[Paleopsych] Pioneer Fund: Grantees
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Grantees
http://www.pioneerfund.org/Grantees.html
Highlights of Pioneer Fund Research and Grantees
__________________________________________
Since its inception in 1937, the Pioneer Fund has made grants to 64
different institutions, located in eight different countries,
including to some of the most prominent universities in the world. The
collected works of the Pioneer Funds distinguished list of grantees
now totals over 200 books and 2,000 articles. The Pioneer fund has
focused its resources on supporting cutting-edge research in:
* Behavioral Genetics
* Cognitive Ability
* Social Demography
* Group Differences Sex, Social Class, and Race
Some of the most celebrated work by Pioneer grantees is summarized below.
__________________________________________
Behavioral Genetics
Hans J. Eysenck
From 1986 Pioneer supported the research program of the late Hans
Eysenck of the University of London in England. One of the world's
leading taxonomists of human personality and its biological basis,
Eysenck began to build the British Twin Register early in his career.
For over three decades his investigations indicated that genes
contribute significantly to measures of extraversion, neuroticism,
psychoticism, personal adjustment, and social attitudes. One of his
longest standing interests was investigating the genetic contribution
to the personality factors underlying antisocial behavior. His 1989
book, The Causes and Cures of Criminality, written in collaboration
with Gisli Gudjonsson, estimated the heritability of criminality at
about 60 percent.
Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr.
Perhaps the best known of the Pioneer-supported studies
is the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart, which reunited
separated twins from around the world. Professor Thomas J. Bouchard
Jr. and his team at the University of Minnesota flew in sixty-two
pairs of genetically identical and forty-three pairs of fraternal
twins, many of who had not been together since infancy, for a week of
testing. The identical twins turned out to have an extraordinary
number of common traits
including eccentricities while the fraternal twins were not nearly as
alike. On quantitative tests of IQ and personality, as well as
attitudes such as religiosity and traditionalism, values, vocational
aptitudes, and work preferences, identical twins separated at birth
grew to be even more similar than did fraternal twins raised together.
The results of this research showed that heredity plays a major role
in almost every type of human behavior, accounting for 40 to 80% of
individual differences.
Joseph M. Horn
Another major study Pioneer helped support was the Texas
Adoption Project. Professor Joseph M. Horn at the University of Texas
at Austin and his colleagues followed 300 Texas families who had
adopted one or more children from a home for unwed mothers. The first
phase of the study tested the personality and intelligence of adopted
children between three and fourteen years-old; then the study
re-tested them again as adolescents and young adults ten years later.
Not only were the adoptees much more like their biological mothers
than their adoptive mothers, but as they grew older, they became
increasingly more similar to the biological parents they had not seen
since shortly after their birth, and the less like the adopting
parents who had raised them. By adolescence, the adoptees showed
virtually no similarity to their adopting parents or the adoptive
siblings with whom they had been raised. The study concluded that
about fifty percent of the individual differences in IQ and
personality were due to heredity and the remainder to environmental
influences.
R. Travis Osborne
J. Philippe Rushton
Philip A. Vernon
Dovetailing with the results from these large scale
projects are those from many others also funded by Pioneer. For
example, Professor Emeritus R. Travis Osborne of the University of
Georgia studied intelligence and personality as well as physical
characteristics in several hundred white and black twins in Georgia,
Kentucky, and Indiana. Osbornes large twin study showed that the
weight of genes and culture are equally as important among Blacks as
among Whites. Professor J. Philippe Rushton of the University of
Western Ontario, used the University of London Twin Register and found
that individual differences in altruism, nurturance, and empathy were
between 50 and 60% heritable, as were individual differences in
aggression and crime. Professor Philip A. Vernon, also of the
University of Western Ontario, has undertaken a longitudinal study of
infant twins who are being tested and followed up over a period of
years. Measures are made of motor, mental, and temperamental
development, with the major goal of identifying cultural,
environmental, and genetic factors that contribute to development.
Smaller scale grants have gone to support research on such genetic
disorders as sickle-cell anemia, eye cancers, hemophilia, Tay-Sachs
disease, and schizophrenia. These results show that discovering the
genetic bases of various conditions serve to make them more amenable
to treatment, rather than less so.
Brunetto Chiarelli
Still other awards have gone to aid international conferences on
anthropology and genetics. One recipient, Professor Brunetto Chiarelli
of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florence,
recently used a grant to defray expenses for travelers from the
developing world so they could attend the XVIth International Congress
of Anthropology, which he hosted in Italy.
__________________________________________
Cognitive Ability
Hans J. Eysenck
One of the most cited psychologists of all time,
Professor Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997) of the Institute of Psychiatry
in London, England, also made significant contributions to the study
of the nature of intelligence. In 1967, Eysenck proposed that faster
neural transmission was the basis of higher IQ scores. Eysenck studied
the reaction time and EEG (electroencephalogram or brain waves)
correlates of intelligence, which are summarized in his posthumously
published book Intelligence: A New Look (1998).
Arthur R. Jensen
Professor Emeritus Arthur R. Jensen of the University of
California at Berkeley is todays leading exponent of the position that
all mental tasks, even simple reaction time tests, reflect a unitary
general factor termed g. In studies conducted over two decades, factor
analyzing a great number of data sets, using a variety of procedures,
he has shown that this large general factor consistently emerges. Some
intelligence tests, however, are better measures of g than others.
Problem solving and reasoning are the best, or purest measures, while
simpler cognitive processes, such as short-term memory still draw on
g, but much less so. Jensen has established that the extent to which a
test measures g is directly related to how much it is a product of
nature, rather than nurture, and is correlated with anatomical and
physiological measures such as brain waves.
