Intelligence Theories IV

 And he certainly tried to follow in his footsteps. Oh no. Do you read classics? I want to be a scientist. Burt was particularly drawn to one of Galton's ideas. In Galton had coined the term eugenics meaning good birth. He believed that people of high rank had greater intelligence and should be encouraged to marry and have children to preserve these traits while the poor be strongly discouraged from breeding. Burt adopted this idea with enthusiasm. For example Burt has written out on his hand "The problem of the very poor. "They must be segregated prevented from reproducing their own kind".
This is the kind of atmosphere obviously to which he was exposed. Working in the s Burt was determined to prove intelligence was inherited. He brought together more evidence for the inheritance of intelligence than any other person had done at that time. His papers were more impressive in terms of the number of different kinds of kinships on which heritables had been estimated. The fine grain detail in which the analyses were carried out. And so on. Burt introduced the IQ test as a way of measuring schoolchildren's intelligence. He was also to influence the introduction of the Plus test which was to become a key decider of a child's academic future. By every child's intelligence was tested. In order to study the inherited element of intelligence
Burt looked for subjects that were the same in every way except the environment they were brought up in. Identical twins who had been separated at birth. So now if you can find when they are old enough to be IQ tested a fair number of pairs of such twins you can give them all IQ tests and if their measured IQs resemble one another that must be due to the only thing they have in common namely their identical genetic make-up. It cannot be due to their environment in theory because they don't have that in common. Burt announced his findings with a great flourish stating that he had found genetics were responsible for % of his subjects' IQ. In the crucial matter of separated monozygotic twins and the measurement of the genetic heritability of intelligence over the years we have been fortunate enough to steadily increase our sample size to the point where our data based on pairs of twins is some % greater than that of its closest rival. Burt's research was highly respected and in he became the first British psychologist to be knighted for his contributions to psychological testing. But his ideas on eugenics had rather lost their appeal.
Adolf Hitler adopted this philosophy to murder thousands of people he labelled mentally defective. The scientific community began to distance itself from the idea of engineering society according to intelligence. Burt continued to defend his ideas but it was only after his death in that scientists including Professor Leon Kamin scrutinised his results and came to some uneasy conclusions. As the sample size increased progressively in successive papers one noted an absolutely incredible thing.