Intelligence Theories III

This was a deliberate construction of a series of crosshatches in each direction. A line across the top a line through the middle and a line down the bottom. So it actually circumscribed that engraving. As if they had made the crosses and deliberately surrounded it with these other lines as well. Here is the first example of the ability of humans to store something outside of the human brain. You're storing a message that somebody else who is part of that same group can pick up and they will understand what that meant. This is the beginning of things like art writing and everything else that follows. It was the earliest evidence of the thinking brain. There is still much that we don't know about the evolution of human intelligence. But it was during the second half of the th century that the ideas of Charles Darwin began to profoundly influence our thinking.
 Francis Galton was the first scientist to propose that intelligence was a biologically-based mental faculty. He was Darwin's cousin and was much inspired by reading his book On The Origin Of Species. Galton thought that human mental abilities were inherited in just the same way as the plant and animal traits outlined by Darwin. And he set out to prove it. Galton was obsessed with measuring things.
 He was convinced that everything was inherited from arm length to reaction time. According to his theory people with bigger heads such as himself would have a greater capacity for intelligence than others. So he started to measure the heads of a group of Cambridge students and compared those measurements to the test results. But disappointingly for him the correlation between those two sets of data was low. The evidence simply didn't stack up. But Galton stuck doggedly to his conviction that intelligence was inherited. He coined the phrase "nature versus nurture" which has proved to be one of the most enduring questions at the heart of the intelligence debate.
 But it was Galton's disciple a psychologist named Cyril Burt whose research was to have a huge impact on both our thinking about and our testing of intelligence. Horizon dramatised Burt's youthful idealisation of Galton which would have an enduring influence on his work. Galton was one of Burt's heroes maybe the only one. Of all the psychologists whose names were mentioned in my discussions with Burt I think the only one that he seemed to talk about admiringly was Galton.
This is young Loddy Sir Francis. Loddy? Loderick sir. It's a shortening. My first name is Cyril then Loderick. Are you good at your schoolwork Loddy? Oh yes sir. Very good. He's a very diligent boy. He has a diligent father. He will have inherited his father's intelligence. Burt seemed to worship Francis Galton. He kept on mentioning the one occasion on which he met him.