April 7, 2026

APPLIED DARWINISM:

The Creator of the SAT Was an Infamous Eugenicist (Jake Currie, April 6, 2026, Nautilus)

Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.

During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.

During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.

Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.

Never “just trust the science.”