Does intelligence flow from parent to child through the genes? The hundreds of women who paid Robert Klark Graham $50 for his sperm certainly hoped so. During the 1980s and 1990s, Graham collected sperm from a register of Nobel Prize winners and other high intellectual achievers and sold it through what he named the Repository for Germinal Choice. Most people called it the Genius Sperm Bank.
More than two hundred babies were born before Graham’s repository closed its doors shortly after his death in 1997 (he slipped and banged his head in the bathroom at a science conference where he was trying to recruit donors). Of those children who have come forward since, some – but far from all – say they are highly intelligent. Doron Blake, the bank’s second born, said in his early twenties: ‘I turned out very well, my IQ was off the charts and basically I was everything Robert Graham wanted. Throughout my life I’ve felt I’ve not had to work as hard for the level of achievement that I’ve reached as most of my peers did’.
They might not sell sperm any more, but scientists still select and work with intelligent people. The biggest list of the brightest is held by scientists at the Centre for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who every year screen school test results to identify gifted teenagers and encourage their development. Stars including Face-book’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin of Google and Lady Gaga have enrolled in the scheme and attended its summer schools – affectionately known as geek camps – and as a result the scientists now have records of some 1.5 million intelligent people.
The brightest of these students – who score the best marks before they are thirteen years old – are invited to join an elite project, which tracks their progress to work out what makes them so special. This Study of Exceptional Talent programme has run since the late 1970s and includes information on what the gifted students achieve as adults: prizes and competitions won, patents awarded and work published.
The psychology of intelligence – Charles Spearman’s discovery of g and its codification as IQ – is controversial. But it’s nothing compared with the arguments and bitterness that surround the genetics of intelligence, which is so badly tainted that many psychologists and geneticists refuse to work on it at all, and argue others should not either. The controversy goes some way to explain why most universities no longer teach the basics of intelligence in undergraduate psychology lessons – an astonishing omission given its centrality to so many human abilities and behaviours.
So, when an international group of genetics experts approached the Centre for Talented Youth in 2008 with a simple request – please put us in touch with your high achievers so we can take and analyse samples of their DNA – they probably knew they were stirring up trouble. And so it proved. The request triggered alarm bells. The academics running the scheme were not sure what to do. They were haunted, they said, by ‘the ugly purposes to which claims about the genetics of intelligence had been put in the past’. Those ugly purposes go back decades. And most of us have some experience of their consequences.
The problems and the controversy began when Alfred Binet’s early intelligence tests followed the Statue of Liberty from France to America, around the time of the First World War. Woodrow Wilson, US president at the time, was desperate to keep his nation out of that war. He called for neutrality ‘in thought and deed’ and held to that line despite the widespread outrage at home and abroad caused by the German sinking of the passenger vessel Lusitania, which drowned more than a thousand people, 128 Americans among them. By the time German submarines started to attack all ships they found in the Atlantic in 1917, finally forcing Wilson to declare war, the US needed to quickly organize and move out hundreds of thousands of troops.
The huge scale and rapid speed of the mobilization was unprecedented and psychologists working on IQ tests saw an opportunity. They borrowed Binet’s idea, adapted the questions and ignored his caveats and appeals for caution. Rather than seeking to identify those at the bottom end of the scale to offer them help, the US psychologists were more interested in creaming off those at the top. They promoted their new intelligence tests as a critical tool for the military to screen recruits for potential, and then efficiently train and distribute an optimal mix of soldiers of different abilities across regiments.
In these early psychological tests, raw recruits were asked questions on subjects including the most prominent industry of Minneapolis (flour), to why a house was better than a tent (more comfortable). Despite common claims this was the birth of widespread IQ testing, in fact the army was sceptical of the value of the tests and largely ignored them. It was not until later that the results would be taken seriously. When they analysed the scores after the war, psychologists were shocked. US recruits – a sample of the population at large and so the platform on which the nation would seek to build its industrial future – had an average mental age of 13. An entire generation of young Americans, they concluded, was mentally retarded.
The conclusion was hopelessly wrong. As written, the army tests measured not intelligence but education. Questions asked the typical colour of garnets (red) and the name of a common soap manufacturer. Yet the damage was done.
