John C. Loehlin


John Clinton Loehlin is an American behavior geneticist, computer scientist, and psychologist. Loehlin has served as president of the Behavior Genetics Association and of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. He is an ISIR lifetime achievement awardee.
He received an A.B. in English from Harvard in 1947, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. He was on active service in the United States Naval Reserve in 1951-53 during the Korean War. He taught at the University of Nebraska from 1957 to 1964, taking a position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has remained.
Formally retired, he remains active in research and publishing. His book on Latent variable models remains very popular. He is a keen poet. His son is the American author and scholar James Loehlin.
Loehlin's research has chiefly focused on the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in normal human personality traits and abilities; he has also been concerned with racial differences and with computer modeling. He has been involved in several twin family, and adoption studies, notably the Texas Adoption Project with Joseph M. Horn and Lee Willerman.
He has also written on the race and intelligence controversy. He was a Director of the American Eugenics Society from 1968 to 1974. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", a public statement written by Linda Gottfredson, published in response to popular criticism of the conclusions presented in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve. Among his PhD students are Eric Turkheimer.
In 1995, he took part in the American Psychological Association task force writing a consensus statement on the state of intelligence research in response to the claims being advanced amid the Bell Curve controversy, titled "."

Selected publications