In articles in The Guardian of 9 July 1991, Clare Burstall, Director of the National Foundation for Educational Research, and Stephen Bates drew attention to two recent books (1,2) which argued for the rehabilitation of Cyril Burt as a researcher of probity and suggest that his conclusions about the distribution and heritability of intelligence have been unjustly tainted by accusations of dishonesty and fraud. Both writers also call attention to the changing intellectual, social and political background to the vacillating public reception of Burt’s work during the last fifty years.
Burt’s ideas were warmly received in the 1940s. They were fundamental to he formulation of the 1944 Education Act and the establishment of selective secondary education based on the testing of intelligence as a constitutional characteristic. By the mid-1970s, when allegations against Burt began to surface in the media (3), times had changed. There was a more radical egalitarian and anti-authoritarian spirit abroad, both in society at large and within academia. Schools went comprehensive and university students revolted. It became fashionable to argue that science and scientists were not culture-free but reflected the society in which they developed. If the system could be changed then so could the science: it did not have to be accepted if its findings were uncongenial. Thomas Kuhn’s concept of alternative paradigms, loosely interpreted, temporarily supplanted Karl Popper’s demarcation principle as the touchstone of scientific method, and the newly emergent sociologists of science seized upon it eagerly in their attempts to demonstrate the inevitability of subjectivity in the hard sciences. In an area of freedom of expression, no one needed to be bound by history or social circumstances, let alone by heredity. Edward Wilson was criticised from every possible viewpoint, and a few impossible ones (4), for asserting that human behaviour had an evolutionary and therefore a genetic basis, Jensen and Eysenck were attacked for what was perceived as racism and elitism, and Burt was accused of fraud.
But now in the UK, as Stephen Bates points out, coincidentally with moves to re-evaluate Cyril Burt’s work, selection has returned to the educational agenda and mixed ability teaching is under persistent criticism. In Clare Burtsall’s somewhat ironic words, Burt would have felt at home in our current period of educational reform (to which one might add, if reform is the right word).
From this tangled tale arise two considerations of more general importance. Firstly, if it is to be argue that scientists are not objective disinterested experts, but opportunists subconsciously reflecting or even consciously pandering to an ambient prejudice, then the same charge must be held to apply, with at least as much force, to those commentators and critics who operate with conspicuous self-importance through the mass media. What is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. To set the record straight regarding Sir Cyril Burt, Clare Burstall calls for an impartial public re-examination of the evidence.
The second issue arises from what is generally taken to be the desirability of research workers paying some heed to the possible implications of their work for society at large. Most scientists accept that there is an obligation on them to explain their findings and ideas to a wide audience so as to contribute to the body of knowledge which should form the basis for public discussion and decision making. But to go further than that, positively to argue for or to campaign for change in society in the light of that new knowledge, is to enter an arena where many motives are questionable and anyone’s may be brought into question. It is not difficult to imply that social convictions mould a research worker’s output rather than follow from it. Oliver Gillie, whose original article in The Sunday Times publicly opened the case against Cyril Burt, notes carefully (3) that Burt ‘‘knew Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the principal founder of eugenics, and acknowledged the influence of Galton’s ideas’’. Burt is also charged with ‘‘coming under the influence of Sir Ronald Fisher .... an ardent eugenist’’, and of basing calculations of heritability on Fisher’s methods. Gillie draws here on work by Bernard Norton (5) on Fisher and Burt’s involvement with the early eugenics movement, in which he makes a concluding comment that ‘‘the criteria of evidence deployed by scientists varies with their social position and commitment’’.
To avoid the possibility of charges of this kind, young research workers should presumably seal themselves in their laboratories or libraries like Trappist monks and avoid all interaction with the intellectual and social world outside. Only when they retire from active work should they be required to develop a social conscience about what they have done.
There are indeed scientists who behave in this way, acting on the idealist philosophy that they have no training or expertise in ethics and no special right to influence public decision making. This is of course a naïvely simplistic philosophy. It takes no account of the fact that very few of those who do affect to influence public opinion, in the media or in politics, have any particular knowledge or formal expertise in ethical matters, let alone in matters of science. It also ignores any responsibility of the researcher in the choice of research topic, although it must be said that nowadays this is generally less than it used to be. It is a curious twist of our times that the concern to make scientists publicly accountable, through dependence on external funding for specified projects, should militate against the exercise of social responsibility by the individual.
At best, however, the ostrich philosophy maintains a principle which must be regarded as essential that the primary, overriding responsibility of the scientist is to do the job properly, to the highest standards of accuracy and honesty, using methods and arguments which according to the state of knowledge at the time are deemed to be appropriate and adequate. To judge whether this is the case is a task for the scientific peer community alone; any wider debate about influences and implications must take place subsequently. In the case of Sir Cyril Burt’s work, however, the judgement appears not yet to be definitive.
(1) Robert Joynson 1989, The Burt Affair
(2) Ronald Fletcher 1991, Ideology and the Media: the Cyril Burt Scandal
(3) Oliver Gillie 1978, Sir Cyril Burt and the Great IQ Fraud, New Scientist, 24 November
(4) Ann Arbour Science for the People Editorial Collective 1977, Biology as a Social Weapon
(5) Barnard Norton 1978, A Fashionable Fallacy Defended, New Scientist, 27 April
Clive Turner