Earlier: Highest IQ Town in America to Expunge from Memory Name of American Founder of IQ Testing
From Palo Alto Online:
New book examines troubled legacy of Silicon Valley capitalism
by Gennady Sheyner / Palo Alto Weekly
Uploaded: Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 5:17 pm 4
Time to read: about 10 minutesA review of Malcolm Harris’ new book, “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”:
…His true passion, however, was horses and [Leland] Stanford transformed his farm into a laboratory for speed, using the latest technology and breeding techniques to boost equine performance.
“This was not an animal farm in any classic sense; it was an experimental engine factory, churning out high-performance horse flesh by the ton,” Harris writes.
The horse farm became a university but the guiding ethos remained mostly unchanged. Under the direction of school administrator David Starr Jordan, a eugenicist who may or may not have poisoned Leland Stanford’s wife during a power struggle over the university’s future, Stanford became a bastion of “bionomics,” which examined how living organisms respond to artificial conditions, and eugenics, which seeks to propagate “desirable” heritable characteristics in humans.
“Whatever else it was at the time, Stanford was a positive eugenic project, breeding high-IQ people to produce the next generation of Palo Alto residents,” Harris writes.
Jordan found the perfect partner for his grand project in Lewis Terman, who believed that some children, by virtue of their genetic traits, are more likely to attain academic success and whose team at Stanford devised what became known as the Stanford-Binet test to quantify general intelligence. His various tests, including the Stanford Achievement Test, became a commercial hit and propelled him to professional and academic stardom—chairmanship of Stanford’s psychology department in 1922 and appointment to president of the American Psychological Association in 1923. It hardly mattered that the tests, which included questions on sports trivia, didn’t actually measure intelligence. By efficiently assigning scores to students, Terman’s and Jordan’s system fed into and amplified the eugenics frenzy of the day. Like Leland Stanford and his foals, Harris writes, “Lewis Terman developed a model for assessing how fast children could run, and the bionomists helped convince him that the results mattered.” And it wasn’t just intelligence. By focusing on genes and asking incoming freshmen to provide height records (a practice that Harris notes extended into the 1980s), Stanford was literally reshaping the student body—hence the bed shortages of 1930 and 1950.
“In this period of Palo Alto’s history, the town’s golden boys were noted for their athletic prowess, their physical attractiveness, and, not infrequently, the simple virtue of their size as much as their intelligence,” Harris writes. “All were evidence of the same underlying characteristic: evolutionary fitness.”
In Spielberg’s autobiographical movie The Fabelmans, in a bid to inject some drama into Spielberg’s triumphant life, little Stephen finds his life ruined when his father moves the family to Silicon Valley because the other high school senior boys tend to be so much taller than him.
Harris is hardly the first person to detail the racist academic programs of Jordan and Terman, two men who until 2018 served as namesakes of two Palo Alto middle schools. But he also takes on other local figures, some of whom have heretofore been subject to mostly hagiographic treatment. There is Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, a “eugenics devotee” who “worried that new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Japan were diluting America’s stock and causing ‘racial indigestion.’” Cubberley, whose name currently graces a community center in south Palo Alto, was rewarded for his views in 1917, when Jordan appointed him to serve as dean of the newly established Stanford School of Education.
William Shockley Jr., a Palo Alto native and Stanford professor who won a Nobel Prize in 1956 for his team’s pioneering research on semiconductors, is described in the book as “one of the most infamous American bigots of the 20th century” and a passionate advocate for eugenics who late in his career shifted his professional focus to the genetics of intelligence.
I made many of the same points in 2012, but from the perspective that whatever else you want to say about Palo Alto, it has been massively successful:
What has almost never been pointed out is that the two rivals for the title of Father of Silicon Valley, Shockley and [Lewis Terman’s son Fred] Terman, have common roots in early 20th century Palo Alto’s scientific and ideological consensus, a now extremely unfashionable worldview that has been driven underground but remains fundamental to how Silicon Valley actually succeeds in the 21st century. …
Silicon Valley chroniclers usually treat Shockley’s eugenics campaign as a regrettable and idiosyncratic anomaly. Yet Shockley was merely trumpeting what had long been a prevalent ideology in Palo Alto dating back to Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan. In 1902, Jordan published a pamphlet, The Blood of the Nation, that made a eugenic case against war, arguing that the battlefield kills the bravest and best. (Jordan’s argument became widely accepted in Britain after World War I.)
Strikingly, Fred Terman’s father, Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist, was the father of IQ testing in America. In 1916, he published the Stanford-Binet IQ test, America’s first. Lewis Terman became a prominent eugenics advocate.
It’s important to understand that Galton’s eugenics was neither a “science” nor a “pseudoscience,” it was a proposal and a program of achieving scientific advances (e.g., Galton’s 1888 invention of the correlation coefficient) that would be needed to achieve the goals. It was a lot like Gordon Moore’s 1968 paper/exhortation announcing Moore’s Law: We can double the power of silicon chips every year or two indefinitely if we really try.
In 1921, Terman began his landmark study of gifted children with IQs of 135 and above, which continues even today to track its dwindling band of aged subjects. (Ironically, the young William Shockley was nominated for inclusion in Lewis Terman’s study, but his test score fell just short of the cutoff.) To the public’s surprise, “Terman’s Termites” showed that highly intelligent children were not particularly likely to grow up to be misfits like the much publicized prodigy/bad example William James Sidis. Indeed, the higher the IQ, the better the outcome. Terman’s study was an early landmark in Nerd Liberation, one of the 20th century’s most important social developments.
His son inherited Lewis’s biases: Fred Terman’s wife of 47 years, who had been one of his father’s grad students, said he only became serious about courting her after he went to the Psych Department and looked up her IQ score.
Of course, all that IQ and eugenics stuff was just pseudoscience, and it’s all been forgotten in modern Silicon Valley, right?
No, not really. To get into Stanford today, you have to score higher than ever on the IQ-like SAT. Students who scored a perfect 800 on the SAT math test make up 26 percent of Stanford’s freshman class. Silicon Valley firms such as Google make a cult of recruiting high-IQ workers, constantly devising clever ways to identify the clever.
Silicon Valley has largely managed to stonewall the diversity enforcers.
All that began to change after Obama was reelected with Silicon Valley’s help.
Jesse Jackson has been bringing his racial shakedown tour to town since the 1990s, with relatively little to show for it other than some Go Away money. Shockley would be hardly surprised to learn that black, Latino, and female shares of the complex jobs in Silicon Valley are low and falling.
The second term Obama White House gave the okay to the diversity grifters to shake down Silicon Valley.
In summary, the worldview that Palo Alto’s early 20th-century IQ testers and eugenicists developed explains part of the basis for the American economy’s most productive sector in the 21st century.
