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Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.
Dear Virginia Tech community,
Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”
Let me make an allegation of my own. President Sands is unfamiliar either with the actual content of The Bell Curve — the book I wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein to which he alludes — or with the state of knowledge in psychometrics.
I should begin by pointing out that the topic of the The Bell Curve was not race, but, as the book’s subtitle says, “Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Our thesis was that over the last half of the 20th century, American society has become cognitively stratified. At the beginning of the penultimate chapter, Herrnstein and I summarized our message:
Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:
- An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
- A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
- A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.
Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. [p. 509].
It is obvious that these conclusions have not been discredited in the twenty-two years since they were written. They may be more accurately described as prescient.
Now to the substance of President Sands’s allegation.
The heritability of intelligence
Richard Herrnstein and I wrote that cognitive ability as measured by IQ tests is heritable, somewhere in the range of 40% to 80% [pp. 105–110], and that heritability tends to rise as people get older. This was not a scientifically controversial statement when we wrote it; that President Sands thinks it has been discredited as of 2016 is amazing.
You needn’t take my word for it. In the wake of the uproar over The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association (APA) assembled a Task Force on Intelligence consisting of eleven of the most distinguished psychometricians in the United States. Their report, titled “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” was published in the February 1996 issue of the APA’s peer-reviewed journal, American Psychologist. Regarding the magnitude of heritability (represented by h2), here is the Task Force’s relevant paragraph. For purposes of readability, I have omitted the citations embedded in the original paragraph:
If one simply combines all available correlations in a single analysis, the heritability (h2) works out to about .50 and the between-family variance (c2) to about .25. These overall figures are misleading, however, because most of the relevant studies have been done with children. We now know that the heritability of IQ changes with age: h2 goes up and c2 goes down from infancy to adulthood. In childhood h2 and c2 for IQ are of the order of .45 and .35; by late adolescence h2 is around .75 and c2 is quite low (zero in some studies) [p. 85].
The position we took on heritability was squarely within the consensus state of knowledge. Since The Bell Curve was published, the range of estimates has narrowed somewhat, tending toward modestly higher estimates of heritability.
Intelligence and race
There’s no doubt that discussing intelligence and race was asking for trouble in 1994, as it still is in 2016. But that’s for political reasons, not scientific ones.
There’s no doubt that discussing intelligence and race was asking for trouble in 1994, as it still is in 2016. But that’s for political reasons, not scientific ones. Once again, the state of knowledge about the basics is not particularly controversial. The mean scores for all kinds of mental tests vary by ethnicity. No one familiar with the data disputes that most elemental statement. Regarding the most sensitive difference, between Blacks and Whites, Herrnstein and I followed the usual estimate of one standard deviation (15 IQ points), but pointed out that the magnitude varied depending on the test, sample, and where and how it was administered. What did the APA Task Force conclude? “Although studies using different tests and samples yield a range of results, the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites. The difference is largest on those tests (verbal or nonverbal) that best represent the general intelligence factor g” [p. 93].
Is the Black/White differential diminishing? In The Bell Curve, we discussed at length the evidence that the Black/White differential has narrowed [pp. 289–295], concluding that “The answer is yes with (as usual) some qualifications.” The Task Force’s treatment of the question paralleled ours, concluding with “[l]arger and more definitive studies are needed before this trend can be regarded as established” [p. 93].
Can the Black/White differential be explained by test bias? In a long discussion [pp. 280–286], Herrnstein and I presented the massive evidence that the predictive validity of mental tests is similar for Blacks and Whites and that cultural bias in the test items or their administration do not explain the Black/White differential. The Task Force’s conclusions regarding predictive validity: “Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans” [p. 93]. Regarding cultural bias and testing conditions: “Controlled studies [of these potential sources of bias] have shown, however, that none of them contributes substantially to the Black/White differential under discussion here” [p. 94].
