patrickmcdonagh.net

back again... And Happy Belated Birthday to Lewis Terman

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:51:00 GMT

How time does fly. Somehow, an absence of several months has inserted itself into this blog posting - I can only assume that I was extremely busy & excited with other things.I've sorted out much of that excitement though, and am back to regular blogging. And, handily providing a transition from my last blog, I see that we have just passed the birthday of Lewis Terman, who took Alfred Binet & Theodore Simon's intelligence test and transformed it into the Stanford-Binet test, which still exists today (with revisions, of course). And, of course, he coined the term "intelligence quotient." I boldly predict here that the notion of "IQ" is, while not quite on its deathbed, in a severe decline. More on this later! In the meantime, Happy Belated Birthday, Lewis. Your contribution to the history of intelligence has had a good run...

Birthdays!!

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:13:22 GMT

It almost passed by without me noticing... but I figure that in my family we're allowed to be many weeks late with birthday greetings, so a couple of days lag for a couple of old dead guys shouldn't matter too much. But - July 11, last Sunday, marked the birthday of Alfred Binet, creator, with Theodore Simon, of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, the first widely adopted test, in 1905. He was born on that day in 1857, 153 years ago. And, in a nice chrono-coincidence, Simon himself, the other half of that team, was born on July 10, 1872 - a comparatively recent 138 years ago. Happy birthday Alfred & Theo! Everybody sing along!

But even though Binet and Simon came up with the first IQ test, which still is used in a much revised form, they didn't create the term "intelligence quotient" - that was Lewis Terman, who adapted their test into the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test in 1916. His birthday was January 15, 1877, so we're way to late for him. No song for you, Lewis!

Quick Wits and the English Malady

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:02:00 GMT

Here’s a little bit of an excerpt on somthing like intelligence - wit, perhaps, or speeds of thinking - from George Cheyne, an 18th century physician to the stars (everyone from literary folk like Samuel Richardson, James Boswell and Alexander Pope to minor aristocracy like the Countess of Huntingdon, who was apparently a very pious lady). Cheyne was renowned in his day for numerous medical treatises, including most famously The English Malady, or, a treatise on nervous diseases of all kinds (1733). The book was a hit, going through six editions in six years, and addressing all kinds of nervous disorders. In it, he claimed that some people were more likely to experience nervous disorders than others: specifically, quick-witted folk were more likely to be afflicted by diseased nerves, on account of their more highly attuned sensitivity. “The common Division of Mankind, into Quick Thinkers, Slow Thinkers, and No Thinkers, is not without Foundation in Nature and true Philosophy. Persons of slender and weak nerves are generally of the first Class: the Activity, Mobility and Delicacy of their Intellectual Organs make them so, and thereby weakens and relaxes the Material Organs of the Intellectual Faculties; and therefore ingenious flattering, easy and agreeable Amusements, and Intervals of No-thinking and Swiss-Meditation, (as it is maliciously called) is as necessary for such, as Sleep to the Weary, or Meat to the Hungry, else the Spring will break, and the Sword wear out the Scabbard.” Your quick wit, says Cheyne, is a sign that you may also be a bit on the high-strung side. In fact, he also likes to compare good mental health to the proper tuning of an instrument, so that “the Intelligent Principle, or Soul, resides somewhere in the Brain, where all the Nerves, or Instruments of Sensation terminate, like a Musician in a finely fram’d and well-tuned Organ-Case; that the Nerves are like Keys, which, being struck or touch’d, convey the Sound and Harmony to this sentient Principle, or Musician”.

I couldn't say off hand what "Swiss meditation" refers to.. and for the rest, I'm not convinced how common Cheyne's Quick/Slow/No-thinking division might have been back in the day... but that's a question, isn't it? Was this really a common division? And were the quick-witted really liable to great mental distress, thanks to their inner musician being over-burdened with keeping the instrument in tune?

Heron Versus Yule

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:44:49 GMT

David Heron was named the first Francis Galton Fellow in National Eugenics in 1907, plying his trade in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London. He wanted to measure whether external factors had an impact on intelligence, and in 1910 published on “The Influence of Defective Physique and Unfavourable Home Environment on the Intelligence of School Children.” He found what he expected: environment, he said, had little effect on intelligence. Not surprisingly, some critics disagreed with his analysis, but not always for reasons we might think today.

