PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL 7and his place in the British upper class, seized on the idea to scientifi cally
vindicate what, to him, was already quite obvious: that the class system
so favoring him was a refl ection of inherited natu ral ability. His interpre-
tation of Darwin’s theory was that it fi nally quashed all “pretensions of
natu ral equality” (as he put it in his book Hereditary Genius in 1876).
Galton soon turned this new biology of heredity into a social and
po liti cal mission. He founded the Eugenics Society, with the aim of re-
stricting reproduction to those with the most potential (as he perceived
it). To make it scientifi c, and seemingly objective, though, he needed
a scientifi c mea sure of potential. Such mea sure would serve, he argued,
“for the indication of superior strains or races, and in so favouring them
that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the
old one.”^4
Galton thus defi ned intelligence as what ever it is the upper class has
more of, and he in ven ted the fi rst intelligence test with a po liti cal purpose
in mind. He was the fi rst, in what has been a long line of scientists, to ex-
ploit the notions of potential and intelligence in that way (I will have
much more to say about that in chapter 3).
By the turn of the twentieth century, Galton’s ideas were taken up
by many others, including renowned statistician Karl Pearson. Like
Galton, Pearson argued that social reforms would not eradicate “feeble-
mindedness.” Only programs for selective breeding could prevent
the degeneration of society, he said. He, too, used rather crude intelligence
tests to promote the idea. Aft er administering them to Jews and other
immigrants of East London, he warned that they are “inferior physically
and mentally to the native population.”
Darcie Delzell and Cathy Poliok have shown how Pearson’s class back-
ground and ideology encouraged errors in methodology, data quality, and
interpretation, and infl uenced his “oft en careless and far- fetched infer-
ences.” With a warning that expertise and esteem off er no immunity to such
errors, they note how “the infl uence of personal opinions and biases on
scientifi c conclusions is a threat to the advancement of knowledge.”^5
Th at ideological perversion of science was, however, only the start of
much that was to follow on both sides of the Atlantic. Aft er the turn of
the century, genes had been identifi ed as the hereditary agents, and Galton’s
followers had revised his test to become the modern IQ test. Th e essential
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