COPYRIGHT TOM LEONARD
In 1925, Sir Godfrey Thomson (1881-1955) was appointed Director of Studies at Moray House School of Education, and Professor of Education (the Bell Chair) at Edinburgh University. See Robertson (1964) for the ‘official’ eugenics-free version, which seems to have been written on behalf of the University of Edinburgh.
Thomson worked in the eugenics-ridden area of psychometrics. He was most famous for his prolific use of mental tests and IQ tests for children and adults, The IQ tests followed Alfred Binet (see Cherry, 2023 ),Francis Galton (see All Psych [1]) and Cyril Burt (see Rose, 1979). See also the diagram on p23 of Penrose (1949), and the discussion in Part 22: The not-so-Normal Distribution of my Introduction.
In short, intelligence tests provide inappropriate single-dimensional measures of a multi-faceted phenomenon, namely the spectrum of human abilities. Indeed, there is arguably no such thing as ‘human intelligence’. We are all simply humans with various abilities and disabilities. Intelligence tests don’t obviously measure ability at doing anything particularly useful.
Another problem with IQ tests is that they have been used e.g. by Galton and Penrose to falsely judge whether children were ‘mentally defective’. Another is that they are often ‘white-collar’ orientated,. While Godfrey Thomson advocated a comprehensive education of all children irrespective of class, the discriminatory 11 plus examinations were nevertheless in force in Scotland from 1944 to 1965. The IQ component of the 11 plus was prejudicial with regard to race and class and caused a high percentage of creative and productive children to have limited educational opportunities for ever
The Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 tested 87498 Scottish children who were born
in 1921, including44210 boys and 43288 girls (according to their own arbitrary
definitions of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ that took no account of intersex), in total about 95% of all
Scottish children born in 1921 (See Scottish Mental Survey, 2021a) The objectives of the
Survey were to discover the rates of mental deficiency in Scotland and to judge the
distribution of intelligence throughout the community.
Each child in the survey took the Moray House Test No.12, which was designed
by Godfrey Thomson. The test did not estimate IQs. It had 71 items, eight practice items,
and two short picture tests. For a child judged mentally deficit, the test would have had
an immensely detrimental impact on the child’s future. Neurodiverse children risked
being falsely judged mentally deficit. Transgender neuro-diverse children risked being so
judged. As the choice of items would not have been orientation-sensitive, the test was
potentially orientation-biased.
In the Summer of 1932, a stratified but non-random sample of 817 of the children
took a Stanford-Binet IQ test. The correlation between the IQ scores and the Moray
House Test (MHT) Scores was about 0.8 .
Deary et al (2005,p378) fit a ‘normal’ curve to a histogram of the observed MHT scored for the whole sample of children. The observed histogram is skew to the left and the normal curve provides a very poor fit. If a further child has an MHT score less than 10, then the normal curve exaggerates the evidence that the child should receive a ‘special’ education.
In his presentation to the Eugenics Society of February 1946, Godfrey Thomson (1946) expresses some quite eugenic ideas relating to the apparently declining ‘national trend of national intelligence. He regretted that children chosen at 11 or I2 to prolong and increase the difficulty level of their course of education were likely, on average, to marry later (if at all) and to have fewer children (if any) than those who were not chosen. Since this was still more the case with those chosen later to enter colleges and universities, Thomson thought that the educational system of the country acted as a sieve to sift out the more intelligent and destroy their posterity.
Sir Godfrey estimated that there was a negative correlation of about -0.25 between the average ‘intelligence’ of children aged about 11, and the sizes of their families. He thought that this may have been largely due to the later marriages of intelligent people, their restraint in producing fewer children, and the inheritance of their intelligence by their offspring. The remainder of Sir Godfrey’s 1946 presentation was similarly eugenicist and Fisher-style heuristic.
