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Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 215–217

Book review

Intelligence, destiny and education: The ideological roots of intelligence testing, John White. London andNew York (2006). 172 pp., Routledge, ISBN: 0-415-39493-7 (pbk).

According to John Calvin, God has predestined some to eternal life, some to eternal death. Forthe journalist Walter Lippman, an early critic of IQ tests, the theory that intelligence is ‘innate,hereditary, and predetermined’ evoked Calvin’s doctrine. But John White goes much further.He maintains that the school of psychology founded by Galton was systemically influenced byascetic Protestantism.

When Galton’s Hereditary Genius was published in 1869, the dominant theory of academic psy-chology was associationism, a forerunner of behaviourism. Where then, White wonders, did Gal-ton get his ‘odd’ conceptions of general intelligence and of the heritability of intellectualeminence? Not from Darwin, evidently. As the author points out, there are no references to indi-vidual differences in mental ability in The Origin of Species.

Of course, Professor White could have attributed the emergence and resilience of Galton’s sys-tem of psychology to its essentially scientific character. As Detterman (2006) has remarked, theempirical evidence for a unitary cognitive ability is now so overwhelming that it no longer engen-ders debate (within the field of psychometrics, at least). As for the heritability of g, Detterman, forone, concludes that no further behavioural genetic studies are required.

In White’s judgement, however, innate general intellectual ability ‘probably does not exist’ (p.88). The persistence of this erroneous construct is due to its unfalsifiability.

White complains that Cyril Burt’s fabricated evidence for the heritability of g should havefatally compromised Galtonian thinking about intelligence. Yet as Deary (2000) has observed, be-tween 1937 and the 1990s there were five studies of monozygotic twins raised apart. These studiesgive a weighted average twin pair correlation of 0.75. The inference is that mental ability differ-ences are ‘substantially heritable’. Elsewhere, Deary (2006) highlights White’s failure to considerrecent research on intelligence.

Eysenck deplored ‘the consistent disregard of biological reality manifested by present-day edu-cational theorists’ (p. 79). Professor White’s thinking provides a striking example. For White, too,comes from a particular ‘thought-world’, to quote a phrase he uses. He is Emeritus Professor ofthe Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, in the University of London.

At the Institute, the idea of natural limits to the individual’s intellectual ability is anathema.White’s ‘egalitarian vision’ of human capability prevails therein. As Jensen (1998) has observed,neo-Marxist philosophy demands that individual differences in socially significant traits must be‘wholly the result of economic inequality’.

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216 Book review / Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 215–217

Since, for the author, Galton’s conception of cognitive ability is false, its origin constitutes aperplexing mystery that demands a ‘deeper level explanation’. This explanation is indebted toMax Weber.

Weber’s starting point in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was the dispropor-tionate involvement of Protestants in modern capitalism. For Weber, the latter’s salient charac-teristic is acquisition of money as an end in itself or acquisition as compulsion. Webersurmised that for a follower of Calvin, ‘intense worldly activity’ (this-worldly asceticism) was apsychological mechanism for assuaging doubts about salvation (Weber, 1930).

In Intelligence, Destiny and Education, in similar vein, the author’s premise is the undeniablePuritan ancestry of some of the IQ pioneers, notably Galton and Goddard (Quakers) and Burt(Congregationalists). These connections cannot be coincidental in his view, although he recog-nises that the Quakers did not believe in predestination.

Concerning Galton’s assumption that intelligence is bound up with the capacity for abstractthought, White draws attention to the Puritan emphasis on logic. He cites in particular the pro-found influence on early Puritanism of the French logician Pierre de la Ramee or Petrus Ramus(1517–1572).

White also notes that in the Dissenting Academies that flourished in England from around themiddle of the 17th to the late 18th century, Pneumatology was a central element of the curriculum.Pneumatology, the science of the human mind or soul, was a forerunner of modern psychology.Its exponents emphasised the importance of abstract reasoning and logic.

Yet the author concedes that there is no evidence of any direct link either between Galton andRamus or between Galton and Pneumatology. Indeed, a more plausible explanation for Galton’sequation of intelligence with complex problem solving is that modern society has placed such apremium upon the latter. As Deary (2006) laconically observes, ‘g matters in life’.

White detects further parallels or connections between Galtonian psychology and the radicalProtestant sub culture. Galton’s interest in tests unconsciously reflected his Quaker ancestors’ pre-occupation with spiritual self-monitoring (examination). His emphasis on high achievement asconfirmed by reputation bespeaks the Quakers’ social exclusiveness and their attachment toworldly success. And his notion of intelligence as reasoning ability reminds White of the Puritandoctrine of the eternal soul whose essence is pure thought.

The author shows that the idea of innate, albeit God-given differences in reasoning capacitywas part of the dissenting tradition. Moreover, each person was deemed to have received specifictalents from God. These talents corresponded to a particular occupation, the individual’s ‘calling’or vocation. Burt’s view that an individual’s intelligence limits his choice of employment isreminiscent of this Puritan concept of the calling, in White’s opinion. Who would think, on read-ing his exegesis, that g is the best single predictor of academic achievement and of jobperformance?

Professor White is occasionally his own best critic. In The Constitution of Man, published in1828, the phrenologist George Combe referred to inborn intellectual powers and to individual dif-ferences in these. White speculates that Combe influenced Galton. But he admits that there is noevidence.

Then there are the counter-examples to his thesis that the author acknowledges but fails to re-solve. Awkwardly, Charles Spearman had no nonconformist antecedents. But John Dewey, whorejected the Galtonian paradigm and J.B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, did.

Book review / Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 215–217 217

As White reminds us, Galton wanted eugenics to become a new religion. He (White) sees fur-ther evidence of Galton’s incorrigible ‘religiosity’ in his description of the universe as a ‘pure the-ism’, in Hereditary Genius.

Yet the term religion has at times been used without supernatural connotations. Comte’s Pos-itivist religion (the ‘worship of humanity’) springs to mind. So does eugenics. And contra White,Galton had no time for supra rational religious creeds. Nor does his disciple Arthur Jensen (per-sonal communication), his Danish, probably Lutheran, ancestors on his father’s sidenotwithstanding.

As for eugenics qua historical movement, Professor White has not grasped the thinking behindit. Burt’s work in the school system promoting streaming and selection was ‘Galtonian eugenics inaction’ (p. 66). And scholarships to selective schools were ‘a key eugenic mechanism’ (p. 22). YetGalton (1908) defined eugenics as ‘the science of improving stock’. Educational selection does notconstitute positive eugenics. Indeed, certain commentators maintained that the process of socialselection based on abundant scholarships was dysgenic, given the relative infertility of the selectedclass of superior individuals.

Galton and his followers within psychology ‘made it very clear that they were scientists’ (p. 54).No matter. Their theory of intelligence was informed by religion. It cannot therefore be scientific.Proving this thesis, however, is an uphill task. But so is disproving it. One salient criticism of We-ber’s methodology in The Protestant Ethic, that it permits neither proof nor disproof, seems per-tinent here.

References

Deary, I. J. (2000). Looking down on human intelligence: From psychometrics to the brain. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Deary, I. J. (2006). Review of intelligence, destiny and education. Intelligence, 34, 621–622.Detterman, D. K. (2006). Spearman’s g: past, present and future. Human ability: genetic and environmental influences.

London: The Galton Institute, pp. 19–45.Galton, F. (1908). Inquiries into human faculty and its development (2nd ed.). J.M. Dent & Co.Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor: the science of mental ability. London: Praeger.Weber, M. (1930). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Leslie JonesFellow of the Galton Institute,

October 2006

Available online 22 December 2006