The Bell Curve

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The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is is substantially influenced by inherited factors and the environment and that it is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, unmarried birth, and involvement in crime rather than the individual's parent socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", become separate from the average and below average intelligence. The book is controversial, especially where writers write about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of these differences.

Shortly after publication, many people united in the criticism and defense of this book. A number of critical texts were written in response to them.

Video The Bell Curve

Synopsis

The Bell Curve, published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain variations in intelligence in American society, warning of some of the consequences of that variation, and proposed a social policy to reduce the worst of its consequences. The title of the book comes from the normal distribution of IQ scores (IQ) in a population.

Introduction

This book begins with an introduction that assesses the history of the concept of intelligence from Francis Galton to modern times. Spearman's introduction of the general factors of intelligence and other early advances in intelligence research is discussed along with consideration of the relationship between intelligence testing and racial politics. The 1960s were identified as periods in American history when social problems were increasingly attributed to forces outside the individual. This egalitarian ethos, Herrnstein and Murray argue, can not accommodate individual biological differences.

The introduction states six authors' assumptions:

1. There is a big difference as a general factor of cognitive ability that differentiates humans.
2. All standardized academic or achievement standard tests measure these general factors to some degree, but clearly designed IQ tests for that purpose measure them most accurately.
3. IQ scores match, for the first level, whatever people mean when they use smart words, or smart in everyday language.
4. IQ scores are stable, though not perfectly, beyond most of a person's life.
5. A properly managed IQ test can not be biased against a social, economic, ethnic, or racial group.
6. Cognitive ability can be substantially inherited, apparently not less than 40 percent and not more than 80 percent.

At the close of the introduction, the author warns the reader not to make ecological mistakes in summarizing the things about the individual based on the aggregate data presented in this book. They also affirm that intelligence is just one of the many valuable and important human attributes among human virtues overly exaggerated.

Part I. The Emergence of Cognitive Elite

In the first part of the book Herrnstein and Murray chart how the American society changed in the 20th century. They argue that America evolved from societies in which social origins strongly determine one's social status to one in which cognitive ability is the primary determinant of status. Growth in attendance at universities, recruitment of more efficient cognitive abilities, and cognitive ability sorting by selective colleges are identified as an important driver of this evolution. Increased job sorting by cognitive ability is discussed. The argument is made, based on published meta-analysis, that cognitive ability is the best predictor of worker productivity.

Herrnstein and Murray argue that due to the increasing return of cognitive abilities, cognitive elites are being formed in America. These elites are getting richer and getting separated from other societies.

Part II. Cognitive and Social Behavior Classes

The second part explains how cognitive abilities are related to social behavior: a high ability predicts socially desirable behavior, low ability of undesirable behavior. Arguments are made that group differences in social outcomes are better explained by differences in intelligence rather than socioeconomic status, perspectives, authors argue, who have been ignored in the study.

The analyzes reported in this section of the book were conducted using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth Labor Market Experience (NLSY), a study conducted by the US Department of Labor's Labor Statistics Bureau that tracks thousands of Americans beginning in the 1980s.. Only non-Hispanic whites were included in the analysis, suggesting that the relationship between cognitive and social behavior was not racially or ethnically driven.

Herrnstein and Murray argue that intelligence is a better predictor of individual outcomes than the parental socioeconomic status. This argument is based on an analysis in which individual IQ scores prove to better predict their outcome as adults rather than their parents' socioeconomic status. The results are reported for many outcomes, including poverty, dropping out, unemployment, marriage, divorce, unlawfulness, welfare dependency, criminal offenses, and possible elections.

All participants in the NLSY take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a battery of ten tests taken by all who apply for entry into armed services. (Some have taken IQ tests in high school, and the average correlation of the Armed Forces Qualification Score (AFQT) and IQ test score is 0.81). Participants are then evaluated for social and economic outcomes. In general, the IQ/AFQT score is a better predictor of life outcomes than the social class background. Similarly, after statistically controlling the difference in IQ, many of the differences in outcomes among ethnic-race groups disappear.

Values ​​are the percentage of each IQ sub-population, among non-Hispanic whites only, matched with each descriptor.

