[ExI] Cyril Burt

[John Clark]

On Sep 6, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:

> You ought to read the first few pages of
> "The Bell Curve". The deliberate defamation
> of Cyril Burt is carefully explained.

Neither of the authors of "The Bell Curve" Herrnstein and Murray,  
wrote one word in scientific journals about the genetic nature of  
intelligence or collected any data themselves, they relied entirely on  
other people's data, particularly that of Cyril Burt. In 1973  
Herrnstein proved he was no better than Burt; in that year he  
published a book called "IQ in the Meritocracy" and talks about Burt's  
1961 study  "Intelligence and Social mobility"; he says Burt's sample  
size was 1000, later he says he was wrong about that and the true  
sample size was 40,000. In reality Burt didn't say how big his sample  
size was and as all his notes and raw data were burned we will never  
know how big it really was. We do know that both burt and Herrnstein  
were con men.
,
> It's politically completely incorrect, but
> I'm surprised you haven't seen it.

I think genetics is far more important to intelligence than the  
liberal mentality is comfortable with, but Cyril Burt was more than  
politically incorrect, he was plain old incorrect. Nobody is ever  
going to convince good scientists of something by citing terrible  
scientists.

   John K Clark
>

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