Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt (3 March 1883 – 10 October 1971) was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics.

Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ and his theories that the “best people” gave rise to the “best” children (cleverest). He created a storm

Remember this was in the days of sniveling socialism, when everybody HAD to equal everybody else and it was not PC to even suggest people from poorer families might not actually be that smart.

In 1942, Burt was elected President of the British Psychological Society and in 1946 became the first British psychologist to be knighted for his contributions to psychological testing and, ironically, for making educational opportunities more widely available, despite his critics.

Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence supposedly emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Some scholars have asserted that Burt did not commit intentional fraud.

More importantly, modern science is starting to back what he said. There was no fraud by Burt; only his critics lied and deliberately tarnished his reputation.

New research indicates that Burt was in fact correct. Up to half of human intelligence can be explained by genetics. There isn’t some big “smart gene” but it relies on the expression of quite a number of genes.

We needn’t go into the biology here. The point is that the smart set really are likely to have smart kids and this truth matters more than socialist agendas.

The researchers found that approximately half of individual differences in intelligence can be explained by genetics and across a great variety of genes. In fact, as the lead researcher explained, this is likely to be an UNDER-estimate, since they could only detect variation that is correlated with common DNA markers.

[SOURCE: Aug. 12, 2011, Molecular Psychiatry]