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During his lifetime Burt’s standpoint and conclusions were often criticized, especially where they concerned heredity and its influence on mental traits. His 1966 paper on twins, for example, was at once challenged. Stott (1966) argued that Burt’s conceptual framework was not the only one which could be fitted to the data, and suggested that the observed differences could be ascribed to motivational rather than cognitive factors; Lewis (1966) considered that insufficient attention had been paid to the environment in which the twins had been raised, and doubted whether the conditions had been sufficiently different in the case of the twins reared apart to justify confident conclusions. But both critics accepted the data as genuine, and neither suggested that Burt had been careless or incompetent, still less that he had been dishonest. It was only his interpretations which they questioned. The points they raised might equally have been made about the twin research conducted by others. Indeed, Burt’s kinship correlations were sufficiently similar to those reported earlier (for instance, Newman et al. 1937) for them to be generally accepted as genuine; and leading writers such as Jensen (for example, 1969 , 1970 ) and Eysenck (for example, 1973b) treated Burt’s work as wholly reliable.
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