II - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

In the Republic, Plato presents his self-serving myth of the metals as a useful means of justifying social stratification. The impact of Plato's Republic upon political, social and educational thought within Western civilization is incalculable, and yet, the self-serving deceits underpinning this masterpiece of conservative sophistry are frequently ignored. Plato conceived of political harmony being achieved through five long-term manipulative (eugenic) strategies.

1. Regulated sexuality via marriage festivals involving State-run (i.e., non-random) lotteries

2. Controlled breeding to maintain class purity (via abortion, infanticide and eugenics)

3. Educational streaming (i.e., knowledge apartheid).

4. Guardian selection criteria and associated weeding-out processes.

5. No class mixing. Plato believed that mingling among the three classes does the greatest harm to the state and is the worst of evils.

The Platonic social ideal rested on a foundation myth of metals that proposed that the three stratified classes represented palpable differences between the essential natures of men, and which the gods themselves had deliberately cast. Plato likened these essential differences to gold (representing guardians), silver (representing auxiliaries), and iron-bronze (representing workers).

The contemporary version of Plato's myth of metals is the myth of IQ which purports to assign value to individuals and groups not only more precisely than Plato did, but also in a completely honest and scientific way. The self-serving deceits underpinning this masterpiece of sophistry are frequently ignored.

American society represents social discrimination and the preservation of privilege on a massive scale. According to conservative proponents of the status quo, the hierarchical stratification apparent in nearly all spheres of contemporary consensus reality reflects the "fact" that special mental abilities are required in order to attain wealth, privilege, and prestige in modern society, and these special mental abilities are limited in the general population. According to the conservative myth of IQ, the socially discriminatory distribution of wealth, privilege and prestige is a reflection of nature's unequal distribution of mental abilities.

The relatively poor, underprivileged, and socially subordinate inhabitants of economically depressed urban and rural areas tend to have relatively low IQ test scores. (so when someone upsets the conventional wisdom - the authorities take a very keen interest in such an outlier). Relatively rich, privileged and prestigious inhabitants of cities and suburbs tend to have relatively higher IQ test scores. What does this mean?

Well, according to the Platonic conservative, it means that the first group is comparatively stupid and unworthy because they were born that way. The members of the second group are where they are because they are comparatively smart and they were born that way. This is certainly nothing that the father of modern IQ testing - Alfred Binet would have argued. Instead, Binet constructed an altogether different kind of test intended to subserve an altogether different kind of objective. I wrote about Binet in response to David Mills - Binet's theory goes a little something like this;

After the middle of the 19th century, industrialization in America and western Europe forced a growing demand for universal public schooling as the means by which children could be taught the skills and values desired by industry. It was in this industrially oriented educational climate that the French minister of education Alfred Binet, director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne, developed a testing procedure capable of identifying students in need of special schooling. The task as defined was essentially a technical one, and Binet approached it in a straightforward practical fashion. He amassed hundreds of questions drawn from the school curriculum and covering a broad range of difficulty.

His basic idea was to design a test which could be given to children of varying ages and on which children at a given age or grade level would do either well or poorly - depending on whether they were already doing well or poorly in school. Preliminary versions of the test were given to small groups of children whose scores were compared with their teachers ratings of classroom performance. In the process, items were added or deleted in order to bring about the closest possible correspondence between test performance and educational age norms.

In its final form, Binet's test provided an index of scholastic performance based on the prevailing standard of scholastic success. In other words, scores on his test generally correlated with the ratings assigned by French teachers in the classrooms of his day. By using teachers judgements of classroom performance as the standard by which his test was validated, Binet established a practical basis for its use as a predictor of success in the school system. Because his aim had been to identify children who required special schooling, he did not require, nor did he assert, a theory or definition of intelligence. Moreover, he did not make a distinction between acquired or congenital feeblemindedness and he never argued that poor performance on his test was a sign of innate mental inferiority. On the contrary, he sternly rebuked his contemporaries who contended that intelligence is a fixed quantity that cannot be augmented.

Now then, what do we know about schools and about the performance of Black children in schools? (that first link is a whole book by John Taylor Gatto - The Underground History of American Education - which makes the following extraordinary contention; The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.)

