The Bell Curve
Cover of the first edition | |
| Authors | Richard J. Herrnstein Charles Murray |
|---|---|
| Subject | Intelligence Social class |
| Publisher | Free Press |
Publication date | 1994 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 845 |
| ISBN | 0-02-914673-9 |
| OCLC | 30913157 |
| 305.9/082 20 | |
| LC Class | BF431 .H398 1994 |
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime, than is an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this separation is a source of social division within the United States.
The book has been, and remains, highly controversial, especially where the authors discussed purported connections between race and intelligence and suggested policy implications based on these purported connections. The authors claimed that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, a view that is now considered discredited by mainstream science.[1][2][3] Many of the references and sources used in the book were advocates for racial hygiene, whose research was funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund and published in its affiliated journal Mankind Quarterly.[4][5]
Shortly after its publication, many people rallied both in criticism and in defense of the book. A number of critical texts were written in response to it. Several criticisms were collected in the book The Bell Curve Debate.
- ^ Bird, Kevin; Jackson, John P.; Winston, Andrew S. (2024). "Confronting Scientific Racism in Psychology: Lessons from Evolutionary Biology and Genetics". American Psychologist. 79 (4): 497–508. doi:10.1037/amp0001228. PMID 39037836.
Recent articles claim that the folk categories of race are genetically meaningful divisions, and that evolved genetic differences among races and nations are important for explaining immutable differences in cognitive ability, educational attainment, crime, sexual behavior, and wealth; all claims that are opposed by a strong scientific consensus to the contrary. ... Despite the veneer of modern science, RHR [racial hereditarian research] psychologists' recent efforts merely repeat discredited racist ideas of a century ago. The issue is truly one of scientific standards; if psychology embraced the scientific practices of evolutionary biology and genetics, current forms of RHR would not be publishable in reputable scholarly journals.
- ^ Turkheimer, Eric; Harden, Kathryn Paige; Nisbett, Richard E. (June 15, 2017). "There's still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes". Vox. Vox Media. Archived from the original on May 4, 2021. Retrieved 29 April 2021.
- ^ Panofsky, Aaron; Dasgupta, Kushan; Iturriaga, Nicole (2021). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 175 (2): 387–398. doi:10.1002/ajpa.24150. PMC 9909835. PMID 32986847. S2CID 222163480.
- ^ Paul, Dianne B. (2003). "The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (review)". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 77 (4): 972–974. doi:10.1353/bhm.2003.0186.
Media attention peaked in the aftermath of the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994), which drew heavily on fund-supported research by Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, and J. Philippe Rushton (who was appointed president of the Fund in March 2002). Critics have charged that, from its inception, Pioneer pursued a racist/eugenicist agenda, and they view its more recent support of work in behavioral genetics as a continuation of this aim.
- ^ Lane, Charles (1 December 1994). "The Tainted Sources of 'The Bell Curve'". The New York Review of Books.
Charles Murray recently expressed his own sense of queasiness about the book's sources to a reporter from The New York Times: 'Here was a case of stumbling onto a subject that had all the allure of the forbidden,' he said. 'Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we're on planes and trains. We're furtively peering at this stuff.' What sort of 'stuff' could Murray mean? Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve's bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828). But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of "racial history" founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.