As well as tests and expertise to promote, the psychologists now had a cause to fight. They warned whoever would listen about the dangers of a feeble-minded generation. Spooked authorities around the country and then the world started to use IQ tests more widely, including in schools, as a way to identify and separate out potentially problematic children who were identified by their low intelligence. The problem they posed, these scientists reasoned, was carried in their genes. So the solution was to stop them passing on those genes, to stop them from having offspring of their own. Most of these children are dead now, but monuments to them are everywhere.
The stretch of the A50 that links the Cheshire towns of Knutsford and Holmes Chapel is not a famous road but a friend once told me about a curious incident that happened there. A friend of hers had been driving along the A50 one winter evening when she saw a cardboard box in the centre of the road. Thinking it might cause an accident she stopped her car, opened the door and walked across to pull the box to the side.
As she moved it, one of the flaps of the box’s flimsy lid fell open. Inside was a child’s doll. Someone had dressed it as a clown; its glassy eyes were smeared with white makeup and its nose had been covered in what looked like red blood. The woman was glad to push the box onto the verge and return to her car. Closing its door against the gathering winter fog, she started for home again.
As she pulled away, bright light flooded the interior. A car appeared directly behind her, its headlights on full beam. Annoyed at her lack of attention to the road – the contents of the box must have troubled her more than she had realized – the woman lifted her hand in apology to the driver behind, and pressed the accelerator. As she sped up, so did the car behind. She went a little faster, and so did the other. It started to flash its lights.
The woman was annoyed at this aggressive response and, having had enough shocks for one night, signalled she would stop at an approaching lay-by to allow the impatient driver to pass. As she pulled off the road, so did the car behind. Its lights continued to flash, more rapidly now.
Fearing a road-rage attack, the woman hurriedly locked the door and was relieved to hear the whirr of the central locking confirm she was secure. Just in time – a man had jumped from the car behind and was now pulling on the handle outside and yelling, his face full in her door window.
‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!’
She ignored him and stared ahead.
‘PLEASE, GET OUT OF THE CAR. QUICKLY!’
Startled, she turned to look at him. He was pointing to the back seat.
‘SOMEBODY IS IN THERE WITH YOU. I SAW THEM GET IN. PLEASE, GET OUT.’
‘What?’
‘WHEN YOU STOPPED, SOMEBODY GOT IN.’
The woman went to look behind her.
‘THEY ARE IN THE BACK SEAT.’
Something stroked the back of her neck.
Unlocking the car, the woman jumped out. The man outside shone a torch into the back seat and the face of a young man smiled back. He was skinny and lying on his back. White circles were drawn around his eyes and his nose was painted red.
My friend swore the story was true, but of course it’s an urban myth. In this version, the location adds piquancy because the A50 in Cheshire snakes past a centuries-old country pile called Cranage Hall. And until recently, Cranage was used as a psychiatric hospital.
I grew up in the area and we didn’t call Cranage a psychiatric hospital. Cranage was a mental home, a loony bin, the place where the men in white coats – and for some reason yellow vans – would cart you away to if you did or said something odd. And exactly the kind of place a young man carrying a doll painted as a clown would escape from and climb into a stranger’s car.
Cranage Hall is an expensive-looking hotel now. I called in, intending to ask staff and guests if they knew of the building’s history. I hadn’t been able to find anything on the hotel’s website about its former use and I wondered if the owners were reluctant for those staying there to make the connection.
In fact, Andrea, the friendly woman who worked behind the bar, was happy to talk about it. A tunnel in the cellar, she said, led over a mile underground to a nearby village. It was used back in the day to deliver patients to the hospital, she explained, so families could avoid scrutiny and stigma. I asked to see it, but she said it was bricked up now.
Lots of curious visitors came to Cranage Hall, she added, drawn to the past. In truth, there was little to see, the refurbishment had seemingly erased anything distinctive; some hospital buildings had been demolished and a new extension constructed. She had a factsheet somewhere that detailed the history. She would run me off a copy.
