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The following items are from a number of different sources that were collected and published in The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman [New York, NY: Times Books, 1995]). The debate in the title refers to the debate over the thesis that was reproduced by authors Richard J. Herrnstein and Bill Murray in their book, The Bell Curve (published in 1994 by the Free Press); namely, that genetics and not the environment is the principal determinant of intelligence, and therefore some groups (e.g. blacks and the white working class) are less intelligent than others-such as Asians. Of course, this was not an original argument because it was really a rehash of the old geneticist argument advanced by eugenicists and social darwinists nearly a century ago (and taken to its logical conclusion, in practice, in Nazi occupied Europe). The publication of the Bell Curve, as you may guess, was accompanied by much publicity and controversy. I am presenting to you to digest the following items that critique the geneticist thesis because even though the geneticist argument about the origins of intelligence are nothing more than sophisticated drivel, many people, especially those of racist inclinations, believe in this stuff. As you read the material also keep in the forefront of your mind the basic conclusion that recent studies of the human brain and learning leave us with: intelligence is a product of a DIALECTICAL interplay (the key word here is dialectical) between the genes and the environment and that the two can NEVER be disentangled in order to measure the extent of the role played by each. Consider this fact also: once upon a time, the following groups of people were considered genetically inferior by their conquerors, rulers, etc.: Europeans as a whole; European slaves; European serfs; Roman Catholics; Italians, Spanish and other Mediterranean peoples; Poles, Russians and other East Europeans; The Japanese and other Asians; etc.

(Note: 1. The American Enterprise Institute-see below-- is a right-wing conservative think-tank. 2. Material in square brackets below are my comments. 3. In addition to race, the Bell Curve authors also add to the mix "class" where they argue that the working classes-which means people like you!--are genetically less intelligent than the intellectuals, who they label the "cognitive elite.")

Among the ideas that have harmed mankind, one of the most durable and destructive is that the human species is divided into biological units called races and that some races are innately superior to others. At the moment this notion is being resurrected yet again, in a new and seemingly objective guise, by several prominent social scientists. Their argument goes like this. Blacks perform more poorly on IQ tests than whites, so they must be less intelligent. The IQ scores of children correlate with those of their parents, so intelligence must be at least partly governed by genes. Therefore, the IQ difference between blacks and whites has a genetic component that cannot be eliminated by society. A highly sophisticated version of this reasoning can be found in an incendiary new book called The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and Richard J. Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard who recently died of cancer.

The topic of racial differences in intelligence today is like the topic of sex in Victorian England, the authors submit. Among friends-in the office, locker room, and dormitory--people say things that would be considered racist if uttered in a public forum. "As the gulf widens between public discussion and private opinion," they write, "confusion and error flourish."

What the authors fail to mention is that it is social scientists like them who have been responsible for much of the "confusion and error." Psychometry--the measurement of mental faculties like intelligence-has a long and farcical history, one driven by irrational convictions about racial superiority. Among its discoveries over the last century and a half are that Jews are not really very smart, that Mediterranean peoples are genetically inferior to Nordic ones, and that the average mental age of white U.S. enlistees in World War I was thirteen.

That such findings can now be seen to be nonsense does not, of course, mean that the conclusions like those in The Bell Curve should be dismissed out of hand, for genuine science sometimes sprouts from the manure of pseudoscience and quackery. But it does suggest that we should be extremely skeptical of claims that whites are on average smarter than blacks, that Japanese and Chinese are smarter than whites, and that these differences are writ immutably in our genes. It also suggests that we should take a look at what the natural sciences--biology and genetics, as against the more dubious field of psychometry--have to say about racial differences.

And here is what we learn when we do. First, the human species most likely arose only a hundred thousand years or so ago-the day before yesterday in evolutionary time. That means that any differences among the races must have emerged since then. Superficial adaptations like skin color can evolve very quickly, in a matter of several thousand years. Changes in brain structure and capacity take far longer--on the order of hundreds of thousands of years. Moreover, there is no evidence for such changes since Homo sapiens first appeared on the fossil record. Innate differences in intelligence among the races have simply not had enough time to evolve.

Second, genetic diversity among the races is minuscule. Molecular biologists can now examine genes in different geographical populations. What they have found is that the overwhelming majority of the variation observed--more than 85 percent--is among individuals within the same race. Only a tiny residue distinguishes Europeans from Africans from Asians. This means that Patrick Buchanan [a racist U.S. politician] has more in common genetically with many Xhosas and Outer Mongolians than he does with, say, Prince Charles.

Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein respond by insisting that "some ethnic groups nonetheless differ genetically for sure, otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures .... The question remaining is whether the ,intellectual differences overlap the genetic differences to any extent." But with hundreds of human genes now mapped, it has become apparent that patterns of variation in the outwardly visible traits by which we distinguish the races are independent of those in other genetically determined traits. Biologically speaking, a person's color reveals very little indeed about what's beneath his skin.

So, while all men may not be created equal when it comes to cognitive abilities, it would seem that all races are. How then do we account for the sizable gap in measured IQ (some 15 points on average) that seems to separate American blacks and whites?

Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein are adept at rebutting many of the conventional explanations for the discrepancy-that IQ tests are culturally biased, that poverty and racism alone are to blame. They and many fellow researchers have gone to heroic lengths to disentangle nature from nurture, striving to show that environmental factors explain only a small part of the racial gap. But they have not gone far enough. Perhaps that is owing to their rather naive understanding of the relation between genes and the physical embodiment of IQ, the brain. Genes encode only a sketchy blueprint of our cortical hardware. Even identical twins, who are exact genetic clones of each other, have somewhat dissimilar brains at birth-a consequence of the different patterns of stimulation they were exposed to in the womb, which give rise to different neuronal connections.

The importance of this prenatal "hard-wiring" for a child's future intellectual prospects is only beginning to be appreciated. What is amply known, though, is that African-Americans are enormously disadvantaged when it comes to the quality of prenatal care they receive; a black mother is three times as likely as a white mother to have a lowbirth-weight baby. This is one environmental effect (and a correctable one) that, to the social scientist, looks like a matter of genetics.

Of all the interracial comparisons of intelligence that have been made over the years, only one effectively controlled for differences in pre- and postnatal care. That was a 1961 study of the out-of-wedlock offspring of black and of white U.S. soldiers and German mothers during the Allied occupation. The very small IQ difference observed actually favored the black children. Put this together with adoption studies showing that an early move from a deprived home to an advantaged one can boost a child's IQ by zo points, and the conviction expressed in The Bell Curve that public policy is impotent to redress IQ inequalities begins to betray a lack of imagination, if not will.

