Just when the world seems poised to boil over with political rancor and outrage, along comes Charles Murray — right on time — with a new book titled “Human Diversity.”
Yes, that Charles Murray, who in 1994 co-authored “The Bell Curve,” with Richard J. Herrnstein, arguing in two notorious chapters that I.Q. differences between the races were mostly innate and mostly intractable. (They allowed that environmental factors play a part in I.Q., but held that the “balance of the evidence” put a genetic factor of 60 percent “on the low side.”) Social programs like welfare or early education intervention ought to be scrapped not only because they were fruitless but because they encouraged women with low I.Q. (“the wrong women”) to have more children. These “findings” were presented as good news: Why should intellectual achievement be considered the hallmark of success? Why should black people interpret this neutral data as a statement of their inferiority? No, the authors maintained, with breathtaking condescension: They will develop their own alternate sources of esteem; they might, for example, console themselves with their athletic “dominance.”
In the years since its publication, the book has been roundly discredited on moral, political and scientific grounds. Reviewing “The Bell Curve” in The New Yorker, Stephen Jay Gould called attention to the authors’ questionable use of statistics and cherry-picked data. Peer reviews found shoddy reasoning and mathematical errors (all in service of the book’s thesis). There have been debates about what I.Q. really measures (other than the ability to take I.Q. tests), and whether an individual’s I.Q. is as relatively unchangeable as the authors claimed.
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