HERRNSTEIN ON GARBAGE

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In The Crimson for 11 December 1973, Professor Lewontin wrote "such phrases as 'I.Q.'s substantial heritability' or 'the heritability of I.Q. is 80 per cent,' despite their appearance as English, are actually scientifically meaningless garbage which have not been refuted in technical journals because there is nothing to refute." In the book The Fallacy of I.Q. (edited by C. Senna and published in 1973), the same Professor Lewontin wrote "the weight of evidence from a variety of correlations between relatives puts the heritability of I.Q. in various human populations between .6 and .8. For reasons of his argument, Jensen prefers the higher value but it is not worth quibbling over. Volumes could be written on the evaluation of heritability estimates for I.Q. and one can find a number of faults with Jensen's treatment of the published data. However, it is irrelevant to questions of the failure of compensatory education, whether the heritability of I.Q. is .4 or .8, so I shall accept Jensen's rather high estimate without serious argument." [p. 11] I agree with Professor Lewontin's latter statement almost entirely and offer it as an answer to his former statement. R.J. Herrnstein   Professor of Psychology