Archive (Home)
Breaking the Last Taboo Thomas J. BouchardAcademic Nazism Steven J. Rosenthal
A Cartoon Elite Nicholas Lemann
Acting smart James Q. Wilson
Common knowledge Michael Barone
Methodological fetishism Brigitte Berger
How the Left betrayed I.Q. Adrian Wooldridge
The Attack on The Bell Curve Richard Lynn
IQ since The Bell Curve Christopher Chabris
The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite Volkmar Weiss
Cracked Bell James J. Heckman
The Bell Curve and its Critics Charles Murray
Curveball Stephen Jay Gould
The Bell Curve David Lethbridge
Deeper into the Brain Charles Murray
The Return of Determinism? The Pseudoscience of the Bell Curve Rajiv Rawat
Soft Science With a Neoconservative Agenda Donald D. Dorfman
IQ and Economic Success Charles Murray
Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud Linda S. Gottfredson
Ethnicity and IQ Thomas Sowell
The Bell Curve Chester Finn
IQ Fight Renewed Anthony Flint
Foretelling The Bell Curve Daniel Seligman
For Whom The Bell Curve Tolls Frank Miel
When facts and orthodoxy collide Craig Frisby
Cracking Open the IQ Box Howard Gardner
Race, Genes and I.Q. Herrnstein, Richard and Murray, Charles
Genius of genes Pallab Ghosh
A Reply to Charles Murray Heckman, James J.; Kamin, Leon J.; Lane, Charles; Lewis, Lloyd B.; Loury, Linda Datcher; Nisbett, Ri
Riding "The Bell Curve" Ernest R. House and Carolyn Haug
How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Arthur R. Jensen
The Intelligence Of Nations Philippe Rushton
Is intelligence fixed? Nathan Glazer
IQ will put you in your place Charles Murray
Paroxysms of denial Arthur R. Jensen
Intelligence and the social scientist Leon Kass
Obscuring the Message and Killing the Messenger Pat Duffy Hutcheon
Commentary on some of the empirical and theoretical support for The Bell Curve John Kranzler
Ländernas framtid avgörs av medborgarnas IQ Gunnar Adler-Karlsson
Legacy of racism Pat Shipman
Aim higher Barbara Lerner
Living with inequality Eugene D. Genovese
Meritocracy that works Loren E. Lomasky
Dispirited Glenn C. Loury
Mainstream Science on Intelligence
Moral intelligence Michael Young
Murdering the Bell Curve Ann Coulter
Going public Richard John Neuhaus
The Ominous, New Cognitive Elite Charles Murray
The Bell Curve Francois Nielsen
Not hopeless Ernest Van den Haag
Sins of the cognitive elite Michael Novak
Robert Siegel Interviews Charles Murray
The Bell Curve: Some implications for the discipline of school psychology Thomas Oakland
Some Recent Overlooked Research On The Bell Curve Arthur Jensen
The Bell Curve E.L. Pattullo
Race, I.Q., American Society and Charles Murray
Race, IQ, Success and Charles Murray
Does IQ Matter?
Interview With Robert Sternberg
Scientific American Debunks Leon J. Kamin
America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve. Part I: IQ and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It Steve Sailer
America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve. Part II: How the Other Half Lives Steve Sailer
What Feminist Celebrity Eugenics Teaches Us about Immigration Policy. Part 1: Jodie Foster's Baby Steve Sailer
How to Keep Immigrants from Regressing toward the Mean Steve Sailer
A Few Thoughts on IQ and the Wealth of Nations Steve Sailer
The Bell Curve Sandra Scarr
Is the Bell Curve Statistically Sound? James Case
Is The Bell Curve the stealth public-policy book of the 1990s? Charles Murray and Daniel Seligman
The General Intelligence Factor Linda S. Gottfredson
For Whom The Bell Curve Tolls Frank Miele
A Conversation with Charles Murray
Trashing 'The Bell Curve' David Seligman
The Coming War over Genes: Darwin's Enemies on the Left Steve Sailer
Freedom, Welfare and Dystopia Charles Murray
W
hy do half our kids score lower on tests than the other half? (OK, this is a joke. But
why do some kids score poorly?) The Democrats blame test bias or underfunded schools or racism. The Republicans point to
teachers' unions or gangsta rap or parents who don't help their kids with their homework. Everybody seems to think the
problem of kids who perform poorly on tests will be solved by giving them even more tests.
Nobody is willing to publicly admit that a whole lot of young people just didn't draw winning hands in the genetic lottery
for intelligence. To state this fact is considered insensitive and, horrors, bad for self-esteem. Maybe, but to ignore it
is to acquiesce in the IQ elite setting policies that are starkly self-interested and uncharitable.
