THE MISMEASURE OF MANward Child (1937), written at the height of his powers and before
his descent into conscious fraud.
Backwardness, Burt notes, is defined by achievement in school,
not by tests of intelligence: backward children are more than a year
behind in their schoolwork. Burt argues that environmental
effects, if at all important, should have most impact upon children
in this category (those much further behind in school are more
clearly genetically impaired). Burt therefore undertook a statistical
study of environment by correlating the percentage of backward
children with measures of poverty in the boroughs of London. He
calculated an impressive array of strong correlations: 0.73 with
percentage of people below the poverty line, 0.89 with overcrowd-
ing, 0.68 with unemployment, and 0.93 with juvenile mortality.
These data seem to provide a prima-facie case for a dominant
environmental influence upon backwardness, but Burt demurs.
There is another possibility. Perhaps the innately poorest stocks
create and then gravitate to the worst boroughs, and degree of
poverty is merely an imperfect measure of genetic worthlessness.
Burt, guided by his idee fixe, opted for innate stupidity as the
primary cause of poverty (1937, p. 105). He invoked IQ testing as
his major argument. Most backward children score 1 to 2 standard
deviations below the mean (70-85), within a range technically des-
ignated as "dull." Since IQ records innate intelligence, most back-
ward children perform poorly in school because they are dull, not
(or only indirectly) because they are poor. Again, Burt rides his
circle. He wishes to prove that deficiency of innate intelligence is
the major cause of poor performance in school. He knows full well
that the link between IQ score and innateness is an unresolved
issue in intense debates about the meaning of IQ—and he admits
in many places that the Stanford-Binet test is, at best, only an
imperfect measure of innateness (e.g., 1921, p. 90). Yet, using the
test scores as a guide, he concludes:
In well over half the cases, the backwardness seems due chiefly to
intrinsic mental factors; here, therefore, it is primary, innate, and to that
extent beyond all hope of cure (1937, p. 110).
Consider Burt's curious definition of innate in this statement. An
innate character, as inborn and, in Burt's usage, inherited, forms
part of an organism's biological constitution. But the demonstra-