Intelligence, Sapience and Learning, part 2: Dark Science – the deathly (mal)practice of Francis Galton and Cyril Burt

Sir Francis Galton in 1912 (left) and Sir Cyril Burt (right). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

25 July 2024

By Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott

This blog post is Part 2 of a series relating to our newly published book: Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices.

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971) were two pioneers of differential psychology who had close connections to UCL and IOE respectively. They worked at a time when a theistic philosophy in education was on the decline, and the new discipline of Psychology was in the ascendancy. The lives of Galton and Burt provide us with a cautionary tale about the dangers of working unchallenged in the field of science, with little accountability. Both subscribed to a deterministic version of science, incorporating unchallenged beliefs in innate superiority. Both also used their poorly evidenced ideas as a mechanism to justify eugenics and promote social discrimination, mirroring and exaggerating the faults of the society surrounding them. Despite the obvious shortcomings of their work, they were knighted for their efforts, and their legacies remain. UCL has committed itself to discussing, examining, critiquing and repudiating eugenic thinking having a lasting impact on academic and public discourse within and beyond UCL.

The moral of the tale is never underestimate the importance of ethical considerations, or the need for ongoing scrutiny and critical evaluation of scientific findings.

Sir Francis Galton

Francis Galton at M. Bertillon’s Biometrics Laboratory, 1893 (Creative Commons)

Contrary to popular belief, Galton never held an official university post, instead funding his research from inherited wealth, working from privately rented rooms at 88 Gower Street, adjacent to the UCL campus. This gave credence to his perceived status as an intellectual leader. Galton’s establishment of the Anthropometric Laboratory in 1884 allowed the collection of data on various human traits such as hand-eye coordination, and physical characteristics (inspired by previous studies of so-called criminal characteristics carried out by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon). He later left a substantial legacy to UCL (worth about £4.75m today) to endow the Galton Professorship in Eugenics. A fuller account of this legacy and its aims can be found in UCL’s history of eugenics inquiry report.

Galton’s interest in intelligence was sparked by his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Galton argued that intelligence, like physical traits, was hereditary. His enquiries led to the publication of the book Hereditary Genius in 1869, where he argued that intellectual talents were largely inherited and distributed unequally among the population. His own family tree, and that of other wealthy families, featured prominently in his analysis.

One of Galton’s most significant, and most dangerous, contributions was to develop the field of Eugenics, advocating for selective breeding to enhance human intelligence. This has been used to justify the selective execution and sterilisation of different social and ethnic groups, a practice which led to the Holocaust, and still continues in some places today, for example targeting the Uyghurs in China, transgender people in Japan (as well as in Finland until 2023), and women with more than two or three children in Uzbekistan.

Eugenics Society Exhibition, 1930 (Creative Commons)

Along with founding the discredited field of eugenics, Galton also made substantial and highly durable contributions to statistical methods, where they have proved instrumental to the development of the broader discipline of Psychology, and Social Science more widely. He developed the concept of correlation and regression to the mean that many of us use in research today. This utility makes his darker legacy particularly difficult to reconcile with what we understand to be modern research ethics.

Sir Cyril Burt

Portrait of Cyril Burt

Burt was a part-time professor in Educational Psychology at the London Day Training College (forerunner to the Institute of Education) from 1924-1932. He had worked with Galton’s student, Karl Pearson (the first holder of the Eugenics Chair endowed by Galton), and carried forward Galton’s legacy into the 20th century. Burt’s work focused on the heredity of intelligence and the development of educational psychology; indeed, he went on to take up the Chair of Psychology at UCL in 1931. In the same way as Galton, however, his career was marred by controversy, particularly concerning the validity of his research findings.

Burt was a staunch advocate of the idea that intelligence was primarily hereditary. His studies of twins in the 1920s and 1930s, which purportedly showed a high heritability of IQ, were influential in supporting this view. These studies claimed to demonstrate that identical twins reared apart had very similar IQ scores, suggesting a strong genetic component to intelligence. His research lacked scrutiny (he often published it in journals where he was editor). When we examine what remains of his methodologies (much of his raw data is said to have been destroyed as a result of World War 2 bombing), his research looks fatally flawed to the modern eye, containing statistical errors and anomalies, and making erroneous assumptions about biological correlations between familial employment patterns (always male, of course) and IQ.

In addition to his research on heredity, Burt developed tests to measure children’s cognitive abilities, and advocated for the use of these tests to guide educational placement and policy. In this way, Burt’s work was instrumental in the development of the 11-plus examination in the UK, which was used to determine the type of secondary education a child would receive under the ‘tripartite’ system put in place by the 1944 Education Act, of grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools. By 1975 it was starting to become clear that the scientific basis for school selection at 11 along such lines was fatally flawed and with concerns about social class segregation surfacing, comprehensive schools were introduced in most areas of England, which did not require an entrance exam.

As a result of the inconsistencies within his work, Burt’s legacy has been overshadowed by controversy, which increased in intensity after his death in 1971. In our book, we have chosen not to rehearse the case for and against the prosecution yet again, as many others have done so already. However, it seems to us that repeated errors have tainted the credibility of his work so extensively that this makes it difficult for serious academics to rely on it.

Despite these problems, the legacies of Galton and Burt have had a profound and lasting impact on the fields of Psychology and Statistics. Their work continues to influence social and educational policies in different ways, as well as the way intelligence is perceived and measured. This acts as a reminder of the need for rigorous standards and transparency in scientific research, to aid ethical scrutiny and critical evaluation.