Stephen Poole, The Guardian
Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, had a peculiar mania for measuring things – the curves of a “Venus among Hottentots” he encountered in Africa, for instance, and people’s craniums, reaction times and sensory acuity – all in the name of good breeding, or, as he called it, “eugenics”. Are IQ tests any more reliable? Murdoch’s zestily polemical history recounts their explicit beginnings in the eugenics movement and the horrific uses to which they were then put, including forced sterilisation of “imbeciles” in the US. Officers in the US military were contemptuous of the results of mass testing of their men, and Murdoch is similarly contemptuous of psychologists, though he shows persuasively that early on they explicitly sought power and influence through claims that their tests were scientific, and demonstrates that even modern IQ tests are made up of a haphazard accretion of questions born from expediency, not from any lucid theory about what they might measure. The book takes in arguments over the old 11-plus exam, the reliance on IQ scores to determine if US prisoners may be executed, and the furore over alleged “racial” differences in IQ. Perhaps there is something called “general intelligence”, the author accepts, and perhaps you can test it – but not like this. Now, back to my Nintendo for a spot of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training.”
Stephen Poole, The Guardian (UK), August 11, 2007: