scientists around Lewontin and Gould, some of them self-admittedly motivated by a Marxist ideology, rejected the research of Jensen and Herrnstein as "bad science". While not objecting to research into intelligence per se, they felt that this research was politically motivated and objected to the reification of intelligence: the treatment of the numerical quantity g as a physical attribute like skin colour that could be meaningfully averaged over a population group. They claimed that this was contrary to the scientific method, which required explanations at a molecular level, rather than the analysis of a statistical artifact in terms of undiscovered processes in biology or genetics. In response to this criticism, Jensen later wrote: '…what Gould has mistaken for "reification” is neither more nor less than the common practice in every science of hypothesizing explanatory models to account for the observed relationships within a given domain. Well known examples include the heliocentric theory of planetary motion, the Bohr atom, the electromagnetic field, the kinetic theory of gases, gravitation, quarks, Mendelian genes, mass, velocity, etc. None of these constructs exists as a palpable entity occupying physical space.' He asked why psychology should be denied "the common right of every science to the use of hypothetical constructs or any theoretical speculation concerning causal explanations of its observable phenomena?"

The academic debate also became entangled with the so-called "Burt Affair", because Jensen's article had partially relied on the 1966 twin studies of the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt: shortly after Burt's death in 1971, there were allegations, prompted by research of Leon Kamin, that Burt had fabricated parts of his data, charges which have never been fully resolved. Franz Samelson documents how Jensen's views on Burt's work varied over the years: he was his main defender in the USA during the 1970s; in 1983, following the publication in 1978 of Leslie Hearnshaw's official biography of Burt, he changed his mind, "fully accept as valid ... Hearnshaw’s biography" and stating that "of course will never be exonerated for his empirical deceptions"; however, in 1992 he wrote that "the essence of the Burt affair ... a cabal of motivated opponents, avidly aided by the mass media, to bash reputation completely", a view repeated in an invited address on Burt before the American Psychological Association, when he called into question Hearnshaw's scholarship.

Similar charges of a politically motivated campaign to stifle scientific research on racial differences, later dubbed "Neo-Lysenkoism", were frequently repeated by Jensen and his supporters. Jensen (1972) bemoaned the fact that "a block has been raised because of the obvious implications for the understanding of racial differences in ability and achievement. Serious considerations of whether genetic as well as environmental factors are involved has been taboo in academic circles," adding that, "In the bizarre racist theories of the Nazis and the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we have seen clear examples of what happens when science is corrupted by subservience to political dogma."

After the appearance of his 1969 article, Jensen was later more explicit about racial differences in intelligence, stating in 1973 "that something between one-half and three-fourths of the average IQ differences between American Negroes and whites is attributable to genetic factors." He even speculated that the underlying mechanism was a "biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence" linked to their joint development in the ectoderm of the embryo. Although Jensen avoided any personal involvement with segregationists in the US, he did not distance himself from the approaches of journals of the far right in Europe, many of whom viewed his research as justifying their political ends. In an interview with Nation Europa, he said that some human races differed from one another even more than some animal species, claiming that a measurement of "genetic distance" between blacks and whites showed that they had diverged over 46,000 years ago. He also granted interviews to Alain de Benoist's French journal Nouvelle École and Jürgen Rieger's German journal Neue Anthropologie of which he later became a regular contributor and editor, apparently unaware of its political orientation owing to his poor knowledge of German.

The debate was further exacerbated by issues of racial bias that had already intensified through the 1960s because of civil rights concerns and changes in the social climate. In 1968 the Association of Black Psychologists (ABP) had demanded a moratorium on IQ tests for children from minority groups. After a committee set up by the American Psychological Association drew up guidelines for assessing minority groups, failing to confirm the claims of racial bias, Jackson (1975) wrote the following as part of a response on behalf of the ABP:

Psychological testing historically has been a quasi-scientific tool in the perpetuation of racism on all levels of scientific objectivity, it has provided a cesspool of intrinsically and inferentially fallacious data which inflates the egos of whites by demeaning Black people and threatens to potentiate Black genocide.

Other professional academic bodies reacted differently to the dispute. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a division of the American Psychological Society, issued a public statement in 1969 criticizing Jensen's research, declaring that, "To construct questions about complex behavior in terms of heredity versus environment is to oversimplify the essence and nature of human development and behavior." The American Anthropological Association convened a panel discussion in 1969 at its annual general meeting, shortly after the appearance of Jensen's paper, where several participants labelled his research as "racist". Subsequently the association issued an official clarification, stating that, "The shabby misuse of IQ testing in the support of past American racist policies has created understandable anxiety over current research on the inheritance of human intelligence. But the resulting personal attacks on a few scientists with unpopular views has had a chilling effect on the entire field of behavioral genetics and clouds public discussion of its implications." In 1975 the Genetics Society of America made a similarly cautious statement: "The application of the techniques of quantitative genetics to the analysis of human behavior is fraught with human complications and potential biases, but well-designed research on the genetic and environmental components of human psychological traits may yield valid and socially useful results and should not be discouraged."