Heron’s most potent critic was George Udney Yule, a mathematician interested in applying statistical methods to social sciences (and author of An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, a standard textbook published first in 1911 and revised through many subsequent editions). Yule’s main objection was that Heron’s research relied on teachers' assessments of intelligence in order to evaluate and categorize students, and that these assessments were vague and flawed.

Heron had asked teachers to classify their students as "brilliant," "above the average," average," "below the average," or "very dull and backward"; he also drew on another study in which teachers assigned their students to the categories “excellent,” “good,” “moderate,” or “dull.” Yule, on the other hand, endorsed measurements gathered between 1888 and 1894 by Dr. Francis Warner, who claimed to have assessed some 50,000 “dull” children for various physical characteristics, including the form of the external ear, quality of hand balance, and degree of “grinning or over-smiling.” In Yule’s estimation, Warner’s warehouse of anthropometric data provided a physical shape for “dullness” – it didn’t rely simply on the assessments of teachers, but instead was shaped by a hefty load of apparently related information.

Heron responded in “Mental Defect, Mal-Nutrition, and the Teacher's Appreciation of Intelligence,” a short booklet published in 1911. First of all, he wrote, many of Warner’s measurements were entirely unrelated to intelligence – at any rate, no evidence clearly linked ears to intelligence. Secondly, he took aim at Warner’s methodology, questioning just how precise it could be: after all, in order to examine all of the people he claimed, he must have galloped along at a pace of well under 20 minutes per individual, if working each day from 1888 to 1894. Then, he pointed out, Warner does not bother to provide measurements from all the “normal” subjects he also claimed to have examined in his survey. And, finally, wrote an exasperated Heron, Warner’s subjects were categorized – by teachers, no less! – as simply “under the average,” or left entirely uncategorized. Warner’s data, he claimed, was worthless.

Lying at the heart of this dispute was not simply a disagreement over how to collect data, but more fundamentally over how to identify intelligence. Researchers were assessing intelligence more and more often at the turn of the century, mainly because of fears that the allegedly “feeble-minded” would procreate wildly, thus weakening the national breeding stock (Heron’s pamphlet was part of a series published by the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory called “Questions of the Day and of the Fray,” so the researchers clearly imagined a social dimension to their work – this was no abstract ivory tower stuff). Subjective assessments of intelligence, including the “idiot/imbecile” diagnoses used by 19th century physicians, had worked just fine for most of the nineteenth century. But clearly something more precise, more nuanced, was required to confront the twentieth century’s eugenic challenges.

Fun Frank G Factoids

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:45:55 GMT

A couple of Francis Galton factoids: the phrase “nature and nurture,” that catchy cliché opposing the influences of heredity and environment, was coined by Galton, who uses it in the title of his 1874 book English Men of Science: their nature and nurture. And of course he also neologized “eugenics” in 1883 to refer to his program to improve the stock of the human race (well, the anglo-saxon part of it, at any rate) in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development.

Not all of Galton’s neologisms stuck. For instance, “stirp,” designating the total of “germs” or “gemmules” carried in a fertilized egg (the term is from stirpes, the latin word for “root”). The gemmules and germs were Galton’s versions of the carriers of heredity, which we now recognize to be chromosomes and DNA. So the stirp would be roughly like the genome. And the gene pool would be the, ahhh, germ pool?? Too bad we missed that one…

And Galton's friends & family called him Frank, so I'm being factual, not frivolous, with my title for this post. In addition to being alliterative, of course.

Genius judges

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 03:12:47 GMT

In his Hereditary Genius, Galton alights on judges as men sufficiently elevated (& well-documented enough, too) to demonstrate his idea that genius runs in families. “A judgeship is a guarantee of its possessor being gifted with exceptional ability,” he writes. “It might be different in other countries, but we all know that in England, the Bench is never spoken of without reverence for the intellectual powers of its occupiers. A seat on the Bench is a great prize, to be won by the best men.” Surely everyone would agree. Wouldn’t they?