Can the Black/White differential be explained by socioeconomic status? We pointed out that the question has two answers: Statistically controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) narrows the gap. But the gap does not narrow as SES goes up — i.e., measured in standard deviations, the differential between Blacks and Whites with high SES is not narrower than the differential between those with low SES [pp. 286–289]. Here’s the APA Task Force on this topic:
Several considerations suggest that [SES] cannot be the whole explanation. For one thing, the Black/White differential in test scores is not eliminated when groups or individuals are matched for SES. Moreover, the data reviewed in Section 4 suggest that—if we exclude extreme conditions—nutrition and other biological factors that may vary with SES account for relatively little of the variance in such scores [p. 94].
The notion that Herrnstein and I made claims about ethnic differences in IQ that have been scientifically rejected is simply wrong.
And so on. The notion that Herrnstein and I made claims about ethnic differences in IQ that have been scientifically rejected is simply wrong. We deliberately remained well within the mainstream of what was confidently known when we wrote. None of those descriptions have changed much in the subsequent twenty-two years, except to be reinforced as more has been learned. I have no idea what countervailing evidence President Sands could have in mind.
At this point, some readers may be saying to themselves, “But wasn’t The Bell Curve the book that tried to prove blacks were genetically inferior to whites?” I gather that was President Sands’ impression as well. It has no basis in fact. Knowing that people are preoccupied with genes and race (it was always the first topic that came up when we told people we were writing a book about IQ), Herrnstein and I offered a seventeen-page discussion of genes, race, and IQ [pp. 295–311]. The first five pages were devoted to explaining the context of the issue — why, for example, the heritability of IQ among humans does not necessarily mean that differences between groups are also heritable. Four pages were devoted to the technical literature arguing that genes were implicated in the Black/White differential. Eight pages were devoted to arguments that the causes were environmental. Then we wrote:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. [p. 311].
That’s it—the sum total of every wild-eyed claim that The Bell Curve makes about genes and race. There’s nothing else. Herrnstein and I were guilty of refusing to say that the evidence justified a conclusion that the differential had to be entirely environmental. On this issue, I have a minor quibble with the APA Task Force, which wrote “There is not much direct evidence on [a genetic component], but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis” [p. 95]. Actually there was no direct evidence at all as of the mid-1990s, but the Task Force chose not to mention a considerable body of indirect evidence that did in fact support the genetic hypothesis. No matter. The Task Force did not reject the possibility of a genetic component. As of 2016, geneticists are within a few years of knowing the answer for sure, and I am content to wait for their findings.
But I cannot leave the issue of genes without mentioning how strongly Herrnstein and I rejected the importance of whether genes are involved. This passage from The Bell Curve reveals how very, very different the book is from the characterization of it that has become so widespread:
In sum: If tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100 percent genetic in origin, nothing of any significance should change. The knowledge would give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 percent environmental. By the same token, knowing that the differences are 100 percent environmental in origin would not suggest a single program or policy that is not already being tried. It would justify no optimism about the time it will take to narrow the existing gaps. It would not even justify confidence that genetically based differences will not be upon us within a few generations. The impulse to think that environmental sources of difference are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.
In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story. But the evidence eventually may become unequivocal that genes are also part of the story. We are worried that the elite wisdom on this issue, for years almost hysterically in denial about that possibility, will snap too far in the other direction. It is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences on intelligence and not run screaming from the room. That is the essential message [pp. 314-315].
I have been reluctant to spend so much space discussing The Bell Curve’s treatment of race and intelligence because it was such an ancillary topic in the book. Focusing on it in this letter has probably made it sound as if it was as important as President Sands’s open letter implied.
But I had to do it. For two decades, I have had to put up with misrepresentations of The Bell Curve. It is annoying. After so long, when so many of the book’s main arguments have been so dramatically vindicated by events, and when our presentations of the meaning and role of IQ have been so steadily reinforced by subsequent research in the social sciences, not to mention developments in neuroscience and genetics, President Sands’s casual accusation that our work has been “largely discredited” was especially exasperating. The president of a distinguished university should take more care.