Several developments in recent decades threaten to undermine America's traditional knack for incorporating the great
majority of citizens into the middle class. First, the relative economic value of a strong brain has risen dramatically
compared to that of a strong back. Modern computers and telecommunications turbocharge the productive capacity of the
intelligent. For example, Charles Murray pointed out in a follow-up to The Bell Curve, "In constant dollars, an engineer
earned about $30,000 in 1952 compared with $20,000 for a manufacturing worker, which was not much different from the ratio
at the beginning of the century. By 1988, the engineer earned almost $75,000 compared with $22,000 for the manufacturing
worker."
Second, we've discovered that equality of opportunity can do surprisingly little to insure equality of result. One of the
best methods for disentangling the effects of nature and nurture is to look at differences among children raised in the
same household. I pointed out in my recent VDARE columns
on the frustrations
that feminist celebrities like Jodie Foster and Melissa Etheridge are likely to encounter when their designer babies don't
live up to their hand-picked sperm donor dad's accomplishments.
Why not? The genes a child is dealt at conception don't come solely from those visible in his parents. Instead, they are
randomly drawn from his entire family tree (weighted by closeness of relationship). Thus, as U. of Texas psychologist John
Loehlin recently wrote to me: "The IQ difference between siblings is only about 30% smaller (on average) than that between
any two randomly chosen people."
U. of Delaware psychometrician Linda S. Gottfredson noted in Society: "Those sibling differences [in IQ] are due mostly to
the genetic differences among siblings, because their genotypes correlate only 0.5 on average... [The exceptions are
identical twins. Their IQ's are much more similar because their genomes are the same.] Large IQ differences among siblings
in turn produce large differences among them in school achievement and life outcomes. Those differences, in fact, are
almost as large as those found between strangers whose IQs differ to the same degree."
Charles Murray recently quantified this in an ingenious study of pairs of American siblings raised together in non-poor
homes. Murray described his findings in the Sunday Times of London in 1997:
Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of 90-110, a range that includes 50% of the population. I
will call this group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either higher than 110, putting him in the top
quartile of intelligence (the brights) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the dulls). These constraints
produced a sample of 710 pairs. How much difference did IQ make? Earned income is a good place to begin. In 1993, when we
took our most recent look at them, members of the sample were aged 28-36. That year, the bright siblings earned almost
double the average of the dull: £22,400 compared to £11,800. The normals were in the middle, averaging £16,800.
[http://www.usaor.net/users/ipm/murray.html]
By the way, these earnings gaps are likely to widen with age, as the blue-collar workers' bodies wear out and therefore
their incomes stagnate or fall.
Within families, parents do a better job of equalizing children's environments than any government less tyrannical than the
Khmer Rouge could accomplish. Yet, even with the same upbringing, IQ differences are both substantial and play a huge role
in the kids' prosperity as adults.
The plight of the left half of the Bell Curve is hardly restricted to ghetto blacks. It can afflict any family. Could your
children end up with the fuzzy end of the IQ lollipop? Let's work the numbers assuming that that you and your spouse are
both solidly ensconced in Murray's brights. Let's say you each have an IQ of 119, which puts you each at the 90th
percentile. Well, due to regression toward the mean, the chance that your child will join you in the brights is less than
fifty-fifty. In fact, more than one fourth of your children would be expected to inherit only double digit IQ's. A sobering
9% of your offspring are forecasted to end up among Murray's dulls with IQ's in the 80's or worse.
And unless your children marry smarter people than themselves, you can expect that fairly close to half of your
grandchildren will have below average IQ's. (Of course, if you and your spouse both come from ethnic groups or family trees
with an average IQ well above normal, the mean toward which your kids will regress will be higher.)
Of course, marrying a smart spouse is still the best, if not the only, way of smartening up your offspring. The edge you
get, while not decisive in individual cases, would still be very well worth playing at the roulette wheel.
But I hope the exercise of contemplating our possible progeny can engender a little of the empathetic identification with
the left half of the Bell Curve that is sorely lacking among the IQ overclass today. But whether their problems strike
close to home for you or not, please do keep in mind that half of our fellow American citizens belong to this group today.
Half of all Americans always will. Including, probably, some of your children or grandchildren.
How can we best help those who didn't roll sevens in the genetic crapshoot? That's what I'll consider in my next column.
Steve Sailer is president of the Human biodiversity institute and an Adjunct Fellow of the Hudson
Institute.