The Flamingo’s Smile

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Vivian Buck was adopted by the Dobbs family, who had raised (but later sent away) her mother, Carrie. As Vivian Alice Elaine Dobbs, she attended the Venable Public Elementary School of Charlottesville for four terms, from September 1930 until May 1932, a month before her death. She was a perfectly normal, quite average student, neither particularly outstanding nor much troubled. In those days before grade inflation, when C meant “good, 81–87” (as defined on her report card) rather than barely scraping by, Vivian Dobbs received A’s and B’s for deportment and C’s for all academic subjects but mathematics (which was always difficult for her, and where she scored D) during her first term in Grade 1A, from September 1930 to January 1931. She improved during her second term in 1B, meriting an A in deportment, C in mathematics, and B in all other academic subjects; she was placed on the honor roll in April 1931. Promoted to 2A, she had trouble during the fall term of 1931, failing mathematics and spelling but receiving A in deportment, B in reading, and C in writing and English. She was “retained in 2A” for the next term—or “left back” as we used to say, and scarcely a sign of imbecility as I remember all my buddies who suffered a similar fate. In any case, she again did well in her final term, with B in deportment, reading, and spelling, and C in writing, English, and mathematics during her last month in school. This daughter of “lewd and immoral” women excelled in deportment and performed adequately, although not brilliantly, in her academic subjects.

  Vivian Buck (Dobbs) school record for grade 1B, showing satisfactory progress. Note that she was placed on the honor roll in April, 1931. REPRINTED FROM NATURAL HISTORY.

  In short, we can only agree with the conclusion that Dr. Lombardo has reached in his research on Buck v. Bell—there were no imbeciles, not a one, among the three generations of Bucks. I don’t know that such correction of cruel but forgotten errors of history counts for much, but I find it both symbolic and satisfying to learn that forced eugenic sterilization, a procedure of such dubious morality, earned its official justification (and won its most quoted line of rhetoric) on a patent falsehood.

  Carrie Buck died last year. By a quirk of fate, and not by memory or design, she was buried just a few steps from her only daughter’s grave. In the umpteenth and ultimate verse of a favorite old ballad, a rose and a brier—the sweet and the bitter—emerge from the tombs of Barbara Allen and her lover, twining about each other in the union of death. May Carrie and Vivian, victims in different ways and in the flower of youth, rest together in peace.

  21 | Singapore’s Patrimony (and Matrimony)

  SOME HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS are so intrinsically illogical or implausible that, following their fall from grace, we do not anticipate any subsequent resurrection in later times and contexts. The disappearance of some ideas should be as irrevocable as the extinction of species.

  Of all invalid notions in the long history of eugenics—the attempt to “improve” human qualities by selective breeding—no argument strikes me as more silly or self-serving than the attempt to infer people’s intrinsic, genetically based “intelligence” from the number of years they attended school. Dumb folks, or so the argument went, just can’t hack it in the classroom; they abandon formal education as soon as they can. The fallacy, of course, lies in a mix-up, indeed a reversal, of cause and effect. We do not deny that adults who strike us as intelligent usually (but by no means always) spent many years in school. But common sense dictates that their achievements are largely a result of the teaching and the learning itself (and of the favorable economic and intellectual environments that permit the luxury of advanced education), not of a genetic patrimony that kept them on school benches. Unless education is a monumental waste of time, teachers must be transmitting, and students receiving, something of value.

  This reversed explanation makes such evident sense that even the staunchest of eugenicists abandoned the original genetic version long ago. The genetic argument was quite popular from the origin of IQ testing early in our century until the mid-1920s, but I can find scarcely any reference to it thereafter—although Cyril Burt, that great old faker and discredited doyen of hereditarians, did write in 1947:

  It is impossible for a pint jug to hold more than a pint of milk; and it is equally impossible for a child’s educational attainments to rise higher than his educable capacity permits.

  In my favorite example of the original, genetic version, Harvard psychologist R.M. Yerkes tested nearly two million recruits to this man’s army during World War I and calculated a correlation coefficient of 0.75 between measured intelligence and years of schooling. He concluded:

  The theory that native intelligence is one of the most important conditioning factors in continuance in school is certainly borne out by this accumulation of data.

  Yerkes then noted a further correlation between low scores of blacks on his tests and limited or absent schooling. He seemed on the verge of a significant social observation when he wrote:

  Negro recruits though brought up in this country where elementary education is supposedly not only free but compulsory on all, report no schooling in astonishingly large proportion.

  But he gave the data his customary genetic twist by arguing that a disinclination to attend school can only reflect low innate intelligence. Not a word did he say about the poor quality (and budgets) of segregated schools or the need for early and gainful employment among the impoverished. (Ashley Montagu reexamined Yerkes’s voluminous data twenty years later and, in a famous paper, showed that blacks in several northern states with generous school budgets and strong commitments to education tested better than whites in southern states with the same years of schooling. I could almost hear the old-line eugenicists sputtering from their graves, “Yes, but, but only the most intelligent blacks were smart enough to move north.”)

