For Whom the Bell Curves

Charles Murray, the influential conservative social scientist, is resigned to the fact that a lot of the people who pick up his new book will turn immediately to Chapter 13 -- the one blandly titled "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability." It's a rare sociological text that gets rifled for the dirty parts, but The Bell Curve (The Free Press; $30), 845 pages of provocation-with-footnotes that Murray co-authored with the late Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, touches upon what the authors say is a great taboo of American life: IQ differences between the races and the degree to which intelligence is hereditary.

That blacks on average score lower than whites on IQ tests is not disputed by anyone who has studied the scores. (The cumulative test results form a bell curve on a statistician's graph.) Everything from that point on is subject to challenge, including whether IQ tests are a valid measure of intelligence or even what intelligence is. Murray and Herrnstein side with those who believe IQ is real and reasonably measured by the available tests. Their truly inflammatory notions are in what follows. While they acknowledge that intelligence is shaped by both heredity and environment, they say heredity plays the larger role -- perhaps 60%, perhaps more -- and insist that it's almost impossible to nudge IQ upward by much after the earliest stage of life. Government attempts to do so, like the Head Start education program, have been a failure. Until we know what, if anything, works at raising intellect, say Murray and Herrnstein, let's stop trying. The Bell Curve's explosive contentions detonate under a cushion of careful shadings and academic formulations. Even so, they explode with a bang. To give credence to such ideas -- even when doing so with loud sighs of alas! -- is to resume some of the most poisonous battles of the late 1960s and '70s, when the sometimes cranky outer limits of the IQ debate were personified by Arthur Jensen, the Berkeley psychologist who stressed the link between race, genes and IQ, and William Shockley, who proposed paying people with low IQs to be sterilized. Murray says the reaction against them shut off a necessary discussion. "The country has for a long time been in almost hysterical denial that genes can play any role whatsoever."

Herrnstein threw himself into the quagmire with a 1971 article in the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote that because economic status depends in good measure on IQ, which he believed was largely determined by genes, a true meritocracy, such as America sought to be, would develop a hereditary upper class, a notion the book elaborates into an emerging "cognitive elite." Before long, his classes at Harvard were being disrupted by student protesters.

Since Herrnstein died in September, Murray is facing the new round of uproar alone. Not that he's sheepish. After Reaganites discovered his 1984 book Losing Ground, which said poverty programs actually worsened the problems of the poor, he became the sociologist liberals loved to hate. More recently he introduced himself into the debate on welfare reform by insisting that unwed motherhood, not joblessness, was the key problem. His solution was to get rid of welfare altogether. Murray says when he and his co-author started work on The Bell Curve, "((Herrnstein)) said to me, 'You know, we're the only two people in America who can write this book because they've already said everything about us they can think of.' "

Maybe not. In this week's issue of the New Republic, which includes a Murray-Herrnstein article that summarizes their views, an accompanying roundup of their critics describes the theories of the two men as "indecent, philosophically shabby and politically ugly," and as "pseudoscientific racism." Racism? asks Murray. "I am absolutely baffled by the overwhelming tendency of people to say we are pushing the genetic explanation," he says. "We are staying smack dab in the middle of the scientific road regarding nature and nurture. For us to say that IQ is 60% heritable actually gives us more problems with people who say we have erred on the other side. The best studies tend to give higher estimates."

Which is a view that may just shed more darkness where obscurity is already the rule. While few scientists would argue that genes have nothing to do with IQ, fewer still are ready to conclude just how genes fit in. Specialists in the intelligence field complain that Herrnstein and Murray all but ignore what is known about brain development before and after birth. "When it comes to science, the book could have been written a hundred years ago," complains Harvard professor of education Howard Gardner. A pregnant mother's nutrition or drug abuse can have a crucial impact on her child's eventual intellectual capability -- which could go far to explain the lower IQs of inner-city children. After birth the brain's higher intellectual centers show explosive growth. Around eight or nine connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex are pruned back. The rule that governs this elimination is simple: use the connection or lose it. Children without a rich early life exposure to reading or numbers may be at a disadvantage that can register later as diminished intellect.

"Most people think that when you say IQ is genetic, you're saying you can't change it. That isn't what it means," insists Christopher Jencks, the liberal social scientist. "If you say breast cancer is hereditary, it tells you nothing about whether you can cure breast cancer." Craig Ramey, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, studied poor children who were enrolled as infants in a multiyear program that provided them and their mothers with health care and a stimulating learning environment. Many of them developed and sustained normal IQs of around 100, while those in a control group were as much as 20 points lower. The Bell Curve describes Ramey's Abecedarian Project as provocative but inconclusive and leaves it at that.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich accepts Murray and Herrnstein's expectation that a technological society will give its highest pay to people who have mastered its complex tasks but rejects their scenario of a genetically determined class structure. "There is a great deal of experimental data showing that education and training have significant effects on future earnings," says Reich. "I'm afraid ((their ideas)) will give solace to those in our society who are looking for every excuse to do less and less for those who are less fortunate."

The policy implications that Murray and Herrnstein arrive at can be hard to fathom, even if one accepts that improving IQ is as difficult as they say it is. Why not redouble attempts to bring the lagging populations, white and black, closer to the norm? Murray acknowledges that IQ may be more malleable than he supposes. But he holds that a workable strategy for intervention, especially by the bumptious instrument of government, is simply not there. And his philosophical conservatism predisposes him to look first for solutions that don't involve government at all. So The Bell Curve suggests ending welfare to discourage births among low-IQ poor women, changing immigration laws to favor the capable and rolling back most job discrimination laws, which the authors feel promote the intellectually underequipped.

Racists will be delighted. Murray says he's not trying to make them happy. Statistical trends among whole racial groups mean nothing for the fate of any individual, he points out, and any given African American may have a higher IQ than any given white person. Much of what's been done in the name of affirmative action, Murray says, has been pernicious because it encourages people to think in terms of group identities. "The way that we used to talk about this country being a great place was to say, 'In America, you can go as far as your abilities and your energy will take you,' " Murray argues. "Dammit, that is what I want to do again. We never, until about 30 or 40 years ago, talked about group outcomes. And we shouldn't."

While that may be a peculiar position for an author whose book is all about group identities, stranger still is his premise that the early '60s were a time when race was unimportant to the people who controlled schools and jobs, to say nothing of lunch counters. Murray frets that the cognitive elite is out of touch with ordinary realities. There are times when he seems to be a good example of that himself. He says he wants his book to be remembered for promoting such values as individualism. It looks as if it is likely to be remembered for some dubious premises and toxic conclusions.