It is in that context that I came to the end of President Sands’s indictment, accusing me of promulgating “a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.” At that point, President Sands went beyond the kind of statement that merely reflects his unfamiliarity with The Bell Curve and/or psychometrics. He engaged in intellectual McCarthyism.
See you next week.
Charles Murray
WH Brady Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Very well said, Dr. Murray.
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Astonished this was even an issue. Derbyshire speaks of ‘The Bell Curve’ as having been published during a sort of ‘interglacial warming period’ when such things were permitted. He could be right.
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I’m not so sure. I remember a whole university course dedicated to “debunking” it at the time.
What made it shocking was that the actual book was not actually assigned, only articles attacking it. Kind of curious, considering that it’s far cheaper than your average college text.
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Professor Murray, as you perhaps noticed, I follow you on Facebook and often comment. I studied the Bell Curve a long time ago and found it in total alignment with my life experience (worked for 30 years in the US under various conditions including the steel industry and oil field, that is, with people of different racial, ethnic backgrounds and of different social strata. I was brought up in an orphanage, and from there I also took out a good number of observations.
The Virginia president’s comments are evidence of ignorance and not becoming of a scholar, it is political correct smearing.
In following you, I was hoping to see you not to fall into such traps when it comes to the Trump Issue.
The facts, the evidence is not there to judge and condemn Trump beforehand.
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The letter is more the expression of cowardice than ignorance, such is the fearsome repressiveness of political correctness in the West and especially on the campuses these days. The man would be pilloried and probably lose his job if he were to publicly reconsider his remarks, and he knows this full well.
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The university president’s letter is in keeping with the cowardice of university administrations these days. It was not much different in 1994. I was at Dartmouth when “The Bell Curve” came out. Several colleagues knew I was reading it and asked to borrow it when I finished. They did not want to be seen buying it in the Dartmouth Bookstore.
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I was at Rice at the time – I was a math major so, I took some statistics courses. The book was discussed, but not in a formal setting (as previously noted – the book had just come out). Murray came to speak on the topic, and was treated with respect – at least, by the audience.
And, yeah, it was the race thing that got everyone riled up there, including the profs.
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My student goes to VT. The hate-filled emails that have been distributed via the VT email system from both teachers and students are extremely discouraging and illustrate that even at a somewhat conservative institution such ast VT, intellectual curiosity is sucumbing to political correctness. How can we expect these students to solve problems when they are only taught one side of an issue and one way of thinking and are led to believe that inconvenient facts are a form of hatred?
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“How can we expect these students to solve problems…”
The problem isn’t that students aren’t exposed to “both sides.” The problem is that the sides – as with the global warming “debate” – are science and far left politics.
Science requires an understanding of both math and logic, far left politics abhors both.
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We can’t expect that. We can, however, expect them to make things worse.
Maybe after a decade or so away from academia, some of them will be capable of being contributors rather than parasites. Maybe.
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Mark, what are you talking about? I go to Tech and there are no such things as hate-filled emails sent from staff to the students. Please do not go around spreading false information about our community.
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Mark crawford never stated e-mails were from staff to students. reaf carefully.
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Mark crawford never stated e-mails were from staff to students. read carefully.
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Mark crawford never stated e-mails were from staff to students. read carefully.
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The fascinating irony is that the Testing Gap among white, asian, black, hispanic, native, and all other groups is not only known in Education departments, but receives an enormous amount of focus. In that discipline everyone assumes that the differences are almost entirely due to environmental factors, but they at least know what the data is.
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I recall the controversy in 1994 about the Bell Curve so I went out and bought a copy and read it. It took be 6 months to get through the exhaustively researched work. I stand by the work of Murray and Herrnstein and often wonder why no one criticizes them for reporting that Ashkenazi Jews’ IQ are one standard deviation to the right of the mean. Is that not racist too?
