History of the race and intelligence controversy

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical study of a human skull, 1510-1511

The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate, primarily in the United States, concerning possible explanations of group differences in intelligence. Although it has never been disputed that there are systematic differences between average scores in IQ tests of different population groups, sometimes called "racial IQ gaps", there has been no agreement on whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or whether some inherent hereditary factor is at play, related to genetics.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, group differences in intelligence were assumed to be due to race and, apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1930s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role. In 1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen published a long article reviving the older hereditarian point of view, with the suggestion that there might be genetic reasons why compensatory education had failed. His work, publicized by the Nobel laureate William Shockley, sparked controversy amongst the academic community and even led to student unrest. A similar debate amongst academics followed the publication in 1994 of The Bell Curve, a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray which argued in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint. It not only provoked the publication of several interdisciplinary books on the environmental point of view, some in popular science, but also led to a public statement from the American Psychological Association acknowledging a gap between average IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic. The hereditarian line of research continues to be pursued by a group of researchers, mostly psychologists, some of whom are supported by the Pioneer Fund.

Early history

Lithograph of a North American skull from Samuel Morton's Crania Americana, 1839

Francis Galton

The idea that there are differences in the brain structures/sizes of different racial groups, and that these differences explain varying rates of intelligence, was widely advocated and studied during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Through the publication of his book Hereditary Genius in 1869, polymath Francis Galton spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity and eugenics.

In 1895, R. Meade Bache of the University of Pennsylvania published an article in Psychological Review claiming that reaction time increases with evolution. Bache supported this claim with data demonstrating increased reaction times among White Americans when compared with those of Native Americans and African Americans, with Native Americans having the shortest reaction time. He hypothesized that the long reaction time of White Americans was to be explained by their possessing more contemplative brains which did not function well on tasks requiring automatic responses. This was one of the first examples of modern scientific racism, in which science was used to bolster beliefs in the superiority of a particular race.

In 1912 the Columbia psychology graduate Frank Bruner reviewed the scientific literature on auditory perception in black and white subjects in Psychological Bulletin, characterizing, "the mental qualities of the Negro as: lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, untruthful, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy, and similarly in industrial pursuits, the Negro shows a woeful lack of power of sustained activity and constructive conduct."

Alfred Binet (1857-1911), inventor of the first intelligence test

Henry H. Goddard

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Lewis Terman

In 1916 George O. Ferguson conducted research in his Columbia Ph.D. thesis on "The psychology of the Negro", finding them poor in abstract thought, but good in physical responses, recommending how this should be reflected in education. In the same year Lewis Terman, in the manual accompanying the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, referred to the higher frequency of morons among non-white American racial groups stating that further research into race difference on intelligence should be conducted and that the "enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence" could not be remedied by education.

In 1916 a team of psychologists, led by Robert Yerkes and including Terman and Henry H. Goddard, adapted the Stanford-Binet tests as multiple choice group tests for use by the US army. In 1919, Yerkes devised a version of this test for civilians, the National Intelligence Test, which was used in all levels of education and in business. Like Terman, Goddard had argued in his book, Feeble-mindedness: Its causes and consequences (1914), that "feeble-mindedness" was hereditary; and in 1920 Yerkes in his book with Yoakum on the Army Mental Tests described how they "were originally intended, and are now definitely known, to measure native intellectual ability." Both Goddard and Terman argued that the feeble-minded should not be allowed to reproduce. In the USA, however, independently and prior to the IQ tests, there had been political pressure for such eugenic policies, to be enforced by sterilization; in due course IQ tests were later used as justification for sterilizing the mentally retarded.

