page_title: History of the race and intelligence controversy
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: History of the race and intelligence controversy / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: Frederick Douglass Ambrotype, 1856
context_page_description: The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between average scores of different population groups, but there has been no agreement about whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or even if the dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the most effective approach to the debate.
  In the late 19th and early 20th century, group differences in intelligence were assumed to be racial in nature; apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1940s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors predominated. In the mid-1960s, physicist William Shockley sparked controversy by claiming there might be genetic reasons that black people in the United States tended to score lower on IQ tests than white people.
context_section_description: In the 18th century, European philosophers and scientists such as Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Carl Linnaeus, proposed the existence of different mental abilities among the races. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the idea that there are differences in the brain structures and brain sizes of different races, and that these differences explained the different intelligences, was much advocated and studied.
  Through the publication of his book Hereditary Genius in 1869, polymath Francis Galton spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity and eugenics. Lacking the means to directly measure intellectual ability, Galton attempted to estimate the intelligence of various racial and ethnic groups. He based his estimations on observations from his and others' travels, the number and quality of intellectual achievements of different groups, and on the percentage of "eminent men" in each of these groups. Galton argued that intelligence was normally distributed in all racial and ethnic groups, and that the means of the distributions varied between the groups. In Galton's estimation ancient Attic Greeks had been the people with the highest average intelligence, followed by contemporary Englishmen, with black Africans at a lower level, and Australian Aborigines lower still.  He did not specifically study Jews, but remarked that "they appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds".
  Meanwhile, the American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) had gained fame for his oratory and incisive writings, despite having learned to read as a child largely through surreptitious observation. Accordingly, he had been described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that people of African descent lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. In the later years of his life, one newspaper described him as "a bright example of the capability of the colored race, even under the blighting influence of slavery, from which he emerged and became one of the distinguished citizens of the country."
  In 1895, R. Meade Bache of the University of Pennsylvania published an article in Psychological Review claiming that reaction time increases with evolution. Bache supported this claim with data showing slower reaction times among White Americans when compared with those of Native Americans and African Americans, with Native Americans having the quickest reaction time. He hypothesized that the slow reaction time of White Americans was to be explained by their possessing more contemplative brains which did not function well on tasks requiring automatic responses. This was one of the first examples of modern "scientific racism", in which a veneer of science was used to bolster belief in the superiority of a particular race.
  
  In 1903, the pioneering African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois published his landmark collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk in defense of the inherent mental capacity and equal humanity of black people. According to Manning Marable, this book "helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. 'Souls' justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class." In contrast to other civil rights leaders like Booker T. Washington, who advocated for incremental progress and vocational education as a way for black Americans to demonstrate the virtues of "industry, thrift, intelligence and property" to the white majority, Du Bois advocated for black schools to focus more on liberal arts and academic curriculum (including the classics, arts, and humanities), because liberal arts were required to develop a leadership elite. Du Bois argued that black populations just as much as white ones naturally give rise to what he termed a "talented tenth" of intellectually gifted indiv
caption: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1856
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "355", "Image ImageLength": "560", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2020:02:26 22:23:27", "Image ExifOffset": "232", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "474", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5655", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "355", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "560", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "344", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "f85e1f0b6b8dc3e8bceb0211abba1d5c"}