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Ah, but Ashkenazi Jews tend to vote Left and therefore are a “protected class.”
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No Jews of any stripe or ethnicity are a protected class among the Left any longer, regardless of how they vote.
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Jews are the anti-protected for the Left, which is drinking the BDS koolaid as fast as it can be doled out. Also, all protected groups have legislation “protecting” them with special favors and programs. Jews have no such help, nor do Asians.
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I stand corrected. You are right.
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You can make a good liberal Jew very, very uncomfortable by bringing that up. Liberal Jews *really* don’t want to hear that they’re special in any way.
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For more than 400 years Western universities have provided a de-facto breeding ground for the cognitively advantaged. At its endgame today, these same institutions function more like ‘promise’ harvesters, scooping up out of the poorer classes any child that the system might use. Those remaining are made economically and cognitively poorer with each generation lost from their midst. Caste society? It is here now. Visit any big box on a Sunday.
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Add to that assortive mating and you have a clear reproductive selection bias. What was that about the Ashkenazim again?
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When the book came out, a black colleague of mine fervently and vocally objected to it. When I asked if he had read it, he admitted that he had not. I gave him a copy and encouraged him to do so, after which, he admitted that it did not say what he had been led to believe. What ever happened to the “send me someone who reads” campaign?
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(Just a nit with respect to your punchline: McCarthyism was to some extent retroactively justified, when the Soviet archives were opened. Evidence for broad infiltration of Hollywood etc. was found. There really was a red menace.)
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This letter of Dr. Murray’s is a topic of discussion in the Triple Nine Society, of which I am a member.
The situation described by Dr. Murray strikes me as coming very close to one in which the very idea of intelligence is considered taboo in polite society. It is simply not to be mentioned. Since this is so, the very idea of such societies as Mensa and Triple Nine are themselves more or less taboo, and one would expect their members to be relatively free of these and similar inhibitions.
This I have found to be not the case. A similar taboo concerns the physical claims made on behalf of the U.S. government regarding the events of 9/11. I have canvassed some of them in a talk at the last annual meeting, and invited a public debate on the matter. It has attracted no interest.
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I think the Triple Nine Society (TNS) and its members are treated somewhat unfairly by your comment. I don’t think that disagreeing with someone is equal to creating a taboo around a topic.
Competing interest: I am a board member of TNS.
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Good luck to you, Mr. Murray. I regret so say that victims of intellectual McCarthyism, unlike the victims of the real thing, are not generally permitted rehabilitation. On the contrary, ours is an age of rapidly narrowing intellectual horizons.
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Good luck to you, Mr. Murray. I regret so say that victims of intellectual McCarthyism, unlike the victims of the real thing, are not generally permitted rehabilitation. On the contrary, ours is an age of rapidly narrowing intellectual horizons.
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You have to be willing to go where the data take you, which is exactly what Dr. Murray seems to have done. Tim Sands, not so much.
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… guaranteed to schwinnngg right over the head of the V. Tech community, including the Pres.
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I worked at Virginia Tech for 20 years, leaving shortly before it tried to initiate a program of hiring, promoting, and granting tenure on the basis of whether an applicant’s work promoted “diversity.” F.I.R.E. put a stop to that nonsense, but I knew liberal pieties would live on at VT when Sands was inaugurated and one of his first acts was to sit on the gym floor with the incoming freshman class while wearing tennis shoes and holding onto his toes like a 10 year old. His decorum was apparently in keeping with the level of his intellectual depth.
Keep up the true classic liberal intellectual probing, Dr. Murray.