Are racial differences in intelligence natural, innate, and unchangeable, as some social scientists like to believe? Or can such differences be made to shrink and ultimately disappear with a better understanding of how the early environment determines the formation of our cognitive apparatus, as the conclusions of natural scientists seem to indicate? I am putting my money on the natural scientists. After all, at least one occupational study has shown that they have the higher IQs.

When I was in college, I applied to the Air Force ROTC program. I thought I would save my parents the expense of paying tuition and also learn to fly an airplane. I was given the most complete physical of my life (confirming, among other things, that I was too nearsighted to fly a kite, much less a plane). And I took an intelligence test. When I reported back to the ROTC staff, they looked glum. What is it? I thought. Did the physical turn up some life-threatening defect?

It turns out I had gotten the highest test score ever at my school, higher than the engineering and pre-med students who had kept me at the bottom of the bell curve in calculus. Rather than feeling pleased and flattered, I felt like a sideshow freak. The recruiters were not happy either. I think our reactions had a lot to do with the fact that I did not resemble a typical recruit. I am a woman of East Asian, specifically Korean, descent. Also, I probably looked like a hippie. They did not want me in ROTC no matter how "intelligent" I was.

The caricature of the superintelligent Asian is part of what drives Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein's book, The Bell Curve. In it, they rely on a number of statistical studies to make claims about the superior intelligence of certain groups-specifically Asian Americans--and the inferior intelligence of others, including African Americans. Because I am supposedly smarter than any previous ROTC candidate at my college, I'll explain why Asian Americans are not more intelligent than other people and, more important, why Murray and Herrnstein do a disservice to Asian Americans by promoting us as the superhuman race.

The authors make a mountain of a claim out of a molehill of evidence. Only two studies sampled Asians in America, and they were inconclusive. Five other studies compared Asians in Asia to white, Europeans or white Americans. A scientist who is testing for the effects of genes independently of environment could not think of a worse study than one which compares groups in radically different cultures. People in different countries are going to have different environments, regardless of socioeconomic status. Comparing Asians in Asia to whites in America is like comparing apples to oranges--not to mention the fact that IQ is to intelligence as apples are to zebras. In lawyer's language, Murray and Herrnstein have not met their burden of proof: They have not demonstrated an IQ difference between Asians and whites in America.

Because they need to find an Asian--white IQ difference. Once they establish a superhuman or "good" minority, then there can't be any racism in their research. If two white males admit that Asians are smarter than whites, then the rest of us might as well accept the inevitable: There are subhuman or "bad" minorities.

Asian Americans must not allow themselves to be misused in the service of Murray and Herrnstein's political agenda. To do so would just exacerbate two problems that we already face in the United States. First, painting Asian Americans as super intelligent just lets America pretend we don't exist. Social service agencies ignore us because we don't need help. Governments ignore us because we've already made it. Schools won't recruit us because we do so well on the SATs. Yet Asian Americans have inadequate access to culturally and linguistically appropriate voter assistance, health care, and job training. Asian--American households are less wealthy than white ones. Asian Americans occupy substandard housing projects and attend underfunded public schools. And at least thirty Asian Americans died in 1993 as a result of homicides in which racial animus was suspected or proven. Asian Americans, of all intelligence levels, face discrimination based on accent and appearance.

Second, the false flattery allows Murray and Herrnstein to taunt and provoke other minority groups. Using the myth of the superhuman Asian, they drag us into the racialization of American politics, creating an Asian buffer between black and white America. This strategy turns our pluses into negatives, our intelligence into cunning. We are perceived as fanatic, clannish kamikazes who threaten to overtake the local or world economy. That makes us targets of misunderstanding, hatred, and violence. After all, the accumulated rage of the black community cannot reach Beverly Hills or Bronxville, but it can make itself felt at Korean grocery stores in South Central Los Angeles and Flatbush.

Asian Americans seem almost invisible, except when there is a grocery store boycott--or when we're touted as the model minority. Unfortunately, Asian Americans are just visible enough to be misused in the social science pornography that is The Bell Curve.

Rarely do 8oo-page books crammed with graphs reach best seller lists. The Bell Curve, an inflammatory treatise about class, intelligence, and race by the late Richard J. Herrnstein, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, is an exception. The book's

deeply pessimistic analysis of U.S. social woes, together with its conservative policy prescriptions, has hit a nerve. Publishing The Bell Curve may have been a calculated political move on the part of its authors. As the country lurches to the right, many people will be seduced by the text's academic trappings and scientific tone into

believing its arguments and political inferences well supported. Those readers should think again.

The Bell Curve depicts a frightening future in which, absent strong corrective measures, a "cognitive elite" will live in guarded enclaves distant from the dull masses. Opportunities for the underclass will become limited as tolerance evaporates. Strict policing will be widely accepted, and racial hostility will likely spread. The least intelligent denizens of this dystopia will be consigned to a "high--tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation." This apocalyptic vision is presented as the consequence of unpalatable, undeniable "facts" about inheritance and intelligence. But the thesis rests on curiously twisted logic. Its authors have been highly selective in the evidence they present and in their interpretation of ambiguous statistics. The work is "a string of half--truths," states Christopher Jencks, a sociologist at Northwestern University.

The arguments stem from the same tradition of biological determinism chat led, not so long ago, to compulsory sterilizations in the United States and genocide elsewhere. The notion is that individuals' characteristics are both essentially fixed by inheritance and immune to alteration by the environment. Efforts to help those who are unfortunate by reason of their genes are unlikely to be rewarded. Solutions, therefore, should include those Murray has long advocated: abolish welfare, reduce affirmative action, and simplify criminal law.

Herrnstein and Murray produce data suggesting that intelligence--as assessed by a high IQ score--is increasingly important to economic success. They also argue that people who have low scores--including disproportionate numbers of blacks--are more likely than others to fall prey to social ills. The two accept evidence from studies of twins reared apart that there is a large heritable component to IQ scores: they estimate it to be 6o percent. The writers declare themselves agnostic on the question of whether racial differences in IQ scores are genetic, although they are clearly inclined to favor that possibility.

Herrnstein and Murray countenance that just because a trait has a heritable origin does not mean it is unchangeable. Nearsightedness is one example of an inherited, modifiable condition. But they decide, on the basis of a questionable look at the data, that "an inexpensive, reliable method of raising IQ is not available." This conclusion is used to justify an attack on programs aimed at helping society's most vulnerable: the authors prefer to let the genetically disadvantaged find their own level. Evidence that does Murray's way of thinking--such as not accord with Herrnstein and the observation that IQ scores worldwide are slowly increasing--is acknowledged then ignored.