If the U.S. Establishment is reviving Eugenics again, I suspect that it's for somewhat different reasons than in prior go rounds. The core motivation never changes, however, and that's the self-serving justification of the current system of social stratification. What do you suppose the current cycle of pseudo-scientific genetic determinism is all about?

IV - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

The first detailed adaptation of Binet's IQ test was published in America in 1916 by Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) was a major figure in the history of American psychology and the eugenics movement. Terman created the Stanford-Binet intelligence test before World War I and is credited with inventing the term, intelligence quotient or IQ in 1916.

In 1917 he joined a team of psychologists to create the famous Army Alpha and Beta IQ tests administered to more than 1.7 million army recruits. After the war Terman promoted the new IQ tests to school districts across the United States. He created the National Intelligence Tests for grades three to eight and the Terman Group Tests for grades seven to twelve. These tests were the most popular IQ tests used in public schools during the 1920s and 1930s to assist in placing students into ability grouping or tracks. Terman has been referred to as the "father of tracking."

Terman rose to prominence in the 1920s. In 1922 he was elected as President of the American Psychological Association and by the middle of the decade he had become the editor of six journals relating to educational research and psychology. He also had been active in the eugenics movement during this time. Terman believed the IQ test measured a relatively fixed and hereditarily determined intelligence and that there existed marked differences in intellectual capacity between different races. Terman was an active member in the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association throughout the 1920s.

Terman's Americanized Stanford-Binet test was published under an explicitly different imprimatur than the test's creator Alfred Binet would have ever even imagined, much less condoned;

all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals. That every feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by anyone. Moral judgement, like business judgement, social judgement, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence....in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship is most important for the State to assume.

You can't know where you're going to, unless you know where you've been..., in my occasionally humble opinion, it's vitally important to know the pedigree and the heritable ideology of key members of the establishment, particularly as toxic eugenic ideas continue to surface in mainstream media outlets such as the NY Times repackaged and broadly reinjected into the American popular culture. That these folks comprised and continue to profoundly and foundationally influence broad sectors of the current U.S. Establishment - means that their influence and the specifics of their belief system continue to hold wide sway and must be vigorously exposed and repudiated.

Unlike Binet, whose goal had been to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track if they passed muster as possessing acceptable intellectual hygiene. If not, then they should be sterilized as sources of contagion in the societal germ plasm. He believed IQ was inherited and was the strongest predictor of one's ultimate success in life. Terman had a self professed IQ of 180. From the very beginning of his testing regime, he administered English tests to Spanish-speakers and non-schooled African-Americans, concluding:

“High-grade or border-line deficiency… is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes… They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (The Measurement of Intelligence, 1916, p. 91-92).

Terman's biased tests gave "scientific" proof that, for many Whites, justified racial discrimination, segregation, and even eugenics.

Terman later joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group founded by E.S. Gosney in 1928 which had as part of its agenda the promotion and enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California.

Lewis Terman was the father of Frederick Terman, who, as provost of the Stanford University, greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments that helped catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world's first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley.

Frederick Terman is widely credited (together with William Shockley) with being the father of Silicon Valley.

In 1963 Shockley left the electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians — an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike.

Nonetheless, Shockley pursued his inflammatory ideas in a series of articles and speeches. Regularly interrupted by boos and catcalls, he argued that remedial educational programs were a waste of time. He suggested that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.

II - Why Has David Mills Internalized Racist Pseudo-Science?

If as your post on the subject suggests David, The Bell Curve and selective breeding are the sole basis for your uncritical acceptance of genetic determinism of IQ in humans - you have disclosed specific logical fallacies coupled with basic scientific ignorance as the foundation of your beliefs on this subject. Perhaps there's more to it than that - but thus far - those are the basis which you've cited.

Broadly speaking, in the former case you've made a fallacious appeal to authority coupled with basic scientific ignorance that not even Murray or Herrnstein endeavored;

The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, although they state no position on the issue in the book, and write in the introduction to Chapter 13 that "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."

- and in the latter case fallacious question begging coupled with basic scientific ignorance . (restated in more popularly accessible terms here)

There are tons of reasons why Murray and Herrnstein refused to subject the polemical thesis of The Bell Curve to peer review. It was a masterpiece of deceptive conservative propaganda intended to provoke controversy and fool the gullible. As such, it was wildly successful and it even appears to have worked like a charm on you;

Jump to "The Bell Curve." Like a lot of thoughtful people, I followed that controversy closely. Particularly the many rebuttal essays published in Commentary and The New Republic.

