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Intelligence Genes orEnvironment

The Burt Affair in Perspective

STEVE BRADY reveals some littleknown aspects of the Burt Affair

and makes some interestingpoints about the evolution of

intelligence

THE FUNDAMENTAL issue which divides the Racial Nationalist world-viewfrom the alternatives Liberal, Liberal-Capitalist and Marxist does not, atroot, lie in the field of policies. It lies in our attitude to the basic nature ofMan. We believe that human nature, collective and individual, is essentiallygenetically determined, inherited, and therefore essentially fixed, over thehistorical timescale at least.

Our opponents, whatever their other differences, are united in believing thathuman nature is environmentally determined, the product of social,economic and similar factors, and so able to be changed fundamentally bysufficient social and economic changes.

This belief is vital to their entire ideology, since to have any hope of attainingtheir ideals the construction of a multi-racial internationalist World-State,giving free rein to Capitalist multinationals or universal communism theyneed, as they themselves proclaim, to change human nature drastically.

Our ideals, and the policies we advance to realise them, are based on therealisation that human nature is essentially immutable. Thus we should do

the best we can with human nature as it actually exists.

OBJECTIVE VALIDITY

If our opponents' view of human nature as environmentally determined andmutable was proved correct it would do us no harm: our ideas are predicatedon leaving that nature as it is. But if human nature were proved to begenetically determined and essentially immutable it would destroy ouropponents' ideologies utterly.

It would prove that they can never achieve their objectives, since the basicchanges in human nature needed to create any sort of egalitarian, stablymultiracial, internationalist society let alone a Communist global or even

sub-global human ant-colony are forever impossible. Worse still for them, itwould leave Racial Nationalism as the only ideology and world-view with any

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serious claim to objective scientific validity.

Even the proof that an important aspect of human nature, such asintelligence, is genetically determined, or even mainly geneticallydetermined, would be fatal to our opponents' ideologies. If intelligence or tobe more precise, the observed differences in intelligence is primarily the

result of inherent genetic factors, then men and races of men arefundamentally and forever unequal. In that knowledge, the whole elaborateideological superstructure of Liberalism and Marxism comes crashing inruins to the ground, and we alone are left, triumphantly vindicated.

It is in that wider context of ideological struggle that the controversy over thework of the eminent British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt must be set.

Until his death in 1971, Sir Cyril was widely regarded as one of the world'sleading authorities on the measurement and inheritance of humanintelligence. Professor of Psychology at University College London from1931 to 1950, for many years editor of the learned British Journal ofStatistical Psychologyand devisor of the widely used Binet-Burt IQ Test,

Burt was regarded as Britain's most distinguished educational psychologist.

TWIN STUDIES

His published work on intelligence centred mainly on 'Twin Studies,' anelegant method of distinguishing between genetic and environmental originsof differences in human intelligence. The simplest way, in principle, toachieve such a distinction would be to compare the difference in intelligencebetween two people with identical genes reared in different environmentswith that between two people with different genes reared in the sameenvironment.

If intelligence differences reflect genetic differences, one would expect the

former, 'same genes/different environment' pair to have more similar IQ's tothe latter, 'different genes/same environment' pair. The opposite result wouldimply that the measured IQ differences are due to differences inenvironment.

Even more information can be derived from the results of the experiment.Any differences between the measured IQ's of the two people sharingwhichever is found to be the main intelligence difference-causing factor mustbe due to the other, lesser factor, once inherent testing errors and the likehad been allowed for.

If, for example, the results showed the measured IQ differences to be mainlygenetic in origin, then any difference small though it then must be

between the genetically identical twins must be due to the differentenvironments.

Thus it should be possible not only to find out whether genes or environmentare mainly responsible for observed differences in intelligence, but also theexact relative contributions of both factors to such differences. No-onedisputes that, whichever is the main cause of the differences in peoples'intelligences, the other factor must play some role, however small.

Fortunately, Nature provides a suitable supply of pairs of genetically identicalpeople for such studies. Once in every three hundred births amongst ourpeople, when the fertilized egg divides into two daughter cells, those cells,instead of remaining together to divide again and again and give rise to one

embryo, separate, and from each one an embryo and ultimately a baby

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grows, genetically identical to its twin, sprung from the same egg.