Well, no. George Bernard Shaw, for instance, is pretty dubious about this assessment. In "How to Become a Man of Genius," he writes that “In England a judge is as likely as not to be some vulgar promoted advocate who makes coarse jokes over breach-of-promise cases; passes vindictive sentences with sanctimonious unction; and amuses himself off the bench like an ostler. But he is always spoken and written of as a veritable Daniel come to judgement.”

A split decision: we have a hung jury!

George Bernard Shaw, Man of Genius

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:59:06 GMT

Those late Victorians seemed quite engaged with the idea of “the genius,” and intrigued by people who seemed to warrant the label – thanks partly to what Francis Galton had to say in his Hereditary Genius. So here’s one opposing response to the notion of genius, à la Galton, and especially about whether reputation is a fair means of determining it. It’s by George Bernard Shaw, writing in late 1894. And it’s called “How to Become a Man of Genius.”

“The secret at the bottom of the whole business is simply this: there is no such thing as a man of genius. I am a man of genius myself, and ought to know. What there is, is a conspiracy to pretend that there are such persons, and a selection of suitable individuals to assume the imaginary character. The whole difficulty is to get selected.”

Shaw then says that “genius” is one of those projected desires, something we want for ourselves (like honesty, braveness, and, of course, intelligence generally). That’s why we read novels or go to the theatre (OK, go to the movies, and play online games): to identify with a character more steeped in the virtues we admire but lack. Because, depending on when we are taking the inventory, we may possess them only briefly or lack them completely. As he writes,

“Our experience does, then, provide us with material for a concept of a superhuman person. You have only to imagine someone always as good as you were in the loftiest ten seconds of your life, always as a brave as you felt when you read The Three Musketeers, always as wise at a moment’s notice as the books into which philosophers have garnered the corrected errors of their lifetime, always as selfless as you have felt in your hour of utmost satiety, always as beautiful and noble as your wife or husband appeared to you at the climax of the infatuation which led you to the matrimonial experiment which you may or may not have regretted ever since, and there you have your poet, your hero, your Cleopatra or whatever else you may require in the superhuman line, by a simple rearrangement of your own experience…”

So genius is what people want to perceive. Then it is up to the man of genius himself to perform the role. Says Shaw,

“It is now plain how to proceed in order to become a man of genius. You must strike the public imagination in such a fashion that they will select you as the incarnation of their ideal of a man of genius. To do this no doubt demands some extraordinary qualities, and sufficient professional industry; but it is by no means necessary to be what the public will pretend that you are.”

So there we go. According to Shaw, we see genius because it is something we want to believe in. And I can’t help but believe that Shaw's own genius make-up is enhanced considerably by wearing a big bushy beard and a Jaeger suit.

Finally, on the matter of his genius, as represented by media/arts phenom G.B.S., Shaw tells this anecdote:

"Very recently the production of a play of mine [Arms and the Man] in New York led to the appearance in the New York papers of a host of critical and biographical studies of a remarkable person called Bernard Shaw. I am supposed to be that person; but I am not. There is no such person; there never was any such person; there never will or can be any such person. You may take my word for this, because I invented him, floated him, advertised him, impersonated him, and am now sitting here in my dingy second floor lodging in a decaying London Square, breakfasting off twopenn’orth porridge and giving this additional touch to his makeup with my typewriter."

What, me? Genius?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:28:28 GMT

I recently read Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius (1869), in which he argues that genius, as measured by eminent reputation, is hereditary (could you have guessed?). Anyway, his method, once he has established his principles for defining eminence, is to explore professions, especially reasonably well-documented ones like judges, statesmen, commanders, writers, artists, divines, "men of science," poets, and musicians.

In each field, he argues, there is an over-representation of related eminent individuals - fathers and sons, brothers, cousins, etc - indicating that genius is hereditary. The arguments are tremendously flawed, as Galton dismisses all sorts of social factors, working under the assumption that quality will out. He discounts the idea of "eminent women" entirely, although does make some observations on the importance of women in transmitting all that genius. And while men from other nations and races may be eminent, there just aren't as many of them as there are of the Anglo-Saxon sort (who, admittedly, lag behind the ancient Athenians in the ratio of geniuses to regular folk). It's an interesting bit of proto-eugenic writing from the man who coined the term, and one could argue that Galton had a vested interest, being cousin to Charles Darwin and all (I can imagine him thinking "My cousin's a genius - maybe I am too!").