It was also argued that the IQ tests should be used to control immigration to the USA. Already in 1917 Goddard reported on the low IQ scores of new arrivals at Ellis Island; and Yerkes argued from his army test scores that there were consistently lower IQ levels amongst those from Eastern and Southern Europe, which could lead to a decline in the national intelligence. In 1923, in his book A study of American intelligence, Carl Brigham wrote that on the basis of the army tests, "The decline in intelligence is due to two factors, the change in races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of sending lower and lower representatives of each race." He concluded that, "The steps that should be taken to preserve or increase our present mental capacity must of course be dictated by science and not by political expediency. Immigration should not only be restrictive, but highly selective." The Immigration Act of 1924 put these recommendations into practice, introducing quotas based on the 1890 census, prior to the waves of immigration from Poland and Italy. As Franz Samelson has pointed out, however, "the eventual passage of the 'racist' immigration law of 1924 was not crucially affected by the contributions of Yerkes or other psychologists."

In the 1920s psychologists started questioning underlying assumptions of racial differences in intelligence; although not discounting them, the possibility was considered that they were on a smaller scale than previously supposed and also due to factors other than heredity. In 1924 Floyd Allport wrote in his book "Social Psychology" that the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon was incorrect in asserting "a gap between inferior and superior species" and pointed to "social inheritance" and "environmental factors" as factors that accounted for differences. Nevertheless he conceded that "the intelligence of the white race is of a more versatile and complex order than that of the black race. It is probably superior to that of the red or yellow races."

In 1929 Robert Woodworth in his textbook "Psychology: a study of mental life" made no claims about innate differences in intelligence between races, pointing instead to environmental and cultural factors. He considered it advisable to "suspend judgment and keep our eyes open from year to year for fresh and more conclusive evidence that will probably be discovered".

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Raymond Cattell (1905-1998) at the age of 15

In the 1930s the English psychologist Raymond Cattell wrote three tracts, Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937) and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938). The second was published by the Eugenics Society, of which he had been a research fellow: it predicted the disastrous consequences of not stopping the decline in the average intelligence in Britain by one point per decade. In 1933 Cattell wrote that, of all the European races, the "Nordic race was the most evolved in intelligence and stability of temperament." He argued for "no mixture of bloods between racial groups" because "the resulting re-shuffling of impulses and psychic units throws together in each individual a number of forces which may be incompatible." He rationalised the "hatred and abhorrence ... for the Jewish practice of living in other nations instead of forming an independent self-sustained group of their own", referring to them as "intruders" with a "crafty spirit of calculation." He recommended a rigid division of races, referring to those suggesting that individuals be judged on their merits, irrespective of racial background, as "race-slumpers". He wrote that in the past "the backward branches of the tree of mankind" had been lopped off as "the American Indians, the Black Australians, the Mauris and the negroes had been driven by bloodshed from their lands", unaware of "the biological rationality of that destiny." He advocated a more enlightened solution: by birth control, by sterilization and by "life in adapted reserves and asylums," where the "races which have served their turn [should] be brought to euthanasia."

Franz Boas regarded as the father of anthropology in the US, had a lasting influence on the work of Otto Klineberg and his generation

He considered blacks to be naturally inferior, on account of "of their small skull capacity." In 1937 he praised the Third Reich for their eugenic laws and for "being the first to adopt sterilization together with a policy of racial improvement." In 1938, after newspapers had reported on the segregation of Jews into ghettos and concentration camps, he commented that the rise of Germany "should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed ... to adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution." In late 1937 Cattell moved to the US on the invitation of the psychologist Edward Thorndike from Columbia University, also involved in eugenics. He spent the rest of his life there as a research psychologist, devoting himself after retirement to devising and publicising a refined version of his ideology from the 1930s that he called Beyondism.

In 1935 Otto Klineberg wrote two books "Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration" and "Race Differences", dismissing claims that African Americans in the northern states were more intelligent than those in the south. He concluded that there was no scientific proof of racial differences in intelligence and that this should not therefore be used as a justification for policies in education or employment. In the 1940s many psychologists, particularly social psychologists, conceded that environmental and cultural factors, as well as discrimination and prejudice, provided a more probable explanation of disparities in intelligence. According to Franz Samelson, this change in attitude had become widespread by then, with very few studies in race differences in intelligence, a change brought out by an increase in the number of psychologists not from a "lily-white ... Anglo-Saxon" background but from Jewish backgrounds. Other factors that influenced American psychologists were the economic changes brought about by the depression and the reluctance of psychologists to risk being associated with the Nazi claims of a master race. The 1950 race statement of UNESCO, prepared in consultation with scientists including Klineberg, created a further taboo against conducting scientific research on issues related to race.