At a conference in Edinburgh during March 1946, the directors and Executive Committee of The Scottish Council for Research Education (SCRE) met with David V. Glass of LSE and the leading eugenicists Alexander Carr-Saunders and John Fraser Roberts to discuss a repetition of the 1932 mental survey, in view of the presumed decline of national intelligence due to the differential birth-rate observed during the 1932 survey, as described above, (Deary et al, 2009, pp 16-17). Funding was provided by the Nuffield Foundation and the Eugenics Society to David Glass and the two leading eugenicists to finance the new research.
The SCRE decide to add a sociological survey to the mental test, based upon a sample rather than the population of school children. David Glass and the two leading eugenicists persuaded SCRE’s Executive Committee to agree to this extra survey, against the objections of its directors. The sociological survey was distributed to some 8000 children in a ‘36 day’ sample.
Sir Godfrey proceed to organise the Scottish Mental Health Survey of 1947 (See Lothian Birth Cohorts, 2021b).Almost all 1936-born Scottish school-children were given the same Moray House Test that had been used in the 1932 survey. MHT scores were obtained for 70805 children, including 35809 boys and 34996 girls.
Deary et al (2009, p23-25) describe the social implications of the 1947 survey, which also included the 36 day sample and a smaller sample for twins. There were associations between intelligence and age of mother, social class of the father, and occupancy rate of the rooms. These results were potentially exploitable by eugenicists.
Sir Godfrey interpreted the main results of the 1947 survey during his presentation to the Eugenics Society of October 1949 on ‘Intelligence and Fertility’ (See Thomson, 1950). The average MHT score for children of a particular family size decreased with family size, as it had for the children in the 1932 survey (In eugenic terms this would have been seen as justifying enforced birth control or reduced child allowances for mothers of low intelligence) Thomson had consequently expected the overall average MHT score to decrease over the years. He was therefore surprised that the average MHT score in 1947 was 36.7, a modest increase when compared with the average score 34.5 in 1932.
Sir Godfrey felt that he had been left with the apparent paradox that although the less intelligent seemed to be multiplying more rapidly than the intelligent, the average intelligence did not seem to be sinking. Much of the rest of his presentation comes across as a Galton-style spiel, as Thomson searched for plausible explanations of the paradox.
When I discussed this paradox with Eagle Allan in Sandy Bell’s on 7 June 2023, Allan said that it didn’t compare with the paradoxes: ‘Houses are built overnight on beauty spots, and yet they don’t revamp the buildings in other areas’ and ‘During Covid the homeless problem was temporarily solved during a housing crisis.’ Then a Professor of Romanticism and Story-Telling from the University of Mississippi joined the conversation.
While pouring unadulterated praise on the previously long-buried and forgotten Godfrey Thomson, Deary et al (2009) describe the three co-authors’ own various follow-up studies , which investigate the more recent intelligence levels of participants in the 1932 and 1947 surveys, and try to relate the apparent changes in intelligence to various biological and socio-behavioural factors. A major problem with this is the unreliability and only partial relevance of the dependent variable, namely ‘intelligence’, as evaluated by a mental test or IQ test. For example, the scores on the intelligence test are likely to be affected by how the questions were framed, and as to how the questions may have been chosen for the white middle class, rather than, say, trans working class people of colour.
Deary’s late second co-author John M. Starr was a physician specialising in geriatric medicine. Whatever their much-esteemed and ecstatically lauded abilities in interdisciplinary areas, I have severe misgivings regarding the three co-authors’ data analyses and statistics. From 1992 to 2008, Lawrence Whalley was a distinguished professor of mental health at the University of Aberdeen. If only our ‘headshrinkers’ could get around to checking their statistical assumptions a bit more often. Not to even worry about such assumptions would appear to be a distinct form of group craziness.
Some numerate demented elderly people in Edinburgh have been known to retain high mathematical skills, but few other skills. Their performance on a mental test would depend upon how many items involving numbers it contained. See Rose (1979) and Richardson (2022) for other deep objections. On pp 192-197 of his 2022 book, Ken Richardson lists 16 common misunderstandings of intelligence. Most of these had been misconceived by Ian Deary during his writings.
