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Pseudonym for a family involved in a psychological study of the hereditary aspects of intelligence.

The history of intelligence testing in the United States has been troublesome from the beginning. Although psychologists attempted to conduct legitimate research and apply psychological knowledge to the study of intelligence, some of the early work was quite unscientific and led to dubious results.

One case involved the descendants of an anonymous man referred to as Martin Kallikak. This man produced two different lines of descent, one with a supposedly "feebleminded" bar maid with whom he had had sexual relations and one with his wife, reputed to be an honest Quaker woman. The offsprings from the two women generated two lineages that could not have been more different. The pseudonym "Kallikak" was taken from two Greek...