Cranage Hall hospital was one of hundreds of psychiatric hospitals that served the UK in post-war years. Every county had at least one. Conversations at thousands of different UK schools had their own local version of the men from Cranage who would come for you. But in most cases, these places were not built as hospitals at all. They started life as prisons. Prisons to house people – its own citizens – who the British government had decided were not intelligent enough to have children.
Most of these prisons were opened between the wars, in the time of eugenics. Alarmed at the apparent widespread feeble-mindedness revealed by flawed early IQ tests, psychologists and other scientists began to demand action to preserve the intellectual quality of the population. They wanted to protect the intelligence of the human race by controlling who got to breed, and with whom. (That was one of Robert Klark Graham’s goals too. He wanted to use his Repository for Germinal Choice to counter the unchecked breeding of people he considered to be unintelligent and retrograde.)
Eugenics was based on shaky science, that simple breeding could control complex traits. But it was influential and so able to cause the damage it did because it appealed to those wrestling with pressing political and societal concerns. The tragedies of the First World War left in their wake a refugee crisis, with millions of displaced people looking for sanctuary. Naturally, some were heading to places like Britain and America, sparking racial and ethnic tensions.
Broken down by ethnic background, the (flawed) results of the US Army’s psychological tests carried out in the First World War appeared to show that immigrants had lower IQs, which fuelled demands for controls on their movement. That 1926 Nature editorial on Racial Purification at the close of the previous chapter, for example, recommended that Britain only admit immigrants who scored ‘25 per cent higher than the mental and physical averages of the native population’. And, given the problems with feeble-mindedness in that native population, the editorial said, the government should consider moves to sterilize them. Such drastic action, it predicted, would be ‘popular with the public’.
I don’t know who wrote that piece, Nature editorials – then and now – go unsigned. But in one respect he (and it was almost certainly a he) was right, there was public support for such measures. We are all familiar with modern public information campaigns: the adverts that urge us to eat fruit, not to smoke and to walk past the escalator and up the stairs. While Nature was publishing that awful editorial, the UK government was producing posters that, alongside those to urge people to brush their teeth, reminded people to ‘wed wisely and help to build a better nation’ and told them ‘the unfit are a tax and hindrance to the fit.’
The aims of eugenics seem appalling now, but in the early twentieth century they were a popular cause in polite society and promoted widely. Francis Galton, the early intelligence test pioneer we met in Chapter Three, was a big fan. Winston Churchill toyed with them. In 1910, Churchill was home secretary in the UK government of Herbert Asquith and after he saw how US states were sterilizing mentally unfit prisoners he asked officials if Britain could follow their example.
Dr Horatio Donkin, chief medical adviser of prisons, told him the idea was ‘a monument of ignorance and hopeless mental confusion’ but Churchill could not shake the idea. ‘I am drawn to this subject in spite of many parliamentary misgivings,’ he said. ‘It is bound to come someday.’ Some people went further and encouraged the introduction of state-sanctioned murder, which was euphemistically called euthanasia. The author D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1908:
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly and a cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out into the back streets and the main streets and bring them all in, the sick, the halt and the maimed. I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the brass band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus.
Many accounts of eugenics claim that Britain avoided laws that discriminated against people on the grounds of the perceived quality of their genetic stock and so did not intervene to stop them having children, but that’s not true. Rather than sterilize people of low intelligence, Britain decided to simply segregate them, to keep the men and women (and boys and girls) physically apart. They did it in places like Cranage Hall on the A50 in Cheshire.
By the time the necessary law to make this happen reached a vote in July 1913, the parliamentary misgivings Churchill mentioned had ebbed away. Just three MPs voted against the new Mental Deficiency Bill, one of them the Liberal Josiah Wedgwood. A distant relative of both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, and great-great-grandson of the founder of the famous pottery firm that shares his name, Wedgwood, MP for Newcastle-under Lyme, staged a one-man campaign to derail the Bill, which he dismissed as the work of ‘eugenic cranks’. Over two late-night sittings of the House of Commons, fuelled with chocolate and barley water, he tabled 120 amendments and made 150 interventions in a futile attempt to block it. ‘I was nearly off my head at the time,’ he said later.
