The iq controversy: A reply to Layzer

Abstract

The publication of David Layzer’s ‘Science or superstition?’ in the previous issue of this journal brings to 120 the total number of articles and books provoked by my article in the Harvard education review (Jensen, 1969a). A bibliography of these items appears in my recent book Genetics and education (Jensen, 1972~) the Preface to which also provides a chronicle of my involvement in ‘the IQ controversy’. This book, together with my more recently published Educability and group differences (Jensen, 1973) actually give my detailed answers to practically all of the questions, criticisms, and issues raised in Layzer’s article. I therefore urge readers who wish to gain a greater understanding of these matters, and of my own position concerning their educational implications, to delve into these books and see for themselves just what I am saying completely and in context. This is important because it is a common feature of so many of the criticisms of my position that they have had to misrepresent it and distort it, at times in ridiculous ways, in order to criticize it with the appearance of discrediting my main arguments. In this, Layzer’s critique is no exception. Whatever the acumen that Layzer, as a physical scientist, might be able to bring to bear in this field if he were not so politically or ideologically involved, his article makes it all too obvious that he is very one-sided in the exercise of his critical judgment. In discussing the rationale and findings of studies which point to the strong involvement of genetic factors in the distribution of mental ability, Layzer assumes the posture of an extreme methodological blue-nose. Yet he shows total suspension of his critical powers when dealing with studies which he perceives (at times wrongly) as lending support to his ‘environmentalist’ and ‘anti-hereditarian’ attitudes. I am not arguing with Layzer’s political and social egalitarianism. But, I am saying that genetic equality of human abilities is an altogether untenable belief in view of the evidence we already possess, as untenable as the geocentric theory in astronomy or the doctrine of special creation in biology. I find nothing in Layzer’s article that contradicts my main conclusions regarding the inheritance of mental