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I read The Bell Curve when I was learning econometric analysis at The Naval Postgraduate School in 1997. I found it enlightening to my studies and consistent with my life experiences (I served 35 yrs on active duty with the Marine Corps). I am a terribly slow reader, so I don’t often re-read books; I choose instead to keep reading new material so I can fit all the titles into a too-short life. But, I have read The Bell Curve 3 times over the past 19 years, and will read it again, without doubt, it is, to me, that good. Despite the authors having gone out of their way to ensure readers understood the context of their conclusions; i.e., that readers understood what the authors were saying as well as what they were not saying, controversy about the conclusions, and the purpose, of the book live on. Either readers simply don’t fully understand the book, or they choose to draw their own, inaccurate, conclusions that fit their political bent. It is depressing to watch what is going on on college campuses today; the letter from the President of VT serves only to confirm that university administrations must cater to the whims of the snowflakes to keep attendance, and the dollars that go with that, as high as possible, likely simply for the survival of the institution. Best of luck to Dr. Murray and thanks, again, for publishing The Bell Curve.
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“Either readers simply don’t fully understand the book, or they choose to draw their own, inaccurate, conclusions that fit their political bent.”
Neither, I think. Most haven’t read the book or have focused solely on the question of race, genetics, and IQ. Strangely enough, the question of whether genetics affects physical traits is not controversial.
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Thank you Dr. Murray. I wish I could be down in Blacksburg to hear you speak next week.
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Now we will see if Murray will be actually allowed to speak. Most likely, no.
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The Bell Curve has, regrettably, reached the status of myth among those on the left. I used the Bell Curve as a textbook on research methods because inter alia it discussed factor analysis, selection of data sets, and statistical analysis. And it is clear to me, that critics, such as the VT President, nor many of those criticizing it, have neither read it, or if they have, do not understand it.
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Arguments at the book’s publication and now reflect not so much political correctness, or concerns about inequality and social change, but instead ambivalence bordering on terror about the existence and implications of free will. Yesterday’s Marxists wished away genetics in favor of shaping human clay into The New Man. Today’s progressives assemble collectives based on unchosen characteristics lest circumstances change their followers’ minds.
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Wow! President Sands has been intellectually “pantsed” in public!
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Dr. Murray, I read excerpts from Bell Curve long ago, at Naval War College. Part of the pedagogical point, then, was to peel away what “everyone knows” about your book, versus what it really sets forth. Some things don’t change.
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After reading your note, I read Pres. Sands’s letter… Thank you for explaining your case. Pres. Sands is cavalier and gratuitous. He should be embarrassed and ashamed of himself, and his evident intellectual sloppiness. Good luck with your presentation to VA Tech…
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“Sands is cavalier…”
No, actually he’s a Hokie.
The Cavaliers are up the road a piece.
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Thank you, sir, for the laugh and smile.
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He should be embarrassed and ashamed of himself,
If he were capable of that, he’d never have risen to the perch he holds in the higher education landscape.
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Of course, we’ll never know what President Sands’ actual views on he substance of The Bell Curve. This letter was not a dispassionate examination of the facts, but a missive to let his students know he’s on the side of the angels, regardless of the facts.
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I remember hearing about The Bell Curve while an undergraduate, and all of the histrionics (Psych major). And then I read the book. The instructors who spoke about the book did me a disservice. The book was well documented, even-handed, the opposite of inflammatory, and what I would consider to be a model on how to summarize the current understanding of any field of knowledge.
I hope to continue to read more from you in the future.
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Well, if you can punk a university president, President Sands has been punked!
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I’d say that President Sands punked himself.
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Thank you for writing this. I am currently reading your book. We will never solve some of our greatest social challenges if we continue to turn a blind eye to the science of our differences.
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The proper answer to concerns about group differences in intelligence is “So what?”. If you treat each person as an individual, how is a group difference relevant?
The problem for social engineers is that group differences complicate their design of group preferences. This should be a clue to them that group preferences are the wrong solution. When you won’t trust people to treat other people fairly, you are left only with “two wrongs make a right”.
