heredity

the family history method of investigation grew to become a leading technique in research efforts. Since it was clear that large groups of European descendants were unsuccessful in the quest for achievement in the land of opportunity, they were quickly labeled "white trash," regardless of the reasons for their plight. The cause for this failure was identified as degeneration.

,000 such operations had been performed. The constitutionality of the sterilization laws was debated from the beginning.

These authors produced data from racially biased scientists supporting what they claimed is a "taboo fact that intelligence levels differ among ethnic groups . . . already well-known

difference

racial differences in IQ scores

he assertion that individuals and groups of people were either "desir-able" or "not desirable" led to two applied lines of approach to the concept of increasing the "quality" of human beings. These were eugenics and euthenics. Eugenic programs were concerned with the control of individual heredity while euthenics programs sought control of the environment.

Each trait was assigned a numerical rating, for example:

and the criminal reproduces the criminal.

IGURE 4.1 The idealized man of colonial ancestry, drawn to scale from Ales Hrdlicka's studies. The outline of the face is almost oblong; the head is high and "well-developed," which was supposed to denote "superior intelligence." Eugenicists strived to maintain this type in the U.S. population

so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a cor-rupt tree bring forth good fruit.-Matthew 7:17-18

"the best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as possible." 12

In 1940, Tryon reported findings concluding that "proof of inheritance of individual difference in maze ability" was found. As a result of this evidence, many leading researchers and large numbers of laymen quickly inferred that maze running by white rats was directly related to general intelligence in human beings, and that these abilities were Mendelian dominant. Moreover, it was felt that Tryon's study produced evidence substantiating inherited intellectual differences in human beings across racial lines. But in 1949, L. V. Searle reported contradictory findings after testing Tryon's strains of rats on learning tests other than maze-running ability (discrimination of distance, angles, and brightness).

t Burt worked backwards from his conclusions and changed or invented his raw data to make it fit his answers.

Burt argued that 80 percent of intelligence is inherited and that an individual's environment has relatively little effect on intelligence.

identical twins reared apart from each other who were adminis-tered IQ tests to determine if intellectual differences could be noted. While recognizing the uniqueness of identical twins,

and he recorded measurements which supported his belief that Blacks did not possess the cranial capacity to house sufficient cerebral matter necessary for higher intellectual thought and reasoning.

Psychology,people used various psychological practices to gain knowledge about themselves and organizetheir private and public lives.

In tracing that history, it can be seen that founders of the modern discipline of psychology were engaged in race psychology. Francis Galton (1822-1911), considered one of the pioneers of the discipline, argued that Europeans were by nature more intelligent than "primitive races" and recommended the quantification of levels

238 T. Teo higher scores in those dimensions than did Africans and their descendants" (Flandro 2010). He contended that due to this biological difference certain racial groups were incapable of achieving academic success and that it would explain the district's achievement gap (Shaw 2010). As publicized, he did not develop such justifications himself - his arguments were based on the research of the Canadian psychologist R

cs; for example, he describes Blacks as being by nature more aggressive, less intelligent, and less law-abiding than Whites and Asians. According to his view, Whites take the good Aristotelian middle ground between Blacks and Asians (see Aalbers 2002). The data, which themselves have been challenge

Furthermore, these theoreticaldebates have shown up infrequently in histori-cal accounts of the importance of psychophysicsand quantification in the making of the newPsychology.

He carefully recorded whetherhe could tell a difference between the lighterand the heavier weights and then calculated thephysical difference that corresponded to the sub-jectively perceived difference. For his painstakingwork, what Fechner discovered was no less thana mathematical law allowing him to both de-scribe and predict the relationship between thephysical world and our subjective experience ofthat world. This proved to Fechner that man andnature are in harmony, part of a unity.Fechner formulated his law in 1850 but spent10 years refining it and expanding on its im-plications. In 1860 he published Elemente derPsychophysik, where he put forth his work pub-licly for the first time. As historian of psychology

Germany is often identified as the birth-place of the new science, and indeed, scholarsworking at German universities in the mid- tolate 1800s contributed much of the work thatwe retrospectively identify as important for theemergence of scientific psychology