Customer Reviews

Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to THE BELL CURVE (Statistics for Social Science and Public Policy)

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This book has 25 scientific contributors, ostensibly to answer for the Carnegie Commission Task Force on Early Primary Education the question whether the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 had any scientific merit. This book takes a look at the dataset and reanalyzes much of what Herrnstein and Murry had looked at.

Though it brings more perspectives on the subject, and takes issue with much of what TBC concluded, it does vindicate that TBC is now a serious beginning look at intelligence, genetics, and its impact on the nation. This book says, as so many other researchers have contended, "The Bell Curve is a serious book and is not to be ignored."

However, when reading the book, which I recommend for anyone that is very familiar with the subject, remember that of the 25 contributors, only John B. Carroll was also a signatory to "Mainstream Science on Intelligence: 52 scientists respond to The Bell Curve (12/13/1994) in the Wall Street Journal." This book is put together primarily by left-leaning academics. To balance its message, I would strongly recommend reading Arthur Jensen's book The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability. So again, read this book but keep in mind it is highly biased.

This book was written as a response to the 1994 book "The Bell Curve" by Herrnstein and Murray. But unlike several other books that condemned TBC without any empirical data, this book actually does expand the issue of racial differences intelligence and is well worth reading by any one interested in this ongoing debate. At least in this book, while still motivated by an egalitarian goal to deny racial differences in intelligence, the authors do give TBC credit for being essentially a very sound book empirically, while picking away at some of the issues at its periphery. But as they do this, they also make many fundamental errors and omissions. This is to be expected however because TBC is very hard to refute on empirical grounds alone.

As an example, the authors take TBC to task for using heritability in the broad sense rather in the narrow sense like breeders do, which reduces the heritability between races supposedly by about 20% or so. The problem is, as shown by Jensen in "The g Factor", heritability in the broad sense should be used in comparing group averages, while heritability in the narrow sense should be used in predicting the expected intelligence of one's children. TBC was not a book on how to have smart kids or breeding cows for higher butter fat production. So the argument was a feeble attempt at obfuscation.

Later in the book they admit that Blacks almost make as much money as Whites when wages are adjusted for the average difference in intelligence between the two groups. But they go on to say that "almost" is not good enough. The error here of course, as even they argue in this book, is that earnings are not just a matter of intelligence. It is the most important trait with regards to wages, but other traits are also important. Research has shown that conscientiousness is the second most important behavioral trait after intelligence in occupational success, and one would have to assume that conscientiousness would vary among racial groups as easily as intelligence due to evolutionary forces on selection under different ecological conditions. And Rushton has shown that many behavioral differences exist between Whites and Blacks on average, including conscientiousness.

So this book is a mixed bag on not denying that there are differences in the average intelligence between Blacks and Whites while trying at the same time to ameliorate the damage that recent research has produced showing that the differences are in fact real and persistent. But the funding for this book was such that the authors had no choice but to use some very fancy footwork to dance around the primary issue and try to diffuse its impact with regards to education and equality. Politics always comes into play, depending on who is paying the piper.

This book is heavy stuff. It was written in a style similar to articles published in scientific journals. The opinions and views are drawn based on science and prior studies with thorough references. This book is not for the casual reader who is interested in the topic, but only wants to spend a few hours on it and hopes to walk away with a clearly understanding of the facts or the views of the experts.

