Theme: Science

THE SHIFT TO BEHAVIORAL PSEUDOSCIENCE
(the postwar birth and institutionalizaion of academic pseudoscience)

–“In In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Carl N. Degler tells the story of how social scientists “made the…

THE SHIFT TO BEHAVIORAL PSEUDOSCIENCE
(the postwar birth and institutionalizaion of academic pseudoscience)

–“In In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Carl N. Degler tells the story of how social scientists “made the momentous shift from believing that biology explained some human actions to seeing culture or human experience – history, if you will – as the primary if not the sole source of the differential behavior of human beings” (pg. vii). His work draws upon various publications in the social sciences – psychology, sociology, political science – in the years following Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Degler’s work responds directly to Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, disagreeing with Gould’s assessment of H.H. Goddard, though generally supporting his other conclusions (pg. 39, 267, etc.).
Degler writes, “Whether called social Darwinism, or social Spencerism, the defense of the social and economic hierarchy of nineteenth-century America that the doctrine was intended to accomplish held little appeal for the men and women who were shaping the emerging fields of sociology, psychology, economics, and anthropology at the end of the century. The aim of social Darwinism was frankly conservative; the rising social scientists were not”–

BEFORE THE SHIFT:

–“Competent scholars are agreed that today’s differential birth rate will lead to a decline in intelligence.”– Cook (Geneticist and Editor of teh Journal of Heredity) from Human Fertility, the Modern Dilemma (1951)

–“(The 1949 report of the Royal Commission on Population) concluded that the average intelligence quotient of the British people was declining about 2 points every generation. The same pattern exists in the United States, where the experts consider a similar decline to be a “moral certainty.” If this trend continues for less than a century, England and America will be well on the way to becoming nations of near half-wits.”–

–“Argues that F. Galton and the eugenicists were right in their contention that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and fertility in modern populations and that as a result genotypic intelligence is deteriorating. There are 4 lines of evidence presented in this chapter which support this contention, consisting of the inverse relations between: (a) SES and fertility; (b) intelligence and number of siblings; (c) intelligence and fertility; and (d) educational level and fertility. A summary review of worldwide evidence for these propositions is presented.”– Lynn, R. (1998). The Decline of Genotypic Intelligence

This is just the first set of cites in google scholar.
There are a million hits. I’m certain there are over five hundred relevant puplications. I probably have two hundred in my how files.