  I did not, in any case, ever expect to see Yerkes’s argument revived as a hereditarian weapon in the ongoing debate about human intelligence. I was wrong. The reincarnation is particularly intriguing because it comes from a place and culture so distant from the original context of IQ testing in Western Europe and America. It should teach us that debates among academics are not always the impotent displays of arcane mental gymnastics so often portrayed in our satires and stereotypes, but that ideas can have important social consequences with impacts upon the lives of millions. Old notions may emerge later, often in curiously altered contexts, but their source can still be recognized and traced to claims made in the name of science yet never really supported by more than the social prejudices (often unrecognized) of their proposers. Ideas matter in tangible ways.

  I recently received from some friends in Singapore a thick package of xeroxed reports from the English-language press of their nation. These pages covered a debate that has raged in their country since August 1983, when in his annual National Day Rally speech (an equivalent to our “state of the union” message, I gather), Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew abandoned his customary account of economic prospects and progress and, instead, devoted his remarks to what he regards as a great danger threatening his nation. The headline of the Straits Times for August 15 read (Singapore was once the primary city of a British colony named Straits Settlement): “Get Hitched…and don’t stop at one. PM sees depletion of talent pool in 25 years unless better educated wed and have more children.”

  Prime Minister Lee had studied the 1980 census figures and found a troubling relationship between the years that women spend in school and the number of children subsequently born. Specifically, Mr. Lee noted that women with no education have, on average, 3.5 children; with primary education, 2.7; with secondary schooling, 2.0; and with university degrees, only 1.65. He stated:

  The better educated the people are, the less children they have. They can see the advantages of a small family. They know the burden of bringing up a large family…. The better educated the woman is, the less children she has.

  So far, of course, Prime Minister Lee had merely noted for his nation a demographic pattern common to nearly every
modern technological society. Women with advanced degrees and interesting careers do not wish to spend their lives at home, bearing and raising large families. Mr. Lee acknowledged:

  It is too late for us to reverse our policies and have our women go back to their primary role as mothers…. Our women will not stand for it. And anyway, they have already become too important a factor in the economy.

  But why is this pattern troubling? It has existed for generations in many nations, our own for example, with no apparent detriment to our mental or moral stock. The correlation of education with fewer children becomes a dilemma only when you infuse Yerkes’s old and discredited argument that people with fewer years of schooling are irrevocably and biologically less intelligent, and that their stupidity will be inherited by their offspring. Mr. Lee proposed just this argument, thus setting off what Singapore’s press then dubbed “the great marriage debate.”

  The prime minister is not, of course, unaware that years in school can reflect economic advantages and family traditions with little bearing on inherited smarts. But he made a specific argument that deemphasized to insignificance the potential contribution of such environmental factors to years of schooling. Singapore has made great and recent advances in education: universal schooling was introduced during the 1960s and university places were opened to all qualified candidates. Before these reforms, Lee argued, many genetically bright children grew up in poor homes and never received an adequate education. But, he contends, this single generation of universal opportunity resolved all previous genetic inequities in one swoop. Able children of poor parents were discovered and educated to their level of competence. Society has sorted itself out along lines of genetic capacity—and level of education is now a sure guide to inherited ability.

  We gave universal education to the first generation in the early 1960s. In the 1960s and ’70s, we reaped a big crop of able boys and girls. They came from bright parents, many of whom were never educated. In their parents’ generation, the able and not-so-able both had large families. This is a once-ever bumper crop which is not likely to be repeated. For once this generation of children from uneducated parents have received their education in the late 1960s and ’70s, and the bright ones make it to the top, to tertiary [that is, university] levels, they will have less than two children per ever-married woman. They will not have large families like their parents.

  Lee then sketched a dire picture of gradual genetic deterioration:

  If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards. Levels of competence will decline. Our economy will falter, the administration will suffer, and the society will decline. For how can we avoid lowering performance, when for every two graduates (with some exaggeration to make the point), in 25 years’ time there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three?

  So far, I have not proved my case—that the worst arguments raised by hereditarians in the great nature-nurture wars of Western intellectuals can resurface with great social impact in later and quite different contexts. Mr. Lee’s arguments certainly sound like a replay of the immigration debate in America during the early 1920s or of the long controversy in Britain over establishing separate, state-supported schools (done for many years) for bright and benighted children. After all, the arguments are easy to construct, however flawed. Perhaps the prime minister of Singapore merely devised them anew, with no input from older, Western incarnations.