Leaving aside the substantial and unresolved issue of whether a single number can adequately summarize mental performance, The Bell Cure plays fast and loose with statistics in several ways. According to Arthur Goldberger, an econometrician at the University of Wisconsin who has studied genetics and IQ, the book exaggerates the ability of IQ to predict job performance. Herrnstein and Murray assert that scores have an impressive "validity" of about 0.4 in such predictions. They report that the Armed Forces Qualification Test, an IQ surrogate, has a validity of o.62 at anticipating the success of training for mechanical jobs. Yet many of the measures used to assess validity include supervisors' ratings, which are subject to bias, Goldberger notes. Furthermore, the validities that the duo see as so revealing are in fact hypothetical quantities that no employer would expect to find in prospective employees. "It's really bad stuff," Goldberger says.

Other correlations that the writers establish between social ills and low IQ scores are equally suspect. Herrnstein and Murray put great weight on comparisons between the ability of IQ scores and parental socioeconomic status to predict what will happen to young people. Yet the measures of socioeconomic status they use cannot ensure that homes are equally stimulating. The point is crucial because numerous studies have demonstrated that early childhood surroundings have a large role in molding IQ scores--certainly more studies than have indicated a significant role for heredity. Consequently, conclusions about the dominance of IQ cannot be taken at face value. Leon Kamin, a psychologist at Northeastern University and well--known critic of research on intelligence, maintains chat interactions between genes and environment make attempts to weigh nature against nurture `'meaningless."

Herrnstein and Murray's hereditarian bias is also obvious in their account of a study of a hundred children from varying ethnic backgrounds who were adopted into white families. The study got under way in the 1970s. At age seven, the black and interracial children scored an average of io6 on IQ tests--considerably better than the national average of black children and close to levels scored by white children. A decade later researchers Sandra Scarr of the University of Virginia and Richard A. Weinberg of the University of Minnesota found that the IQs of the black children had declined to 89, whereas those of white adoptees had fallen from 112 to 106. Scarr and Weinberg concluded that racially based discrimination at school probably explained the drop in the black youngsters' scores. Jencks agrees: "The results are perfectly consistent with the difference being due to something in the early home environment and, for older kids, their experience in school." But Herrnstein and hurray interpret the findings differently: "Whatever the environmental impact may have been, it cannot have been large."

The Bell Curve's most egregious failing, however, may be its bleak assessment of educational efforts to improve the intellectual performance of children from deprived backgrounds. Herrnstein and hurray cast a jaundiced eye over Head Start and other more intensive efforts for at--risk youngsters--projects that have been claimed to produce long--lasting gains in IQ, a possibility that would not square well with biological determinist thought. Herrnstein and hurray downplay such results, noting that such interventions are too expensive to be widely used. The only one they are enthusiastic about is adoption, which, paradoxically, they accept as having a clearly positive effect on IQ. "Their treatment of intervention wouldn't be accepted by an academic journal--it's that bad," exclaims Richard Nisbett, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan. "I'm distressed by the extent to which people assume [hurray] is playing by the rules."

Jencks is also unhappy with the book's conclusions about education. "Herrnstein and hurray are saying Head Start didn't have a profound effect. But that doesn't tell us that we couldn't do a lot better if we had a different society," he says. "In Japan, for example, children learn more math than they do in the U.S. because everybody there agrees math is important."

Scarr, who accepts a substantial role for heredity in individual IQ differences, insists that efforts to boost intellectual functioning in disadvantaged youth can deliver results. "There's no question that rescuing children from desperately awful circumstances will improve their performance," she notes. Scarr also points out that ameliorating a child's environment may reduce social problems, regardless of its effect on IQ. "The low-IQ group deserves a lot more support than it is getting," she argues. "Other societies manage not to have the same levels of social ills as we do." Edward F Zigler, a prominent educational psychologist at Yale University, asserts that "in terms of everyday social competence, we have overwhelming evidence that high--quality early education is beneficial."

Therein lies the fatal flaw in Herrnstein and hurray's harsh reasoning. Even though boosting IQ scores may be difficult and expensive, providing education can help individuals in other ways. That fact, not IQ scores, is what policy should be concerned with. The Bell Curve's fixation on IQ as the best statistical predictor of a life's fortunes is a myopic one. Science does not deny the benefits of a nurturing environment and a helping hand.

A mainly white "cognitive elite" rules America, and African Americans, Latinos, and working-class whites are destined to be left in the dust. Too bad, but they're just inferior genetically. So say Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein in their new and muchdebated book, The Bell Curve. Not to appear white supremacist, the authors point out that Asian Americans post higher IQ scores on the average than whites, claiming that their scores reflect the Asian "ethnicity's" genetically superior "nonverbal" capacity. Yet Chinese Americans provide the clue to what is wrong with this reasoning. During the ig2os, IQ testers pegged the Chinese at the bottom of the intelligence pile: average IQ between 65 and 70. By the 1950s, Chinese Americans were scoring almost on a par with whites and twenty years later they were scoring higher than whites.

Are we to believe that some magic mutation made the ChineseAmerican gene pool more intellectually powerful? Or is the increase in IQ explainable in terms of a variety of sociological factors on the wings of which a significant proportion of this formerly impoverished and undereducated ethnic group is today solidly upper middle class and successful in high--end "cognitive elite" occupations?

That African Americans score on the average fifteen points less than whites on IQ tests is a fact well known to all who have studied the literature. A fact also known to those who have studied the history of IQ is that up until the mid--1920S, women lagged behind men by a similar point spread. The tests were redesigned to be "unbiased," thereby equalizing their scores.

This second fact, lost on Herrnstein and Murray, was the main reason why the Supreme Court of California banned IQ tests as an educational placement tool. The court concluded that until the tests are adjusted in relation to non--white and non--middle--class groups, as they were in relation to women, the tests will continue to discriminate against these groups.

Also overlooked by the authors is an extensive body of literature on the irrelevance of IQ to creativity and productivity in different "cognitive elite" professions. Although it is true that, on the average, scientists, lawyers, and engineers score higher than blue--collar workers, differences in IQ within these professional groups seem to have no impact on the individual's contribution to the field--high-IQ mathematicians are no more successful than low-IQ mathematicians. The explanation offered by researchers is that IQ is in no way connected to creativity and that the kind of intelligence it measures is too narrow to predict success within occupations. Behavioral and cognitive scientists studying human intelligence over the past dozen years have reached the consensus that IQ is only one very small part of the human intelligence puzzle.

The real problem with intelligence test scores is revealed by way of analogy: IQ tests are to intelligence what crossword puzzles are to literary creativity. In other words, being able to do well on a Sundaymorning puzzle may be correlated with knowledge of world literature, but such knowledge is not causally connected with the ability to write a novel. In a manner typical of hereditarians, Herrnstein and Murray blur the distinction between correlation and causation and conclude that society is destined to be dominated by a racially (read "genetically") superior elite of the highly intelligent, and that the ideals of equality are at best unfounded and at worst dangerous.

Their spiritual father is Sir Francis Galton, who more than a century ago demonstrated that the 74 most eminent men in England were related to each other through a network of some 50 or so families. Did Galton conclude that he was looking at a hereditary ruling class? No. Galton concluded that he had proved these families were of superior racial worth, achieving their position solely on the basis of their inherited intelligence. Galton was the first to statistically "prove" the relationship between intelligence, heredity, and social class. He was also the first to apply the normal (i.e., "bell") curve to heredity and intelligence. Galton called his science "eugenics" and launched hereditarian research as a political movement to weed out the racially inferior and promote the procreation of the superior.

The Bell Curve is just the latest example in a long history of what's known in the trade as "Galtonesque hereditarianism." The media frenzy ballyhooing the appearance of The Bell Curve is quite an orgy of advertising. It cannot be "news" because there is nothing really "new" in The Bell Curve, other than packaging.

The real news story is how and why a media campaign fit for a president has cast the authors, and their scientific racism, into the spotlight. The real news story is precisely how this book has hit the covers of magazines, the editorial pages, and the talk shows with such perfect timing. And the truly big story is that this book will be taken so seriously by so many of the "cognitive elite" as an ideological basis for a more openly racist ultraconservative agenda.

In Montclair, New Jersey, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an elderly woman named Mildred Maxwell who would greet the periodic outbursts of segregationists and other racial provocateurs with the angry and scornful comment "There isn't a hell hot enough for that man and his ideas." Mrs. Maxwell comes to mind whenever I think (angrily and scornfully) about Charles Murray and his book The Bell Curve, a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.

Mr. Murray fancies himself a social scientist, an odd choice of profession for someone who.would have us believe he was so sociologically ignorant as a teenager that he didn't recognize any racial implications when he and his friends burned a cross on a hill in his hometown of Newton, Iowa. In a New York Times Magazine article by Jason DeParle, Mr. Murray described the cross--burning as "dumb." But he insisted, "It never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance."

Now, in middle age, Mr. Murray gets his kicks by thinking up ways to drape the cloak of respectability over the obscene and long--discredited views of the world's most rabid racists. And so The Bell Curve, written with Richard Hermstein, who recently died, promotes the view that blacks are inherently inferior to whites.

It's an ugly stunt. Mr. Murray can protest all he wants, his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.

The book shows that, on average, blacks score about fifteen points lower than whites on intelligence tests, a point that was widely known and has not been in dispute. Mr. Murray and I (and many, many others) differ on the reasons for the disparity. I would argue that a group that was enslaved until little more than a century ago; that has long been subjected to the most brutal, often murderous, oppression; that has-been deprived of competent, sympathetic political representation; that has most often had to live in the hideous physical conditions that are the hallmark of abject poverty; that has tried its best to survive with little or no prenatal care, and with inadequate health care and nutrition; that has been segregated and ghettoized in communities that were then red-lined by banks and insurance companies and otherwise shunned by business and industry; that has been systematically frozen out of the job market; that has in large measure been deliberately deprived of a reasonably decent education; that has been forced to cope with the humiliation of being treated always as inferior, even by imbeciles--I would argue that these are factors that just might contribute to a certain amount of social pathology and to a slippage in intelligence test scores.

Mr. Murray says no. His book strongly suggests that the disparity is inherent, genetic, and there is little to be done about it.

Most serious scholars know that the conclusions drawn by Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein from the data in The Bell Curve are bogus. The issue has been studied ad nauseam and the overwhelming consensus of experts in the field is that environmental conditions account for most of the disparity when the test results of large groups are compared.

The last time I checked, both the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland were white. And yet the Catholics, with their legacy of discrimination, grade out about fifteen points lower on IQ tests. There are many similar examples. Scholars are already marshaling the evidence needed to demolish The Bell Curve on scientific grounds. But be assured that when their labors are completed and their papers submitted, they will not get nearly the attention that The Bell Curve has received.

A great deal of damage has been done. The conclusions so disingenuously trumpeted by Mr. Murray were just what millions of people wanted to hear. It was just the message needed to enable whites to distance themselves still further from any responsibility for the profound negative effect that white racism continues to have on all blacks. Mildred Maxwell is no longer with us. I wish she were. Just once I would like to hear her comment on Charles Murray and his book.

[Note in the book accompanying the article:] This extract from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) appeared under the entry for "Negro." It was written by Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician, United States Census Bureau, and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell University.

Mentally the Negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: "the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence." We must necessarily suppose that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brainpan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and lateral pressure of the frontal bone. This explanation is reasonable and even probable as a contributing cause; but evidence is lacking on the subject and the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts. At the same time his environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely the creature of his environment, and it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests taken directly from the environment of the white man, as for instance tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white race, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro.

On the other hand negroes far surpass white men in acuteness of vision, hearing, sense of direction and topography. A native who has once visited a particular locality will rarely fail to recognize it again. For the rest, the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good--natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog--like fidelity which has stood the supreme test.

For all the shock value of its assertion that blacks are intractably, and probably biologically, inferior in intelligence to whites and Asians, The Bell Curve is not quite an original piece of research. It is, in spite of all the controversy that is attending its publication, only a review of the literature-an elaborate interpretation of data culled from the work of other social scientists. For this reason, the credibility of its authors, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, rests significantly on the credibility of their sources.

The press and television have for the most part taken The Bell Curve's extensive bibliography and footnotes at face value. And, to be sure, many of the book's data are drawn from relatively reputable academic sources, or from neutral ones such as the Census Bureau. Certain of the book's major factual contentions are not in dispute-such as the claim that blacks consistently have scored lower than whites on IQ tests, or that affirmative action generally promotes minorities who scored lower on aptitude tests than whites. And obviously intelligence is both to some degree definable and to some degree heritable.

