Theories about intelligence

 From the moment we're conceived to the day we take our last breath science and the way we use it touches every one of us. Science has given immense power to save and nurture life. But the pace of change is so great that we don't often take time to stop and appreciate how far we've come. That's why I want to share with you ten of the most important scientific advances of our time and reveal some of the things that might just lie ahead. At the end of the programme I'll be asking you to vote for the advance you think has done the most to change your world. It's had a massive impact on our society. It's really changed your life hasn't it? So you're the perfect bionic woman? Yeah! And the winner? Well it's up to you. It's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind. The last years has seen science transform our world. In half a century it's tackled countless diseases put men on the moon and completely changed the way we communicate.

Intelligence Theories VII

 I would not be here without Robert Graham without his existence and in a way I owe him my life. Well I'm Tom Grunwal and live here in Temecula in southern California. I'm Andrea Grunwal and I live with Tom. I had had two children with my first wife then with my second wife I took the steps to have a vasectomy. The next thing you know I'm divorced. I never really thought I would ever have another child in the rest of my life. Until I met Andrea. I finally just spilled my gut and said Tom I don't know how to say this but I would really like to have a baby and I don't know how you feel about that. And I said OK if you can figure out how let's go for it. I wanted to offer these women the seed of clever men and for me scientists were the pinnacle of intelligence.
 With proven measurable practical ability. I figured let's start at the top. We were trying to have outstanding genes and Nobel Prize winners possessed them. Due to your outstanding achievements you would be an excellent donor for our Repository for Germinal Choice.
We hope to create some very bright children possibly a genius or two. I managed to convince three Nobel laureate scientists to each provide an anonymous sample for my bank. I actually was a little surprised that some of these older fellows were able to produce specimens so quickly. Bob was very pleased when we took that first look at the specimen under the microscope and saw thousands of sperm swimming vigorously. He beamed with joy. Good job! It's peculiar but I didn't think it was weird.
My name is Dr Afton Blake and I live in Los Angeles California in a little place called Mount Washington. Om.... When I first called the repository they were very friendly. They came up the next day to meet me and interview me. And I think the very next month I tried my first insemination. Choose me as your mother. Then months after I had tried the first time I conceived. In August having been impregnated with donor codenamed Red Dr Afton Blake gave birth to a boy she named Doran.
It was ecstasy from the moment he came out looked in my eyes and stopped crying immediately that we made contact and the bond was like so incredible. Everybody liked the name Doran which means in Greek a gift from the gods. I could never imagine life without him. It was like suddenly what did I have before I had Doran?

Intelligence Theories VI

I would not be here without Robert Graham without his existence and in a way I owe him my life. Well I'm Tom Grunwal and live here in Temecula in southern California. I'm Andrea Grunwal and I live with Tom. I had had two children with my first wife then with my second wife I took the steps to have a vasectomy. The next thing you know I'm divorced. I never really thought I would ever have another child in the rest of my life. Until I met Andrea. I finally just spilled my gut and said Tom I don't know how to say this but I would really like to have a baby and I don't know how you feel about that. And I said OK if you can figure out how let's go for it. I wanted to offer these women the seed of clever men and for me scientists were the pinnacle of intelligence.
 With proven measurable practical ability. I figured let's start at the top. We were trying to have outstanding genes and Nobel Prize winners possessed them. Due to your outstanding achievements you would be an excellent donor for our Repository for Germinal Choice. We hope to create some very bright children possibly a genius or two. I managed to convince three Nobel laureate scientists to each provide an anonymous sample for my bank. I actually was a little surprised that some of these older fellows were able to produce specimens so quickly. Bob was very pleased when we took that first look at the specimen under the microscope and saw thousands of sperm swimming vigorously.
 He beamed with joy. Good job! It's peculiar but I didn't think it was weird. My name is Dr Afton Blake and I live in Los Angeles California in a little place called Mount Washington. Om.... When I first called the repository they were very friendly. They came up the next day to meet me and interview me. And I think the very next month I tried my first insemination. Choose me as your mother. Then months after I had tried the first time I conceived. In August having been impregnated with donor codenamed Red Dr Afton Blake gave birth to a boy she named Doran. It was ecstasy from the moment he came out looked in my eyes and stopped crying immediately that we made contact and the bond was like so incredible. Everybody liked the name Doran which means in Greek a gift from the gods. I could never imagine life without him. It was like suddenly what did I have before I had Doran?

