Writing on Bryan Caplan's argument at Econlib about the significance of IQ for policy matters, Tyler Cowen notes
The historical correlation between IQ research and anti-egalitarian social engineering is not a complete accident.
I have the same worry; much of the work that David Levy and I did for The Vanity of the Philosopher is about the anti-egalitarian (we call it hierarchical; sometimes we call it racist) social engineering that became so important in late in the 19th and early in the 20th centuries. David Levy and I have an article in the European Journal of Political Economy on how prejudice infected statistical much of the statistical analysis that was used to support eugenic policy. Here's the abstract.
We have so many eugenics images that it's hard to choose what to post. This one's unusual and speaks volumes for later eugenic policy. (Sir) Francis Galton, who founded eugenics (along with W. R. Greg), conducted early work on composite photography, trying to identify (say) a "criminal" or a "Jewish" type. Here's an example:
