THE REAL ERROR OF CYRIL BURTthe most important of all," but he also gives away his answer in
stating why we should be so concerned. Its importance rests upon:... the growing belief that innate characters of the family are more potent
in evolution than the acquired characters of the individual, the gradual
apprehension that unsupplemented humanitarianism and philanthropy
may be suspending the natural elimination of the unfit stocks—these fea-
tures of contemporary sociology make the question whether ability is
inherited one of fundamental moment (1909, p. 169).
Burt selected forty-three boys from two Oxford schools, thirty
sons of small tradesmen from an elementary school and thirteen
upper-class boys from preparatory school. In this "experimental
demonstration that intelligence is hereditary" (1909, p. 179), with
its ludicrously small sample, Burt administered twelve tests of
"mental functions of varying degrees of complexity" to each boy.
(Most of these tests were not directly cognitive in the usual sense,
but more like the older Galtonian tests of physiology—attention,
memory, sensory discrimination, and reaction time). Burt then
obtained "careful empirical estimates of intelligence" for each boy.
This he did not by rigorous Binet testing, but by asking "expert"
observers to rank the boys in order of their intelligence indepen-
dent of mere school learning. He obtained these rankings from the
headmasters of the schools, from teachers, and from "two compe-
tent and impartial boys" included in the study. Writing in the
triumphant days of British colonialism and derring-do, Burt
instructed his two boys on the meaning of intelligence:
Supposing you had to choose a leader for an expedition into an
unknown country, which of these 30 boys would you select as the most
intelligent? Failing him, which next? (1909, p. 106)
Burt then searched for correlations between performance on
the twelve tests and the rankings produced by his expert witnesses.
He found that five tests had correlation coefficients with intelli-
gence above 0.5, and that poorest correlations involved tests of
"lower senses—touch and weight," while the best correlations
included tests of clearer cognitive import. Convinced that the
twelve tests measured intelligence, Burt then considered the scores
themselves. He found that the upper-class boys performed better
than the lower-middle-class boys in all tests save those involving
weight and touch. The upper-class boys must therefore be smarter.
But is the superior smartness of upper-class boys innate or