Psychology's Master Strategist:

In September 1994, Raymond B. Cattell was honored at the "Human Cognitive Abilities," a conference given in his honor. The conference was sponsored by The Jefferson Psychometric Laboratory, The Riverside Publishing Company of Chicago, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The conference was called to honor Cattell for his "lifetime achievements in the study of human abilities."

Dr. Cattell was introduced by one of his closet students, Dr. John Horn: "He has been psychology's master strategist. ... He has put forth a theory of human behavior rivaled in comprehension only by the theory of Freud, and rivaled by no other theory in its adherence to evidence derived from careful research. He must rank among the 20th Century's most influential behavioral scientists."

These are excerpts from Dr. Cattell's keynote speech:

"Among humans there is about a .3 or .4 correlation between measured head size and intelligence. This has been much questioned but it is confirmed recently in a very satisfactory way." . . .

"A talk on intelligence will not be complete without a quick glance at social implications." . . .

"In an (era?) interested in sexist implications, for example, we want to know if males and females differ in intelligence. The answer is a definite no. Though there has been a curious indication in the Negro race that the women tend to be slightly more intelligent that the men." . . .

"A matter of more immediate concern is the distribution of ability by classes and any indication of change over time, for example, it has been known since H? (Herron?) measured it in 1900 that the birth rate decreases with higher social status." . . .

"I remember an old song that went 'the rich get richer and the poor get children.' (laughter) So the relation being with social status it seems to me important to establish it with intelligence. So in 1935 I took 10,000 children in England...." [he describes in detail his 1935 study of the relationship between intelligence and social class. Basically, he shows that high IQ parents have few children, low IQ parents have many children.] . . .

With the heredity of G sub f  being about 80% "This points to alarming conclusions which I predicted in 1936 in the form of the decline of school standards, an increase of violent crime, and a permanent unemployment at the unskilled level." . . .

"The prejudice against heredity is a problem in handling this... Both Jensen and my friend Eysenck in England have actually been physically attacked by apparently left wing student groups when they lecture on heredity and intelligence." . . .

"We see during the 19th century a widespread application to human life of the advances in the physical sciences -- the whole industrial Revolution with the great application of the physical sciences." . . .

"We now face a quite different problem in the acceptance of the results of psychological science and its impact upon privacy and upon pre-psychological political ideas." . . .

"In the recent years reasoning has been unable to keep up with the experimental findings in physics - in atomic physics, for example, Schroeder and ??? have spoken of the indeterminacy principle and they said, 'well G*d plays dice.' Thereupon, Einstein replied - 'no G*d doesn't play dice. He is always subtle, but he is not uh, uh, uh, anti-science.' Unfortunately, Einstein died before reaching his uniform theory." . . .

"But what we are finding is we don't have the brains to understand something beyond our common experience. And the only real advance in science, I maintain, is going to occur through the breeding for brain size and not intelligence." . . .

"Enormities this huge I call Beyondism. It admits that much of mankind is obsolete and that continuing the past course of evolution from Australopithecus and Cro-Magnon -- we need to go beyond ourselves." . . .

(These were his last words. There was polite applause from the audience and a few questions were raised regarding his data set and analytic technique. No one commented on the Hitlarian dimensions of his sweeping call for a massive worldwide eugenic campaign).

Note: It is clear from Cattell's presentation that he and Hitler share a vision. Cattell predicted as early as 1936 that unemployment and violence would become endemic because much of the human race is simply obsolete. Both he and Hitler shared a dream of creating through eugenics a new human with a larger brain.

But what shall we do with the billions of "obsolete humans" as the rich get richer and the poor get children?

Cattell's answer:

"Eugenics is the most humane way to permit Evolution without allowing many short and miserable lives to be sacrificed. ... It demands, it is true, an educated control of reproduction, especially in the lower social classes. This is where politics meets its challenge. For large numbers of voters, in the 70 to 100 IQ range, have no conception that sexual control is part of citizenship." (Beyondists April 1994. p. 1) . . .