Part III. National Context

This section discusses ethnic differences in cognitive abilities and social behavior. Herrnstein and Murray report that Asian Americans have an average IQ higher than white Americans, who in turn outperform black Americans. The book argues that black-and-white gaps are not due to bias tests, noting that IQ tests do not tend to be school underpredict or individual black job performance and that larger gaps in test items appear to be culturally neutral rather than more culturally loaded items. The authors also note that adjusting socioeconomic status does not eliminate the black-and-white IQ gap. However, they argue that the gap narrows.

According to Herrnstein and Murray, high IQ heritability in races does not necessarily mean that the cause of racial differences is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss the line of evidence that has been used to support the thesis that black-and-white gaps are at least partly genetic, such as the Spearman hypothesis. They also discussed possible environmental explanations of such loopholes, such as the increased generation observed in IQ, which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they wrote:

"If the reader is now convinced that a genetic or environmental explanation has prevailed in order to override others, we have not done a good job presenting one side or another.It seems very probable to us that both genes and the environment have to do with racial differences. maybe a mixture of it? We are really agnostic on the matter; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify the forecast. "

The authors also emphasize that regardless of the cause of the differences, one should be treated no differently.

In Part III, the authors also repeat many analyzes from Part II, but now compare blacks with blacks and Hispanics in the NLSY dataset. They found that after controlling IQ, many differences in racial social outcomes decreased.

The authors discuss the possibility that high birth rates among those with a low IQ may put downward pressure on the distribution of national cognitive abilities. They argue that immigration also has the same effect.

At the close of Part III, Herrnstein and Murray discuss the relationship of IQ with social problems. Using NLSY data, they show that social problems are increasing as a monotonic function of a lower IQ.

Live Together

In this last chapter, the author discusses the relevance of cognitive ability to understand major social problems in America.

Evidence for experimental experiments to improve intelligence is reviewed. The authors conclude that there is currently no means to increase intelligence beyond simple titles.

The authors criticized "leveling" public and secondary education and retained a gifted education. They offer a critical review of affirmative action policies in colleges and workplaces, arguing that their goals should be equality of opportunity rather than the same outcome.

Herrnstein and Murray offer a pessimistic portrait of America's future. They predict that cognitive elites will increasingly isolate themselves from society, while quality of life deteriorates for those who are under the cognitive scales. As an antidote to this prognosis, they offer a vision of society where differences in ability are recognized and everyone can have a valuable place, emphasizing the role of local communities and clear moral rules that apply to everyone.

Maps The Bell Curve

Policy recommendations

Herrnstein and Murray argue that the average genetic IQ of the United States declines, because the tendency of smarter children to have fewer than the less intelligent, the length of the generation becomes shorter for the less intelligent, and large-scale immigration to the United States of those who have low intelligence. Discussing the possible future political outcome of an intellectually stratified society, the authors declare that they are "afraid that this new kind of conservatism is the dominant ideology of the rich - not in the social tradition of Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of Adam Smith but of conservatism along the Latin American line , where being conservative often means doing whatever it takes to preserve the mansions in the hills from the slum threats below. "In addition, they fear that welfare improvements will create a" custodian state "in" a high-tech version and more luxurious than the Indian reservation for some of the substantial minorities of the country's population. " They also predict the rise of totalitarianism: "It is hard to imagine the United States preserving the heritage of individualism, equality before the law, free men who run their own lives, so acceptable that the vast majority of the population should be made permanent wards from the state."

The authors recommend the removal of welfare policies that encourage poor women to have babies:

We can imagine there is no recommendation to use the government to manipulate fertility that has no harm. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has a policy that inadvertently the social engineer has a baby, and that encourages the wrong woman. "If the United States does much to encourage high IQ women to have babies today to encourage low IQ women, it is properly described as being involved in aggressive fertility manipulation." The technically correct picture of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately on the lower end of intelligence distribution. We strongly urge that these policies, represented by the vast network of money and services for low-income women with babies, will end. The government must stop subsidizing births to anyone who is rich or poor. Another common recommendation, which is almost harmless because any government program we can imagine, is to make it easier for women to make good decisions before they are not pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are more flexible, very easy, cheap and safe.

The book also argues to reduce immigration to the US which argues to lower the national average IQ. It is also recommended to oppose affirmative action policies.

