JOHN C. LOEHLIN, JOSEPH M. HORN, ROBERT SCHULTZ, NAFTALI RAZ, AND J. MICHAEL BAILEY

to: J. M. biley. Dqmtment of Psydmlogy, Nath- Univereity, Evanston, IL

- l4m: 323-328 copyi@01997byAbbx IS!m 01a2896

324 SOME FRIENDS-LOEHLIN, HORN, SCHULTZ, RAZ, AND BAILEY

Lee Willerman was born in Chicago on July 26,1939; he died suddenly of a heart attack in Austin, Texas, on the evening of January 10,1997, at the age of 57. His death was an event that staggered all who knew him-we had all believed, he had many exciting and produc- tive years of work ahead of him. He left a wife, Ben&, to whom he had been married for almost 35 years, two grown daughters, Raquel and Amiel, two living older brothers, and many grieving friends, colleagues, and former and present students.

Lee grew up in tough neighborhoods in Chicago, the youngest of four sons of poor immigrant parents from Russia. He seems to have resisted his academic calling for some time: at age 16 he turned down a scholarship offer from the University of Chicago to con- centrate on his skills as a pool player and yo-yo demonstrator. Later he left Roosevelt University during his sophomore year to travel the world on a Danish freighter and write novels. He soon found this life to be less romantic than he had supposed, and returned to college, where he met his future wife. He received his BA degree from Roosevelt Univer- sity in 196 1, and he and Ben& were married in 1%2. He obtained his MA from Roosevelt in 1964 and his PhD from Wayne State University in 1967.

Then came three Washington years as a Research Psychologist at the National Insti- tutes of Health, where he was involved with the Collaborative Perinatal Project. This was followed by a post-doctoral year at Ann Arbor in the Department of Human Genet- ics at the University of Michigan. In the fall of 1971 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained, except for a visiting semester in 1983 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At Texas, he rose steadily throu& the academic ranks. At the time of his death he was Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Regents Professor of Clin- ical Psychology.

SCIENTIFIC coNTR.iBuTIoNs

Lee was interested in everything, always full of ideas, and ready to set up a research col- laboration at the drop of a hat. He was dazzlingly diverse. The main thrust of his research work over the years, however, was to relate behavior in one way or another to its biological underpinnings. Lee was an unapologetic reductionist, never sat&ed with a purely psycho- logical explanation of behavior. He attacked the problem of individual dif&rences on many levels, and his quest for answers took him to domains as diverse as neouatology and socio- biology. r

From early on Lee wa5 interested in intelligence, and how it was related to both genetic and environmesual factors. Hi5 first published paper was on one of the latter-it concerned the effect on IQ of biiweight dlf&rences between identical twins: the twin who was heavier at birth tended to be higher in IQ later on (Willerman & Churchill, 1967).

Lee liked data that had dramatic implications and promised to yield crucial insights. ln this category are his papers on retinoblastoma, a genetically-caused eye tumor that causes blindness, but may be associated with elevated IQ (Leavitt, Rosenbaum, Willeiman, & Leavitt, 1972), and his paper in Science on the IQs of children from interracial matings (Willerman, Naylor, & Myrianthopoulos, 1970). Mixed-race children whose mothers were white had higher average IQs than mixed-race children whose mothers were black, which was interpreted as suggesting an environmental rather than a genetic source of the d&f&r- ence. Also from this period was his work on the interaction of social class and IQ development. He found that in lower social classes being retarded in development at 8

LEE WILLERMAN (1939-1 BB7) 325

months had decidedly more severe implications for later IQ than in higher social classes (Willerman, Broman, & Fiedler, 1970).

Among other topics in this area that caught Lee’s attention were intellectual precocity (Willerman & Fiedler, 1974), maternal effects (Willerman & Stafford, 1972), language impairment (Byrne, Willerman, & Ashmore, 1974), sex differences (Turner dz Willerman, 1977), and a study in progress on myopia and IQ. Lee’s contribution to the Texas Adoption Project is discussed separately below.

A number of Lee’s more recent research projects on intelligence share his dual empha- ses on a link to lower level (especially biological) processes and a search for the dramatic rather than the routine result. One such example was his foray into information processing foundations of intelligence. One look at a textbook picture of masking curves sent him and his students onto a line of research that resulted in delineating contributions of individual differences in basic sensory information processing to intelligence (Raz, Willerman, Ing- mundson, & Hanlon, 1983; Raz, Willerman, & Yama, 1987). These studies linked IQ to processing time required to make apparently simple perceptual discriminations and dem- onstrated that IQ cannot merely reflect higher level cognitive strategies.

