Talk:The Kallikak Family

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I found this article hitting "Random page". Although it is an interesting article, it does need a small amout of work to clean of some POV. For example saying "torn to shreds", when "discredited" could have been used. I will try to come back later and do some NPOV edits, but it may take awhile. gK 02:39, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] deleted this part

To criticize Goddard for not realizing these methodological flaws in 1912 is likely missing the point, however. At the time, Goddard's methodology was as cutting edge as anything else in the field of human heredity, because there simply was little or no methodology to work from. It is easy at the beginning of the 21st century to criticize Goddard for failing to take proper account of environmental effects (nutrition and other dietary deficiencies, for example), but such knowledge was not known in his time and certainly had not been discussed on a scale that it is now.

That's pure opinion and has no room in this entry. The fact is that had Goddard looked past his bias, he could easily have found poverty and malnutrition to be the root of the family's troubles. He was way too eager to put forward his racist and elitist viewpoints without any due dilligence on other possibilities.

[edit] Recent study

I found this article to be interesting, as I discovered it in relation to studying Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Two recent articles by Karp suggest that the Kallikak families members likely had FASD due to prenatal alcohol exposure, which could have also plausibly contributed to their conditions in addition to poverty and such. I would like to add that recent perspective into the article, as well as a link to FASD. MLHarris 15:53, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Modern research into the family not reflected in the article

In the last few decades, several researchers have identified the Kallikaks and have done follow-up studies on the family, and they've come to the conclusion that Goddard greatly exaggerated the problems of the "bad" branch of the family, and that the genealogical research used for the book was deeply flawed. The first was J. David Smith and his book Minds Made Feeble, which is mentioned in the Further Reading section. Smith was apparently the first one to identify the family, but he chose not disclose their identity in the book. An article in the April 1994 issue of The American Genealogist by Shirley Garton Straney publicly "outed" the family for the first time. Straney was also very critical of Goddard. Then in 2001, a book about the family of which the Kallikaks were a part argued that Martin Kallikak Jr. was not the illegitimate son of Martin Sr., but a second cousin who happened to have the same name; the authors claim that Goddard's assistant Elizabeth Kite misnterpreted an ambiguous statement by Martin Jr.'s elderly granddaughter to mean that the two Martins were father and son. I think all of that material is relevant to the article, but since it's pretty much all in print, without a lot on the web, it might be tricky to integrate it in to the article. Also, there's the question of whether the real identity of the Kallikaks should be mentioned. Smith didn't mention it because he wanted to protect the family's privacy. Straney identified the real names of the family members in the footnotes of her article, but kept the pseudonyms used by Goddard in the main text. The authors of the family history book actually included a complete list of the names Goddard used in the book and their real life counterparts. I'm very new at editing Wikipedia, I just think this article seems incomplete without the newer information but I don't really know how it ought to be added. Ideas?66.166.250.29 (talk) 03:04, 28 January 2008 (UTC)