Regarding your two articles on The Bell Curve on October 20: Your article "Heated Debate Helps Market The Bell Curve" (page B1) asserts that the book's publisher, the Free Press, tried to "fix the fight" by providing prepublication copies to likely supporters while withholding copies from likely critics. Prof. Howard Gardner of Harvard is quoted as saying, "They wanted to prevent people like me from responding before they made a big ballyhoo."

In fact, the American Enterprise Institute (where Charles Murray is a Bradley Fellow) sponsored a two-day conference on The Bell Curve several weeks before publication, inviting social scientists, psychologists and journalists representing a wide range of views on the arguments advanced in the book. Our invitations offered to pay participants' travel and lodging expenses and, by prearrangement with the Free Press, to send them bound galleys of the book immediately. I made a particular effort to attract likely critics to the conference, and invited every individual quoted in your article with the (deliberate) exception of Leon Kamin. I invited Prof. Gardner in August, two months before the book's publication date and just as the bound galleys had become available; he declined by letter dated Aug. 24. I should add that I sent the book to several people who could not attend the conference, but who requested prepublication copies, including likely critics as well as likely supporters.

You assert that "many" of the academics who have read The Bell Curve say that the book's core precepts about intelligence are "badly out of date." One may agree or disagree with the book's arguments, but the last thing they are is "out of date"--as any reader can see from the book's hundreds of pages of annotated references to the academic literature old and new, and its careful discussion of the work of iconoclasts such as Prof. Gardner. I strongly suspect that the "many" academics you referred to were really the handful of critics interviewed for the article--individuals who, with the important exception of Prof. Jencks, are themselves dissenters from the consensus of modern academic thinking on intelligence and psychology, and who found it more rhetorically effective to pooh-pooh the book's argument as obsolete rather than to challenge them on the merits.

David Brooks's review of The Bell Curve ("Dark Gray Matter: How IQ Trumps Everything Else," Leisure & Arts, Oct. 20) begins with an expose of some of the more egregious distortions in recent articles about the book and Mr. Murray. One of Mr. Brooks's examples is Jacob Weisberg's twisted article in New York magazine--which opens with an account of the AEI conference mentioned above, and says the participants avoided discussing race and IQ until a black participant, Prof. Glenn Loury, left the room. Mr. Weisberg's dissimulation on this point is even worse than Mr. Brooks's account suggests. As Mr. Weisberg knows, the reason that race and IQ was not discussed earlier in the conference is that the conference agenda was concerned with other and more prominent arguments in the book until the afternoon of the first day. And the person who "mysteriously" (Mr. Weisberg's term) raised the subject just as Prof. Loury had left the room was . . . Mr. Weisberg himself. Prof. Loury soon returned and was present (as was Juan Williams the next day) for the discussion of race and IQ. It is indeed correct, as Mr. Brooks notes, that many of the arguments of The Bell Curve are pessimistic and disheartening; but no one who was present at the AEI conference (and certainly no one who knows Charles Murray or Glenn Loury) would imagine there was any reluctance to discuss them with black participants.

Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, is the Bradley Fellow at AEI.