Any differences in appearance, character and intelligence between such apair of genetic 'carbon copies' as they grow up can obviously only be due toenvironmental effects. If, as sometimes happens, the twins are split up ininfancy orphaned, for example and fostered in different homes, we have

the perfect 'same genes/different environment' situation.

The 'different genes/same environment' case is harder to arrange as neatly.The only way two people can share exactly the same environment is tospend all their lives at the same place at the same time! But ordinary,fraternal twins, sprung from two separate eggs fertilized at the same time butby different sperm share a very similar environment if of the same sex andbrought up together, but only 50% of the same genetic inheritance. Adoptedchildren share an environment with their adopted siblings, but no commongenetic inheritance beyond that common to the population they all comefrom. Likewise with children reared in orphanages.

GENETIC FACTORS

In a series of papers, culminating in 1966, Sir Cyril Burt published accountsof thirty years of such twin studies, involving 53 pairs of identical twins,reared separately, and studies of the IQ's of unrelated children in the sameorphanage etc. On the basis of these results, he concluded that 80% ofobserved differences in human intelligence were due to inherited geneticfactors, and only 20% to the environment, and his published figuresappeared to support this firmly.

If unchallenged, this result would be fatal to the liberal/Marxist"Environmentalist" world-view. Quite simply, if Burt was right, Marx and theliberals were wrong, provably wrong and fundamentally wrong. Attempts toargue around these damning results, for example by questioning whetherintelligence exists at all or can be measured, sound lame and unconvincing.Burt's results appeared to point a dagger unerringly at the heart of theMarxist-liberal ideologies. Fortunately for them, there seemed a way out.For, even before his death, Sir Cyril Burt's results had been received withsome scepticism amongst a number of psychologists, many of whomaccepted his basic hereditarian thesis but were suspicious of figures whichattained statistically most unlikely three-decimal-place agreement withtheoretical predictions.

But it was not until after Burt had been dead for three years, in 1974, that thestorm broke, with the first allegations that this distinguished academic had'cooked his books' and faked his figures.

These first surfaced in the murky depths of the academic Nebelheim of anobscure neo-Communist sect, "Psychologists for Social Action," in a book bya left-wing PSA member Leon Kamin, then an assistant professorialnonentity at the academically insignificant New York City University (in otherwords, little more than the equivalent of a polytechnic lecturer in Britain).

But in October 1976, the Sunday Times raised Kamin's allegations from thenether regions in which they had been spawned and brought them blinkinginto the daylight. The paper's medical correspondent, Oliver Gillie, longnoted for his opposition to the hereditarian viewpoint on intelligence,published Kamin's charges that Burt had made up his results, publishedpapers jointly with non-existent co-workers, fiddled his figures and that his

alleged 'pairs of identical twins' never existed.

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At first, many scientists reacted to this savage attack on the reputation of adistinguished scientist after death robbed him of the ability to defend himself,with shock and anger. The antics of Kamin and his politically unsavouryassociates appeared reminiscent of jackals emerging from the undergrowthto yap after the lion was safely away. Leading psychologists, such asProfessor Hans Eysenck of the Maudsley Hospital, Professor Arthur Jensenof the University of California at Berkeley, and Professor John Cohen ofManchester University, came to Burt's defence.

Evidence was produced to indicate that at least one of Burt's allegedlyfictious co-workers, a Dr. Margaret Howard, had existed, though neither shenor any of the others came forward themselves, no doubt to be promoted inthe media from figments of Sir Cyril's imagination to co-conspirators in SirCyril's alleged fraud!

Nevertheless, the affair sparked off investigations of Sir Cyril's publishedresults by reputable scientists which convinced most of his supporters, suchas Prof. Eysenck, Burt's official biographer Professor Leslie Hearnshaw, and

finally the British Psychological Society, that Sir Cyril Burt did indeed 'fiddlehis figures,' rendering suspect the entire body of his published data.

