Brain size expert
Sir: Your editorial on IQ and heredity (Leader, 22 October), while partly sup- portive of research in that area, presents some curious and factually incorrect argu- ments. Thus, you say that those who 'have done research on inheritance and intelli- gence . . . have mostly been social scien- tists . . rather than geneticists'. Not true. One of my teachers, and later colleagues, was J.B.S. Haldane, leading member of the Communist Party, and one of the best- known geneticists of his generation; he encouraged my own interest in that area, and actively proclaimed the importance of genetic factors in intelligence. Since then, nearly all the work in this field has been done by geneticists. To name but a few, we have Jinks, Fulker, Martin and De Fries. The foundations of their research were laid by Sir R.A. Fisher, one of the truly great geneticists. And we social scientists, with our low IQs and small heads, always seek guidance and criticism from our geneticist friends before daring to publish anything in this area.
Nor is the scientific study of brain size and IQ 'sloppy', as you suggest. Recent studies using the latest techniques of mag- netic resonance imaging have found much higher correlations than had been suggest- ed by earlier work using outside measure- ment of head size.
But what is really amusing is your last sentence, suggesting that the most reliable way to assess an individual's intelligence is by 'meeting and talking to him'! Many years ago my then research assistant, later professor of social psychology at the LSE, Dr H. Himmelweit, conducted a large- scale experiment in the selection and pre- diction of success of university entrants, comparing extensive interviewing proce- dures by dons in the relevant departments with IQ test results. The interview proce- dures predicted nothing, the IQ tests pre- dicted academic success quite successful- ly. They have been doing the same for many years at the leading American uni- versities. Meeting and talking had always been shown to be grossly inferior to prop- er testing when intellectual performance was the criterion. (Typically, the LSE went on using interviews and rejecting IQ testing!) H.J. Eysenck
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of London, London SE5
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