Ken Richardson has written several books highly critical of IQ testing and related concepts in the field of psychometrics such as Spearman’s g and s factors of intelligence. Ken contends that the definitions of intelligence, and the assumptions of its causes, "lie at the core of political ideologies", and has called for IQ tests to be banned.
To claim that changes in badly measured intelligence help to predict cognitive decline or help to predict an old age malady could therefore serve to confuse the diagnoses for the vulnerable, elderly, and infirm. It would sometimes be best not to let the elderly know that they may be likely to have dementia in the future. Many elderly people simply want to live in the present. I would be most concerned if MHT scores, or anything similar, were used more generally in medical diagnosis or choice of treatment.
Medical students wishing to take specialist courses are frequently required to take IQ-type tests to qualify for entry to their course of interest (my podiatrist Jen Donegan, personal communication). This can creates biases in favour or against some ethnic groups. More generally, members of the work force are frequently required to take these confounded tests even though they bear scant relation to what the person will be actually working on.
I have severe problems with the statistical procedures employed by Deary et al (2009). As the data are either ‘ incomplete population data’ or ‘a stratum of incomplete population data’ none of the numerous p-values they quote are justified since there is no obviously valid choice of sampling model. That includes any binomial, multinomial model or logistic regression model, and maybe every sampling model which has ever been conceived. Hence any claims Deary et al make throughout their book of ‘significant differences’ are almost totally lacking in statistical justification.
Ian Deary OBE. FBA, FRSE, FMedSci was originally a psychiatrist. He is, as of June 2023, Professor of Differential Psychology at the University of Edinburgh,, and seems to be highly political.. He is known for work in the fields of intelligence, cognitive ageing, cognitive epidemiology, and personality.
Professor Deary is not obviously a eugenicist, though he could be so over-focussed that he is unintentionally enabling eugenicists. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of the notorious racist, pro-sterilization eugenicist, and sexist paedophile supporter Chris Brand, the former Oxford Don who was fired by the University of Edinburgh in 1997 after arguing in favour of way underage sex as long as the participants are intelligent enough (Source: Wikipedia). I don’t think that bright twelve year olds should have to put up with this sort of verbiage.
Deary has published jointly with Chris Brand on ‘Intelligence and Inspection Time’ (Brand and Deary, 1982), on ‘Is Intelligence Illusionary?’ (Brand, Deary et al., 1991) and on ‘Personality and Society’ (Brand, Egan, and Deary,1994).
Brand’s papers should be read with circumspection. For example, Sue Freshwater has advised me (personal communication) that the article by Brand, Freshwater, and Dockrell (1989), which controversially suggested a massive rise in IQ levels in the West, was scientifically flawed and involved ‘incorrect data’.
Professor Neil Turner, a leading Quaker and a top kidney expert and undergraduate dean in the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine was keen to advise me in early 2019 about the continuing work on the Scottish Mental Surveys, and said that it was ‘one of the few times that they got it right’. I don’t quite know how to interpret Professor Turner’s advice, and don’t quite understand where he was coming from.
7.15 MANKIND QUARTERLY
In 1959, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE) was founded in Edinburgh (Psychology Wiki [1]). The IAAEE established a branch in the United States through the personal agency of Lord Malcolm Douglas, a member of the British Cliveden Set which supported Adolf Hitler during World War II. The association’s director A. James McGregor asserted his concerns about congenital birth defects and the reproduction of the mentally retarded, rather than racial matters.
The association published the extremely right wing journal Mankind Quarterly out of Edinburgh. See Mankind Quarterly(2023). The first issue was published in July 1960, by its first editor Stockbridge-based Robert Gayre out of the editor’s townhouse at 1 Darnaway St. See Rational Wiki [1] Other members of its editorial board over the years included the arch-eugenicists Corrado Gini, Cyril Burt, and Hans Eysenck, at least two of whom have been accused of fudging their data. The cover page of the first edition displayed a vignette showing white and Asian heads looking upwards, and beneath them a black head captioned ‘H Africanus’. Gayre later falsely claimed that the vignette wasn’t racist.