Once passed, the Act required local authorities to find and lock up people who could now be legally classed as feeble-minded.
How could these early eugenicists in Britain and elsewhere find their targets? How could they identify the feeble-minded menace they were so anxious about? After all, many of these claimed unintelligent people looked and behaved normally. (As they would, the eugenicists argued rather unconvincingly, as the problem was within.) On a visit to New York State Custodial Institution for Feeble-minded Women at Newark in 1905, UK experts had struggled to spot any signs of low intellect. The inmates, they noted, could ‘converse reasonably’. Only when told by their hosts that many of the women were nymphomaniacs did the British visitors concede ‘on close inspection’ they could spot their defects after all.
Diagnosis was frequently performed by medical examiners. Here’s how one described a typical consultation for possible feeble-mindedness in a young boy. He wrote:
Imagine, if you please, a father bringing his boy at the age of eight or ten years to your institution. In the father’s mind, he is a very dear little fellow, and aside from the fact that he was a little late in cutting his teeth, talking and even walking, the father can see little that is wrong with the boy.
To which the reasonable response from the twenty-first century might be: He sounds normal enough so far, Mr Medical Examiner, now what? The rest of his assessment reveals a baffling haste and lack of rigorous examination, or even understanding, of an eight-year-old child in the presence of a stranger.
You look the boy over hurriedly. You find that he is small for his age, that he has large thick lips, with mouth open a great deal, thick tongue, abnormally large ears and a head that is rather flat and narrow through the temples, but the forehead is very prominent . . . He talks quite a little when he feels like it. But is often stubborn and will not talk at all . . . He has not been to school a day in his life, neither has he been to church or Sunday school.
His hurried examination ends with this abrupt conclusion.
In all probability, the child will never develop, so it would be wise and to the best interest of the child, of the family, and of society, ever to discharge him from your institution . . . We must remember that many people do not believe as we do in regard to this question . . . [But] it occurs to me that no-one is better qualified from personal experience to the people at large than we.
And that was that. After the briefest of inspections and with the stroke of a pen, tens of thousands of children were diagnosed as feeble-minded. They were stripped from their families, robbed of their futures and denied any chance to prove the so-called experts wrong. There were no appeals and no second chances.
Some children were dumped at institutions by families who could not or would not look after them. Others were literally kidnapped – plucked from the streets (often, ironically for a policy to reduce the societal burden of the incapable, while they walked to and from jobs in the mills).
Some children locked up as feeble-minded did have some form of genuine mental retardation, and so they might have benefitted from the security of an asylum, but plenty didn’t. Some were deaf; others were unruly or had done something to draw the displeasure of those in charge.
In 1993, a television documentary to mark the closing of the UK asylums and the dawn of the new policy of care in the community interviewed former inmates, plenty of whom explained in articulate and measured words how they had been wrongly diagnosed, sometimes out of malice, with abnormally low intelligence, and how the system ignored their pleas. The programme estimated a third of the people locked up for decades by the British government were wrongly classed as feeble-minded. That’s 40,000 people.
The more I researched this book and learned about what happened, the angrier I got. I could not understand why more people today do not make more of a fuss about the injustice carried out in the name of the state, science and for the supposed benefit of us – the future generations who needed protection from these intellectual weaklings and their progeny.
Then I realized the reason why these people have no voice; no one left to speak on their behalf, to howl at the unfairness of it all. The people diagnosed as feeble-minded, if the above consultation and thousands like it can truly be called a diagnosis, and then treated so badly were, by definition, not allowed to have children. Parents, brothers and sisters have long passed away. Nieces and nephews are probably unaware, or silent about the secret shame of someone they knew only as mad Uncle Jack and crazy Auntie Jean.
Beyond the UK, other countries introduced their own policies to stop the feeble-minded from breeding. One of the first actions of the Nazi regime in Germany was to pass a 1933 eugenic law, which demanded doctors report ‘unfit’ patients including the mentally handicapped to special courts. It was the first step on the dreadful march to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Yet it was not a Nazi invention. They based it on a draft drawn up in 1922 by Harry Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbour in New York. The United States sterilized at least 42,616 people classed as feebleminded between 1907 and 1944.
