Burt was a Kantian who believed that “primitive races” were unable to acquire civilization and that slum dwellers and the Irish were innately inferior. His work on the correlation between IQ scores of identical twins raised apart and those raised together was proven to be patently fraudulent (Kamin 1974; Brace 2005). Known cases of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart are extremely rare. There had been only three published studies of this kind before Burt’s.