The interpretation of those data, however, is very much in dispute. So, too, are the authors' conclusions that little or nothing can or should be done to raise the ability of the IQ--impaired, since so much of their lower intelligence is due to heredity. Murray and Herrnstein instead write sympathetically about eugenic approaches to public policy (though they do not endorse them outright). It is therefore interesting that 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." [1]

What sort of "stuff' could Murray mean? Surely the most curious of the sources he and Hermstein 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).[2] 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.[3]

Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the U.S. civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly's avowed purpose was to counter the "Communist" and "egalitarian" influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. "The crimes of the Nazis," wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly's founder and editor--in--chief until 1978, "did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable."[4]

Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.[5] In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are "worthless." [6 ] The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens' Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;[7] and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy's eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called "The Scientific Basis of Fascism."[8]

Mainstream anthropologists denounced Mankind Quarterly. "It is earnestly hoped that The Mankind Quarterly will succumb before it can further discredit anthropology and lead to even more harm to mankind," G. Ainsworth Harrison wrote in a 1961 article in Man, the journal of Britain's Royal Institute of Anthropology.[9] Bozo Skerlj, a Slovene anthropologist who had survived Dachau, resigned in protest from his post on the editorial advisory board of Mankind Quarterly, saying that he had joined unaware of the journal's "racial prejudice."[10] Undaunted, Mankind Quarterly published work by some of those who had taken part in research under Hitler's regime in Germany. Ottmar von Verschuer, a leading race scientist in Nazi Germany and an academic mentor of Josef Mengele, even served on the Mankind Quarterly editorial board.[11]

Since 1978, the journal has been in the hands of Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist best known for establishing the Northern League in 1958. The group was dedicated to "the interests, friendship and solidarity of all Teutonic nations." In 1980, Pearson resigned from the ultra-right World Anti-Communist League in a struggle with members who said he was too far to the right.[12] But Mankind Quarterly didn't change. Pearson published eugenically minded attacks on school integration by two American academics, Ralph Scott and Donald Swan, who were alleged to have pro-Nazi affiliations; reports on a sperm bank in which geniuses have deposited their superior genetic material; elaborate accounts of the inherited mental inferiority of blacks; and the fact that Jews first came to South Africa because its gold and diamonds were "attractive" to them.

Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man, which publishes Mankind Quarterly, is bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund, a New York foundation established in 1937 with the money of Wickliffe Draper. Draper, a textile magnate who was fascinated by eugenics, expressed early sympathy for Nazi Germany, and later advocated the "repatriation" of blacks to Africa. The fund's first president, Harry Laughlin, was a leader in the eugenicist movement to ban genetically inferior immigrants, and also an early admirer of the Nazi regime's eugenic policies.[13]

The Pioneer Fund's current president, Harry Weyher, has denied any Nazi or white supremacist connections. But the fund's current agenda remains true to the purpose set forth in its charter of 1937: "race betterment, with special reference to the people of the United States." In a letter in 1989, the fund proposed that America abandon integration, on the grounds that "raising the intelligence of blacks or others still remains beyond our capabilities."[14] The fund not only underwrites Mankind Quarterly and many other Pearson publications, but has also provided millions of dollars in research grants to sustain the "scholars" who write for it and serve on its editorial board.[15]

Which brings us back to Murray and Herrnstein. They cite in their book no fewer than thirteen scholars who have benefitted from Pioneer Fund grants in the last two decades--the grants total more than $4 million. Many of The Bell Curve's sources who worked for Mankind Quarterly were also granted Pioneer money.[16]

Most of The Bell Curve does not explicitly address the relationship between race, genes, and IQ--as Murray has taken great pains to point out. Rather, the book couches its arguments about the impact of IQ on social behavior in terms of class, mostly using examples drawn from data on whites. But in view of the characteristic overlaps between race and class in American society, the insinuation is that all the connections between social pathology and low IQ which the authors find for whites must go double for blacks. It is only after one factors in their argument that IQ itself is mostly inherited (however hedged that argument may be), that the racial connotations of their policy prescriptions become evident.

And many of The Bell Curve's most important assertions which establish causal links between IQ and social behavior, and IQ and race, are derived partially or totally from the Mankind Quarterly--Pioneer Fund scholarly circle. The University of California's Arthur Jensen, cited twenty--three times in The Bell Cue's bibliography, is the book's principal authority on the intellectual inferiority of blacks. He has received $1.1 million from the Pioneer Fund.[17] To buttress Jensen's argument, Murray and Herrstein draw on a book edited by University of Georgia psychologist R. Travis Osborne (the book, co-edited by former Mankind Quarterly editorial advisory board member Frank McGurk, is also cited by Murray and Herrnstein as an authority on the link between low IQ and criminality: pp. 277, 339). Osborne, the recipient of $387,000 from Pioneer, once testified as an expert witness for plaintiffs in a federal suit to overturn the Brown v. Board of Education decision.[18]

Other scholars who have received substantial amounts of money from Pioneer include Robert A. Gordon, a Johns Hopkins sociologist cited by Murray and Hermstein on the causal link between low IQ and black criminality (pp. 321, 327, and 338); Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, cited on the disproportionate representation of lower-IQ blacks in the professions; and University of Pennsylvania demographer Daniel Vining, Jr., a former Mankind Quarterly editorial advisory board member, cited on incipient "dysgenesis," or biological decline, in America, owing to the falling birthrate among the most intelligent members of society"[19]

The tainted funding of some of the scholars Murray and Herrnstein cite does not by itself invalidate those scholars' findings. After all, history is full of examples of scientists who were pilloried as crackpots in their own times but are hailed as geniuses today. However shocking it may be that some of Murray and Herrnstein's sources have chosen to affiliate themselves with such organizations, their work and those parts of The Bell Curve that draw upon it--must be judged on the scholarly merits.

Take the case of Richard Lynn. A professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, Lynn was particularly influential in guiding the two authors of The Bell Curve through their review of the literature. In the book's acknowledgments, they say they "benefited especially" from the "advice" of Lynn, whom they identify only as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences" (pp. xxv, 272).

Lynn is an associate editor of Mankind Quarterly, and has received $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund.[20] One of his articles expressed support for. the view that "the poor and the ill" are "weak specimens whose proliferation needs to be discouraged in the interests of the improvement of the genetic quality of the group, and ultimately of group survival."[21] He has also written that the genetic mental superiority of the Jews may be a happy Darwinian byproduct of "intermittent persecutions which the more intelligent may have been able to foresee and escape."[22]

Lynn's work is cited twenty-four times in The Bell Curve's bibliography. [23] It is used to support three important claims: that East Asians have a higher average IQ than whites; that most immigrants come from groups with subpar IQs; and that the IQ score of blacks in Africa is "substantially below" the American black average. Each of these seemingly discrete claims has a key role in the formulation of The Bell Curve's broader suggestions about the relationship among race, heredity, IQ, and social structure.

