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"In [The Bell Curve], Herrnstein and Murray set out to prove that American society was becoming increasingly meritocratic, in the sense that wealth and other positive social outcomes were being distributed more and more according to people's intelligence and less and less according to their social backgrounds. Furthermore, to the extent that intelligence was not subject to easy environmental control, but was instead difficult to modify and even in part inherited, genetic differences among individuals, Herrnstein and Murray posited, would contribute significantly to their futures.

The evidence for this thesis came largely from an analysis of data compiled in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), an ongoing federal project that tested over 10,000 Americans in 1980, with follow-up interviews regularly thereafter. Each participant completed the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT)--which, like any diverse test of mental ability, can be used as a measure of intelligence--and was then evaluated for subsequent social outcomes (including high-school graduation, level of income, likelihood of being in jail, likelihood of getting divorced, and so forth). As a rule, a person's intelligence turned out to predict such outcomes more strongly than did the socio economic status of his parents. This relationship held for all ethnic groups; indeed, when intelligence was statistically controlled, many "outcome" differences among ethnic groups vanished.

Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard with an impeccable reputation for scientific integrity, died of cancer just a week before The Bell Curve arrived in bookstores. This in itself may have had something to do with the frenzy of the public response. Had Herrnstein lived to participate in the debate, critics might have found the book harder to malign than it became when Murray, whose training was not in psychology but in sociology, was left to promote and defend it by himself.

Not that Murray, the author of Losing Ground (1984) and a vocal critic of the liberal welfare state, failed to do so energetically. But his lack of credentials as a hard scientist, and his overabundant credentials as a scourge of liberalism, made him a tempting target for an attack that was itself motivated as much by political as by scientific differences, and that was almost entirely focused on a side-issue in the book. That side-issue was differences in intelligence not among individuals but among groups--and specifically between whites and blacks--the degree to which those differences might or might not be explained genetically. So heated, and so partisan, was the furor at its peak that even President Clinton was asked about the book at a press conference. (He had not read it, but disagreed with it nonetheless.)

But the overreaction to what was in essence a moderate and closely reasoned book would also not have surprised Herrnstein in the least. If anything, it was a replay--actually, a more civilized replay--of what had happened to him after he published his first article on intelligence in the Atlantic in 1971. That article, entitled "IQ," besides bringing to public attention several points raised by Arthur Jensen in a 1969 paper in the Harvard Educational Review, offered a more speculative version of the argument that would be fleshed out and documented with NLSY data in The Bell Curve 23 years later.

Just as with The Bell Curve, only a small portion of Herrnstein's 1971 article dealt with differences among groups, and only a portion of that portion dealt with possible genetic influences on those differences; and, just as with The Bell Curve, these were the passages that received the greatest attention. In his article, Herrnstein concluded that "although there are scraps of evidence for a genetic component in the black-white difference, the overwhelming case is for believing that American blacks have been at an environmental disadvantage" (emphasis added). This did not stop one Nathan Hare from writing in response that "one would think that the pseudo-scientific generalizations surrounding race and IQ had long been put to rest. But the ghoulish die hard." Nor did it keep students at Harvard and elsewhere from putting up posters accusing Herrnstein of racism and calling him "pigeon-man" (in reference to his animal-learning research). His lectures were filled with protesters, and his speeches at other universities were canceled, held under police guard, or aborted with last-second, back-door escapes into unmarked vehicles. Death threats were made.

People often react most defensively when challenged not on their firmly held beliefs but on beliefs they wish were true but suspect at some level to be false. This is the psychology behind the controversy that ensued after "IQ" in 1971 and The Bell Curve in 1994.³On each occasion intemperate articles were written (some by the same people, barely updated), and the most strident positions were taken by those least qualified to comment on the science.⁴

By now, five major books have been published in direct response to The Bell Curve. Two of them, though critical, are within the bounds of reasonable discourse. Thus, Intelligence, Genes, and Success (1997), edited by four professors from the University of Pittsburgh who seem opposed to the book's public-policy conclusions, offers a fairly balanced range of scholarly views. On the sensitive question of heritability, what is especially notable is that the argument takes place mainly at the margins; although some of the book's contributors contend that the heritability of intelligence falls within a range lower than the 40-80 percent given by Herrnstein and Murray, that range is in every case much greater than zero.

A tougher line is taken in Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996), written by six Berkeley sociologists. This book addresses Herrnstein and Murray's main argument--that intelligence is an important determiner of social outcomes in America. To their credit, the authors do some old-fashioned hard work, reanalyzing the NLSY data and even making one correction that strengthens The Bell Curve's conclusions. But their main effort is to show, by adding variables other than parental socioeconomic status to the mix of factors predicting outcomes, that intelligence is not as important as The Bell Curve claims. Murray has since responded to this argument in a pamphlet entitled Income Inequality and IQ (published by the American Enterprise Institute); there, by considering only the NLSY data from sibling groups, within which parental background is by definition equal, he is able to show that intelligence still has very strong effects.

The conclusion one may reasonably draw from these two books, and from Murray's response, is that while intelligence may matter more or less than family background, it certainly matters, and that if it is not entirely heritable, it is heritable in some degree. It is useful to bear this in mind when considering the other three books, for one would scarcely know from reading them that such a view has any reputable backing at all. Though a few chapters in Measured Lies (1996), the most vituperative and scientifically irrelevant of the five volumes under consideration, attempt data-based argumentation, most settle for sarcasm, self-righteousness, and name-calling. And then there are The Bell Curve Debate and The Bell Curve Wars (both published in 1995); the former is an anthology of historical documents and reviews, mostly negative, which the editors rightly claim represent the general trend among responses to Herrnstein and Murray's book; the latter is a set of essays, also mostly negative, that originally appeared in a single issue of the New Republic when The Bell Curve was first published, with a few similar pieces added for effect.

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"The most basic claim put forth by Herrnstein and Murray was that smart people do better than dumb people."

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(Source for the above two (2) quotes: IQ Since "The Bell Curve" by Christopher F. Chabris Commentary, August 1998 pp. 33-40, bold type emphasis added)

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