The Geography of Intellect by Nathaniel Weyl, Stefan Possony (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Geography of Intellect. By NATHANIEL WEYL and STEFAN PossoNY. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963. Pp. xiii and ~89 with index. $7.95. This is a book which you open with a sense of excited anticipation, which gradually becomes flawed with bits of dismay, and finally succumbs to a sense of disappointment. On reflection, you might find that your original anticipations were not wholly frustrated, but no amount of reflection will dispel the feeling of having been let down in some sense, and let down in a way you would not have originally expected. The subject of the study, The Geography of Intellect, is almost bound to exert a fascination on anyone who is educated enough to know even a little of the world's history. We all know that there are differences in men's intelligence, and that at some times and in some places, some people have shown more communal intelligence than others. But what is the explanation for those sudden extraordinary leaps and crests of intellectual brilliance which have won everlasting glory for a small town in Greece, or a medieval city on the Italian peninsula, or for a race or a class of people, who through their genius have contributed to human weal all out of proportion to their numbers? What lies behind Athens in the fifth century B. C. and Florence in the fifteenth A. D., and the intellectual superiority of the Jews and the Scots, and the dominant role of the Brahmins? Again, why are there people alive today, ignorant, poverty-stricken and dejected, and incomprehensibly living in the ruins of a splendid civilization their ancestors created? What happened to these people in the interim? The authors propose to answer such questions as these, and many more, with the best evidence and reasoning modern science and scholarship can afford, and to a degree they do so. But in the course of the book, so much data is admitted which is at best shaky and sometimes downright misleading, and so much energy is spent pleading a special case, to the detriment of perfect objectivity, that the reader begins to feel himself unfairly imposed upon. On the matter of data, it would be impossible to list all the questionable citations, but a few may be mentioned as examples. On page 57, correlations between intelligence and brain capacity and shape are given, as positive, from .08 to .34. The authors grant that these are small, but in fact they are statistically insignificant. On page 91 they cite a tabulation from a report which, they note themselves, does not identify its references and is slovenly! In both these cases, the materials cited favor one of their 248 BOOK REVIEWS 249 special pleadings. On page llS, they give statistics from a report which, they again note, has been criticized for misquoting material and relying on secondary, inaccurate and valueless work. If this is so, why use it? On pages 124-H?5, they use population figures for European nations computed in 1600 A. D. as a basis for calculations of intelligence ratios for these countries from llOO to 1400 A. D., assuming the relative distributions would not have changed much. This seems like a large assumption. In the section on 'Genius after the Reformation ' (p. 128 f.), they use statistics based only on scientists and composers of high rank, as if genius could not be found among poets, dramatists, statesmen, lawyers, diplomats, theologians , engineers, military men, etc., or as if the figures which might be derived from weighing in these lines of endeavor would not change the picture noticeably. In discussing ethnic differences in I. Q. (pp. 159-160), the authors lean on tests taken in the 1920's and 1930's, when the cultural factors influencing the results were not yet clearly appreciated. Later (pp. 176-177), they use results of I. Q. tests in which the differences of social and economic environment were ironed out, but for groups which have radically different motivations; these results are intended to represent purely ethnic differences. Scientific reporting of this sort tends to shake a reader's confidence. Throughout the book the authors are building up a case for...