The assertion about inferior black African intelligence has particularly far-reaching implications. If it can be shown that low IQ predicts social ills such as crime, poverty, and unstable families, current views of Africa and of the sources of its tragic problems would have to be significantly revised. The finding would also support the claim that the IQ superiority of whites is genetic, because the African-American edge over blacks in Africa could be attributed to their admixture of white genes. (Murray and Herrnstein note pointedly that South African "coloureds" have about the same IQ as American blacks.) And lagging African IQ could also be taken to refute the claim that black Americans' lower IQ is a legacy of racism--assuming, as Murray and Herrnstein put it, that "the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores" (p. 288).

Setting up their discussion of Lynn's data, Murray and Herrnstein contend that the comparison between black Americans and black Africans is a valid exercise because IQ scores have been found to predict job and school performance of black Africans as well as those of black Americans (p. 288). They also attribute the paucity of published estimates of an overall average IQ score for blacks in Africa to the fact that these scores have been extremely low--the implication being that researchers are reluctant to publish such politically incorrect findings (p. 289).

These assertions are based on a highly selective reading of the article Murray and Herrnstein cite to support them: a comprehensive 1988 review titled "Test Performance of Blacks in Southern Africa," by the South African psychologists I. M. Kendall, M. A. Verster, and J. W V Mollendorf (p. 289). The main point of these three researchers' argument is to question sweeping comparisons such as the one Lynn attempts, and Murray and Herrnstein repeat. The three South African psychologists write:

It would be rash to suppose that psychometric tests constitute valid measures of intelligence among non--westerners. The inability of most psychologists to look beyond the confines of their own culture has led to the kind of arrogance whereby judgments are made concerning the "simplicity" of African mental structure and "retarded" cognitive growth.[24]

Given the host of environmental and cultural factors that hamper black Africans' test performance, they also say, "one wonders whether there is any point in even considering genetic factors as an additional source of variance between the average performance levels of westerners and Africans. "[25]

Nevertheless, Murray and Herrnstein venture an estimate of African IQ, drawn mainly from an article by Lynn that appeared in Mankind Quarterly in 1991. It should be noted, for a start, that the authors of The Bell Curve misreport Lynn's data. They say he found a median IQ of 75 in Africa (p. 289). But in his article, "Race Differences in Intelligence: The Global Perspective," Lynn said that the mean African IQ--not the median--was 70.[26]

In any event, how did Lynn arrive at his number? First, he assembled eleven studies of the intelligence of "pure African Negroids," drawn from different tests of several different peoples and widely varying sample sizes in the years from 1929 to 1991. Then, he decided which was the "best": a 1989 study from South Africa. In this test, he says, 1,093 sixteen--year--old black students (who had been in school for eight years and were therefore familiar with pencil--and--paper tests) scored a mean of 69 on the South African Junior Aptitude Test. Finally, Lynn rounded this result up to 70, and declared it a valid approximation of black IQ in the continent of Africa as a whole.[27]

This methodology alone invites skepticism. But Lynn also seems to have misconstrued the study. Its author, Dr. Ken Owen, told me his test was "not at all" an indication that intelligence is inherited. He blamed the low performance of blacks on environmental factors such as poorer schooling for blacks under apartheid and their difficulty with English. Owen said his results "certainly cannot" be taken as an indication of intelligence among blacks in Africa as a whole.[28]

Lynn further defends his choice of 70 as a "reasonable" mean for Africa on the grounds that 70 was the median of the average IQ scores reported in the eleven studies he had found. This statistical artifact aside, his list of studies is dubious. It includes what he calls "the first good study of the intelligence of pure African Negroids": an experiment in 1929 in which 293 blacks in South Africa were given the U.S. Army Beta Test, and got a mean score of 65.[29]

The test was administered by M. L. Fick, whom Kendall, Verster, and Mollendorf call an "extreme protagonist" of the view that blacks are inherently inferior to whites.[30] The Beta test, which was developed for illiterate recruits in the U.S. military, shows blatant cultural bias. One question presents a picture of people playing tennis without a net; respondents are supposed to sketch in the net to get full credit. In 1930, just a year after the Beta test was given in South Africa, C. C. Brigham, who had been its leading proponent in the United States, finally admitted that the test was invalid for non-Americans. Lynn does not mention this fact.[31]

Far from refuting the thesis that the legacy of racism is to blame for black Americans' lower IQ scores vis-a-vis whites, as Murray and Herrnstein contend, Lynn's data actually support it (to the extent they have any meaning at all). Of Lynn's eleven studies, five were conducted in South Africa under apartheid (and one in the Belgian Congo in 1952).[32] If any country oppressed black people more than the United States, it was South Africa. Indeed, as the modern South African psychologists now acknowledge, one of the main uses of IQ tests under apartheid was to provide "scientific" justification for that system.

The assertion of an East Asian IQ advantage over whites, though essentially a success story, also plays a subtle, but crucial, supporting role in The Bell Curve's overall argument about the connections among IQ, social achievement, and race. Coming before the discussion of black-white differences, it helps prepare the reader to accept racial categories as units of social analysis. It also conforms to readers' preconceptions, shaped both by the media and by everyday experience, about the amazing brilliance of Asian immigrants and their offspring.

The authors would seem to be on firmer ground invoking Lynn here, since his specialty is the inherited mental superiority of East Asians, or "Mongoloids," as he refers to them. In Mankind Quarterly, he has contended that the Japanese "have the highest intelligence in the world."[33] In an article in Nature in 1982, Lynn claimed the Japanese enjoy a ten-point IQ advantage over European whites, and that.this difference is growing. He suggested that this helps to explain the postwar economic miracle in Japan.[34]

But two American psychologists, Harold W. Stevenson and Hiroshi Azuma, pointed out in a rebuttal in Nature that the Japanese sample Lynn used was made up of children of relatively well-off urban parents--a fact Lynn failed to disclose in his article. Lynn's result was thus fatally flawed: he had tried to compare this socially skewed sample with a much broader and more representative American one.[35] Murray and Herrnstein's sole mention of this is a footnote: "For a critique of Lynn's early work, see Stevenson and Azuma 1983" (p. 716).

At the opening of their section headed "Do Asians Have Higher IQs Than Whites?" Murray and Herrnstein seem to be struggling to salvage some meaning from Lynn's data. The basic problem is the enormous difficulty of drawing conclusions about the relative intelligence of people who come from vastly different civilizations. They cite a string of Lynn's comparisons that suggest East Asians are superior, but eventually back off, conceding that the various test results he has assembled are not really comparable. Finally, the authors note: "Given the complexities of cross-national comparisons, the issue [of relative East Asian--white--black intelligence] must eventually be settled by a sufficient body of data obtained from identical tests that are comparable except for race" (pp. 272--274).