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Media acceptance

The Bell Curve received a lot of media attention. The book is not distributed first to the media, except for some selected reviewers chosen by Murray and publishers, who postpone more detailed criticism for months and years after the book's release. Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the book at The New Yorker, said the book "contains no new arguments and does not present interesting data to support anachronistic social Darwinism" and says that "the author omits facts, misuse of statistical methods, and seem unwilling to acknowledge the consequences of their own words. "

A 1995 article by Justice and Accuracy in Reporting author Jim Naureckas criticized the media's response, saying that "While much of this discussion includes sharp criticism of the book, media accounts show an annoying tendency to accept Murray and Herrnin's and evidence even when arguing their conclusions".

After the reviewers have more time to review the book's research and more significant critic conclusions begin to emerge. Nicholas Lemann, writing in Slate, said the review later showed that the book was "full of mistakes ranging from careless reasons to misquoted sources to direct math errors." Lemann said that "Not surprisingly, all mistakes are in the direction of supporting the author's thesis."

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Peer reviews

Herrnstein and Murray were criticized for not submitting their work to peer review prior to publication, an omission that was deemed incompatible with their presentation as a scientific text. A writer in Slate magazine online publications complained that the book was not circulated in kitchen evidence, a common practice to allow prospective reviewers and media professionals to have an opportunity to prepare for the book's arrival. Many scientific responses to the book arrived too late. Richard Lynn (1999) writes that "This book has been the subject of several hundred critical reviews, some of which have been collected in edited volumes," suggesting that the lack of peer review of the book does not prevent it becoming the next subject. academic comments. More than two decades after publication, a set of scientific authors states that The Bell Curve contains "... Very little information has since been questioned by mainstream scholars... The Bell Curve is not as controversial as it is his reputation will make people believe (and most of this book is not about race at all). "

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Main Flow of Science on Intelligence

Fifty-two professors, most of them intelligence and field-related researchers, signed the "Mainstream Science of Intelligence", a statement of opinion in support of the views presented in The Bell Curve. The statement was written by psychologist Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal in 1994 and later reprinted in Intelligence, an academic journal. Of the 131 invited by letter to sign the document, 100 responded, with 52 agreeing to sign and 48 declining. Eleven of 48 opponents claimed that a statement or part of it did not represent the main view of intelligence.

APA taskforce report

In response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, the Council of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association set up a special task force to publish investigative reports focused solely on the research presented in the book, not necessarily the policy recommendations made. In their final report, titled Intelligence: Known and Unknown, some of the task force findings are supported or consistent with statements from The Bell Curve. They agree that:

• The intelligence test score has a correlation of 0.5 with GPA and 0.55 with the number of years at school.
• IQ scores have predictive validity for adult employment status, even when variables such as education and family backgrounds have been statistically controlled.
• There is little evidence to suggest that a childhood diet affects intelligence except in the case of severe malnutrition.

Regarding Murray and Herrnstein's claims of racial and genetic differences, the APA task force states:

Of course there is no support for genetic interpretation... It is sometimes suggested that the Black/White differential in psychometric intelligence is partly due to genetic differences (Jensen, 1972). There is not much direct evidence of this, but very few fail to support the genetic hypothesis.

Regarding statements about other explanations for racial differences, the APA task force states:

The difference between the average Black and White Skin score test scores (about one standard deviation, though probably reduced) is not generated from a clear bias in construction and test administration, nor does it reflect only differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on caste and cultural factors may be appropriate, but so far there has been little direct empirical support. Of course there is no support for genetic interpretation. Nowadays, no one knows what caused this discrepancy.

The APA Journal that published the statement, American Psychologist , then published eleven critical responses in January 1997.

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Criticism

Many of the criticisms are collected in The Bell Curve Debate.

Criticism of assumptions

Criticism by Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould writes that the "whole argument" of The Bell Curve writers rests on four unsupported, and mostly false, assumptions about intelligence:

1. Intelligence should be reduced to one number.
2. Intelligence should be able to set ratings to order in a linear order.
3. Intelligence should be genetic based.
4. Intelligence should basically remain unchanged.

But in an interview with Frank Miele, coauthor Charles Murray denied making these assumptions.

Interviewer: Let me get back to four Gould points. Is there one of them that you think is not a fair and accurate statement about what you say?

Murray: The four of them.

Interviewer: You are not a determinist. You do not say everything is inside the gene. You think free will is a meaningful concept.

Murray: Yes, and so does Dick Herrnstein...

Murray said he did not reduce intelligence to a single number but sympathized with Howard Gardner's idea of ​​multiple intelligences.

