Nature v. Nurture

Few years ago a psychologist named Harold Manville Skeels, a professor at University of Iowa, was assigned by the State to advise the State orphanage. He found that the orphanage was sending babies (mostly bastards) born of feeble-minded parents to highly intelligent families for adoption. Horrified, Dr. Skeels hurried forth to see how much damage had been done. He gave the adopted children intelligence tests. To his surprise, their average I.Q. was 115, well above normal (100). Not one was dull.

Dr. Skeels's discovery was one of a series made more or less by chance during the last 15 years by the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station. The Station found that when children attended a nursery school or were transferred from a bleak orphanage to a good home, their I.Q.s invariably improved. Concluded the Station's director, Dr. George Dinsmore Stoddard: with good upbringing even a dull child may become bright.

Dr. Stoddard's conclusions threw other psychologists into a dither. Humphed one: "If what you say is true, an intelligent man and wife should adopt children instead of having their own." Retorted Dr. Stoddard: "Their chances of getting bright kids would be just about as good."

Last week, with blood in their eyes, the nation's leading psychologists gathered in St. Louis. On their way to the meeting--the annual convention of the National Society for the Study of Education--they read both sides of the controversy in the Society's yearbook, Intelligence: Its Nature and Nurture(Public School Publishing Co., Bloomington, Ill.; two volumes; $3.50).

Said Stanford's famed Psychologist Lewis Terman: "It appears characteristic of the Iowa group of workers that they . . . find difficulty in reporting accurately either the data of others or their own." Miss Florence L. Goodenough, of University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Welfare, claimed that Dr. Stoddard's investigators had made technical errors.

But Dr. Stoddard had found supporters. The yearbook reported that identical twins reared in separate homes had different I.Q.s. Southern Negroes who moved to Harlem (and thus got better schooling) raised their I.Q.s. Psychologist Robert Ladd Thorndike (son of famed Edward Lee Thorndike) had examined the records of some 1,100 children in three famed progressive schools (Horace Mann, Lincoln, Ethical Culture), found that in two schools children's I.Q.s were static, but in the third (unidentified) there was an average I.Q. gain of more than six points.

As the convention opened, bald, husky Dr. Stoddard rose to report. He twinkled: "Only a confirmed Pollyanna would say that, as a committee, we have performed our task in a spirit of loving kindness. ..." Listeners looked at each other, wondered when the fireworks would start. They never did start. Long before the end it had dawned on the delegates that there would be no debate, because no one cared to get up and contend that nurture had nothing to do with intelligence. Said the final speaker, University of Chicago's Sociologist Ernest Watson Burgess: "[The] consensus [is] that intelligence, at least as measured by the I.Q., is not a constant and that it is a resultant both of hereditary and environmental factors."

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