Murray and Herrnstein write that they "have been able to identify three such efforts." In the first, they say, "samples of American, British, and Japanese students ages thirteen to fifteen were administered a test of abstract reasoning and spatial relations"--the British and American students did far worse than the Japanese, naturally. In the second "set of studies," they write, nine--year--olds in Japan, Hong Kong, and Britain, drawn from comparable socioeconomic populations, were administered the Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices. Once again, the British children lost out by "well over half a standard deviation" (p. 274).

Only by checking the footnotes (at the back of the 845--page book) can readers discover that the author of both these studies is Richard Lynn. With regard to the first case, The Bell Curve's text leaves the impression that the tests were conducted with similar samples in the three countries at more or less the same time. This is not quite what happened, as one learns from reading the 1987 Mankind Quarterly article from which these data are drawn. Lynn and his assistants gave the test in 1985 to 178 Japanese children. The tiny sample was not checked to reflect the social makeup of Japan as a whole (some 57 percent of the test-takers were boys). The test-givers merely showed up at two schools, one rural and one urban, and gave the tests to whoever was present. Lynn then compared this result to results from an American test that had been given thirteen years earlier to 64,000 subjects screened for their representativity, and to the results of a test given in 1978 to a similarly representative sample of 10,000 students in Britain. His conclusion that Japanese children do better was arrived at by distributing extra points among the three groups to "adjust" for the time lag among the three tests.[36]

The second "set of studies" is in the same 1991 Mankind Quarterly article in which Lynn presented his claims about "pure African Negroids." He says that a group of 118 Hong Kong nine-year-olds scored a 113 IQ, a sample Of 444 Japanese children got a 110 IQ, and a sample of 239 British children got a 100 IQ. He asserts that all three samples were "representative" and drawn from "typical public primary schools," as Murray and Herrnstein report. But in the article Lynn does not explain how he assured the "representativity" of the samples, or the "typicality" of the schools.[37]

Murray and Herrnstein then go on to describe a third set of studies done by Harold Stevenson in Minnesota. In contrast to their seeming circumspection about Lynn's identity, they mention Stevenson's name in the main text of the book. As they note, he "carefully matched the children on socioeconomic and demographic variables"--and found no difference at all between the IQs of Japanese, Taiwanese, and American children (pp. 274--275).

"Where does this leave us?" Murray and Herrnstein then ask. On the one hand, we have two methodologically dubious studies by Lynn, a professor who believes, as he wrote in the Mankind Quarterly article, that "the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization."[38] On the other hand is a rigorous study by a social scientist with no known axe to grind, who finds no IQ disparity between whites and Asians. But Murray and Herrnstein portray this as a debate among a large number of contentious and equally reputable experts. "We will continue to hedge," they write; and simply split the difference. They venture that East Asian IQ exceeds that of whites by three points, a figure which "most resembles a consensus, tentative though it still is" (pp. 276).

By the time Murray and Hermstein get around to talking about immigrants, their "tentative consensus" on the East Asian-white IQ gap has grown by two points, and hardened into a datum firm enough to be factored into immigration policy. Drawing, once again, on Lynn's 1991 article in Mankind Quarterly, they assign East Asians a mean IQ of 105, whites 100, "Pacific" populations a score of 91, and blacks 84. Without reference to Lynn or any other source, Murray and Herrnstein give "Latinos"--a designation empty of meaningful "racial" content--a mean IQ of 91. They give no data on IQs of South Asians and Middle Eastern people, who supplied 11 percent of the immigrants in the 1980s. They're just "omitted from the analysis," as the authors put it. From this hodgepodge of assumptions Murray and Herrnstein produce the "basic statement" that 57 percent of legal immigrants in the 1980s came from ethnic groups with average IQs less than that of American whites, and therefore the mean for all immigrants is probably below that of all native-born Americans (pp. 359-360).

Even if their "basic statement" is true, it says nothing at all about the scores of the individuals who actually did immigrate to the United States. Thus Murray and Hermstein must deal with the commonsense notion that immigrants generally represent the brightest and most energetic members of their former societies, by virtue of their willingness to get up and go to the United States. This the authors try to do by citing numbers from the National Longitudinal Survey, or NLSY They find that foreign-born NLSY members had a mean IQ ".4 standard deviation" lower than the rest of the NLSY sample (p. 360).

But the NLSY began in 1979, as a survey of people who were fourteen to twenty--two years old at the time, and have then been reexamined and re--interviewed each succeeding year. Thus it has no bearing at all on people who arrived in the United States after 1979, when immigration from the third world reached its height--as Murray and Hermstein themselves report. (Probably for this reason, the sample did not include a statistically significant percentage of East Asians.) The authors also acknowledge that the slightly poorer IQ performance of those Latino immigrants who were interviewed in the NLSY probably reflects their weak command of English. That normally improves in a few years, and IQ rises along with it. Finally Murray and Herrnstein find that foreign-born blacks in the NLSY score five points higher than native-born blacks (p. 360)--a fact they are utterly at a loss to explain, perhaps because some of the immigrants must have come from Africa, and they have just finished alleging that black Africans are even stupider than American blacks.

"Nonetheless," Murray and Hermstein assert, "keeping all of these qualifications in mind, the kernel of evidence that must also be acknowledged is that Latino and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence" (pp. 360-361). One hundred eighty-nine pages later, this strained contention is used to justify their inclination toward a more eugenically minded--and, hence, restrictive--U.S. immigration policy. Yet other than Lynn's flawed survey, and their own bald assertion that Latinos have a mean IQ of 911, there is no "kernel of evidence" of the kind they refer to (p. 360).

Murray and Hermstein aren't answerable for every belief of every member of the racialist crowd they rely on for so much of their data. (And they didn't get any money from Pioneer.) Still, there are two matters on which their book and the intellectual mission of the men who founded Mankind Quarterly overlap: both sought to restore the scientific status of race, and to reintroduce eugenic thinking into the public policy debate.

The more pertinent issue here is full disclosure, or what used to be called intellectual honesty. Just as Murray blushingly covered some of his materials on the Delta shuttle, so The Bell Curve tiptoes around facts that might have an inconvenient influence on its readers' evaluation of the book's sources and data--not to mention the judgment of its authors in choosing those sources. Geoffrey Cowley of Newsweek, in a sympathetic review of the book, pronounced its scholarship "overwhelmingly mainstream."[39] Would he have done so if Murray and Herrnstein had provided a full account of the provenance of their data? Indeed, would this heavily marketed book have achieved the same sales success and as much respectful press attention if it had leveled with readers about all of its sources?

