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John C. Loehlin

John Clinton Loehlin (born 1926) is an American behavior geneticist and psychology and computer science professor emeritus. Loehlin has served as president of the Behavior Genetics Association and of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology.

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He received an A.B. in English from Harvard in 1947, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. He was on active service in the United States Naval Reserve in 1951-53 during the Korean war. He taught at the University of Nebraska from 1957 to 1964, taking a position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has remained until retirement.

Loehlin's research has chiefly focused on the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in normal human personality traits and abilities; he has also been concerned with racial differences and with computer modeling. He has been involved in several twin family, and adoption studies, notably the Texas Adoption Project with Joseph M. Horn and Lee Willerman.

He has also written on race and intelligence. He was a Director of the American Eugenics Society from 1968 to 1974, at a time when this society had already moved away from eugenics and towards the study of medical genetics, behavioural genetics, and social biology. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which defended the findings on race and intelligence in The Bell Curve. ^[1]

In 1995, he was on an American Psychological Association task force writing a consensus statement on the state of intelligence research in response to the claims being advanced amid the Bell Curve controversy, titled "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns."

Selected publications

Loehlin, J. C. (1968). Computer models of personality. New York: Random House.
Loehlin, J. C., Lindzey, G., & Spuhler, J. N. (1975). Race differences in intelligence. San Francisco: Freeman.
Loehlin, J. C., & Nichols, R. C. (1976). Heredity, environment, and personality: A study of 850 sets of twins. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Loehlin, J. C. (1987). Latent variable models: An introduction to factor, path, and structural analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Loehlin, J. C. (1992). Genes and environment in personality development. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.