Interviewer: So you do not say intelligence is a single number?

Murray: No.

Criticism by C. Loring Brace

Similarly, anthropologist C. Loring Brace points out that The Bell Curve makes six basic assumptions at the beginning and argues that there are errors in each of these assumptions:

1. Human Cognitive Ability is a single common entity, described as a number.
2. Cognitive abilities have heritability between 40 and 80 percent and are therefore primarily genetic based.
3. IQ is basically unchanged, fixed over the life span.
4. The IQ test measures how "smart" or "smart" people are and is able to rank people order in linear order.
5. The IQ test can measure this accurately.
6. IQ tests are not biased with respect to race, ethnic group or socioeconomic status.

Criticism by James Heckman

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman considers two assumptions made in the book for question: that g contributes to the correlation across test scores and performance in society, and that g does not can be manipulated. Heckman's reanalysis of the evidence used in The Bell Curve found a contradiction:

1. Factors that explain wages accept different weights rather than factors that explain test scores. More than g needed to explain either.
2. Factors other than g contribute to social performance, and they can be manipulated.

In response, Murray argues that this is a straw man and that the book does not argue that the g or IQ is completely unchanged or the only factor that affects the outcome.

In a 2005 interview, Heckman praised The Bell Curve for breaking taboos by pointing out that differences in ability exist and predicting socioeconomic outcomes and to play "a very important role in raising the issue of differences in capabilities and interests they "and claimed that he was" a big fan of The Bell Curve ] than you think. "However, he also argues that Herrnstein and Murray overestimated the role of heredity in determining intelligence differences.

Criticisms of statistical methods

Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, MartÃÆ'n SÃÆ'¡nchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss in the Book of Inequality by Design recalculate the influence of socioeconomic status, using variables similar to The Bell Curve , but weighs it differently. They found that if IQ scores were adjusted, as did Herrnstein and Murray, to eliminate educational influence, IQ's ability to predict poverty could be much greater, 61 percent for whites and 74 percent for blacks. According to the authors, Herrnstein and Murray's findings that IQ predicts poverty is much better than socioeconomic status, substantially the result of the way they handle statistics.

In August 1995, economist National Bureau of Economic Research Sanders Korenman and sociologist Harvard University Christopher Winship argued that measurement errors were not handled properly by Herrnstein and Murray. Korenman and Winship conclude: "... there is substantial bias evidence due to measurement error in their estimates of the effects of socioeconomic status of parents.In addition, Herrnstein and Murray's measure of socioeconomic status of parents (SES) fail to capture the effects of important elements family background (such as single parent family structure at age 14). As a result, this analysis gives an exaggerated impression of the importance of IQ relative to parental SES, and relative to family backgrounds more generally, on a variety of methods, including sibling analysis, that a parent's family background is at least as important, and perhaps more important than IQ in determining socioeconomic success in adulthood. "

In the book of Intelligence, Genes, and Successes: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, a group of social scientists and statisticians analyze the relationship of genetics-intelligence, the concept of intelligence, the elasticity of intelligence and its effects. education, the relationship between cognitive ability, wages and meritocracy, the path to racial and ethnic inequalities in health, and public policy questions. This work argues that most public responses are polemic, and fail to analyze the details of science and the validity of the statistical arguments underlying the book's conclusions.

Criticism of AFQT use

William J. Matthews writes that part of the Bell Curve's analysis is based on AFQT "which is not an IQ test but is designed to predict the performance of certain criteria variables". AFQT covers subjects such as trigonometry.

Heckman observes that AFQT was designed only to predict success in military training schools and that most of these tests seem to test achievement rather than ability tests, measuring factual knowledge and not pure ability. He continues:

Ironically, the authors remove from their composite AFQT, a test of time from numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with other tests. It is known, however, that in the data they use, this subtest is the best predictor of the earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests only correlate weakly with each other, and that the best predictors of income are only weakly correlated with their "g-loaded" scores, only heightening the doubt that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of humans. intelligence. It also pushes to the point that "g-loading" is strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein only measuring agreement among tests - not a predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. In the same way, one can also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis of their conclusions by ignoring the tests with the greatest predictive power.

Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas presented evidence suggesting AFQT scores were probably better markers for family background than "intelligence" in a 1999 study:

Herrnstein and Murray reported that depending on the "intelligence" of the mother (AFQT score), the child test scores were little affected by the variation in socioeconomic status. Using the same data, we show that their findings are very fragile.

