Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:26:20 +1000 From: Steve.Keen-AT-unsw.EDU.AU Subject: Re: IQ While people are considering this latest revival of the "IQ" debate, it's worth looking at the main protagonist of it this century, Cyril Burt. He has been criticised by his biographer for inventing co-researchers and inventing his statistics (though a more recent work has cast doubt on the second of these critiques); but the real irony was how he correlated the IQ of children from different social classes with that of their parents, and also how he worked out social class. Briefly, he did measure the IQ of identical twins raised apart; but he often "adjusted" the scores, based on what their teachers thought they should have been. He did not measure the IQ of the parents--instead, he inferred these from their occupations!, imputing a low IQ to a working class father and a high IQ to a professor (the sexism is intended). Finally, he imputed social class from the father of the twins on the one hand, and the father of the adopter on the other. A sample pair here was the twin sons of an Oxford professor, one of whom was raised by his widow, the other by a farmer in (from memory) Surrey. The son of the don was regarded as being from the upper class, in Burt's peculiar class break-up; the son raised by the farmer went into the lower class. Only two problems: the former's father was DEAD! His mother raised him, in quite possibly impoverished circumstances, since she was not a professor. And the farmer apparently owned some 5,000 acres in Surrey. Nonetheless, Burt's "statistics" on IQ being 80% inherited, and only 20% due to social class and other factors, continue to surface. Cheers, Steve Keen ------------------
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