The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America. - book reviews

National Review, April 17, 1995 by Dan Seligman

NOT PURPORTING to offer a fair sample of opinions provoked by the publication of The Bell Curve, this slender volume brings together 19 previously published commentaries on the book by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein. Most of the reviews are from last fall's famous auto-da-fe issue of The New Republic, and most of the reviewers sound as if they were in the presence of absolute evil.

Jacqueline Jones, a Brandeis historian, tells us that despite the authors' ``disingenuous disclaimers to the contrary,'' the book implicitly calls for disfranchising low-IQ people. Speaking of disingenuousness, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, an Ashkenazi Jew, goes ballistic over the book's statement that Ashkenazi Jews have unusually high IQs, and writes: ``I am not suggesting, of course, that Charles Murray is an anti-Semite. Still, . . .'' Eager to demonize The Bell Curve, the contributors repeatedly distort the views of its authors about the sources of the black - white IQ gap. Herrnstein and Murray made it clear that they believed environment played a significant role in the gap, added that they thought there was probably also a genetic component, and declined to specify the relative strength of the two effects. But Mickey Kaus laboriously argues that the authors are in big, big trouble because ``a significant role for the environment has been substantiated.'' Huh? Stephen Jay Gould's review says that Herrnstein and Murray believe the difference is ``mostly'' genetic. Oh? John Judis says that they believe 40 to 80 per cent of the gap is genetically based, but Judis is mixing up the black - white gap with the authors' statement about the strength of the genetic effect within ethnic groups. Par for the course.