THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ (^215)
Cox's dossiers are motley lists of childhood and youthful
accomplishments, with an emphasis on examples of precocity.
Since her method involved adding to the base figure of 100 for
each notable item in the dossier, estimated IQ records little more
than the volume of available information. In general, low IQ's
reflect an absence of information, and high IQ's an extensive list.
(Cox even admits that she is not measuring true IQ, but only what
can be deduced from limited data, though this disclaimer was
invariably lost in translation to popular accounts.) To believe, even
for a moment, that such a procedure can recover the proper order-
ing of IQ among "men of genius," one must assume that the child-
hood of all subjects was watched and recorded with roughly equal
attention. One must claim (as Cox does) that an absence of doc-
umented childhood precocity indicates a humdrum life not worth
writing about, not an extraordinary giftedness that no one both-
ered to record.
Two basic results of Cox's study immediately arouse our strong
suspicion that her IQ scores reflect the historical accidents of sur-
viving records, rather than the true accomplishments of her
geniuses. First, IQ is not supposed to alter in a definite direction
during a person's life. Yet average Ai IQ is 135 in her study, and
average A2 IQ is a substantially higher 145. When we scrutinize
her dossiers (printed in full in Cox, 1926), the reason is readily
apparent, and a clear artifact of her method. She has more infor-
mation on her subjects as young adults than as children (A2 IQ
records achievements during ages seventeen through twenty-six;
Ai IQ marks the earlier years). Second, Cox published disturbingly
low A 1 IQ figures for some formidable characters, including Cer-
vantes and Copernicus, both at 105. Her dossiers show the reason:
little or nothing is known about their childhood, providing no data
for addition to the base figure of 100. Cox established seven levels
of reliability for her figures. The seventh, believe it or not, is
"guess, based on no data."
As a further and obvious test, consider geniuses born into hum-
ble circumstances, where tutors and scribes did not abound to
encourage and then to record daring feats of precocity. John
Stuart Mill may have learned Greek in his cradle, but did Faraday
or Bunyan ever get the chance? Poor children are at a double dis-
advantage; not only did no one bother to record their early years,
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