He does say in his introduction to his second edition that he regrets using the word "genius" to represent the quality shared by these men, in favour of "talent," which is fair enough - he does seem to be writing more about individuals who are extremely talented... although in some cases this is difficult to judge (as in the case of the judges - Galton has a greater respect for their innate capacities than many of his contemporaries).

Interestingly, he links intellectual strength and vigour with physical strength, especially in his section on oarsmen. Of course, they're all going to Oxford and Cambridge to begin with.... so at least they're well-fed.

Intelligence at School

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:09:44 GMT

I recently had an email from a friend of mine, who had been driving her son home from something or another. And through some circuitous conversational channels, they ended up talking about types of intelligence… and he came up with a secondary school taxonomy. There are three kingdoms: the “mature kingdom,” characterized by logical thinking; the “popular” kingdom, of kids with practical or hands-on intelligence; and an “immature” realm with kids having an academic intelligence.

So here’s the summary: “The mature kingdom is comprised of kids who take courses they're interested in, whether they excel at them or not, because they have a genuine interest in the subject matter and enjoy interesting discussion about ideas. Often they end up in the fine arts department, apparently.

The popular kingdom is self explanatory. The "practical" intelligence part is that things other teens aspire to or have to work at, come easily to them - eg. social skills, fashion, dating.

The immature kingdom has two main sub-classes: the geeks (computer gamers) and the brainy kids - this is the part I thought was so interesting - the kids who get straight As by studying obsessively and following all the rules. So being obedient and rule-bound are, according to X, signs of immaturity."

Nuff said for now...

Deep, deep history & intelligence

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:49:34 GMT

I recently read Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History and the Brain (University of California P, 2007), in which he argues that historians have conveniently neglected deep history - that is, history that stretches back beyond the Edenic starting point of sacred history or the Mesopotamian "cradle of civilization" common to more secular histories of civilization. Smail, a Harvard historian who specializes in 18th century France, makes the sharp observation that both Eden & Mesopotamia are placed at about 4000 BC - with the secular story simply getting layered on top of the sacred one (much as the Christian story is pasted on top of various non-Christian narratives). Smail argues (a) that we should be paying attention to history of a much longer view than this, and (b) that contemporary neuro-research has given us new tools to create an analytical context that will allow us to extend historical research into the deep past - deep history, as he says.

Smail then suggests that humans developed a psychotropic economy early on in this deep history - that is, we did things to change the way we felt mentally and emotionally. This psychotropia could be teletropic, which involves some people doing things to other people - through everything from religious and social rituals to simple intimidation - that would alter how people "felt," essentially manipulating their neurochemical balance to achieve a certain response. For instance, if you could dominate someone by creating a sense of awe, fear, or insecurity, you could impose a particular kind of social order. Hence the importance of a psychotropic economy for early social organization.

However, he suggests, the teletropic economy has shifted to something increasingly autotropic, in which people consume, develop social interactions, behave, et cetera, in ways that will enable them to alter their own neurochemistry for particular emotional ends (say, for instance, the pursuit of happiness, that great enlightenment notion). In fact, he suggests, we can see much of what happens in the 18th century as being connected to this autotropic economy - especially noting the consumption of everything from coffee to tobacco to opium, all mind-altering substances that entered Europe through new trade routes. Even alcohol gets better in the 18th century, thanks to better distilliing methods. This new autotropic economy, Smail says, accompanies a shift in focus on the individual - the individual's needs, experiences, desires, and so forth.

Overall, this is an interesting and accessible book, albeit with broad hypotheses that are not easy to support by evidence. They are pretty intriguing, though. And one thing that intrigues me most is this: if we use Smail's neurologically-informed framework to understand and interpret history process, how could we see the relationship of these pscyhotropic economies to notions of inteliigence? Would societies that are dominantly teletropic or autotropic, in Smail's terms, favour difference notions of intelligence, perhaps those that are "social" or "individual," respectively?

This is the fuzziest of hypotheses, but perhaps one worth thinking about.