THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ 2/ 9
forebears in harsh judgments about women. Girls did not score
below boys in IQ, and Terman proclaimed their limited access to
professions both unjust and wasteful of intellectual talent (1916, p.
72; 1919, p. 288). He noted, assuming that IQ should earn its mon-
etary reward, that women scoring between 100 and 120 generally
earned, as teachers or "high-grade stenographers," what men with
an IQ of 85 received as motormen, firemen, or policemen (1919,
p. 278).
But Terman took the hereditarian line on race and class and
proclaimed its validation as a primary aim of his work. In ending
his chapter on the uses of IQ (1916, pp. 19-20), Terman posed
three questions:
Is the place of the so-called lower classes in the social and industrial
scale the result of their inferior native endowment, or is their apparent
inferiority merely a result of their inferior home and school training? Is
genius more common among children of the educated classes than among
the children of the ignorant and poor? Are the inferior races really infe-
rior, or are they merely unfortunate in their lack of opportunity to learn?
Despite a poor correlation of 0.4 between social status and IQ,
Terman (1917) advanced five major reasons for claiming that
"environment is much less important than is original endowment
in determining the nature of the traits in question" (p. 91). The
first three, based on additional correlations, add no evidence for
innate causes. Terman calculated: 1) a correlation of 0.55 between
social status and teachers' assessments of intelligence; 2) 0.47
between social status and school work; and 3) a lower, but
unstated, correlation between "age-grade progress" and social sta-
tus. Since all five properties—IQ, social status, teacher's assess-
ment, school work, and age-grade progress—may be redundant
measures of the same complex and unknown causes, the correla-
tion between any additional pair adds little to the basic result of 0.4
between IQ and social status. If the 0.4 correlation offers no evi-
dence for innate causes, then the additional correlations do not
either.
The fourth argument, recognized as weak by Terman himself
It is annoyingly characteristic of Terman's work that he cites correlations when
fhey are high and favorable, but does not give the actual figures when they are low
but still favorable to his hypothesis. This ploy abounds in Cox's study of posthumous
genius and in Terman's analysis of IQ among professions, both discussed previ-