The uses of Intelligence

Abstract

I am going to start at the end of this short book on the history of intelligence, where psychologists Anna C. Cianciolo and Robert J. Sternberg write that scholarly thinking about intelligence has an illustrious history, (p. 140) a statement that would stop most historians in their tracks. That the book includes no references to Paul Chapman's Schools as Sorters: Lewis Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement (1988), or Hamilton Cravens' The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity Environment Controversy, 1900-1941 (1978), or Steven Selden's Inheriting Shame: The Story of Racism and Eugenics in America (1999), or James W. Trent's Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History ofMental Retardation in the United States (1994), or Leila Zenderland's MeasuringMinds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (1998), or any of the many other works by historians on intelligence testing and its many uses should be further warning. This is a book about the history of intelligence that contains no references to research written by historians, though Stephen Jay Gould is deservedly referred to many times. It's as if an historian of education had written a book on psychology with no references to psychological research. The blithe confidence of the book's last sentence is characteristic. There has never been a more exciting time than the present to explore many facets of intelligent behavior.... (p. 140). While this may be true, given Harvard President Lawrence Summer's recent remarks on women and science, historians have shown this kind of bland optimism about time periods and science to be problematic presentist positivism. The sentence continues, ... .our knowledge will continue to grow and scientific understanding