[ExI] Cyril Burt (was: The Mismeasure of Man)

[John Clark]

On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:41 AM, Lee Corbin wrote:

> dismissing the honest work of people
> like Cyril Burt

First let me say that I think intelligence is largely inheritable, but  
I'm not going to defend Cyril Burt even if he does support something I  
think is probably true. Burt published a paper establishing the IQ  
correlation coefficients between fraternal and identical twins, a few  
years later he had lots and lots of new data on more twins and guess  
what, the correlation coefficients were still the same to 3 decimal  
points. A few years after that he had an even larger avalanche of data  
and the correlation coefficients were STILL the same to 3 decimal  
points! That just screams fraud, and not even a very skillful fraud.

The evidence that his earlier work was also fraudulent is less  
overwhelming, but the fact that all his notes and raw data were burned  
is highly suspicious. Anyway, the fact that we know the man was a  
crook makes all his work useless to Science, it simply can't be trusted.

  John K Clark



  
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