WISHFUL THINKING

Thinking that they had thus got off one of the innumerable hooks on whichtheir ideology wriggles, liberals and Marxists were quick to use the BurtAffair to smear the whole case for the inheritance of intelligence. Within amonth of Gillie's Sunday Times expose of Burt one Dr. Joseph Schwartz, anassociate of Kamin's at the New York City University, was arguing in theNew Scientist(11th November 1976) that all the studies showing intelligenceto be inherited, not just Burt's, were invalid, an argument dismissed in thatmagazine's next issue by Professor Eysenck as "careless and bizarre."

Kamin, who had profited mightily by the whole affair (to the extent that hehas risen to the exalted heights of a Princeton University professorship) hasgone on to "re-evaluate" all the other non-Burtian identical twin studies which, as we shall see, are not few and not faked in the hope evidentlythat they will go away.

He claims that, subjected to his omniscient if hardly impartial gaze, thesestudies do not show what everyone thought they showed and indeed there is"no evidence from which to deduce that there was any heritable componentto IQ differences at all."

This piece of wishful thinking on the part of the Marxist Kamin was

disseminated as "hard fact" to 50,000 British teachers by his fellow Marxistsin the Communist Party-led, SWP-run National Union of Teachers in thepages of a booklet Race, Intelligence and Education: A Teacher's Guide tothe Facts and Issues published by the NUT in September 1978.

This booklet, which can only be dismissed as inaccurate, ill-arguedpropaganda, was penned by Professor Steven Rose, Head of the OpenUniversity's Biology Department (at which the "careless and bizarre" Dr.Schwartz is a visiting senior research fellow) and a Maoist crank of epicproportions. (In February 1975 he informed the present writer that he "couldnot care less" if the entire population of Britain had to be shot in order tocreate a Chinese-style "workers' paradise" here!)

Despite his frequent expatiations upon the subject of the environmentalorigins of human intelligence and racial differences therein, Professor Rose

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has confined his own actual experimental work to the arguably notinappropriate subject of the mode of functioning of the rat's brain.

The general impression gleefully given by our opponents, and now sharedby rank-and-file Reds, liberals and many ordinary members of the public, isthat the discrediting of Sir Cyril Burt's results destroyed, or at least cast

grave doubt upon, the entire case for the inheritance of human intelligence.Alas for them, nothing could be further from the truth.

CONCLUSIONS NOT DISCREDITED

Firstly, his jiggery-pokery with certain figures in no way alters the fact that SirCyril Burt was a distinguished psychologist who believed, on the basis of 50years of studies (which he did perform) that intelligence is primarily inherited.

It has been suggested that he turned to forging his results after genuineresults, the products of years of work, were destroyed in a wartime air-raid.Whether this is so or not, Burt would not have been the first great scientist to'help' his results toward the right conclusion. Sir Isaac Newton and Gregor

Mendel are now known to have done this, publishing results clearly 'too goodto be true' in terms of precise agreement with their theoretical predictions.Yet for all that no-one today questions the validity of their conclusions aboutgravity, optics and genetics, however suspect their published data. Ifmassaging results, however deplorable, did not discredit Newton andMendel, why should it discredit Burt?

But more importantly, Burt's contribution, monumental though it appeared,was only a small part of the vast weight of scientific evidence which showsthat intelligence is inherited. Quite separate and independent twin studies ofunimpeachable genuineness have been performed by scores of British andAmerican scientists.

These include: Newman, Freeman & Holzinger, 1937; Erlenmeyer-Kimlingand Jarvik, 1963; Huntley, 1966; Bulmer, 1970 and the American NationalMerit Scholarship Corporation study of the 1960's reported by Loehlin &Nichols in 1976. (This last mentioned work studied more than 2,000 sets ofidentical twins, compared to Burt's 53 sets, and many more fraternal twins.)

All these studies confirm the picture of individual differences in intelligencebeing primarily genetically caused.

Professor Christopher Jencks of Harvard, who always regarded Burt's dataas "suspect," concluded on the basis of his own research that intelligence is"at least 60%" determined by hereditary factors, and that irrespective of thevalidity of Burt's data his conclusions were essentially correct. The same

result emerges from studies on relatives other than twins raised apart andtogether.