There is no way to isolate the scholarship of Richard Lynn, and that of the other Mankind Quarterly contributors, from their racial and political views. Social science is not so easily insulated from ideology, as Murray and Hermstein are quick to emphasize when railing against their critics. The scholarly subcultures on which the authors of The Bell Curve depend for information are hardly less biased than those they are summoned to rebut. The bias of the Mankind Quarterly contributors, however, is much nastier. And as we have seen, some of the scholars Murray and Herrnstein rely on distort the evidence, which in key cases does not support The Bell Curve's contentions.

[1] Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?" The New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1994, p. 51.

[2] Richard J. Hermstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994).

[3] According to the bibliography of The Bell Curve, and to back issues of the Mankind Quarterly, the seventeen are W. J. Andrews, Cyril Burt, Raymond B. Cattell (eight citations), Hans J. Eysenck, Seymour Itzkoff, Arthur Jensen (twenty--three citations), Richard Lynn (twenty--four citations), Robert E. Kuttner, Frank C. J. McGurk (six citations), C. E. Noble, R. Travis Osborne (three citations), Roger Pearson, J. Philippe Rushton (eleven citations), William Shockley Audrey Shuey, Daniel Vining (three citations), and Nathaniel Weyl. The ten who are or were either editors or members of the editorial board are: Carrell, Eysenck, Itzkoff, Kuttner, Lynn, McGurk, Noble, Pearson, Shuey and Vining.

[4] Robert Gayre, "The Mankind Quarterly Under Attack," The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 2, NO. 2 (October-December 1961), p. 79. Emphasis in original.

[5] Michael Billig, Die Rassistische Internationale (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1981), p. 101. This is the German edition of Billig's 1979 book Psychology, Racism, and Fascism (Birmingham, England: A. E and R. Publications/Searchlight, 1979).

[7] Billig, Die Rassistische Internationale, pp. 103-104, and Adam Miller, "Professors of Hate," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1994, p. 113. Garrett also wrote in 1961 that "Hitler's persecution of the Jews has greatly oversensitized the American Jew toward anything which smacks of racial distinction. The preoccupation of the Jews with racial matters today is evident in the activities of various Jewish organizations. Most of these belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been `scientifically' proven." Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1961), p. 256.

[9] G. Ainsworth Harrison, "The Mankind Quarterly" Man, September 1961, p. 164.

[11] Billig, Die Rassistische Internationale, p. 106; Stefan Kuehl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.102-103.

[12] Kuehl, The Nazi Connection, p. 4; Miller, "Professors of Hate," p. 113; and Tim Kelsey and Trevor Rowe, "Academics `were funded by racist American trust,"' The Independent, March 4, 1990, p. 4.

[14] Kuehl, The Nazi Connection, p. 6; Miller, "Professors of Hate," p. 114; and Kelsey and Rowe, "Academics `were funded by racist American trust.' "

[15] Miller, "Professors of Hate," Kuehl, The Nazi Connection, pp. 9, 10, and Kelsey and Rowe, "Academics `were funded by racist American trust.'" See also copies of federal form 990-PF tax returns filed by the Pioneer Fund, which are available on microfiche at The Foundation Center, Washington, DC.

[16] The numbers were derived by cross--checking the Murray--Herrnstein bibliography with Kuehl, Billig, Miller, and Kelsey, back issues of Mankind Quarterly, and copies of federal form 990--PF filed by the Pioneer Fund.

[19] Miller, "Professors of Hate," p. 114, and the federal 990--PF forms filed by the Pioneer Fund at The Foundation Center. Vining is also thanked in the book's acknowledgments. The amounts of the Pioneer Grants are often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years. Another major recipient, J. Philippe Rushton of Canada's University of Western Ontario, is cited eleven times in The Bell Curve bibliography; and receives a two-page mention in the book's appendix (pp. 642-643) defending his highly controversial work. Rushton believes that blacks have been selected by evolution to have low intelligence. They have small heads, large genitalia, and other supposed racial features, because they developed in the warm savannah and jungle climates of Africa, where natural selection 'favored a reproductive strategy of high birthrates and low parental investment. In other words, Rushton believes that black people are genetically programmed to be irresponsible parents; he has also written that this genetic predisposition to sexual excess explains why so many blacks have AIDS.

[21] Richard Lynn, "Civilization and the Quality of Population," Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1991), p. 123. This is another Roger Pearson publication.

[22] Richard Lynn, "Orientals: The Emerging American Elite?" Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 31, Nos. 1 and 2 (Fall/Winter 1990), p. 189.

[23] Six of the Lynn articles cited by Murray and Herrnstein appeared in Personality and Individual Differences, a British journal edited by Hans J. Eysenck. Eysenck is the recipient of $250,000 in Pioneer grants and a frequent contributor to Mankind Quarterly. In 1990, two years after the University of London barred Eysenck from taking any more funds from Pioneer, Lynn channeled $30,000 from one of his Pioneer grants to Eysenck. All told, eighteen of The Bell Curve's bibliographical citations are from Eysenck's journal. See Pioneer Fund's 990--PF forms at The Foundation Center, and Kelsey and Rowe, "Academics `were funded by racist American trust.' "

[24] I. M. Kendall, Mary Ann Verster, and J. W. Von Mollendorf, "Test Performance of Blacks in Southern Africa," in S. H. Irvine and J. W. Berry, editors, Human Abilities in Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 328.

[25] Kendall, Verster, and Mollendorf, "Test Performance of Blacks in Southern Africa," p. 326.

[26] Richard Lynn, "Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective," The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 1991), p. 255 passim.

[30] Lynn, "Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective," p. 267; Kendall, Verster, and Mollendorf, "Test Performance of Blacks in Southern Africa," p. 300.

[33] Richard Lynn, Susan L. Hampson, and Saburo Iwakawi, "Abstract Reasoning and Spatial Abilities Among American; British and Japanese Adolescents," The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 1987), p. 379.

[34] Lynn, "IQ in Japan and the United States Shows a Growing Disparity," Nature, Vol. 297 (May 20, 1982), pp. 222-223.

[35] Harold Stevenson and. Hiroshi Azuma, "IQ in Japan and the United States," Nature, Vol. 306 (November 17, 1983), pp. 291-292.

[36] Lynn, "Abstract Reasoning and Spatial Abilities Among American, British, and Japanese Adolescents," pp. 400 and 401.

[37] Lynn, "Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective," pp. 275, 278.

[39] Geoffrey Cowley "Testing the Science of Intelligence," Newsweek, October 24, 1994, p. 56.