Essentials of behaviour genetics / David A. Hay.

  • Hay, David A.
Date:
1985
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Essentials of behaviour genetics / David A. Hay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    intelligence test as we know it, the Binet-Simon test of 1905, designed to screen out Paris school children needing special education. Fol¬ lowing the international adoption of these tests and the work of people such as Spearman, Burt, Vernon and their American counter¬ parts Thurstone, Guilford and R. B. Cattell, has developed the field of psychometrics, the measurement of individual differences in behaviour and the analysis of their structure and determinants (Willerman 1979). Psychometrics has had its share of controversy over the role of inheritance in intelligence and the social and political consequences arising therefrom, but it has always recognized genetic analysis as a viable research area. In complete contrast, a second influence of the philosophers led to the virtual elimination of behaviour genetic research on animals other than man for many years. The problem stemmed from the theories of the philosophical schools of psychology in existence early this century. Predominant among these were Freud's psychoanalysis which stressed such inborn determinants of behaviour as thanatos, the death instinct, and Gestalt psychology, a mainly European school concerned with perception and innate perceptual mechanisms. The most visible school in the USA was McDougall's hormic psychology which although useful in stimulating much experimental work, went too far in enumerating instincts or inherited dispositions responsible for the impetus and direction for all activities. In 1908 McDougall specified 12 instincts to explain behaviour and by 1930 this had grown to 17. Other members of McDougall's school had up to 118 instincts. It is too easy to propose instincts to explain behaviour and not surprisingly there was a backlash spearheaded by Watson (1924) in his book Behaviorism (Norton, New York), from which comes the most famous quote in modern psychology. I should like to go one step further now and say, 'Give me a dozen heahhy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors'. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Watson was reacting against two things. One was the imprecise nature of the data provided by introspection and by the psychoanalytic interview. He preferred animal research for which interview methods are obviously impractical and where objective measurement is the only possible approach. At the same time he overreacted to the instinct concept, denying the role of genetics in behaviour. It was unfortunate that Watson's stressing of objective measurement be¬ came linked in the minds of so many psychologists with the idea that all behaviour was environmentally determined. Altering behaviour and dealing with individual differences was just a question of finding and manipulating the correct environmental factors. DEVELOPMENT AND SCOPE I9
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