Mainstream Science on Intelligence
It was published originally in The Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994, as a response to criticism of the book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which appeared earlier the same year.
[10][11][9][12][13][14] Gottfredson was prompted to write the statement by what she considered to be "outdated, pseudoscientific notions of intelligence" promoted by critics of The Bell Curve in the controversy that resulted from the publication of the book.
She contacted David Brooks of The Wall Street Journal, who was willing to publish a short statement signed by experts describing what he considered mainstream in the study of intelligence.
Gottfredson drafted the statement, had it vetted by several researchers, and finally solicited signatures for it from experts in several disciplines, including anthropology, behavior genetics, mental retardation, neuropsychology, sociology, and various specialties in psychology.
Even though individuals like psychologist J. Philippe Rushton have published monumental treatises to support the claim of Nordic racial superiority, and despite the flamboyant approaches of Shockley, Jensen, Herrnstein, and Murray, there remain only two ways the psychometric syllogism can be deemed acceptable-- either: (a) one has little or no knowledge of the broad areas of the scientific method, statistical reasoning, population studies, quantitative genetics, developmental physiology, neurophysiology, environmental toxicology, sociology, educational psychology, economics, and history required to adequately comprehend the issues involved; or (b) one has no desire to examine the facts of this problem objectively.
[10]In a posthumous article in 1996, Donald T. Campbell, a former president of the American Psychological Association, included his own analysis of the Wall Street Journal statement, drafted previously as a letter to that newspaper.
I do not have a list of those who were asked to sign and refused, but I know they included Lee Cronbach, Robert Sternberg, and myself.He remarked that the rhetorical organization of statements in the letter seemed to him to imply, inadvertently or deliberately, the conclusion that the black-white racial gap had a genetic cause.
Later on regarding statement 14, he judged that the claims for heritability had been made without mentioning that it was based on twin studies, where environmental opportunities had been excluded as possible factors.
Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings "catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.Gottfredson (1997b) describes intelligence in her own article in the same volume less broadly as "the ability to deal with complexity".
[citation needed] The validity of the "mainstream science" described in the editorial was also questioned by Belkhir & Duyme (1998), who argued that the signatories were attempting to revive the "pseudo-scientific inquiry" of biological determinism.
In a 2001 article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Ian J. Deary noted that The Wall Street Journal "... is an odd place for such a document, and readers might view the signatories as one-sided, largely committed to the psychometrics-based intelligence research they were endorsing".
Schlinger (2003) argued: With a few exceptions, the list of cosigners reads like a Who's Who of those theorists (e.g., Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., John B. Carroll, Raymond B. Cattell, Hans Eysenck, Linda S. Gottfredson, Seymour W. Itzkoff, Arthur R. Jensen, Robert Plomin, J. Philippe Rushton and Vincent Sarich) who have continued Spearman's tradition of factor analyzing intelligence test scores to generate a theory of general intelligence — g — and some of whom (e.g., Thomas J. Bouchard, Robert Plomin) believe that behavior genetic research supports the conclusion that g is highly heritable, and others of whom (e.g., Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Seymour Itzkoff) have written highly emotionally charged articles arguing that the research supports the conclusion that group differences on intelligence tests reflect genetic differences.
Garrett Hardin, for example, was an ecologist and anti-immigration activist, while Vincent Sarich was an anthropologist who gained notoriety for making racist and homophobic claims in his undergraduate courses (he later admitted to The New York Times that these assertions were not based on established scientific facts)."