1960-1980

William Shockley

In 1965 William Shockley, Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Stanford University, made a public statement at the Nobel conference on "Genetics and the Future of Man" about the problems of "genetic deterioration" in humans caused by "evolution in reverse". He claimed social support systems designed to help the disadvantaged had a regressive effect and subsequently claimed the most competent population group were the original European settlers in America which he claimed superior by virtue of the extreme selective pressures imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism. Speaking of the "genetic enslavement" of African Americans, owing to an abnormally high birth rate, Shockley discouraged improved education as a remedy, suggesting instead sterilization and birth control. In the following ten years he continued to argue in favor of this position, claiming it was not based on prejudice but "on sound statistics". Shockley's outspoken public statements and lobbying brought him into contact with those running the Pioneer Fund who subsequently, through the intermediary Carleton Putnam, provided financial support for his extensive lobbying activities in this area, reported widely in the press. "

W.P. Draper

The Pioneer Fund had been set up by W.P. Draper in 1937 with one of its two charitable purposes being to provide aid for "study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race ... and ... into the problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States". From the late fifties onwards, following the 1954 Supreme Court Decision on segregation in schools, it supported psychologists and other scientists in favour of segregation. All of these ultimately held academic positions in the Southern States, notably Henry E. Garrett (head of psychology at Columbia University until 1955), Wesley Critz George, Frank C.J. McGurk, R. Travis Osborne and Audrey Shuey, who in 1958 wrote the The Testing of Negro Intelligence, demonstrating "the presence of native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests." In 1959 Garrett helped to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organisation promoting segregation. In 1961 he blamed the shift away from hereditarianism, which he described as the "scientific hoax of the century", on the school of thought—the "Boas cult"— promoted by his former colleagues at Columbia, notably Franz Boas and Otto Klineberg, and more generally "Jewish organizations", most of whom "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proved." He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation; fact and hokum, that "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of equalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess. Equalitarianism is good Marxist doctrine, not likely to change with gyrations in the Kremlin line." In 1951 Garrett had even gone as far as reporting Klineberg to the FBI for advocating "many Communistic theories", including the idea that "there are no differences in the races of mankind."

One of Shockley's lobbying campaigns involved the educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen, from the University of California, Berkeley. Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during the year 1966-1967 spent at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. Here Jensen got to know Shockley and through him eventually received support for his research from the Pioneer Fund. Although Shockley and Jensen's names were later to become linked in the media, Jensen does not mention Shockley as an important influence on his thought in his subsequent writings; rather he describes as decisive his work with Hans Eysenck. He also mentions his interest in the behaviorist theories of Clark Hull which he says he abandoned largely because he found them to be incompatible with experimental findings during his years at Berkeley.

Arthur Jensen

By 1968 Jensen's emphasis had shifted. In an article published in Disadvantaged Child he decried the "misguided and ineffective attempts to improve [the] lot" of blacks through antipoverty programs and child development programs. In 1969 Jensen wrote a long article in the Harvard Educational Review, "How Much can We Boost IQ and Achievement?" which defended three claims. First, IQ tests provide accurate measurements of a real human ability that is relevant in many aspects of life. Second, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly (about 80%) heritable and parents with low IQs are much more likely to have children with low IQs. Third, educational programs have been unable to significantly change the intelligence of individuals or groups. He suggested that initiatives like the Head Start Program were ineffective, writing, "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." Joan Freeman, a psychologist specialising in gifted education, wrote that Jensen found that after matching up black and white children according to socioeconomic level, although the IQ scores of black children were distributed over the whole range, their average score was 15 points less than that of the white children, Inferring that black intelligence was different from white, he suggested that black children receive different forms of education, more suited to their needs: as whe wrote, "less conceptual flights of fancy and more rote learning". Tucker 1996 summarized the implications of Jensen's paper as "rote memorization to improve the scholastic skills of those low IQ black children unable to understand abstract principles and some sort of eugenic program to reduce their numbers".

