THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ 259them as a test of his language hypothesis. But, in fact, he only knew
their country of origin, not their degree of familiarity with English.
On average, these so-called non-English Nordics had been in
America far longer than the Alpines or Mediterraneans. Many
spoke English well and had spent enough years in America to mas-
ter the arcana of bowling, commercial products, and film stars. If
they, with their intermediary knowledge of American culture,
scored almost a year below the English Nordics, why not attribute
the nearly two-year disadvantage of Alpines and Mediterraneans
to their greater average unfamiliarity with American ways? It is
surely more parsimonious to use the same explanation for a contin-
uum of effects. Instead, Brigham admitted environmental causes
for the disparity within Nordics, but then advanced innatism to
explain the lower scores of his despised southern and eastern
Europeans (pp. 171-172):
There are, of course, cogent historical and sociological reasons
accounting for the inferiority of the non-English speaking Nordic group.
On the other hand, if one wishes to deny, in the teeth of the facts, the
superiority of the Nordic race on the ground that the language factor mys-
teriously aids this group when tested, he may cut out of the Nordic distri-
bution the English speaking Nordics, and still find a marked superiority of
the non-English speaking Nordics over the Alpine and Mediterranean
groups, a fact which clearly indicates that the underlying cause of the
nativity differences we have shown is race, and not language.
Having met this challenge, Brigham encountered another that
he couldn't quite encompass. He had attributed the declining
scores of successive five-year groups to the decreasing percentage
of Nordics in their midst. Yet he had to admit a troubling ana-
chronism. The Nordic wave had diminished long before, and im-
migration for the two or three most recent five-year groups had
included a roughly constant proportion of Alpines and Mediter-
raneans. Yet scores continued to drop while racial composition
remained constant. Didn't this, at least, implicate language and cul-
ture? After all, Brigham had avoided biology in explaining the sub-
stantial differences between Nordic groups; why not treat similar
differences among Alpines and Mediterraneans in the same way?
Again, prejudice annihilated common sense and Brigham invented
an implausible explanation for which, he admitted, he had no
direct evidence. Since scores of Alpines and Mediterraneans had