The nature (and nurture) of IQ

doi:10.1126/science.abj6806

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.abj6806
	The nature (and nurture) of IQ
	Meredith Wadman
	2021-07-30
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	In July 1934, psychologist Harold Skeels evaluated two toddlers at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, a Dickensian Civil War–era facility that was both a residence for abandoned children and the state's central adoption facility. Skeels had been tasked to use intelligence quotient (IQ) tests to identify the “imbeciles,” “morons,” and “idiots” among the hordes of children at the home and shunt them to institutions for the “feebleminded.” (This review, like the book at hand, will use the terminology of the era.) As infants, the two toddlers under evaluation—13-month-old CD and 17-month-old BD—had been taken by the state from their mothers, a prostitute and an inmate in an insane asylum, respectively, and placed at the Davenport home, where they were “scarcely touched, never held, rarely spoken to,” as Marilyn Brookwood, the author of the excellent The Orphans of Davenport , writes. When Skeels performed an IQ test, the girls scored 46 and 35. (An individual score of 90 to 109 was considered average intelligence.) Skeels tried to send the girls away, but facilities for the feebleminded were overcrowded. In desperation, he accepted an unusual offer: The toddlers would move to an institution that housed feebleminded adults, where they would be cared for by adult women with mental ages of 5 to 9 years. The women at the Woodward State Hospital for Epileptics and School for the Feebleminded lavished the children with affection. Nine months later, Skeels was astonished to find CD and BD “alert, attractive, playful, [behaving] like any normal toddlers,” Marie Skodak, a colleague who accompanied him that day, later wrote. After another 18 months living with the women, CD's IQ score was 95 and BD's was 93. The girls were returned to Davenport and adopted within months. When located again in their late 20s, both were married with children in apparently stable, loving households. CD and BD are among the many children whom Skeels and a handful of colleagues at the University of Iowa's Iowa Child Welfare Research Station studied in the 1930s. Benefiting from the station's milieu of intellectual freedom, these scientific heroes of The Orphans of Davenport developed a body of work finding that neglected children placed in caring and stimulating environments could recover tens of IQ points; that institutional neglect eroded, but preschool improved, children's IQ scores; and that institutionalized babies born to low-IQ parents and adopted in the first months of infancy scored in the good or superior range on later IQ tests. The suggestion that children's IQ scores changed with time and circumstance set off a frenzy of reaction in the young, insecure discipline of academic psychology. Its eugenicist establishment was convinced that intelligence was a fixed and heritable trait—a belief that generated between 60,000 and 70,000 forced sterilizations in the United States in the 20th century. Led by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, the field's leaders launched sustained, vicious, and humiliating attacks on the Iowa group. It would be 30 years before the validity of the Iowa group's clinical findings and their implications—that nurture as well as nature plays a pivotal role in the development of children's intelligence—were at last recognized and celebrated by their profession. But Skeels and his Iowa colleagues—chief among them Skodak, the outspoken daughter of Hungarian immigrants; Beth Wellman, who conducted pioneering preschool studies before dying prematurely; and the research station's director, George Stoddard, who would go on to become the chancellor of New York University—made a lasting impact all the same. Their work caught the attention of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, helping to launch Head Start, the US government program for disadvantaged preschoolers. The quiet courage of the Iowa researchers illuminates this story, not least when others admit that they failed to rise to the same challenge. “I feel guilty” for finding results similar to those of the Iowa group but not publicizing them in the 1930s, recalled leading children's development scholar Lois Barclay Murphy decades later. “I knew that Skeels and Skodak were sound, but with the whole establishment against us I didn't think there was any point in trying to convince people.” In chronicling a major intellectual battle of the 20th century, The Orphans of Davenport offers scientists a cautionary, timeless tale about groupthink's power to subvert the dispassionate analysis of new findings. It is also yet another sobering reminder of how specious science can be wielded to justify evil ends—with the attendant suffering of those least able to defend themselves.
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/335524
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Meredith Wadman. The nature (and nurture) of IQ[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Meredith Wadman.(2021).The nature (and nurture) of IQ.Science.
MLA	Meredith Wadman."The nature (and nurture) of IQ".Science (2021).