In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors." He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the USA was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that eugenic reform would prevent this more effectively than compensatory education, surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage", who although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Type I" learning), had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Type II" learning). He felt that it in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting the "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities." Later, writing about how the article came into being, Jensen said that the editors of the Review had specifically asked him to include his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published. He also maintains that only five percent of the article touched on the topic of race difference in IQ.

Raymond Cattell became one of Jensen's main supporters, referring to his opponents as "ignoracists"

Shockley conducted a widespread publicity campaign for Jensen's article, supported by the Pioneer Fund. Jensen's views became widely known in many spheres. As a result there was renewed academic interest in the hereditarian viewpoint and in intelligence tests. Jensen's original article was widely circulated and often cited; the material was taught in university courses over a range of academic disciplines. In response to his critics, Jensen wrote a series of books on all aspects of psychometrics. There was also a widespread positive response from the popular press — with The New York Times Magazine dubbing the topic "Jensenism" — and amongst politicians and policy makers.

In 1971 Richard Herrnstein wrote a long article on intelligence tests in The Atlantic for a general readership. Undecided on the issues of race and intelligence, he discussed instead score differences between social classes. Like Jensen he took a firmly hereditarian point of view. He also commented that the policy of equal opportunity would result in making social classes more rigid, separated by biological differences, resulting in a downward trend in average intelligence that would conflict with the growing needs of a technological society.

Hans Eysenck

Jensen and Herrnstein's articles were widely discussed. Hans Eysenck defended the hereditarian point of view and the use of intelligence tests in "Race, Intelligence and Education" (1971), a pamphlet presenting Jensenism to a popular audience, and "The Equality of Man" (1973). He was severely critical of anti-hereditarians whose policies he blamed for many of the problems in society. In the first book he wrote that, "All the evidence to date suggests the strong and indeed overwhelming importance of genetic factors in producing the great variety of intellectual differences which [are] observed between certain racial groups", adding in the second, that "for anyone wishing to perpetuate class or caste differences, genetics is the real foe".

The militant organisation Students for a Democratic Society staged protests in 1969 against Arthur Jensen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, chanting "Stop racism. Fire Jensen!"

Although the main intention of the hereditarians had been to challenge the anti-hereditarian establishment, they were unprepared for the level of reaction and censure in the scientific world. Militant student groups at Berkeley and Harvard conducted disruptive campaigns of harassment on Jensen and Herrnstein with charges of racism, despite Herrnstein's refusal to endorse Jensen's views on race and intelligence. Jensen himself states he even lost his employment at Berkeley because of the controversy. Similar campaigns were waged in London against Eysenck and in Boston against Edward Wilson, the founding father of sociobiology, the discipline that explains human behavior through genetics. The attacks on Wilson were orchestrated by the Sociobiology Study Group, part of the left wing organization Science for the People, formed of 35 scientists and students, including the Harvard biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin, who both became prominent critics of hereditarian research in race and intelligence.

This disruption was accompanied by a high level of commentaries, criticisms and denouncements from the academic community. Two issues of the Harvard Educational Review were devoted to critiques of Jensen's work by psychologists, biologists and educationalists. As documented by Wooldridge (1995), the main commentaries involved: population genetics (Richard Lewontin, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Walter Bodmer); the heritability of intelligence (Christopher Jencks, Mary Jo Bane, Leon Kamin, David Layzer); the possible inaccuracy of IQ tests as measures of intelligence (summarised in Jensen 1980, pp. 20–21); and sociological assumptions about the relationship between intelligence and income (Jencks and Bane).