Intelligence Theories V

 The correlations the statistical results that he reported remained identical to the third decimal. Well theoretically that sort of thing could happen. Also theoretically the sun might not rise tomorrow morning and that's probably a more probable event than what one would have had to have believed if one took Burt's number seriously. All of them remain identical to the third decimal place. Clearly something was drastically wrong. There's universal agreement among psychologists that Burt couldn't possibly have tested pairs of twins. That at least the last pairs must be figments of his imagination. I take perhaps an even more sceptical view of Burt. I think it's reasonable to suppose that he may never have laid eyes on a separated twin in his entire lifetime.
But Kamin was convinced that Burt was motivated only by his genuine belief in inherited intelligence. I don't think Burt thought of himself as a manipulator and misleader of the public. I think Burt had the intellectual audacity to think that he knew the truth prior to any actual investigation of the facts and therefore on account of noblesse oblige he was letting the rest of us get a handle on the truth by presenting us numbers that would help us to accept it. And he did us the courtesy of inventing the numbers for us.
Comprehensive proof of the part genetics play in intelligence still remained elusive but as the ' s got underway that didn't deter one man from adopting a radical new approach. In a rather sinister echo of Burt and Galton's theories Californian doctor Robert Graham reasoned that if there were intelligence genes to be had he could find a way of passing them on. In after Graham's death Horizon looked back at his extraordinary quest. My name is Robert Klark Graham and I had a dream. To single-handedly saved the human race one child at a time. Robert Graham believed that the gene pool was going downhill and that we needed to do something about that. He had this grandiose plan to remake all of humanity.
It had the air of James Bond movie meets Disney or something. Using the sperm of clever men I hope to create intelligent kids. He was this strange scientist that was trying to breed the super race. What we're doing is exploring the possibilities of genetics. I was accused of being a racist and a Nazi. I can't say that I know much about Hitler or his vision. Yet my sperm bank was operational for nearly years. Despite tremendous controversy I was responsible for the creation of over children.

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.

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.

Intelligence Theories I

 What is intelligence?What does an entomologist study? Wow! That was tough. Did a lot of people get this one in two minutes? And why do some people apparently have so much more of it than others? Where does intelligence come from? Is it a matter of luck biology or just a good education that makes this guy cleverer than me? Is there anything that I or my parents could have done to make me more intelligent? Well scientists have been battling thorny questions like these for decades making intelligence one of the most studied traits in science. But it's only really now that we are beginning to get some answers.
For nearly years Horizon has been following that search to understand our mysterious mental power looking at everything from our evolutionary history to whether a computer could outsmart us. And asking the questions how do you test for intelligence? Is it inherited or innate? Nature or nurture? In so doing science has begun to redefine our understanding of what makes every one of us unique.
The benchmark for measuring one person's intelligence against another is the iconic IQ or Intelligence Quotient test. Most of us will have sat through one of these at one time or another. It is the dreaded IQ test with sections on spatial awareness general knowledge and reasoning.
 And it tots up different areas of skill to create one score. A single mark that can brand you with either a low high or maybe an average IQ. Now we've been judged on the merits of this test for years now. What's remarkable about it is that it was introduced in . So essentially this has remained the same for almost years. In Horizon tested the IQs of seven experts in their field to see who would come out on top. Seven people from seven very different backgrounds. All highly successful. And all seven prepared to do battle over the elusive nature of intelligence. The test lasts minutes.
What it revealed would show how our understanding of intelligence has changed since the IQ test was first devised. We have spent years on IQ tests that are basically the same. Imagine if physics or chemistry or medicine or biology were the same today as they were years ago.
 That's essentially the state of the testing industry. It's unusual to find a methodology that has changed so little. And perhaps this reflects the century-long struggle to work out how intelligence develops. In their bid to understand human intelligence scientists have looked for evidence of it in other animals. During the s Dr James Gould searched for signs of intelligent behaviour in the complex lives of bees.