Philip A. Vernon
Professor Philip A. Vernon and his collaborators at the
University of Western Ontario used state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) techniques and found that IQ scores are related to brain
size. In one study, they reported the results for 40 adult females for
whom the correlation between brain size and IQ was 0.40. In a
subsequent study, this time of 68 adult males, they again found a 0.40
correlation between brain volume and IQ. They also showed that
external head size measures such as head length, head width, and head
circumference also correlated with IQ scores, but only about 0.20, and
that brain size correlated more highly with the g component of IQ
scores.
Linda S. Gottfredson
Professor Linda S. Gottfredson, a sociologist at the
University of Delaware, has investigated the role IQ plays in
vocational aptitudes, health and longevity, and success. Gottfredson
has demonstrated that intelligence is the single most important factor
in the world of work. IQ predicts job performance better than any
other single trait or circumstance, including education or specific
aptitudes. While useful in all jobs, IQ becomes critical in the more
complex and highly prestigious occupations. Gottfredson concluded that
the occupational-prestige hierarchy is essentially a ranking of
relative intellectual difficulty.
Robert Gordon
Professor Robert Gordon, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins
University, examined the role IQ plays in crime and delinquency. His
review of the literature and subsequent mathematical models
demonstrate that people with lower levels of intelligence are at much
greater risk to fall into a life of delinquency. More recently, he has
demonstrated that social outcomes such as single parenthood, HIV
infection, poverty, and belief in conspiracy rumors are also predicted
by lower IQ.
__________________________________________
Social Demography
Garrett Hardin
Professor Garrett Hardin of the University of California
at Santa Barbara, is one of the worlds leading ecologists. He has
extended his Tragedy of the Commons and Living on a Lifeboat metaphors
to questions of environmental conservation, world population, and
immigration, noting that individuals tend to maximize their own
advantage even if this entails a net cost to society as a whole.
Applying this same analysis to people who have a large number of
children and thereby impose a cost on society that they themselves do
not have to bear, Hardin has questioned the assumption of many
demographers that as people become more affluent they automatically
control their fertility. His mathematical models predict that economic
and other aid is likely to lead to population increases, not
decreases, so that even more aid will be required in the future.
Richard Lynn
Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster has
studied the social ecology of intelligence, and the question of
whether the intelligence level of a population helps determine its
level of economic and cultural achievement. After calculating average
IQs for 13 regions in the UK, which ranged from 102 in London, to 97
in Scotland, to 96 in Ireland, he found that per capita income and the
number of Fellows of the Royal Society paralleled the mean IQs. Lynn
then replicated these findings in a study of regional IQ differences
in France. Most recently, he collaborated with Tatu Vanhannen, a
political scientist in Finland, to publish IQ and the Wealth of
Nations (2002). They examined IQ scores and economic indicators in 185
countries and demonstrated that national differences in prosperity
were best explained in terms of the intelligence levels of their
respective populations. National IQ correlated more than 0.70 with per
capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The second determinant of
national wealth was whether a country had a market or a socialist
economy. The widely credited factor of natural resources (such as
oil), was only third.
__________________________________________
Group Differences Sex, Social Class, and Race
Lloyd Humphreys
Sex differences. Professor Lloyd Humphreys of the
University of Illinois has long been interested in mathematically
gifted youth. In one study of approximately 100,000 tenth graders, he
found that at the highly gifted end of the ability range, boys
exceeded girls by a ratio of about 10 to 1, which he thought might
help to explain the under-representation of women in math and science
courses and careers.
Philip E. Vernon
Socioeconomic status. Professor Philip E. Vernon
(1905-1987) of the University of London in England and the University
of Calgary in Canada documented the substantial social class
differences in IQ scores found in both the U.S. and the U.K. For
example, the analysis of the World War I American military conscripts
showed that the average IQ of children born in the professional class
was 123, whereas those born to unskilled workers averaged 96. Vernon
concluded that these social class differences have some genetic basis.
He based this assessment on his review of the evidence that the
intelligence of adopted children related more to the social class of
their biological parents than to that of their adopting parents.
Vernon suggested that social mobility allows those with higher
intelligence to rise in the social hierarchy, while those with lower
intelligence tend to fall.
Aurdrey M. Shuey
Racial variation. Professor Audrey M. Shuey (1910-1977) of
Randolph-Macon Womans College in Virginia published the first
comprehensive review of all the studies of average Black-White IQ
differences in her book, The Testing of Negro Intelligence (1958, 2nd
ed., 1966). The standard sourcebook on the topic, it demonstrated that
the 15-point Black-White average IQ difference remained constant from
the 1910s to the 1960s, across all regions of the U.S., as well as in
Canada and Jamaica. It was also constant across all types of tests
(verbal or non-verbal, and whether individual or group administered),
age groups (primary school, high school, college, and adult), and
specific samples (the gifted, the retarded, the delinquent, the
military in World Wars I and II, as well as in the Korean and Viet man
Wars).
Arthur R. Jensen
Richard Lynn
Philip E. Vernon
Other Pioneer grantees significantly extended the scope of the debate
about racial differences. Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University
of California at Berkeley in his book The g Factor (1998) demonstrated
that IQ tests mostly measure the general factor (g) of intelligence,
are not culturally biased against minorities, and that even the
simplest reaction time measures correlate with IQ and show average
race differences. In fact, Jensen has shown that Black-White IQ
differences are greatest on the most g-loaded, heritable subtests.
Professors Richard Lynn and Philip E. Vernon found that, on average,
Pacific Rim Asians in Asia and in the United States averaged higher on
tests of mental ability than did Whites. In his book The Abilities and
Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982), Vernon also showed
that East Asians tended to have a quieter temperament, a more stable
family structure, and lower rates of violent crime.
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