Cognitive ordering

Charles R. Tittle and Thomas Rotolo found that the more written, such as IQs, the examinations used as a screening tool for job access, the stronger the relationship between IQ and income. Thus, rather than a higher IQ leading to the achievement of status as it demonstrates the skills required in modern society, IQs may reflect the ability to take the same tests used in artificial screening devices in which group status protects their domains.

Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert M. Hauser wrote that Herrnstein and Murray provide little evidence of growth in cognitive sorting. Using data from the General Social Survey, they tested each hypothesis using a short verbal test of abilities given to about 12,500 American adults between 1974 and 1994; the results do not provide support for any trend hypothesis proposed by Herrnstein and Murray. One chart on The Bell Curve is meant to show that people with IQs above 120 have become "faster concentrated" in high IQ jobs since 1940. But Robert Hauser and his colleague Min-Hsiung Huang retest the data and came with falling estimates "well below Herrnstein and Murray." They added that the data, used appropriately, "do not tell us anything but the selected, highly educated work groups have grown tremendously since 1940."

In 1972, Noam Chomsky questioned Herrnstein's idea that society was developing toward meritocracy. Chomsky criticized the assumption that people are only looking for work based on material gains. He argues that Herrnstein does not want to be a baker or a woodcutter even if he can earn more money that way. He also criticized the assumption that such a society would be fair with payments based on the value of the contribution. He argues that because there already exists a large unfair inequality, people will often be paid, not for valuable contributions to society, but to sustain such inequalities.

In 1995, Chomsky immediately criticized the book and its assumptions about IQ. He takes issue with the idea that IQ is 60% inherited words, "the statement is meaningless" because heritability does not have to be genetic. She gave an example of women wearing earrings:

To borrow an example from Ned Block, "a few years ago when only women were wearing earrings, heritability has high earrings because of the difference in whether someone has earrings due to chromosome differences, XX vs XY." No one has suggested that wearing earrings, or ties, is "in our genes," the inevitable fate of which the environment can not influence, "bumps into liberal ideas."

He goes on to say there is almost no evidence of a genetic relationship, and greater evidence that environmental problems are what determines IQ differences.

Race and intelligence

One part of the controversy concerns parts of the book that deal with racial group differences in IQ and the consequences of this. The authors are reported throughout the popular press by stating that these IQ differences are genetic, and they do write in chapter 13: "It seems very likely to us that both genes and the environment have to do with racial differences." The introduction to this chapter has more carefully stated, "The debate over whether and how many genes and environments related to ethnic differences is still unsolved."

When some prominent critics turn this into an "assumption" that the authors have attributed most or all of the racial differences in IQ with genes, co-author Charles Murray responded by quoting two parts of the book:

• If the reader is now convinced that a genetic or environmental explanation has prevailed to override the other, we have not done a good job presenting one side or the other. It seems very likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might be the mixture? We are really agnostic about the matter; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify the forecast. (p.Ã, 311)
• ... If tomorrow you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that all cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, nothing significant has to change. That knowledge will not give you a reason to treat individuals differently than if the ethnic differences are 100 percent of the environment...

In an article praising the book, economist Thomas Sowell criticized several aspects, including some of his arguments about race and IQ flexibility:

When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored the lowest on the abstract part of the test. Similarly, the children of white mountaineers in the United States tested it back in the early 1930s... Surprisingly, Herrnstein and Murray call "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups are considered to be below average in intelligence." It's not folklore or something subjective like the mind. It's based on hard data, as hard as the data in The Bell Curve . These groups were repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the military and in civilian life. For the Jews, it is clear that subsequent tests showed very different results - in an era when there was very little marriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.

Rushton (1997) and Cochran et al. (2005) argue that initial testing actually supports a high average Jewish IQ.

Columnist Bob Herbert, writing for The New York Times, described the book as "a piece of racial pornography posing as a serious scholarship." "Mr. Murray can protest everything he wants," wrote Herbert; "His book is just a polite way of calling a nigger."

In 1996, Stephen Jay Gould released a revised edition and expanded from his 1981 book The Mismasure of Man, which is intended to more directly disprove the Bell Curve 's bounds on race and intelligence , and states that evidence of heritability IQ does not show genetic origin to classify differences in intelligence. This book has been criticized.