In the late 1980s Lee became convinced that the new neuroimaging technologies of CT and MRI would permit the discovery of fundamental brain mechanisms and character- istics responsible for individual differences in intelligence. Armed with the knowledge that the amount of connective wiring in the brain (the white matter) increased in extent across phylogeny, he embarked on a study of neuroanatomical predictors of intelligence. Although his initial idea of increased connectivity between brain modules of the more intellectually gifted is probably incorrect, this research serendipitously revealed a moder- ate association between overall brain size and intelligence (Willerman, Schultz, Rutledge, & Bigler, 1991). This work has been replicated many times since, and it has helped revital- ize interest in the biological bases of intelligence. At the time of his death Lee and his ex- student Robert Schultz, were completing revisions on Lee’s magnum opus on this topic, ‘The Physical Basis of Psychometric g and Primary Abilities” (Willerman & Schultz, under review). They propose that psychometric g is a function of correlated processing capabilities across structurally independent brain modules, especially those contributing to the central executive, and- that neural mass is fundamental to general and specialized abilities.

Lee’s interests were by no means confined to the topic of intelligence-he also did important work in the areas of personality and psychopathology. One example of the former was his notion that we ought to measure personality as we do ability, in terms of maximal rather than typical performance-we should find out how extraverted a person can be, not just how extraverted he or she usually is (Willerman, Turner, & Peterson, 1976). Typical of the work on psychopathology are the ongoing studies of Lee and his stu- dents involving the microscopically visible network of capillaries at the base of people’s fingernails. A tangled pattern of these had been shown to be associated with a predisposi- tion to the development of schizophrenia. Lee’s hypothesis was that this reflected a capillary fragility that might be present in the central nervous system as well, and allow the leakage of free radicals into the brain. We don’t yet know whether this hypothesis is true or not, but-typical of Willerman-it is surely an interesting idea.

326 SOME FRIENDS-LOEHLIN, HORN, SCHULTZ, RAZ, AND BAILEY

The Texas Adoptian Project

When Lee’s colleague Joe Horn discovered a Texas home for unwed mothers where the residents had routinely been given IQ and personality tests, Lee and John Loeblin were promptly recruited, and the Texas Adoption Project was born. An adoption study is a Row- erful design for untangling genetic and environmental influences on a trait, and Lee loved powerful designs.

The project involved giving IQ and personality tests to the members of 300 families that had adopted childmn as infants from this home. Thus Lee and his colleagues were able to study resemblances between the birth mothers and the children with whom they had had no contact since at most a few days after birth, and between biologically related and bio- logically unrelated members of the adoptive families-made possible because in quite a few of the families the parents had one or more biological children of their own in addition to an adopted child or children.

The children have so far been studied twice-once at the time of the initial study, when they averaged about 8 years old (although spanning a range of ages), and again, roughly ten years later, when most of them were late adolescents or young adults.

The results with regard to IQ were straightforward enough to delight even a Willer- man. The adoptive childtens’ IQs resembled those of their birth mothers, whom they had never seen, more than they did those of their adoptive mothers, with whom they had lived all their lives. Biologically unrelated children reared as siblings (pairs of adopted children in the same home, or an adopted and a biological child) resembled one another to some degree at the time of the first testing, when they were still children, but by the time of the second testing, when most of them were late adolescents or young adults, these cormlations had dropped essentially to zero. That is, children who grew up together but who did not share a genetic resemblance were somewhat similar in their measured IQs when they were young, but by late adolescence their genetic differences had expressed themselves, and they were as different as any two randomly-selected members of the (somewhat restricted) population to which they belonged.

About a dozen papers and chapters from the Texas Adoption Project have reported results for intelligence and abilities, including Lee’s paper on the influence of families, published in American Psychologist (Willerman, 1979b). Two other papers that illustrate the typical Willerman focus on generalizing the findings are Willerman, Horn, and Loehlin (1977) and Willerman, Loehlin, and Horn (1979). The former showed that the results extended to academic achievement (the Wide Range Achievement Test) as well as IQ. The latter looked at a component of intelligence, processing speed.

At the time of Lee’s death another round of follow-ups of the adoptive children, now adults, was in the planning stages. His colleagues expect to go forward with the project, but at every step of the way will sorely miss Lee’s energy, enthusiasm, and l$ight ideas.

TEACHER AND TE.XTBOOK CONTRIBUTION

Lee wrote The Psychology of Individual and Group Differences in 1979(a), and it is still in regdar use. Student response to the book is mixed the good ones like it and the bad ones think it is hard to follow. This never surprised or disappointed Lee; he relished it.

LEE WILLEFMAN (1939-l 997) 327

Contrary to what many book publishers want today, Lee always wrote up to the level of the subject matter, never down to the lowest common denominator of student. He also told the truth as he knew it. This had costs, but Lee didn’t care. And he was consistent. In his book, Psychopathology, written with David Cohen (19!30), they maintained their integ- rity and refused to cater to disproven theories in order to secure the widest possible market for their text. The result was not a best seller; but it was, and still is, the best textbook on the topic.

