A differential paradox: The controversy surrounding the Scottish mental surveys of intelligence and family size

Abstract

In 1947, the Scottish Council for Research in Education and the Population Investigation Committee conducted a survey of Scottish schoolchildren, exploring the relations between tested intelligence and fertility. The survey was not only significant for its size, measuring the IQ of all 11-year-olds at school on the day of testing, some 80,805 children, but also because it was a repeat survey. Its purpose was to establish whether the intelligence of the population had declined because of the negative correlation between IQ and family size. The paper will explore how the impetus for the 1947 survey came from attempts to revive the fortunes of the eugenics movement, based upon the interdisciplinary study of population. While most expected the study to provide evidence of a decline in intelligence, it revealed an increase. This was in spite of a continuing process of differential fertility. This paper will explore the influence of these results, described as a "paradox," upon the future development of the eugenics movement and the sciences of population. While for many, the results were seen to have completely, and thankfully, undermined eugenic fears of degeneration, the supposed "resolution" of the paradox in 1962 provided the basis of a meritocratic and optimistic "new eugenics" that sought to reunite social and biological scientists concerned with human betterment in Britain and the United States.

Social context, stress, and plasticity of aging

“…, 2000; Hart et al. , 2003; Ramsden, 2007). At the same time, death rates among elderly continue to decline without a corresponding increase in disease‐free life expectancy (Robine & Jagger, 2005).…”

Surveying the meritocracy: The problems of intelligence and mobility in the studies of the Population Investigation Committee

“…Ramsden, 2007). This followed from the evidence that the Eugenics Society presented to the Royal Commission on Population.…”

“…Carr-Saunders was appointed chairman of the PIC in 1937dthe same year that he became director of London School of Economics (LSE)dwhile the secretary of the Eugenics Society, C. P. Blacker, became Honorary Secretary. The Eugenics Society also provided the PIC with offices and its main source of funding in its early years (Langford, 1998;Ramsden, 2007). The PIC's stated aim was to examine the trends of population in Britain and its colonies, with special reference to the falling birth rate.…”

An intelligent Scotland: Professor Sir godfrey Thomson and the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947

“…That is, the children born in 1936 (tested in 1947) scored a few points higher on the same test than did the children born in 1921 (tested in 1932). However, Thomson, in his lectures, continued to consider the possibility that other factors might have affected this result, and that a dysgenic trend in intelligence test scores could not firmly be excluded by the results (also see Ramsden 2007). For example, Thomson was concerned about whether the contents of mental tests were becoming more widely known amongst the public and that the test score increase might be an artefact of this.…”