Nascent Doubts May Presage Conceptual Clarity: Reply to Surbey

Article: It is difficult for anyone to acknowledge that an idea he or she has been leaching may be invalid. I faced this situation several years ago and, after a period of vacillation, concluded that heritability analysis, the dominant paradigm in behavioural genetics, was not merely weak at its foundations but actively misleading to the nonspecialist; hence, it ought to be relegated to the history of science along with phlogiston, penis envy and cold fusion. During a postdoctoral fellowship year with McClearn and DeFries at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado in 1968-69, I eagerly absorbed the lessons of Falconer and my mentors, who were foremost authorities on heritability analysis. These lessons were acquired easily because mathematically they were so similar to the classic rendition of the analysis of variance presented by Hays and Winer, the stans6cal gurus of psychology graduate students in that period.