ABSTRACT
I find much with which I heartily concur and little with which I disagree in the ‘Hereditarian Research Program: Triumphs and Tribulations’. I agree with the emphasis on the need for meta-analysis and ‘more careful pre-processing of data prior to model-fitting.’ However, I think it is too harsh to say that Jensen’s (1970) reanalysis of the data for identical twins reared apart ‘while statistically acceptable…was conceptually flawed and has, in part, contributed to the controversy over these data. Jensen simply failed to deal adequately with the question of the quality of the data and its impact on any resulting conclusions’ (Bouchard, this volume, p. 58). To the contrary, Jensen (1974) brought the problems concerning Burt’s data to the fore and concluded that Burt’s ‘… correlations are useless for hypothesis testing. Unless new evidence rectifying the inconsistencies in Burt’s data is turned up, which seems doubtful at this stage, I see no justifiable alternative conclusion in regard to many of these correlations’ (Jensen, 1974, p. 24).