Lee wrote and taught more about intelligence than about any other of the many topics he studied. The chapters on intelligence in his textbook are comprehensive, erudite, and courageous. Implications are taken seriously; the reader is pushed to confront the facts and what they entail for both policy and future research. Lee not only asked his readers to do this but lived by these considerations in his own professional life. He saw the future and educated himself to be a part of it, as his recent research studies on intelligence have shown.

THEMAN

Lee was a highly effective mentor, who motivated his students by insuring that their studies were stimulating enough that they, and he, would want to know their results. He was quite flexible in terms of topics he would supervise, but was helpfully blunt about the value of research questions students were considering. He challenged students to think critically and tackle questions fundamental to the core of human nature, and he outwardly showed his impatience with ideas and pursuits which he regarded as “pedestrian” or misguided. Lee conveyed a sense of intellectual excitement that was contagious and he imparted in his students a sense of intellectual integrity, ambition and passion for the truth.

He invested heavily in his students. Manuscript drafts would be returned within 24 hours, dense with corrections. (In contrast to his speaking style, Lee preferred terse writing, preferring to let the data speak for themselves.) He continued to be a tough editor and critic for several of his former students, well into their academic careers.

Lee modeled, for both students and colleagues, the consummate academic who loved ideas and hence his job. It was difficult to have a long conversation with Lee that did not wander back to one of his scientific obsessions-especially in recent years, general intelli- gence. He attended nearly all colloquia, after which he was usually the first to ask a question, always a good one, and most often having to do with general intelligence (even at a social psychology talk). We cannot imagine a place where g was as discussed as fre- quently or enthusiastically as at Texas during Lee’s tenure.

Lee was a wonderful person-sympathetic, erudite, entertaining. He was an intellec- tual enthusiast, always full of new and exciting information. Those of us who had had lunch with him literally thousands of times always looked forward to the next such occa- sion. Lee liked fancy words: said “lacunae” as naturally as most of us would say “gaps.” He was Scrabble champion of Austin one year, and was also a passionate devotee of temiis and racquetball, in which there was relatively little risk of his ever becoming champion of anything-although not according to him. But that was Lee.

His personal charm and his wide-ranging interests made him an important figure in the department and in the wider community. His death brought forth an outpouring of tributes. He will be missed by everyone W$I knew him; life will definitely have an enduring lacuna.

328 SOME FRIENDB-LOEHLIN, HORN, SCHULTZ, RAZ, AND BAILEY

REFERENCES

Byrne, B.M., Wikrman, L., & Ashmore, L.L. (1974). Severe and moderate language impairment: Evidence for distinctive etiologies. Behavior Genettcs, 4.331-345.

Leavitt, E.A., Rosenbaum, A.L., WilIerman, L.. & Leavitt, M. (1972). InteBigence of patients with retinobbtstoma and their siblings. Child Development, 43,939-948.

Rax, N., Willerman, L., Ingmundson, P., & Hanlon, M. (1983). Aptitude-related differences in auditory backward recognition masking. Intelligence, 7,71-90.

Raz, N., Willerman, L., & Yama, M. (1987). On sense and senses: Intelligence and auditory information proceasing. Personality and Individual Dt~erences, 8,201-210.

Turner, R.G., & Willerman, L. (1977). Sex differences in WAIS item performance. Journal @ Clinical Psychology, 33,795-798,

Willerman, L. (1979a). The psychology of individual and group differences. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Willerman, L. (1979b). Effects of families on intellectual development. American Psychologist, 34,923-929. Willerman, L., Broman, S.H., Br Fiedler, M. (1970). Infant development, pre-school IQ, and social class. Child

Development, 41,69-77. Willerman, L. & Churchill, J.A. (1967). Birthweight and intelligence in identical twins. Child Development, 38,

623-630. Willerman, L. & Cohen, D.B. (1990). Psychoputhology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Willenuan, L. & Fiedler, M. (1974). Infant performance and intellectual precocity. Child Development, 45,383-

386. Willerman, L., Horn, J.M., & Loehlin, J.C. (1977). The aptitude-achievement test distinction: A study of

unrelated children reared together. Behavior Generics, 7,465+470. Willerman, L., loehhn, J.C., & Horn, J.M. (1979). Parental problem-solving speed as a correlate of intelligence

in patenta and their adopted and natural children. Journal of Eabcational Psychology, 71,627-634. Willerman, L., Naylor, A.F., & Myrianthopoulos, N.C. (1970). Intellectual development of children from

interracial matings. Science, 170.1329-133 1. Willerman, L., & Schultz, R.T. (under review). The physical basis of psychometric g and primary abilities. Willerman, L., Schultz R., Rutledge, J.N., L Bigler, E.D. (1991). In vivo brain sire and intelligence. intelligence,

15,223-228. Willerman, L. & Stafford, R.E. (1972). Maternal effects on intellectual functioning. Behavior Genetics, 4,321-

325. Willerman, L., Turner, R.G., & Peterson, M. (1967). A comparison of the predictive validity of typical and

maximal personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, IO, 482-492.