The Terman Family: Proof that IQ and heredity are frauds

Glancing at the comments on a Salon article on IQ testing:

politicalrealist3 23 hours ago 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote of the problems with IQ tests in "Outliers".  In the 1920s, Stanford psychology professor Lewis Terman thought the IQ test was the answer to predicting what would happene in people's lives.  He devoted his life to the concept.  He managed to track the children who had scored in the highest percentiles for decades. He thought their high IQs would predict their success.   

It didn't.  Only a tiny percentage of Terman's High IQ children excelled. Many were complete failures in life.  None were Nobel prize winners. Ironically, in California two children who DID win the Nobel prize were not a part of his group because their IQs were not high enough. 

I've run through this history before, but it's so ironic that it's worth repeating. 

One of the two Nobelists who just missed Terman's cut-off was physicist William Shockley. Shockley is often called "the father of Silicon Valley" because so many of the silicon chip firms were founded by lieutenants he recruited to work at Shockley Semiconductor, such as Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, founders of Intel. 

So, obviously, this proves that Louis Terman's obsession with IQ and heredity was pseudo-science.

And yet, Shockley didn't think so: as a Stanford professor in the 1960s and 1970s, he was a notorious advocate of the heritability of IQ. 

But that raises other questions, such as why was Shockley hired as a Stanford professor after he washed out as an entrepreneur by alienating his employees? And was Shockley really the father of Silicon Valley? After all, HP and a number of other Stanford-connected high-tech firms were flourishing there before Shockley arrived from Bell Labs.

The other candidate for the title of father of Silicon Valley is Stanford's dean of engineering Fred Terman, who mentored future entrepreneurs like Hewlett and Packard, and developed the military-industrial-academic-entrepreneurial complex on Stanford land that he leased to his former students. 

Fred Terman hired his buddy Shockley for Stanford. 

And Fred Terman was the son of Louis Terman, the inventor of the famous Stanford-Binet IQ test.

Of course, we now know that the Termans, father and son, and Shockley were totally wrong about everything, which is why nobody today at Stanford or in Silicon Valley ever worries about how smart anybody is. Hence, Stanford or Google just admit or hire applicants at random.