Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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57 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book even though it is highly left-biased, January 2, 1999
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.
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61 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A second reading and a second review., January 19, 2001
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.
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89 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Methinks the lady doth pretend to protest too much., August 26, 1999
By A Customer
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.
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