THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ 217boy and his questioning nature. His elevated A2 IQ of 150 only
records increasing information about his more notable young man-
hood. In one case, however, Cox couldn't bear to record the
unpleasant result that her methods dictated. Shakespeare, of hum-
ble origin and unknown childhood, would have scored below 100.
So Cox simply left him out, even though she included several oth-
ers with equally inadequate childhood records.
Among other curiosities of scoring that reflect Cox and Ter-
man's social prejudices, several precocious youngsters (Clive, Lie-
big, and Swift, in particular) were downgraded for their
rebelliousness in school, particularly for their unwillingness to
study classics. An animus against the performing arts is evident in
the rating of composers, who (as a group) rank just above soldiers
at the bottom of the final list. Consider the following understate-
ment about Mozart (p. 129): "A child who learns to play the piano
at 3, who receives and benefits by musical instruction at that age,
and who studies and executes the most difficult counterpoint at age
14, is probably above the average level of his social group."
In the end, I suspect that Cox recognized the shaky basis of her
work, but persisted bravely nonetheless. Correlations between rank
in eminence (length of Cattell's entry) and awarded IQ were dis-
appointing to say the least—a mere 0.25 for eminence vs. A2 IQ,
with no figure recorded at all for eminence vs. Ai IQ (it is a lower
0.20 by my calculation). Instead, Cox makes much of the fact that
her ten most eminent subjects average 4 —yes only 4 —A 1 IQ points
above her ten least eminent.
Cox calculated her strongest correlation (0.77) between A2 IQ
and "index of reliability," a measure of available information about
her subjects. I can imagine no better demonstration that Cox's IQ's
are artifacts of differential amounts of data, not measures of innate
ability or even, for that matter, of simple talent. Cox recognized
this and, in a final effort, tried to "correct" her scores for missing
information by adjusting poorly documented subjects upward
toward the group means of 135 for Ai IQ and 145 for A2 IQ.
These adjustments boosted average IQ's substantially, but led to
other embarrassments. For uncorrected scores, the most eminent
fifty averaged 142 for Ai IQ, while the least eminent fifty scored
comfortably lower at 133. With corrections, the first fifty scored
160, the last fifty, 165. Ultimately, only Goethe and Voltaire scored