Deary (1991) published a paper in Mankind Quarterly which includes highly eloquent discussions of various racist, genetic, and non-racist explanations for racial differences in IQ-type scores. I wonder whether the racial differences were largely caused by patriarchal, pro-gender-binary choices of items in the tests, though this is only a, possibly intelligent, suggestion.
Sir Godfrey Thomson (1881-1955) was appointed Director of Studies at Moray House
James Robertson (1964) Godfrey Thomson (Extracts of invited lecture, Moray House School) https://www.ed.ac.uk/education/about-us/maps-estates-history/history/godfrey-thomson.
Kendra Cherry (2023) Alfred Binet and the History of IQ testing (VeryWell Mind) https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581
All Psych (2021) Intelligence (Psychology 101) https://allpsych.com/psychology101/states_of_mind/intelligence/
Lothian Birth Cohorts (2021a) The Scottish Mental Survey of 1932
https://www.ed.ac.uk/lothian-birth-cohorts/history/scottish-mental-survey-1932
Ian Deary, Alison Pattie, Valerie Wilson, Lawrence Whalley (2005)The Cognitive Cost of Being a Twin: Two Whole-Population Surveys Twin Research and Human Genetics 8 (4) pp. 376–383 C:/Users/user/Downloads/Deary20200520Twin20Research20Hum20Genetics20cognitive20cost20of20being20a20twin.pdf
Ian Deary, Alison Pattie, Valerie Wilson, Lawrence Whalley (2005)The Cognitive Cost of Being a Twin: Two Whole-Population Surveys Twin Research and Human Genetics 8 (4)pp.376–383C:/Users/user/Downloads/Deary20200520Twin20Research20Hum20Genetics20cognitive20cost20of20being20a20twin.pdf
Godfrey Thomson (1946) The Trend of National Intelligence Eugenics Review Apr; 38,pp 9–18. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2986315/pdf/eugenrev00247-0018.pdf
Ian Deary, Lawrence Whalley, and John Starr (2009). A lifetime of intelligence: follow-up studies of the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Ken Richardson (2022) Understanding Intelligence-Understanding Life Cambridge University Press.
Lothian Birth Cohorts (2021b) The Scottish Mental Survey of 1947 (University of Edinburgh) https://www.ed.ac.uk/lothian-birth-cohorts/history/the-scottish-mental-survey-1947
Godfrey Thomson (1949) Invited talk to Eugenics Society with diagrams omitted, based on Thomson’s 1950 published article Intelligence and Fertility: The Scottish 1947 Survey in Eugenics Review 41 (4), pp 163-17 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2972905/pdf/eugenrev00072-0007.pdf
Chris Brand and Ian Deary (1982). Intelligence and ‘Inspection Time. On pp133-148 of Hans Eysenck (ed) A Model for Intelligence. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer
Chris Brand, Peter Caryl, Ian Deary, Vincent Eagle and Claudia Pagliari (1991) Is Intelligence Illusionary? The Lancet 337 (8742), pp 678-9
Chris Brand, Vincent Egan and Ian Deary (1994) Intelligence, personality and society: constructivist vs. essentialist possibilities, pp29-42 of Douglas.Detterman, ed, Current Topics in Human Intelligence 4. New York : Ablex https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1994-detterman-currentopicshumanintelligence-4-theoriesofintelligence.pdf
Chris Brand, Susan Freshwater, and W. Brian Dockerell (1989) Has there been a 'massive' rise in IQ levels in the West? Evidence from Scottish children. Irish Journal of Psychology10 (3), p388 -394.
Psychology Wiki [1] International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenicshttps://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/International_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Ethnology_and_Eugenics
Mankind Quarterly (2023) https://mankindquarterly.org/
Rational Wiki [1] Robert Gayre https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Gayre
Ian Deary (1991) Pandora’s Box and the Eskimo’s Nose Mankind Quarterly 32 (1-2), pp 153-159 https://docplayer.net/229848681-Pandora-s-box-and-the-eskimo-s-nose-ian-j-deary-university-of-edinburgh.html
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