Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 83

Table 3.1 shows some of Spearman’s early results, taken from twenty-
two boys in a preparatory school. He assumed that school per for mance
is itself a mea sure of intelligence and reasoned that per for mances that
correlate signifi cantly like this are prob ably expressions of the single
under lying factor that Galton had proposed. As mentioned in chapter 1,
a correlation is really a mea sure of how two entities co- vary, or vary
together, not of its under lying causes. However, Spearman leapt to the
conclusion that “ there really exists a General Intelligence.” He claimed that
this was in the nature of an innate energy or power variable, raising or
lowering the ability to learn across all subjects, and he called it “g.” To t he
pres ent day psychologists have hailed this fi nding as perhaps the biggest
single discovery in psy chol ogy.^8
Th at same reasoning— that correlated scores refl ect a common ability
—is just as popu lar today, even though the causes of the correlations can
be due to many other factors or to none at all. (For example, there is a
correlation between the price of coff ee and the distance of Haley’s comet
from the earth). Th e mistake is in assuming that the correlations reveal
the hidden entity generating the observations, a habit of thought referred
to as “reifi cation.” So g has become another shadowy apparition widely
open to ideological infi ll.
Nevertheless, the habit has been impossible to resist, and further
“structures” of intelligence have been inferred from intercorrelations
between item subscores. So we get verbal intelligence; mathematical

TABLE 3.1 Spearman’s reported correlations among scholastic

and sensory mea sures

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Classics

French .83

En glish .78 .67

Math .70 .67 .64

Pitch .66 .65 .54 .45

Music .63 .57 .51 .51 .40

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