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Stephen J. Gould

Ideological differences also emerged in the controversy. The circle of scientists around Lewontin and Gould, some of them self-admittedly motivated by a Marxist ideology, rejected the research of Jensen and Herrnstein as "bad science". While not objecting to research into intelligence per se, they felt that this research was politically motivated and objected to the reification of intelligence: the treatment of the numerical quantity g as a physical attribute like skin colour that could be meaningfully averaged over a population group. They claimed that this was contrary to the scientific method, which required explanations at a molecular level, rather than the analysis of a statistical artifact in terms of undiscovered processes in biology or genetics. In response to this criticism, Jensen later wrote that, "'reification' is neither more nor less than the common practice in every science of hypothesizing explanatory models or theories to account for the observed relationships within a given domain." He asked why psychology should be denied "the common right of every science to the use of hypothetical constructs or any theoretical speculation concerning causal explanations of its observable phenomena?"

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Cyril Burt

The academic debate also became entangled with the so-called "Burt Affair", because Jensen's article had partially relied on the 1966 twin studies of the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt: shortly after Burt's death in 1971, there were allegations, prompted by research of Leon Kamin, that Burt had fabricated parts of his data, charges which have never been fully resolved. Franz Samelson documents how Jensen's views on Burt's work varied over the years: he was his main defender in the USA during the 1970s; in 1983, following the publication in 1978 of Leslie Hearnshaw's official biography of Burt, he changed his mind, "fully accept[ing] as valid ... Hearnshaw’s biography" and stating that "of course [Burt] will never be exonerated for his empirical deceptions"; however, in 1992 he wrote that "the essence of the Burt affair ... [was] a cabal of motivated opponents, avidly aided by the mass media, to bash [Burt’s] reputation completely", a view repeated in an invited address on Burt before the American Psychological Association, when he called into question the scholarship of the recently deceased Hearnshaw.

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Trofim Lysenko who, as director of Soviet research in biology under Joseph Stalin, blocked research into genetics for ideological reasons

Similar charges of a politically motivated conspiracy to stifle scientific research on racial differences, later dubbed "Neo-Lysenkoism", were frequently repeated by Jensen and his supporters. Jensen (1972) bemoaned the fact that "a block has been raised because of the obvious implications for the understanding of racial differences in ability and achievement. Serious considerations of whether genetic as well as environmental factors are involved has been taboo in academic circles," adding that, "In the bizarre racist theories of the Nazis and the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we have seen clear examples of what happens when science is corrupted by subservience to political dogma."

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The first issue of Neue Anthropologie was dedicated to Fritz Lenz, coauthor with Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer of a text on Rassenhygiene, the scientific theory used to justify genocide in Nazi Germany

After the appearance of his 1969 article, Jensen was later more explicit about racial differences in intelligence, stating in 1973 "that something between one-half and three-fourths of the average IQ differences between American Negroes and whites is attributable to genetic factors." He even speculated that the underlying mechanism was a "biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence" linked to their joint development in the ectoderm of the embryo. Although Jensen avoided any personal involvement with segregationists in the US, he did not distance himself from the approaches of journals of the far right in Europe, many of whom viewed his research as justifying their political ends. In an interview with Nation Europa, he said that some human races differed from one another even more than some animal species, claiming that a measurement of "genetic distance" between blacks and whites showed that they had diverged over 46,000 years ago. He also granted interviews to Alain de Benoist's French journal Nouvelle École and Jürgen Rieger's German journal Neue Anthropologie of which he later became a regular contributor and editor, apparently unaware of its political orientation owing to his poor knowledge of German.

The debate was further exacerbated by issues of racial bias that had already intensified through the 1960s due to civil rights concerns and changes in the social climate. In 1968 the Association of Black Psychologists (ABP) had demanded a moratorium on IQ tests for children from minority groups. After a committee set up by the American Psychological Association drew up guidelines for assessing minority groups, failing to confirm the claims of racial bias, Jackson (1975) wrote the following as part of a response on behalf of the ABP:

Psychological testing historically has been a quasi-scientific tool in the perpetuation of racism on all levels of scientific objectivity, it [testing] has provided a cesspool of intrinsically and inferentially fallacious data which inflates the egos of whites by demeaning Black people and threatens to potentiate Black genocide.

