A Harvard professor of Psychology predicts, in the lead article of the September issue of The Atlantic that American society will soon develop into a hereditary, biological meritocracy.

In an article entitled "I.Q.", Richard J. Herrnstein, former chairman of the Psychology Department, says that the trend in society toward the dissolution of artificial social and legal barriers will lead to the creation of biological barriers which will be almost impossible to break down.

Herrnstein bases his prediction largely on the basis of the high heritability of I.Q. He cites intelligence tests which measured the I.Q.'s of identical twins who were brought up in different homes. The data he cites is drawn from a study in the Harvard Educational Review, by Berkeley geneticist Arthur Jensen who compiled statistics and conclusions from four different studies done in the 1920's.

Herrnstein uses the figures to deal with the relative importance of nature vs. nurture in I.Q. He argues that since the genes of identical twins are identical, any differences in their I.Q. test scores will be due to the environment.

Comparing the variation of I.Q.'s in this sample of 122 sets of identical twins, Herrnstein (through Jensen) finds that "more than four times out of five the difference between identical twins raised apart fell short of the average difference between fraternal twins raised together by their own parents."

Based on these and other data Herrnstein says that Jensen and most other experts in the field agree that inheritance counts for about 80 per cent of an individual's I.Q., and all other factors around 20 per cent. including education, nutrition, etc.

Herrnstein believes that a high I.Q., while not sufficient, is very definitely necessary for success in society. He cites the results of a massive 40-year test conducted by Lewis M. Terman, a Stanford psychologist. Terman tested over 1600 California schoolchildren between the ages of eight and twelve with I.Q.'s of 150 or over and kept track of their lives for 40 years.

The study showed that these selected children went on to have extraordinarily successful lives. Herrnstein states that this shows clearly the predictive power of the I.Q. test.

Thus, Herrnstein says that in a society in which social and legal barriers are being rapidly dismantled, a person's social standing will be determined pretty much on the basis of what he is born with.

He states his belief in the form of a syllogism:

1. If differences in mental abilities are inherited, and

2. If success requires those abilities, and

3. If earnings and prestige depend on success,

4. Then social standing (which reflects earnings and prestige) will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people.

Herrnstein then details five corollaries from this, which can be summarized as follows: