Book Review

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published their New York Times best seller The Bell Curve in 1995. I relied heavily on the information presented in this literary masterpiece when writing America In Decline and consider The Bell Curve to be the most important book written in the past 150 years, quite possibly the most significant scholarly work of all time. I firmly believe that the falling intelligence of those living in the western world is primarily responsible for social and economic problem we face in today's high-tech world. The fact that we, as a society, are literally getting stupider with each passing generation provides an explanation for most, if not all, of our social and economic ills including the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have not's; the escalating crime rate in minority communities; the high rate of illegitimacy in blacks; and, most importantly, our failure to erase poverty even though we have squandered over 22 trillion dollars over the past 55 years attempting to do so. I am convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our world would be a better place if everyone read and understood the material presented in The Bell Curve. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population has never heard of the book and even fewer understand the importance of inherited intelligence. Worse yet, the liberal academics who run our education institutions consider the information presented by Herrnstein and Murray to be heresy of the highest order. My goal for the next year or so will be write a series of reviews that will introduce The Bell Curve to those who are unfamiliar to it. The Bell Curve consists of an introduction and 22 chapters, each of which will be the subject matter of a separate post. The purpose is to cover the material, which often is of a statistical nature, in a way that is easy to read, and most important, simple to understand. I will make every effort to keep my editorial comments and personal opinions to a minimum. Anyone who reads these chapter reviews will be better informed for having done so. I guarantee it! Hopefully, some of my readers will be induced to obtain a copy of The Bell Curve and have the pleasure of reading it themselves. If so, my efforts will not have been in vain. Introduction The authors begin their 575 page book by pointing out that the word intelligence is a universal and ancient term that has been used to describe differences in mental capacity amongst people of the same race and those of different races since the beginning of recorded time. Most observant first graders know that some of their class mates are smarter than others and so did the ancients. In this respect, it was not until the last forty years that the concept of intelligence variation became a pariah in the world of ideas. As the authors point out, any attempt to measure differences in IQ have been dismissed as racist, statistical bungling or outright scholarly fraud. Without doubt, the vast majority of those reading these words believe that these accusations are true. While, in fact, the concept of intelligence variation among humans is a well-understood construct, measured with accuracy and fairness by numerous standardized mental tests. The primary purpose of The Bell Curve is to introduce these indisputable concepts to an unaware and ill-informed public. The study of intelligence variation began in the last half of the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin asserted that the transmission of inherited intelligence was a key to human evolution which separated our simian ancestors from the other apes. Darwin's younger cousin Francis Galton, a celebrated geographer in his own right, presented evidence that intellectual capacity ran in families. His Hereditary Genius, published in 1869, began the controversy, with respect to the importance of inherited intelligence, which remains with us today,146 years later. Galton may have been the first to point out that humans vary in their intellectual capacity and these differences matter to them personally and to society. Galton's first attempts to quantify intellect using measurements of sensory perception, acuity of sight and hearing, and speed of reaction to simple stimuli failed; however, his successor French psychologist Alfred Binet attempts to measure intelligence by measuring the capacity of a person to reason, draw analogies and identify patterns were more successful in identifying crude differences in intellectual capacity that accorded with the commonly understanding of high and low intelligence. By the end of the nineteenth century mental tests that we would recognize today as IQ tests were in wide use throughout the civilized world. In 1904, a former British Army named Charles Spearman made a statistical break thought that has fueled the debate on inherited intelligence to this day. Based on Karl Pearson's correlation coefficient, statisticians could determine how two variables, such as height and weight were related to each other. For example, using Pearson's r (as the coefficient was labeled) investigators could determine, for the first time, just how much a man's weight was determined by his height. The correlation coefficient ranged from -1 to +1. In a study of the relationship of height and weight, if the r was determined to be -1 then, from a statistical standpoint, there would be no relationship between a person's height and his weight. Alternately, an r of +1 would indicate that a person's weight was determined entirely by how tall he was. An r of +.8 would mean that 80 percent of a person's weight was a result of his height. Before long several tests were developed to measure human intelligence. Charles Spearman noted that people who did well on one test invariably did well on all other tests of mental acuity while those that that did poorly on one mental or academic test did poorly on all others as well. This observation led Spearman to conclude that there was a single mental factor, which he named the g factor for general intelligence. Spearman's g factor differed subtly from the commonly held concept of intelligence at the time which was centered around the ability to learn and to apply what is learned to subsequent tasks and endeavors. In Spearman's view his g factor was a measurement of a person's capacity for complex mental work. By 1908 the concept of mental level or mental age had been developed. This was followed a few years later by the more sophisticated conception of the intelligence quotation, or IQ. By 1917 the U.S. Army was using IQ test to classify and assign recruits for World War 1, a practice which persists to this day. During this period of time a new specialty called psychometrics was developed in the field of psychology which was devoted to the study of mental capacity. The study of mental capacity had far reaching results some good, and some not so good. For example, by 1917, 16 states had passed mandatory sterilization laws designed to decrease the numbers of dim-witted in their populations. Oliver Wendell Homes, in upholding the constitutionality of the law stated that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." In the 1920s immigration policies were introduced to limit the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe because people from these areas were thought to be less intelligent than those of Nordic stock. A review of these policies reveals that they were politically based and not driven by the findings based on tests of mental capacity. The rise of social democratic movements which began after World War 1 ultimately changed everything. By the 1960s a fundamental shift was taking place regarding the concept of equality. This was most evident in the political arena where the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, based on presumptions of unfairness and inequality of opportunity, dominated the American political scene. Whereas in the 1930s psychometricians had debated the role environmental factors, like poverty and family structure, might play in development of a person's IQ , by the 1960s it became extremely controversial for psychologists to claim that genes played any role at all in the development of intelligence. The behaviorists, as they were called, based on learning experiments performed in rats and pigeons, convinced large segments of the population that human intellectual potential was almost perfectly malleable and was shaped almost entirely by environmental influences including, most importantly, good parenting, educational opportunity and other factors that lay outside the individual. In other words, if a person was dumb it was a result of his environmental handicaps, not his inherited genetic makeup. These environmental limitations were blamed on capitalism and, most often, an uncaring, incompetent government. Of more importance the behaviorists convinced the academics responsible the educating our nation's young people that these deficiencies in opportunity could be righted by changes in public policy- redistribution of wealth, better education, better housing and better medical care. These claims, of course, collided head-on with a half century of accumulated IQ data indicating that differences in intelligence are intractable; that IQ is largely inherited; and that the average IQ of various socioeconomic groups and ethnic groups differ significantly. This debate came to a boiling point in 1969 when Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at UC Berkeley was asked to explain why the compensatory and remedial programs of the War on Poverty had been such dismal failures? Jensen's reply shocked the liberal establishment when he concluded that " Such programs were bound to have little success because they were aimed at populations of youngsters, predominately black, with relatively low IQs, and success in school depended in significant degree on IQ." Jensen went on to add that IQ had a large heritable component. As expected, the reaction to Jensen's article in the Harvard Educational Review was immediate and violent. "It perhaps is impossible to exaggerate the importance the Jensen disgrace," wrote the behaviorist Jerry Hirsh. During the years after Jensen's article was published in the Harvard Educational Review he could not appear in any public forum without triggering something perilously close to a riot. So much for the freedom of academic expression. To continue this sordid tale, in 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the use of standardized ability tests because they acted as "built-in headwinds" for minority groups. A year later the National Education Association called for a moratorium on all standardized intelligence testing, hypothesizing that "A third or more of American citizens are intellectually folded before they have a chance to get through elementary school because of linguistically or culturally biased standardized tests." In 1976 the British journalist, Oliver Gillie, published an article in the London Sunday Times charging Britain's most eminent psychometrician, Cyril Burt, with fraud stating that he made up data, fudged his results and invented co authors in his study of identical twins which had been raised apart. Burt, by then dead, had claimed that the correlation factor, r, for the IQs of identical twins raised apart was +.77 which irrefutably supported a large genetic influence on IQ. Burt's reputation was not restored until 1990 when the Minnesota twin study produced almost identical results showing that the correlation of IQ in twins raised apart was +.78. Nonetheless, Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man, in which he accused Burt of being a fraud, became a best sell and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. When all was said and done, Gould and his allies won the battle and the new perceived wisdom relating to intelligence became what it is today. Intelligence is a bankrupt concept. Whatever it might mean- and nobody really knows how to define it- intelligence is so ephemeral that no one really knows how to measure it accurately. IQ tests are, of course, culturally biased, and so are all other "aptitude" tests, such as the SAT. To the extent that tests such as IQ and SAT measure anything, it certainly is not innate "intelligence." IQ scores are not constant; they often change significantly over a person's life span. The scores of entire populations can be expected to change over time- look at the Jews, who early in the twentieth century scored well below average on IQ tests and now score well above average. Furthermore, the tests are nearly useless as tools, as confirmed by the well-documented fact that such tests do not predict anything except success in school. Earnings, occupation, productivity- all the important measures of success- are unrelated to the test scores. All IQ tests really accomplish is to label youngsters, stigmatizing the ones who do not do well and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that insures the socioeconomically disadvantaged in general and blacks in particular. Comment: This, in a nut shell, summarizes what is being taught in our institutions of higher learning today with respect to the importance of inherited intelligence. The Bell Curve was written to dispel the myths related to the subject of IQ, especially the commonly held belief that intelligence is not an inherited genetic trait similar to height, weight and skin color. As we proceed through the chapters of this important book it will become increasingly clear that every single concept voiced in the paragraph above is false, every last one of them! More importantly, we will see the relationship between IQ and the socioeconomic ills that are destroying our once prosperous nation. Questions: 1. Do you believe that it is possible for there to be a white Michael Jordan? 2. Do you believe that there ever will be a black Albert Einstein? If not , why not?