Eventually even the social engineers will have to admit that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
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The paradigm shift is coming. Soon.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/2016/03/14/maths-and-reading-skills-found-be-75-cent-genetic?cid=trending
At university in the early ’90s–a few years after having been converted from liberalism from Mr. Murray’s Losing Ground–I read up on the subject of IQ in anticipation of what would become The Bell Curve. I was often “refuted” by professors obviously ignorant of the subject by the invocation of Stephen Gay Gould’s very influential best seller. It was supposed to conclude debate
It turns out the mis-measuring has boomeranged as if thrown by Homer Simpson. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=0
Doh!
Bon chance with your heads-in-the-sand, flat-earthers of the left. You’re about to be buried by the mountains of data.
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Very good links, I’m a collector of research papers on this topic and wasn’t aware of the recent Australian research in this area. Thank you Brent!
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The problem is not the conclusions reached by the Bell Curve but how they can be interpreted by those with a political or social agenda, right or left. What is abhorrent to liberals is the possibility that true racists ( and there are many ) will use these conclusions to justify their abhorrent philosophy. To even admit that there may be some truth to the conclusions reached in the book is inherently threatening to the core of a liberal. On the other hand, to make any assumptions ( justified by the Bell Curve ) about another individual based on the color of their skin is totally noxious.
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Dead on; “The Bell Curve” leaves a major is-ought problem for readers to grapple with and if someone has a prejudicial framework for assessing information like this, they’re bound to end up being a new member of the alt-right cesspool on twitter. Right now that’s the last thing needed if an accurate message about the book is going to get out.
Ironic that most of the material about race in “The Bell Curve” was mainly about why “cultural bias” doesn’t explain score differences, as well as how many major gaps in income and education close when IQ is accounted for. The only major claim made about genetics was that the authors were “resolutely agnostic” about what the mix between genes and environment would be in being a cause for ethnic differences.
Race is becoming less of a predictor in educational attainment but socioeconomic status has become *more* predictive. No surprise given that society is less discriminatory and more cognitively demanding than previous generations.
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Horses are bred based on genetics. Dogs. Cats. It is irrefutable that physical characteristics can be emphasized (or, in fact, changed: vide the dinosaurian legs bred into chickens) or diminished. Tall parents breed tall children. It might even be said that quarterbacks breed quarterbacks, if you look at
Archie Manning’s sons.
Why not cognitive ability; the brain is part of the body, no?
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It’s even more ridiculous than that. If there weren’t a genetic component to intelligence, humans couldn’t have evolved.
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I had a Sociology Professor in 1971, that discussed this. His position was that social sciences use sloppy statistics when it is something they want to believe, and have restrictive statistical standards for the things they don’t like.
As we all know, that isn’t limited to social sciences anymore, it seems environmental and climate science is in the same sad state.
Their problem is that one standard deviation is *always* statistically significant, even though their explanations are not.
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Did university presidents learn nothing from the Duke lacrosse fiasco. Sands sets a bad example of how we come to be educated.
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What’s distressing is what casual liars people in the higher education apparat are. It’s a sub-profession in which the scum rises to the top.
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i think that your color-heuristic normal distribution curve is the nicest touch and makes the thesis succint
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*whoops* succinct.
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These findings are quickly becoming irrelevant as our workplaces and schools become more and more biased and politicized. Policies such as Affirmative Action (and related pervasive attitudes) place individuals in higher positions even though other candidates likely have higher credentials and capabilities. Many higher education institutions in the U.S. today care more about a political agenda than producing intelligent critical thinkers. In fact, they DO NOT want to encourage or produce independent thinkers. When I attended graduate school, minorities and minority-worshippers could answer every single question wrong and still pass a class. Yet they will hold higher positions in society because of their “education.” I am MUCH more worried about when our graduating physicians and lawyers are all just pushed through, patting each other on the back, but completely void of intelligence. With the ego that comes along with such degrees, it will be an extremely difficult problem to fix. We still need to encourage and value true mental capability, with a focus on equal opportunity – not equity. Because that’s just unrealistic. There are respectable jobs for every level.
