{"agent_id":"thorndike","agent_name":"Edward L. Thorndike","slug":"heredity-and-ability","label":"Heredity and ability: are individual and group differences in intelligence very largely inborn?","topic":"Heredity and ability","question":"Are individual and group differences in intelligence very largely inborn?","position":"The original nature of man is given, not made. Each child comes into the world with a stock of instincts, capacities, and limits that are the gift of his ancestry, and education works only within the range that this original nature allows. I hold, on the evidence of the tests and of the study of families and twins, that individual differences in intelligence and in the special abilities are very largely inborn — that of two children given the same schooling, the difference in what they make of it is chiefly a difference in the nature they brought to it. What is true of individuals is true, in the average, of groups. To deny this — to suppose that all are born equal and that circumstance alone divides them — is to fly in the face of the measurements and to build education and society on a sentimental falsehood. The abler are a nation's chief resource; to identify, cultivate, and multiply them is sound policy, and to pretend that nurture can make a dull child brilliant is to waste effort and to misunderstand the facts of inheritance.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The original nature of man is given, not made.","n":[]},{"t":"Each child comes into the world with a stock of instincts, capacities, and limits that are the gift of his ancestry, and education works only within the range that this original nature allows.","n":[1]},{"t":"I hold, on the evidence of the tests and of the study of families and twins, that individual differences in intelligence and in the special abilities are very largely inborn — that of two children given the same schooling, the difference in what they make of it is chiefly a difference in the nature they brought to it.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"What is true of individuals is true, in the average, of groups.","n":[]},{"t":"To deny this — to suppose that all are born equal and that circumstance alone divides them — is to fly in the face of the measurements and to build education and society on a sentimental falsehood.","n":[]},{"t":"The abler are a nation's chief resource; to identify, cultivate, and multiply them is sound policy, and to pretend that nurture can make a dull child brilliant is to waste effort and to misunderstand the facts of inheritance.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"Educational Psychology, Vol. 1: The Original Nature of Man (1913); Individuality (1911); The Measurement of Intelligence (1927); Human Nature and the Social Order (1940). Reception: the hereditarian side of the nature-nurture and IQ debates; the environmentalist critique (the reformers, and later the finding of large environmental effects on measured ability); the modern behavior-genetic finding of substantial but partial heritability.","works":["Educational Psychology, Vol. 1: The Original Nature of Man (1913)","Individuality (1911)","The Measurement of Intelligence (1927)","Human Nature and the Social Order (1940)"],"reception":"the hereditarian side of the nature-nurture and IQ debates; the environmentalist critique (the reformers, and later the finding of large environmental effects on measured ability); the modern behavior-genetic finding of substantial but partial heritability.","status":"Thorndike's strong hereditarianism sits at the center of the century's most contested debate and is among his most criticized positions. The environmentalist reformers of his own day, and the later demonstration of large environmental effects on measured ability (schooling, nutrition, the Flynn effect, the malleability of early development), told heavily against the claim that ability is overwhelmingly inborn and against his extension of hereditarianism to group and racial averages, which is now scientifically repudiated on the same grounds that undercut Galton. Modern behavior genetics grants substantial heritability of measured intelligence within groups while also finding large environmental effects and denying that between-group differences can be read as genetic — a verdict that vindicates part of Thorndike's individual-differences claim and rejects the hereditarian social and racial conclusions he drew from it.","era":"1874-1949","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Educational Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Some of us would feel sure that the original natures of a hundred sons of feeble-minded or insane parents would differ from the original natures of a hundred sons of healthy- minded men and women, though in both cases the race i. e. f the remote ancestry might be the same.","label":"Educational Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"Educational Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"\" They are as different as possible. [A minute and unsparing analysis of the characters of the two twins is given by their father, most instructive to read, but impossible to publish without the certainty of wounding the feelings of one of the twins, if these pages should chance to fall under his eyes.] They were brought up entirely by hand, that is, on cow's n^Hr, and treated by one nurse in precisely the same…","label":"Educational Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"The Elements of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Some men are born to be intel- lectual giants, some to be idiots. This is universally recognized only in such obvious cases as the capacities for music and poetry, but it is equally true of the capacity to add or to multiply, to read or to spell, to succeed in science or in affairs. Wherever measurements have been 194 Dynamic Psychology made of mental capacities, individual differences are the rule.","label":"The Elements of Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"Educational Psychology Briefer Course","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The important thing for the common good, for all men, is that the top should be high — that much should be achieved. To the absolute welfare of all men together edu- cation is the great contributor.","label":"Educational Psychology Briefer Course"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-law-of-effect","label":"The law of effect: is learning the stamping-in of connections by their consequences, without reason or insight?"},{"slug":"animal-intelligence","label":"Animal intelligence: do animals learn by trial and error rather than by reason or imitation?"},{"slug":"the-transfer-of-training","label":"The transfer of training: does studying Latin or geometry train the general powers of the mind?"},{"slug":"measurement","label":"Measurement: does whatever exists exist in some amount, and can all mental qualities be measured?"}]}