Psychologist David Marks has suggested that the ASVAB test used in the Bell Curve analysis is highly correlated with literacy measurements, and argues that the ASVAB test is not really a measure of general intelligence but literacy.

Melvin Konner, professor of anthropology and professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, called Bell Curve a "deliberate attack on efforts to improve the performance of African-American schools":

This book provides strong evidence that genes play a role in intelligence but relate it to unsupported claims that genes explain small but consistent black and white differences in IQ. The alignment of good arguments with the bad seems politically motivated, and persuasive rebuttal soon arises. In fact, African-Americans have excelled in virtually every enriched environment they have placed in, most of them previously banned, and this is only the first or second decade of enhanced opportunities but still not the same. It is likely that the actual curves for the two races will one day become superimposible to each other, but this may take several decades of change and different environments for different people. Claims about genetic potential are meaningless except in light of these requirements.

The 2014 textbook "Evolutionary Analysis" by Herron and Freeman says it is a mistake to think that heritability can tell us something about the cause of the differences between population tools. Referring to African-American comparisons with European-American IQ scores, the text states that only common garden experiments, in which both groups are raised in an environment typically experienced by European-Americans, will allow one to see if the differences are genetic. Such experiments, routines with plants and animals, can not be done with humans. It is also impossible to estimate this design with adoption into families of different groups, as children will be recognizable and likely to be treated differently. The text concludes: "There is no way to assess whether genetics has anything to do with the difference in IQ scores between ethnic groups."

In 1995, Noam Chomsky criticized the conclusion of the book on race and the idea that Blacks and people with low IQs have more children even become a problem.

Rutledge M. Dennis points out that through the soundbites of works such as the famous Jensen study of achievement gaps, and Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve, the media "portray images of blacks and other colored peoples as collective biological blind - not just intellectually unworthy but evil and criminal as well, "thus providing, he says" logic and justification for those who will further deprive his rights and exclude racial and ethnic minorities. "

Charles Lane points out that 17 of the researchers whose work is referenced by this book have also contributed to Mankind Quarterly, an anthropology journal founded in 1960 in Edinburgh, which has been seen as a supporter of the theory of the genetic superiority of the skin white. David Bartholomew reported Murray's response as part of the controversy over Bell Curve. In closing for the 1996 Free Press edition of the Bell Curve, Murray responded that the book "drawing evidence from over a thousand scholars" and among the researchers mentioned in the Lane list "are some of the most respected psychologists of our time and that almost all of the so-called sources as polluted is an article published in the leading reference journal. "

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and Future of America is a collection of articles published in reaction to the book. Edited by Steven Fraser, the authors of this essay have no particular point of view on the contents of The Bell Curve, but express their own criticisms from various aspects of the book, including the research methods used, the concealed bias in research and policy which is suggested as a result of conclusions drawn by the author. Fraser writes that "by examining footnotes and bibliographies in The Bell Curve, readers can more easily recognize projects as they are: a cool synthesis of eccentric racial theorists and eccentricists."

Accusations of racism

Because this book provides statistics supporting the assertion that blacks, on average, are less intelligent than whites, some fear that the Bell Curve can be used by extremists to justify genocide and hate crime. Much of the work referenced by The Bell Curve was funded by the Pioneer Fund, which aims to advance the scientific study of human heredity and diversity, and has been accused of promoting scientific racism. Murray criticized the characterization of Dana Perintis as a racist organization, arguing that he had many connections with its founder as "Henry Ford and Ford Foundation today."

The evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves describes The Bell Curve as an example of racist science, which contains all kinds of errors in the application of the scientific method that has marked the history of scientific racism:

1. claims that are not supported by the data provided
2. errors in calculations that always support the hypothesis
3. does not mention data that goes against the hypothesis
4. does not mention theory and data as opposed to core assumptions
5. bold policy recommendations consistent with those recommended by racists.

Eric Siegel published on the Scientific American blog that the book "supports prejudice based on what it does not say There is no place where this book discusses why it investigates racial differences in IQ By never mentioning the reasons for reporting these differences in place, the authors sending an unspoken but firm conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator, whether a person tends to have a certain ability.Even if we consider the trend of data presented is sound, the book leaves the reader alone to conclude the best way to use this insight to use. secretly justifying individual prejudice based on race. "

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Global Bell Curve

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