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Murray correctly reports the state of the IQ field of study – it always finds that the mean of black IQ is one standard deviation below white IQ. This means that 50% of black students are in the intellectually disabled range (below 85) and a large group are slow learners (the group closer to 85 than to 100). In real life it is not true of blacks that 50 % are intellectually disabled so that is why it is constantly said that the IQ academic field is not reporting black IQ correctly. But this fault in the field is disregarded by Murray. This disregard leads to charges of racism. People wonder why he can’t see that it is not true that 50% of blacks are intellectually disabled as the field of IQ studies finds.
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What did I just read?
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They need to restrict comments to the non-intellectually disabled…
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Anyone who does not recognize that intelligence is correlated with genetics is either blind or lying.
I personally tutor high school kids, and there is an enormous difference between those with innate ability that need help to bloom and those who will never understand.
One of the easiest to see is the math gene. This runs in families, although it does require opportunity to bring it out. My grandfather had it, I have it, my kindergartener has it. I attended one of the top technical universities in the country (count to 2, it was one of those). My 5 year old is doing 3rd grade math, plus bits and pieces of 8th and 9th grade. One of my sisters has the math gene too, and her son is similarly capable. We did not grow up in a privileged environment, math was simply easy.
Since the Bell Curve was written, DNA has become more accessible. There seem to be about a dozen genes that account for IQ, in ways that are not yet understood, but they are working on it.
It appears as though the population is starting to bifurcate as intelligence, education, and success are coalescing. High performing people are mating with high performing people and low performers with low performers.
I am not sure much can or should be done about that.
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What can be done about it is being done about it: The intelligent people are committing suicide of their genetic lines by not having children.
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The Marching Morons By Cyril M. Kornbluth published in Galaxy Magazine April 1951 addressed this situation (science Fiction).
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Translation of Sands: “If you students agree to shut up, I’ll agree to your assessment of Murray’s work even though it’s probably wrong and even though neither of us have ever actually read it.”
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“By the same token, knowing that the differences are 100 percent environmental in origin would not suggest a single program or policy that is not already being tried.”
Well, while fixing the environment in which children develop has been tried, those biggest obstacles to the fixes comes from the greatest supporters of your work, the conservative economic and business community that opposes paying losts of workers creating lots of labor income and gdp, but zero economic profit, to clean up the environment, getting rid of heavy metals like lead and mercury from the air, water, and diet of all children, but impacting most positively the families of the poor.
The “try” was the 1970 Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and the creation of the EPA, “tries” that have been fought in the courts and Congress and States to the present day with business even today suing to block an EPA rule removing mercury from coal burning flue gas emissions.
And diet is obviously critical, but here again, supporters of the author totally oppose serious action to ensure good nutritional food to all children, not just the upper 50% of the US incomes. Again the objection is to paying the many workers that are needed to deliver good foods.
Likewise, good housing is an important environmental factor, which also requires paying lots of workers.
Oh, yes, the supporters will claim they are trying to create jobs, but that paying higher taxes and higher energy costs kills jobs because paying workers to provide benefits to the public at large just to benefit the poor is too costly to profit and wealth creation and it is the profit from not paying workers that creates the wealth that creates jobs, not paying workers who spend their pay checks paying for the higherror cost goods that pay the workers that creates jobs.
But the indicates a kind of mental defect in many people who fail to see that paying more workers to deliver a better environment creates more jobs than not paying workers and instead polluting the environment and causing harm to children’s development.
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The only thing that made any sense in that mess was the first sentence you typed.
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That’s mulp for you. It’s not fully sentient
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The greatest irony is that the biggest detractors of your work and the implications it suggests are also those who pay the most lip-service to the income inequality.
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For over 50 years, almost three Generations, all of the colleges in our Country have been using an I Q Test ( the SAT’s) to sort and admit Students primarily based on I Q. When you couple this with a dysfunctional K-12 education system which condemns 30% of the population to terrible outcomes, you should not be surprised when the result is growing Income disparity. I would point out that both of these key institutions are controlled by the University Elites, and the Teachers Unions with the full support of the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. “We have met the enemy ,and it is US” with apologies to POGO.