Other professional academic bodies reacted differently to the dispute. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a division of the American Psychological Society, issued a public statement in 1969 criticizing Jensen's research, declaring that, "To construct questions about complex behavior in terms of heredity versus environment is to oversimplify the essence and nature of human development and behavior." The American Anthropological Association convened a panel discussion in 1969 at its annual general meeting, shortly after the appearance of Jensen's paper, where several participants labelled his research as "racist". Subsequently the association issued an official clarification, stating that, "The shabby misuse of IQ testing in the support of past American racist policies has created understandable anxiety over current research on the inheritance of human intelligence. But the resulting personal attacks on a few scientists with unpopular views has had a chilling effect on the entire field of behavioral genetics and clouds public discussion of its implications." In 1975 the Genetics Society of America made a similarly cautious statement: "The application of the techniques of quantitative genetics to the analysis of human behavior is fraught with human complications and potential biases, but well-designed research on the genetic and environmental components of human psychological traits may yield valid and socially useful results and should not be discouraged."

1980-present

James Flynn

In the 1980s, the New Zealand psychologist James Flynn started a study of group differences in intelligence in their own terms. His research led him to the discovery of what is now called the Flynn effect: he observed empirically a gradual increase in average IQ scores over the years over all groups tested. His discovery was confirmed later by many other studies. Flynn concluded in 1987 that "IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence".

Richard Lynn

From the 1980s onwards, the Pioneer Fund continued to fund hereditarian research on race and intelligence, in particular the two English-born psychologists Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster and J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, its president since 2002. Rushton returned to the cranial measurements of the nineteenth century, using brain size as an extra factor determining intelligence; in collaboration with Jensen, he most recently developed updated arguments for the genetic explanation of race differences in intelligence. Lynn, long time editor of and contributor to Mankind Quarterly and a prolific writer of books, has concentrated his research in race and intelligence on gathering and tabulating data about race differences in intelligence across the world. He has also made suggestions about its political implications, including the revival of older theories of eugenics, which he describes as "the truth that dares not speak its name".

Snyderman & Rothman (1987) announced the results of a survey conducted in 1984 on a sample of over a thousand psychologists, sociologists and educationalists in a multiple choice questionnaire, and expanded in 1988 into the book The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy. It included the question, "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" 661 researchers returned the questionnaire, and of these, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was purely "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely due to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". Jencks & Phillips (1998) have pointed out that those who replied "both" did not have the opportunity to specify whether genetics played a large role. There has been no agreement amongst psychometricians on the significance of this particular answer.

In 1989, two hereditarian researchers supported by the Pioneer Fund had their right to academic freedom challenged by the authorities, resulting in prolonged legal battles; J. Phillipe Rushton was placed under police investigation by the Attorney General of Ontario, after complaints that he had promoted racism in one of his publications on race differences; and Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware had an extended battle with her university over the legitimacy of grants from the Pioneer Fund, eventually settled in her favour.

Both later responded with an updated version of Henry E. Garrett's "equalitarian dogma", labelling the claim that all races were equal in cognitive ability as an "egalitarian fiction" and a "scientific hoax". Gottfredson (1994) spoke of a "great fraud", a "collective falsehood" and a "scientific lie", citing the findings of Snyderman and Rothman as justification. Rushton (1996) wrote that there was a "taboo on race" in scientific research that had "no parallel ,,, not the Inquisition, not Stalin, not Hitler." In his 1998 book "The g Factor: The science of mental ability", Jensen reiterated his earlier claims of Neo-Lysenkoism, writing that "The concept of human races [as] a fiction" has various "different sources, none of them scientific," one of them being "Neo-Marxist philosophy," which "excludes consideration of genetic or biological factors ... from any part in explaining behavioral differences amongst humans." In the same year the evolutionary psychologist Kevin B. MacDonald went much further, reviving Garrett's claim of the "Boas cult" as a Jewish conspiracy, after which "research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport."

