Since you're reading this, I assume you're thinking of buying — or at least reading — this book. That being so, you'll probably want to read other reviews than mine. This is in principle a good idea; but having just read all of them (147 at the time of writing) I should warn you that you'll need both considerable stamina and a strong stomach: there are indeed thoughtful and informative reviews, but they are islands in a sea of drivel. By "drivel" I mean the following:
1) Reviews consisting entirely (or almost entirely) of expostulation rather than information ("racist garbage", "most important book of the 20th century")
2) Asserting what the book doesn't deny and denying what it doesn't assert.
3) Distortions of the book's content, and other disinformation, for instance:
- "the panel criticized the authors for not explaining what intelligence is" (intelligence is defined on page 4 (!) ).
- "The Bell Curve ignores bad diet" (Nutrition is explicitly dealt with on pp. 391-3).
And so on.
Many of the critics appear not merely to have misunderstood the book, but not even to have read it; amusingly, this is actually admitted in one review ("Although Head has only browsed through the book, she has seen this kind of pseudo-science before")
For myself, I found this a strange book in some ways, but only one other reviewer (Jennifer Kerns, I think the name was) touched on the reason. And that is that the book falls logically into three parts, which by their very nature are of varying reliability.
The first, and by far the largest, covers the available evidence on IQ and heredity. The second and third parts extrapolate present trends to the future (with unpleasant consequences) and make policy recommendations to deal with these projected consequences. Thus almost by definition these are on shakier ground.
- The first section, which excited by far the most controversy, is (ironically), easily on the firmest ground scientifically — as confirmed (for example) by an American Psychological Association task force explicitly set up to investigate it*; and by a letter to the Wall Street Journal by fifty-two leading psychometricians, a copy of which can be found on the Net ("Mainstream Science on Intelligence", also reprinted as an appendix in H.J. Eysenck's
Intelligence: A New Look).
It seems to me a very able summary: it defines its terms, states its assumptions, produces its evidence and argues the merits of the various theories purporting to explain it. So there's no need for you to take my word (or anyone's) as to whether the thesis is justified; the evidence and the arguments are both there; if you're capable of rational thought, you should be able to decide for yourself. And this is what I advise you to do.
- The second part envisages the potential stratification of society by intelligence into a hereditary élite and underclass. Here the authors start to part company with some (at least) of the aforementioned psychometricians. Eysenck, for instance — certainly in the "hereditarian" camp as regards IQ — writes of an earlier article in Atlantic Monthly:
"Here Herrnstein is definitely beginning to run off the rails in his predictions (...) he disregards the importance of regression, the genetic factor which causes children of very bright and very dull parents to regress towards the mean of the whole population (...) [R]egression makes it quite impossible that castes should be created which will breed true — that is, where the children will have the same IQ as their parents. Within a few generations, the differences in IQ between the children of very bright and very dull parents will have been completely wiped out." (
The Inequality of Man, ISBN 0-912736-16-X, pp.213-219)
Richard Lynn, however, disagrees, pointing out that if regression operated in all cases, then dog-breeding, and indeed evolution as a whole, would be impossible.
- The third part, the policy recommendations, is well outside my area of competence, so I offer no comment.
I should, however, like to make one further comment on other reviews, those containing the recommendation: "People wanting an honest scientific analysis of the claims of racial superiority should read Stephen Jay Gould's
The Mismeasure of Man".
Gould's writing certainly has many admirable qualities, but honesty and scientific impartiality are not conspicuous among them — for specifics, see (for example) Chapter 3 of John L. Casti's
Paradigms Lost (ISBN 0-380-71165-6). Or see J. Philippe Rushton's review of "Mismeasure", or Arthur Jensen's review ("The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons"), both of which you can find on the Web.
I've been following the debate over IQ for 40 years, and
The Mismeasure of Man has more factual errors per page than any book I've ever read.
For a critical but still rational review of Herrnstein & Murray, I suggest Thomas Sowell's from American Spectator, which can also be found on the Web ("Ethnicity and IQ").
If you want a balanced account of the IQ field, try
Intelligence: The Battle for the Mind, half of which is written by H.J. Eysenck and half by Leon Kamin, with a final rejoinder from each. The best summary I'm aware of remains, despite its age, H.J. Eysenck's
The IQ Argument (
Race, Intelligence and Education in the U.K.); but good luck getting hold of it!
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*Update 2007: I should have said that although the APA report could not (or at least did not) explicitly rebut any of Herrnstein & Murray's data, or their logic, it refused to endorse their conclusions.
I haven't changed the body of the review because that would make nonsense of the discussion in the Comments.
For a more detailed factual account of the tactics of Gould et al, I recommend Ullica Segerstrĺle's
Defenders of the Truth, although I'm not sure I'm convinced by her psychological diagnosis.