The rise in eugenics and the discrimination against those judged of low intelligence is often blamed on the rise in popularity of IQ tests in the early decades of the twentieth century. That’s not entirely true – it was driven more by the racism and elitism of the times, and how these attitudes were used as a political lens to view, and express concern about, the mass movements of people. It did not always need an IQ test to diagnose and condemn someone as of low intelligence. But the spread of IQ tests did make these decisions appear more scientific, and gave them a veneer of legitimacy. It outsourced the reasoning for someone to be imprisoned, sterilized, or even executed away from the individuals who made the decisions and towards a numerical scale that appeared neutral and non-judgemental. Eugenics did not depend on IQ, but to achieve its widespread infamy, IQ did depend on the eugenicists. And although eugenicists did not need the IQ tests, for their ideas to prosper they did require something else. Low IQ and feeble-mindedness had to run in families. They needed genetics.
Of Shakespeare’s bad guys, it is Caliban, the sub-human slave of the sorcerer Prospero in The Tempest, who can divide opinion the most. Despite his scheming and his attempt to rape Prospero’s daughter Miranda, some insist Caliban should not even be classed a villain. Caliban, his defenders claim, is as much a victim as anyone else in the story – orphaned, captive and sensitive to the beauty and magic of the island home stolen from him.
Shakespeare certainly wanted us to see a positive side to Caliban and gave him some of the play’s most memorable lines – his speech about the isle being full of noises (performed by Kenneth Branagh dressed as the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel) was a highlight of the ceremony to open the 2012 London Olympics.
Caliban earns sympathy largely because of his parents. His mother was a vicious witch banished from her home and his father, according to Prospero, was a demon. If Caliban was bad then he was born that way. He’s an example of pure biological determinism. Prospero says as much, in a line that, as so much of Shakespeare’s work does, remains acutely relevant several centuries on.
Caliban, the sorcerer says, is, ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick’.
He’s a lost cause – no amount of attention, education or inspiration can save him from his innate flaws, so why even try?
To Francis Galton and the other eugenicists, determined to save the world from the peril of low intelligence and the feeble-minded, Prospero’s view of Caliban would have been something of a motto. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that Galton adapted Shakespeare’s nature–nurture axis for the conflict between the circumstances of a person’s birth and their environment. (Hence Galton is often credited with inventing the term ‘nature versus nurture’.) Just like natural born devils, there was no hope for the less intelligent. They and their social curse had to be stopped, and that meant – the eugenicists said – they must not be allowed to have children.
That assumed, of course, feeble-minded parents would have feeble-minded children; that cognitive ability and disability would slide through the generations as easily as red hair or blue eyes. That was an assumption the eugenicists were happy to make, indeed they wrote endless books and pamphlets to make the case, and in doing so they unfairly demonized families and even entire communities.
Using the newly rediscovered work on early genetics by the monk Gregor Mendel – who crossed pea plants and then worked out the basic laws of inheritance – the eugenicists of the early twentieth century said intelligence was a trait passed on from parent to child. And on this point they were mostly right. For all of the controversy then and now over the genetics of intelligence, the basic science is pretty simple. IQ is a heritable trait – intelligence does run in the genes. If you have intelligent parents then you are more likely to be intelligent yourself.
The strongest evidence for this comes from studies of identical twins. In the past, such siblings given up for adoption were sometimes separated, and the babies could then grow up in different circumstances. Tracking these people down then gives scientists a powerful way to distinguish the impact of genes from the effects of environment.
Studies of intelligence in twins show those raised apart have cognitive abilities in later life more similar to each other than to members of their adopted families. Intelligence is not all down to genes (and even those bits that are can be held back by environmental factors like poor nutrition) but the right genes can offer a significant head start.
A major reason why this relatively simple finding is so heavily disputed, and why geneticists who want to study it draw such criticism, is because the genetics of intelligence has become entangled in another loaded social and political issue: race.
Though the gap is narrowing, various published studies show that groups of black people in the United States have scored, on average, significantly lower than groups of white people on IQ tests. (And groups of East Asians tend to outscore whites.) Entire books have been written about this finding, and every possible cause has been investigated and talked about, sometimes cautiously and sometimes less so. The one thing almost everybody agrees is that there a genuine difference to explain – in other words, as much as we might wish it away, the IQ gap does not seem down to the questions on the IQ test being culturally biased against black people.
