Firing Line Videos, Hoover Institution, taped on October 16, 1973, uploaded to YouTube on March 25, 2011.

Guest: Thomas G. Bever, Richard J. Herrnstein

Summary:

The second show in the series on human behavior, this one on the explosive subject of heritability of IQ. “Explosive,” because of its implications for social policy. Mr. Herrnstein had stirred up a ruckus with his book IQ in the Meritocracy (though nothing like the ruckus he and Charles Murray would stir up twenty years later with The Bell Curve), and he and Mr. Bever are old antagonists. But they remain civil enough to give us a clear idea of the points at issue between those who believe there is an element of heritability and those who believe IQ is purely a matter of social conditioning. Herrnstein: “It’s not unclear at all. When you give a group of children–or adults, for that matter–an IQ test, you get a group of numbers. The numbers don’t know where they came from, and these numbers can be subjected to a statistical procedure known as estimative heritability… The answer comes out that the variation in IQ scores from individual to individual is something between 60 and 90 per cent heritable. You don’t need a theory of intelligence to say that.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJLvMc-XMYM

Online:
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