In 1994 The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray rekindled the public debate in the media and academia about race and intelligence

In 1994 the debate on race and intelligence was reignited by the publication of the book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book was received positively by the media, with prominent coverage in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Although only two chapters of the book were devoted to race differences in intelligence, treated from the same hereditarian standpoint as Jensen's 1969 paper, it nevertheless caused a similar furore in the academic community to Jensen's article. Many critics, including Stephen J. Gould and Leon Kamin, asserted that the book contained unwarranted simplifications and flaws in its analysis; in particular there were criticisms of its reliance on Lynn's estimates of average IQ scores in South Africa, where data had been used selectively, and on Rushton's work on brain size and intelligence, which was controversial and disputed. These criticisms were subsequently presented in books, most notably The Bell Curve Debate (1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996) and an expanded edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1996).

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Otmar von Verschuer, editor of Mankind Quarterly, was assisted by Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele on his twin studies in Berlin in 1944

In 1994 a group of 52 scientists, including Jensen, were cosignatories of an editorial article in the journal Intelligence entitled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" . The article, supporting the conclusions of The Bell Curve, had been expanded from a letter drafted by Gottfredson that originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. In 1999 the same journal Intelligence reprinted as an invited editorial a long article by the attorney Harry F. Weyher Jr. defending the integrity of the Pioneer Fund, of which he was then president and of which several editors, including Gottfredson, Jensen, Lynn and Rushton, were grantees. In 1994 its house journal Mankind Quarterly, of which Roger Pearson was the manager and pseudonymous contributor, had been described by Charles Lane in a review of The Bell Curve in the New York Review of Books as "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race"; he had called the fund and its journal "scientific racism's keepers of the flame." Gottfredson had previously defended the fund in 1989-1990, asserting that Mankind Quarterly was a "multicultural journal" dedicated to "diversity ... as an object of dispassionate study" and that Pearson did not approve of membership of the American Nazi Party. Pearson (1991) had himself defended the fund in his book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe.

In response to the debate on The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association set up a ten-person taskforce, chaired by Ulrich Neisser, to report on the book and its findings. In its report, published in February 1996, the committee made the following comments on race differences in intelligence:

African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established. The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally-based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available.

San bushmen from the Kalahari desert, classified as "mentally retarded" by Lynn (2006). In the 1990s, hereditarian researchers started writing about the genetic causes and socioeconomic effects of intelligence rates in sub-Saharan Africa

Rushton found himself at the centre of another controversy in 1999 when unsolicited copies of a special abridged version of his 1995 book Race, Evolution and Behavior, aimed at a general readership, were mass mailed to psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists in North American universities. As a result Transaction Publishers withdrew from publishing the pamphlet, financed by the Pioneer Fund, and issued an apology in the January 2000 edition of the journal Society. In the pamphlet Rushton recounted how black Africans had been seen by outside observers through the centuries as naked, insanitary, impoverished and unintelligent. In modern times he remarked that their average IQ of 70 "is the lowest ever recorded", due to smaller average brain size. He explained these differences in terms of evolutionary history: those that had migrated to colder climates in the north to evolve into whites and Asians had adapted genetically to have more self-control, lower levels of sex hormones, greater intelligence, more complex social structures, and more stable families. He concluded that whites and Asians are more disposed to "invest time and energy in their children rather than the pursuit of sexual thrills. They are 'dads' rather than 'cads.'" J. Philippe Rushton has not distanced himself from groups on the far right in the US. He has been a regular contributor to the newsletters of American Renaissance and has spoken at many of their biennial conferences, in 2006 sharing the platform with Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.

In the 2000s two public figures generated controversy by repeating in interviews the claim of Lynn and Rushton that one of the main causes for poverty in Africa is the low average intelligence among sub-Saharan Africans. Following an interview in the monthly magazine of Helsingin Sanomat, Lynn's coauthor Tatu Vanhanen, a political scientist and father of the Prime Minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen, was investigated by the Finnish police between 2002 and 2004. In 2007 James D. Watson, Nobel laureate in biology, gave a controversial interview to the Sunday Times Magazine during a book tour in the United Kingdom. This resulted in the cancellation of a Royal Society lecture, along with other public engagements, and his suspension from his administrative position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He subsequently cancelled the tour and resigned from his position.

See also

• Race and intelligence
• Henry Garrett
• Robert Yerkes
• Snyderman and Rothman (study)
• Cyril Burt

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