In his classic 1969 paper ('How much can we boost IQ and scholasticachievement,' Harvard Educational Review39/1, pp.1-123) Prof. ArthurJensen summarises the results of over a hundred separate studies, allindicating that intelligence is primarily inherited.

Prof. Henry Munsinger of the University of California, after critically reviewingall the work done on adopted children, including some twin studies ('TheAdopted Child's IQ: A Critical Review,' Psychological Bulletin of theAmerican Psychological Association, September 1975) was led to concludethat "the available data suggests strongly that, under existing circumstances,

heredity is much more important than environment in producing individual

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differences in IQ."

That is evident also when we simply plot what the distribution of IQ's in thepopulation would be if intelligence were entirely genetically determined and ifit were entirely environmentally determined and compare these two curveswith what the IQ distribution actually is. The observed similarity between the

observed curve and the 100% hereditary IQ curve fits a 75-80% hereditaryIQ conclusion.

FIRST PRINCIPLES

This is precisely what would be expected from basic biological first principlesanyway. Unless human intelligence was primarily genetically determined, itis hard to see how it could ever have evolved in the first place. Themachinery of Natural Selection which powers the evolutionary process canonly engage its gears on variations which are genetically controlled.

The selective survival or reproduction of individuals and groups on the basisof variations in a character which are merely the product of the environment

during the organism's lifetime as Liberals and Marxists would have usbelieve human intelligence is is evolutionarily useless, since the gains inthat character made by the selection of the parents are not passed on totheir offspring. If one accepts, as all but the ignorant and the eccentric nowdo, that human intelligence, like all aspects of the human organism, is aproduct of evolution, then it follows that it must be a trait primarilydetermined by genes, the units which actually are selected and 'do theevolving.'

Human intelligence seems to have evolved extremely rapidly: it took 60million years for the horse to evolve its running powers, but only 3 million forour ancestors to quadruple their brain capacity. Only if intelligence isinherited could it have evolved, presenting Liberals and Marxists with aconundrum, since they cannot accept 'Creationism' or any of the otherunscientific alternatives to evolution as an explanation of human origins anymore than they can accept the inheritance of intelligence which is aprerequisite for that evolution of man to have taken place!

And if differences in intelligence primarily reflected genetic differences in thepast, as they must have done for selection for higher intelligence to bereflected in the gradual genetic increase in human intelligence shown by thefossil record (even Marxists concede that the differing intellectualendowments of a modern man and a proto-hominid 'ape-man' are primarilygenetic in origin!) then they must still do so now. The more so asenvironmental factors such as education, nutrition and health would cause

intelligence to be more uniform in Western societies today than they havebeen for centuries. Yet differences in intelligence remain over the samerange as ever.

So, the Burt affair notwithstanding, the case for the hereditary determinationof human intelligence remains overwhelming, both on the basis of scientists'findings and on a prioriexpectations based upon fundamental biologicalprinciples. All the huff and puff over one man's questionable figures shouldnot be allowed to distract attention as it is clearly intended to do from thatfact. It is indeed a commentary on the desperation of those whoseideological survival depends on keeping the environmentalist view of humannature afloat that, bereft of scientific support themselves, they are reduced to

seeking speciously to smear the results of hundreds of scientific studies onthe basis of one allegation of malpractice.

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Science provides ever more confirmation of our Racial Nationalist world-view, undermining all alternatives and leaving them as mere intellectualcastles in the air, devoid of any basis in reality.

It only remains for us to make sure the world knows this, to hammer homethe fact that our policies, our ideas, are not merely what we and millions of

our countrymen inwardly believe in but are the only logical products of atrue, scientific, objectively correct appreciation of the human reality.

Further reading:1) RACE by Prof. John R Baker.2) THE TESTING OF NEGRO INTELLIGENCE by Prof. Audrey Shuey.3) THE BIOLOGY OF THE RACE PROBLEM by Prof. Wesley C. George.4) I.Q. AND RACIAL DIFFERENCES by Dr. Henry E. Garrett.5) RACE. HEREDITY AND CIVILISATION by Dr. Carleton S. Coon.6) RACE. INTELLIGENCE AND EDUCATION by Prof. Hans Eysenck.

From New Nation, No. 3 (Autumn 1982, edited)

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