A History in thought...

Leading figures and movements in the study of intelligence.   

Galton "the poor man's Darwin" (they were cousins)

• 1869: Hereditary Genius: It's Laws and Consequences
• Coined term "eugenics" and phrase "nature versus nurture"

Spearman: G-UNIT

• introduced the idea of a general intelligence (g).  This concept dominated intelligence studies up until

Jensen

Binet created the test.  Stern established the formula.  And Terman labeled it. 

• Binet devised the first intelligence (not IQ) test to determine which students required extra help in school.  He then helped the French government produce a test for culling out those children who would not benefit from further schooling.

Stern

• Formula for IQ: Mental Age/ Chronological Age x 100 = IQ
• A Psychometric view of intelligence maintains that standardized tests are the most accurate measure of intelligence.  How do you measure up?
• Binet did not agree with with the premise of IQ.

During World War I, the United States Army required all new draftees to take an IQ test.  It was used to quickly process the large number of incoming troops. 

• This is the first instance of mass compulsory testing.

1927: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

• Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes supported state sterilization of people whose IQ tests identified them as inferior intellectual specimen.

Wechsler

1971: U.S. Supreme Court banned the use of IQ tests in employment (with allowances for the occasional exception).

Flynn Effect

• 1984: James Flynn published. 
• He gathered data from IQ tests  in twenty of the world's industrialized nations.
• He documented an increase of over three points per decade.  Flynn was the first person to use a cross-generational approach for the interpretation of IQ.
• Unlikely that intelligence has increased--more likely some "abstract problem-solving ability"
• "Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills"
• are we simply better test takers?

Gardner

• disassembled the monolithic g  by identifying seven types of human intelligence in his book, Frames of Mind (1983).

Social Darwinism

• Some people are better than others due to innate (meaning hereditary)
• Herrnstein and Murray published The Bell Curve  in 1984.  Their study concluded that, among other things, the United States should restructure itself as a  custodial state. 
• Of course, the book's most controversial assertion was that African-Americans were intellectually inferior to their Caucasian counterparts due to innate hereditary differences. 

from "Darwinistic Elitism is Idiotic" by. Al Siebert, PH.D

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This website was created for H0NOR210: The Ideal, a course offered at Monmouth College during the fall 2005 semester.