That leaves a range of possible explanations, none of which are comforting. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, is among those who have claimed that genetic differences (nature) between the races can explain it. Other experts in intelligence point to the different environments (nurture) that kids of minority racial groups in the US typically experience: profound inequality in socioeconomic backgrounds and schooling, varying cultural expectations and more limited opportunity. As the study of identical twins shows, tough circumstances can drag down the cognitive performance of people whose genes should allow them to do better.
There is plenty of speculation on what causes the black–white IQ gap, but not much strong evidence to go on, and certainly not enough to be certain. So most neutral and objective researchers tend to sit on the fence. And commentators like Watson who leap off the fence and land firmly on one side show they aren’t neutral and objective.
The controversy rumbles along and still flares from time to time, most prominently in a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, in which psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray discussed racial differences in IQ scores and genetics, which was interpreted as arguing that little could be done to help those with the wrong genes to succeed.
It’s not just mental differences between racial groups that are claimed. A small core of intelligence researchers dedicate their careers to trying to find differences in the average IQ between all sorts of people – from men and women and northern and southern Italians, to the Irish and everybody else. Some of these scientists remain obsessed by cranial capacity and have gone back and re-measured all those nineteenth-century skulls.
Most notorious was a psychologist called Jean Philippe Rushton, a Brit who made his academic career at the University of Western Ontario in Canada with a series of bizarre studies intended to prove intelligence was linked to race through size of genitalia. (When Rushton died in 2012, his own university boss described his work as ‘not highly thought of’. Others labelled him a straightforward academic racist.)
Rushton (not a geneticist) was a strong believer the black–white IQ gap was down to genetics – about half at least, he reckoned – and he argued public policies to offer black children help in school were therefore a waste of time. But then Rushton, it seems fair to say, wasn’t neutral. His politics were clear. For a decade before his death he ran the Pioneer Fund, an organization set up in 1937 to promote eugenics, the founders of which courted the Nazis, and which would later pay for political resistance to the American Civil Rights movement.
Given this landscape, it’s easy to see why even the mention of research on the genetics of intelligence can make people uncomfortable. It certainly made the officials at the Centre for Talented Youth uncomfortable – so much that they discussed the request to access their records for so long that the project that wanted to use them finished before they decided what to do. They knew that a political mind-set is ready to use the results – any results – to confirm and fuel inherent prejudices. So it’s important to say that, while IQ is largely a heritable trait, there is no serious evidence to support the claim that a racial difference in genes can explain the black–white IQ gap.
And despite fears that research on the genetics of intelligence will cement in the (flawed) biological explanations for racial differences in IQ scores, the early results support an opposite conclusion; even though intelligence is passed from parent to child, it is done in a way far too complex to break down in simple and significant terms that neatly contrast between groups of people. (We’ll come back to this in a later chapter.)
Forget white people or north Italians or the upper classes, or whatever socially, ethnically or geographically constrained population someone wishes to favour. The most reliable group of people to sire intelligent children are, simply, intelligent adults (of all colours and nationalities), just as taller parents (of all colours and nationalities) tend to have taller kids. When it comes to intelligence, nature can be cruel and unsentimental, but it does not pick sides.
The legacy of all this bad science – and the pockets of biased research that continue – have poisoned the well for many psychologists who want to investigate the nature of intelligence and where it comes from. That helps to explain why many neuroenhancement techniques under investigation started life as treatments in medical projects, and even today are considered to be on the fringes of serious science. There is something uncomfortable about scientists who want to look at intelligence for its own sake. There is suspicion about their motives. People are reluctant to get involved or sometimes even to discuss it. The shadow of eugenics, even the likely mention of the word eugenics, or even human improvement, is enough to put them off.
But scientists have not always been so cautious. Before eugenics arrived to spoil everything there was widespread and relatively uncontroversial interest in how the brain could be modified to improve its functioning. Before eugenics, after all, there was electricity.