When The Bell Curve first came out, I predicted that, 200 years from now, university professors would use it, along with the collapse of the iron curtain, to mark the end of "the Socialist Epoch" or "the Egalitarian Age," which I suppose, to make a nice round number, they will have in their textbooks as 1789-1989. Now I'm even more convinced. In fact, nothing could possibly better confirm the essential validity of the Bell Curve's claims than the fact, behind all the self-fueling sound and fury it provoked, and behind the holier-than-thou pretentions to be "debunking," "refuting," and "flattening" the Bell Curve, the careful reader cannot help but notice a striking absence of real, substantive objections to it. Instead, the supposed objections are either opposed to something the Bell Curve never said (and indeed, explicitly denied), or else they tend to try to nit-pick without actually disagreeing. Indeed, with Cafalli-Sforza's lead, we see a new formula emerging. If you are involved in writing up some potentially politically incorrect scientific research, here is what to do. First, write up the research, which, of course, largely confirms the hereditarian heresy (which most people have always known, or secretly suspected, anyway). Then, decorate the outside of the package with a lot of ostentatious window dressing which, ingenuously, implies that your book "flattens" the evil heresy. That ought to keep YOUR head out of the noose! Besides, it makes the reviewers much more likely praise you, and sells more copies too. If your conscience bothers you, you can salve it with the thought that there is surely SOME version of the evil heresy which your arguments really DO oppose, even if this is just a straw man, i.e., some 100% hereditarian determinism which nobody, and certainly not the ("40-60%") Bell Curve authors, has ever actually held. The only thing that surprises me is the fact that the media and publishing world falls for this sham. I guess the relatively moderate Murray and Herrnstein have simply been designated the official targets of popular wrath, if only because they came out FIRST. And perhaps everybody else, from the most heretical hereditarian to the most orthodox Marxist, has an interst in keeping it that way.

We are all taught as little children to make a distinction between two fundamental issues.

#1. What IS the world like.

#2. What SHOULD the world be like.

What IS? What Should be? They are essentially totally two different questions.

The USA has about two (2) million people in prison.
In an ideal world, the USA should have no one in prison.
Wal-Mart pays low wages. Wal-Mart should pay wages of $50-$100 per hour.

All peoples should have equal IQ. False.
The reality is that IQ in distributed in a "natural distribution" in the form of a bell curve.

All races should have equal IQ. False.

Whites are centered at 100 (one hundred) on IQ test. Jews and East Asians have generally tested higher than 100.

Blacks and Hispanics have tested around 85 (IQ eighty-five). Sub-saharan Africans have tested around 70 (IQ seventy). That is just the results of decades of IQ testing. In an ideal world, all races would test equally at IQ 100. The truth is that different groups test at differently. True. We could wish the truth to be different, but the facts are the facts.

IQ is highly critical in all areas of success in life be it on the job, school, crime, income, ability to reason, think, plan and experiment.

IQ is constant throughout an individual's life. Inidividuals tested at age 10 will attain same results at age 70.
Researcher have found IQ is highly inherited at about 80%. It about 80% inherited and 20% cultural.

The facts in the book are not new. IQ test and IQ results have existed for over a hundred years. The gap in IQ scores among whites-blacks have been known for over a hundred years. Anyone who has taken a basic psychology class know about the basic facts of the Bell Curve.

What's the reason for writing or having such a book. It all about the Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the Truth. As adults we must accept the world for what IT IS. We must learn to live in reality.

Many do not like the facts or findings of the Bell Curve, but facts are facts, the Truth is just the Truth. We should not fear the Truth, hide aways from the Truth and search the Truth as the ultimate goal of all science.

if this book makes the claim that race doesn't exist, I hope that everybody can see right through that (although at least one fellow reviewer seems to accept everything he's told, as long as it fits with the egalitarian myth). Here's a little example that everyone ought to understand.

My aunt and uncle have a mixed-breed dog: a chihuahua crossed with a dachshund. This dog has a dachshund-like body and a chihuahua-like face, and is very nervous and skittish like a chihuahua. Does the fact that this dog is a mixed breed, keep us from concluding that there does in fact exist the breed "chihuahua" and the breed "dachshund", each of which has its own distinctive shape, coloring, and personality traits?

This is what people are claiming: that because there are lots of mixed-race people in America, then race doesn't exist. This has got to be the dumbest argument I've ever heard. And "no biological basis for race" -- so, I guess that melanin all comes from one's environment? These arguments are so dumb, it's no wonder that regular people never question them. It's a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

This book is fantastic for the layperson that was swayed by the misuse of psychometrics in science. These authors evince clearly that there is no biological concept of race. Any effort to compare races is simply false beacause even anthropolgists and biologists cannot decide the cutoff point in races.So why do psychologists put people in categories that do not even exist? Ideology.The authors of the Bell Curve have no way to define the boundaries of race- even so there is no such thing as racial purity. In America 20% of whites have black ancestry. Unless psychologists can clearly delineate where races end and begin, books like the Bell Curve have no scientific legitimacy.