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I have several comments at the Inside Higher Ed article about this.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/18/speech-virginia-tech-renews-debate-over-bell-curve-race-and-academic-freedom#disqus_thread
One of those comments mostly quotes an Amazon review of The Bell Curve that I think would be of interest to Charles Murray if he does not already know about the Pew studies it refers to.
Bell Curve findings, rediscovered, August 6, 2012
There are a couple of relatively recent studies from the Pew Charitable Trusts which find that scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) have a lot of predictive power concerning how well people do in life. One report is:
“Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream”
by Gregory Acs
“Upward Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States”
by Dr. Bhashkar Mazumder
he Bell Curve was based on NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth)
data. It found that people with high AFQT scores do much better in life than people with low scores, even controlling for other factors. Blacks are found to do much worse on the AFQT than whites.
The Pew studies use NLSY data. They find that people with high AFQT scores do
much better in life than people with low scores, even controlling for other factors. Blacks are found to do much worse on the AFQT than whites.
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This has been one of the best comment threads I’ve ever read. No flaming histrionics, just intelligent discussion.
At the end of the day, there is such as thing as Truth and Facts. Whether people are willing to face them honestly, without agenda or emotion, is another story.
I would be willing to bet that there isn’t anybody who has commented on this page that wouldn’t have been thrilled if the facts and data in the Bell Curve had been used over the last 20 years to target and improve the lives of those less fortunate. We would all be smiling, and a lot of lives enhanced. Sadly, because of agenda driven politics, that is not the case. If the day ever comes when Truth and Facts prevail we will all be better off for it.
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Since when are demonstrable facts relevant? A huge percentage of under 30’s think socialism is the best way to organize society despite it’s utter failure every time it has been tried.
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The interesting thing is that these fools (i.e., detractors) are only acting out of a childish need to protect, at all costs, their own fairy tale view of the world. And the principal victims of their ghoulish sensitivities are those in whose name they pretend to act. In any case, I believe wisdom is more important than intelligence (although both are nice!). So, what gene produces intelligent fools, and how can we begin to breed it out of our race?
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100% of the people I have met who criticize Mr. Murray’s Bell Curve haven’t read it.
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The letter from Dr. Sands’ letter is a classic error in logic, the false authority. It is always dangerous when issued from a leader.
Dr. Sands is a world authority in material science and nanotechnology. But my dead dog knows as much as Dr. Sands about psychometrics. Some may value his judgments, pre judgments, concluded before study and thus be mislead. There would be value in debate between similarly educated opponents, but this is not the case.
In academia and in national politics, the current social policy is to silence your opponents, perhaps by threat or use of violence. And many sophisticated leaders light the fuse but never wade into the melee. They may be high on the bell curve but low on ethics.
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The letter from Dr. Sands is a classic error in logic, the false authority. It is always dangerous when issued from a leader.
Dr. Sands is a world authority in material science and nanotechnology. But my dead dog knows as much as Dr. Sands about psychometrics. Some may value his judgments, pre judgments, concluded before study and thus be mislead. There would be value in debate between similarly educated opponents, but this is not the case.
In academia and in national politics, the current social policy is to silence your opponents, perhaps by threat or use of violence. And many sophisticated leaders light the fuse but never wade into the melee. They may be high on the bell curve but low on ethics.
Share
The letter from Dr. Sands is a classic error in logic, the false authority. It is always dangerous when issued from a leader.
Dr. Sands is a world authority in material science and nanotechnology. But my dead dog knows as much as Dr. Sands about psychometrics. Some may value his judgments, pre judgments, concluded before study and thus be mislead.
There would be value in debate between similarly educated opponents, but this is not the case.
In academia and in national politics, the current social policy is to silence your opponents, perhaps by threat or use of violence. And many sophisticated leaders light the fuse but never wade into the melee. They may be high on the bell curve but are low on ethics.
Share