It was the unpersuasiveness of those rebuttals which impacted me. I was like, "Shit... they didn't knock it down at all." I was rooting for them to. But they didn't.

Specifically speaking, I believe you've suffered an a priori entanglement in the projective snare of the three lies you posted - underscoring the fixity of your poorly informed and politically motivated beliefs concerning the subject;

And so I asked Nulan: Did those childhood tests measure something real... and worth measuring? He buck-danced around that one like Sandman Sims, refusing to give the simple and obvious answer: YES.

And still, even Gould (whose resume of the history of psychometrics has been well studied by Nulan)

So, at least in Gould's case, we've narrowed down the area of interest: figuring out just how major or minor is the acknowledged influence of genetics on intelligence. Craig Nulan won't grant even that much.

I didn't buck dance, I answered your question very precisely then, which answer I will now repeat;

After the middle of the 19th century, industrialization in America and western Europe forced a growing demand for universal public schooling as the means by which children could be taught the skills and values desired by industry. It was in this industrially oriented educational climate that the French minister of education Alfred Binet, director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne, developed a testing procedure capable of identifying students in need of special schooling. The task as defined was essentially a technical one, and Binet approached it in a straightforward practical fashion. He amassed hundreds of questions drawn from the school curriculum and covering a broad range of difficulty.

His basic idea was to design a test which could be given to children of varying ages and on which children at a given age or grade level would do either well or poorly - depending on whether they were already doing well or poorly in school. Preliminary versions of the test were given to small groups of children whose scores were compared with their teachers ratings of classroom performance. In the process, items were added or deleted in order to bring about the closest possible correspondence between test performance and educational age norms.

In its final form, Binet's test provided an index of scholastic performance based on the prevailing standard of scholastic success. In other words, scores on his test generally correlated with the ratings assigned by French teachers in the classrooms of his day. By using teachers judgements of classroom performance as the standard by which his test was validated, Binet established a practical basis for its use as a predictor of success in the school system. Because his aim had been to identify children who required special schooling, he did not require, nor did he assert, a theory or definition of intelligence. Moreover, he did not make a distinction between acquired or congenital feeblemindedness and he never argued that poor performance on his test was a sign of innate mental inferiority. On the contrary, he sternly rebuked his contemporaries who contended that intelligence is a fixed quantity that cannot be augmented.

Genetics doesn't have a causal or correlative effect on scholastic performance based on the prevailing standard of scholastic success. Which is what IQ tests measure.

Education - OTOH - has a decisive effect. With that answer, all further controversy should have ceased - but because of your unshakeable conviction that IQ is innate and measurable - you proceeded into a series of factual errors -All of Nulan's polemical eggs appear to rest in a basket of denialism...

denying that intelligence is heritable;

denying that intelligence can be measured via testing;

denying even the possibility that different human sub-groups might have unequal cognitive aptitudes.

Social heritability - YES - Genetic heritability - NO

Scholastic aptitude as a function of curricular competency can be measured, but that's not intelligence

Human sub-groups? Are these breeds of human David?

In the course of nearly 1000 words of bloviation in which you claim to be a good faith seeker after objective truth - you even managed two ad hominem attacks on me;

Having traded a few comments with this charmer at BlackProf.com and The Assault on Black Folks' Sanity, I'm fairly certain that Mr. Nulan isn't interested in a good-faith dialogue on this wickedly complicated subject.

Nulan's preferred style of disputation seems to be the "ad hominy" attack (i.e., throwing personal insults around like hot grits)

Let the record show, I deeply dislike anti-Black propagandists. I am prone to viscerally respond to sources of anti-Black propaganda whenever and wherever I encounter them. Why do you suppose your reflexive and uncritical screeds on Black crime at Blackprof.com triggered my gag reflex concerning your ideological orientation? My boy Cobb is a conservative and staunchly pro-American commentator, and we stridently disagree all the time - but never once in all the years we've sparred politically have I seen him get the racial dimension of crime all twisted up the way you seem to have gotten it twisted David. If I couple your expressed views on crime with your expressed views on intelligence, you read exactly like a dyed-in-the-wool racist. This puts a completely unexpected spin on your nom de plume "undercover black man" don't it?