THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQpolicemen. Terman suppressed this embarrassment by ordering
his table in a curious way. The hobo mean was distressingly high,
but hobos also varied more than any other group, and included a
substantial number of rather low scores. So Terman arranged his
list by the scores of the lowest 25 percent in each group, and sunk
his hobos into the cellar.
Had Terman merely advocated a meritocracy based bn achieve-
ment, one might still decry his elitism, but applaud a scheme that
awarded opportunity to hard work and strong motivation. But
Terman believed that class boundaries had been set by innate intel-
ligence. His coordinated rank of professions, prestige, and salaries
reflected the biological worth of existing social classes. If barbers
did not remain Italian, they would continue to arise from the poor
and to stay appropriately among them:
The common opinion that the child from a cultured home does better
in tests solely by reason of his superior home advantages is an entirely
gratuitous assumption. Practically all of the investigations which have been
made of the influence of nature and nurture on mental performance
agree in attributing far more to original endowment than to environment.
Common observation would itself suggest that the social class to which the
family belongs depends less on chance than on the parents' native qualities
of intellect and character.... The children of successful and cultured par-
ents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for the
simple reason that their heredity is better (1916, p. 115).Fossil IQ's of past geniuses
Society may need masses of the "merely inferior" to run its
machines, Terman believed, but its ultimate health depends upon
the leadership of rare geniuses with elevated IQ's. Terman and his
associates published a five-volume series on Genetic Studies of Genius
in an attempt to define and follow people at the upper end of the
Stanford-Binet scale.
In one volume, Terman decided to measure, retrospectively,
the IQ of history's prime movers—its statesmen, soldiers, and intel-
lectuals. If they ranked at the top, then IQ is surely the single mea-
sure of ultimate worth. But how can a fossil IQ be recovered
without conjuring up young Copernicus and asking him what the
white man was riding? Undaunted, Terman and his colleagues
tried to reconstruct the IQ of past notables, and published a thick
book (Cox, 1926) that must rank as a primary curiosity within a