  But another key passage in Lee’s speech—the one that set off waves of recognition and inspired me to write this essay—locates the source of Lee’s claims in old fallacies of the Western literature. I have left one crucial part of the argument out—the “positive” justification for a predominance of heredity in intellectual achievement (versus the merely negative claim that universal education should smooth out any environmental component). Lee stated, in a passage that sent a frisson of déjà-vu up my spine:

  A person’s performance depends on nature and nurture. There is increasing evidence that nature, or what is inherited, is the greater determinant of a person’s performance than nurture (or education and environment)…. The conclusion the researchers draw is that 80 percent is nature, or inherited, and 20 percent the differences from different environment and upbringing.

  Note the giveaway phrase: “80 percent” (supplemented by Lee’s specific references to studies of identical twins reared apart). All cognoscenti of the Western debate will immediately recognize the source of this claim in the “standard figure” so often cited by hereditarians (especially by Arthur Jensen in his notorious 1969 article entitled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement”) that IQ has a measured heritability of 80 percent.

  The fallacies of this 80 percent formula, both of fact and interpretation, have also been thoroughly aired back home, but this aspect of the debate has, alas, apparently not penetrated to Singapore.

  When Jensen advocated an 80 percent heritability, his primary defense rested upon Cyril Burt’s study of identical twins separated early in life and raised apart. Burt, the grand old man of hereditarianism, wrote his first paper in 1909 (just four years after Binet published his initial IQ test) and continued, with steadfast consistency, to advance the same arguments until his death in 1971. His study of separated twins won special fame because he had amassed so large a sample for this rarest of all animals—more than fifty cases—where no previous researcher had managed to find even half so many. We now know that Burt’s “study” was perhaps the most spectacular case of outright scientific fraud in our century—no problem locating fifty pairs of separated twins when they exist only in your own head.

  Burt’s hereditarian supporters first reacted to the charge of fraud by attributing the accusation to left-wing environmentalist ideologues out to destroy a man by innuendo when they couldn’t overwhelm him by logic or evidence. Now that Burt’s fraud has been established beyond any possible doubt (see L.S. Hearnshaw’s biography, Cyril Burt, Psychologist), his erstwhile supporters advance another argument—the 80 percent figure is so well established from other studies that Burt’s “corroboration” didn’t matter.

  In my reading, the literature on estimates of heritability for IQ is a confusing mess—with values from 80 percent, still cited by Jensen and others, all the way down to Leon Kamin’s contention (see bibliography) that existing information is not incompatible with a true heritability of flat zero. In any case, the actual number hardly matters, for Lee’s argument rests upon a deeper and more basic fallacy—a false interpretation of what heritability means, whatever its numerical value.

  The problem begins with a common and incorrect equation of heritable with “fixed and inevitable.” Most people, when they hear that IQ has a heritability of 80 percent, conclude that four-fifths of its value is irrevocably set in our genes with only one-fifth subject to improvement by good education and environment. Prime Minister Lee fell right into this old trap of false reason when he concluded that 80 percent heritability established the predominance of nature over nurture.

  Heritability, as a technical term, measures how much variation in the appearance of a trait within a population (height, eye color, or IQ for example) can be accounted for by genetic differences among individuals. Heritability simply isn’t a measure of flexibility or inflexibility in the potential expression of a trait. A type of visual impairment, for example, might be 100 percent heritable but still easily corrected to normal vision by a pair of eyeglasses. Even if IQ were 80 percent heritable, it might still be subject to major improvement by proper education. (I do not claim that all heritable traits are easily altered; some inherited visual handicaps cannot be overcome by any available technology. I merely point out that heritability is not a measure of intrinsic and unchangeable biology.) Thus, I confess I have never been much interested in the debate over IQ’s heritability—for even a very high value (which is far from established) would not speak to the main issue, so accurately characteri
zed by Jensen in the title of his article—how much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? And I haven’t even mentioned (and won’t discuss, lest this essay become interminable) the deeper fallacy of this whole debate—the assumption that so wonderfully multifarious a notion as intelligence can be meaningfully measured by a single number, with people ranked thereby along a unilinear scale of mental worth. IQ may have a high heritability, but if this venerable measure of intelligence is (as I suspect) a meaningless abstraction, then who cares? The first joint of my right ring finger probably has a higher heritability than IQ but no one bothers to measure its length because the trait has neither independent reality nor importance.

  In arguing that Prime Minister Lee has based his fears for Singapore’s intellectual deterioration upon a false reading of some dubious Western data, I emphatically disclaim any right to pontificate about Singapore’s problems or their potential solutions. I am qualified to comment on Mr. Lee’s nation only by the first criterion of the old joke that experts on other countries have lived there for either less than a week or more than thirty years. Nonetheless, buttinsky that I am, I cannot resist two small intrusions. I question, first, whether a nation with such diverse cultural traditions among its Chinese, Malay, and Indian sectors can really expect to even out all environmental influences in just one generation of educational opportunity. Second, I wonder whether the world’s most densely populated nation (excluding such tiny city-states as Monaco) should really be encouraging a higher reproductive rate in any segment of its population. Despite my allegiance to cultural relativism, I still maintain a right to comment when other traditions directly borrow my own culture’s illogic.