I’m about 90% of the way through The Bell Curve, a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. At this point I find it quite compelling, yet I see some reviews of the book that say the basic premise has been discredited. Problem is the criticism does not provide details beyond the simple conclusion that the ideas are wrong. While I understand that some of the issues presented are very provocative I would be interested in hearing other ideas. Has anyone here read the book or have an enlightened opinion about the question of IQ and its value as a general predictor of things like achievement, behavior, general health and even life expectancy? Or does anyone have thought out ideas about the value of such a book in our society?
Lots of people provided detailed criticisms when it was published. You might want to read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. Although Herrnstein and Murray’s book was written much later, they commit many of the same errors that Gould discusses.
Short answer: You can’t generalize across groups by looking at variations within groups.
This would seem to be more of either a General Question or a Great Debate depending on how it spins off. (Unfortunately, while terribly wrong, The Bell Curve is neither mundane nor pointless.)
For look at specific criticisms of the book (and the strange tactics employed both in its writing and in its publication), check out
The Bell Curve Flattened that includes links to three specific errors Case Study One, Case Study Two, and Case Study Three in which they both lied about the meaning of their sources and lied about what their sources actually said.
This site presents links to several scientific criticisms of the work.
Generally, what the authors did was to say “We don’t have real numbers for the whole population, so we’re going to go collect numbers for this group of (self-selected) ‘smart’ people and for this group of (oddly mis-matched) ‘not so smart’ people, and then we’re going to pretend that they were all measured on the same scale by pretending that we have a magical way to reconcile the discrepancies between the groups that were measured differently using different measuring rods, even though we are claiming the measurements are the same.”
. . . or end up in the The BBQ Pit
Off to Great Debates.
Cajun Man - SDMB Moderator
I second cher3’s recommendation that you read The Bell Curve together with The Mismeasure of Man. They are both thoughtful and well-written, yet they draw almost opposite conclusions. Although S. J. Gould is brilliant and witty, I found the arguments in TMOM to be flawed.
Many of the reviews of TBC bore little relationship to the actual book. There was a whole class of reviewers who panned the book and called it racist based on things it didn’t say, things where it said the opposite, things that were widely believed by people in the field, and things that were simply a recitiation of facts.
I’m glad to hear that you’re reading the book, so you can make up your own mind, Tigers2B1.
Oh, by the way, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board.
Of note, of course, is that december lacks the most elementary background to judge any of these issues, other than december’s a priori political prejudices.
The Bell Curve was neither thoughtful nor well-written. It engaged in academic fraud in mischaracterizing in a substantive manner the underlying data, including series of fundamental statistical errors, that as many scientists noted, all went in one direction. Not sloppiness, deliberate bias.
Gould had a point of view, but his science to date was 100% straight up on the facts, although interpretations might be discussed on some issues.
The fact december has yet to grasp the difference, after so many conversations on this over the years here well, is utterly unsurprising.
I have not bothered to address decembers other claims, insofar as usual they bear little resemblance to the undelrying facts. Ideological blither.
I could be wrong, but doesn’t december do statistical work of some sort?
BC did not factor environment and nurturing at all as a contributor to the disparity of IQs discussed. That alone makes it flawed, december.
For once, I must disagree with Collounsbury. I simply don’t accept that The Bell Curve was nothing more than a psuedoscientific racist fraud. The book sparked a virulent debate and some of its specific claims have certainly taken a few knocks. That, however, is how academic debate works. I’ve read a number of the critiques, ranging from the hysterically incoherent to the merely vituperative. Only a few have even bordered on the dispassionate. This, I think, does serious disservice to rational debate. One of Herrnstein and Murray’s critics, sums it up as well as any.
**
There is little dispute that different populations have different “IQs.” The question is, what is “IQ” and why is it different. Herrnstein and Murray offer evidence that at least some of this difference is inherited. It is simply unreasonable to dismiss this idea out of hand. In fact, those who would argue that there is no inherited component of IQ would seem to have the burden of proof. It may be that, in fact, the IQ differences between populations is entirely due to environmental factors. However, you can’t demonstrate that by simply refusing to consider the alternate hypothesis.
The magnitude of these inherited differences, if any, and what impact they have on social policy are separate questions. Even Herrnstein and Murray observe that the differences between individuals is so much greater than that between populations that any difference in average intelligence between populations is meaningless with respect to any individual.
Here is a link giving some “generally accepted” facts that may help sort through some of the hype.
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/support-bell-curve.html
Here’s a site (generally pro-Murray) with a great deal of argument both pro and con, including a number of reviews. It tells you something about the visceral reaction to the book that these reviews are divided into “balanced,” “hostile,” and “vitriolic” categories
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/index.html
The point here is that there is a real debate. As much as we might like to, we can’t simply dismiss The Bell Curve out of hand.
Truth Seeker, I would not characterize that website as “generally pro-Murray.” It appeared to me to be entirely pro-Murray with various criticisms labeled either “Hostile” or “Vitriolic” simply to dismiss them before they could be read. (Why no category indicating a Pollyanna-like embrace of the work for those comments that were wholly uncritical in their acceptance?)
Nevertheless, what that site presents is nothing more than the immediate opinions of people on one side or the other of psychometrics at the time the book was pubished. Of the links that I could make work, every single one (pro or con) was an Op-Ed type statement made in the few months immediately following the publication of The Bell Curve (which was, as noted in my earlier link, deliberately published without peer review). None of those articles actually delved into the work to analyze the science or the math.
The Wall Street Journal ad provided in the first link is typical of the stuff in the rest of the links. The claim that those statements are “generally accepted” is hyperbole (and disingenuous, at best). In fact, many, perhaps most, of the statements are actually hotly contested within the psychological community. The people who signed that ad happened to be on the side that favors psychomerics and believes in IQ. “The following professors-all experts in intelligence an allied fields-have signed this statement” Well, I guess they would identify themselves that way. The fact that they solicited the signature of Arthur R. Jensen indicates that they have a particular axe to grind. The fact that they would solicit the signature of J. Philippe Rushton indicates that they were willing to solicit even cranks to bolster the number of signatories.
In the years susbsequent to those initial reactions, mathematicians and social scientists have had an opportunity to actually study the book in depth. I have seen no peer-reviewed defense of the work. One does not have to oppose psychmetrics or IQ to recognize that Murray and Herrnstein “cheated” when they assembled their book in order to get the result they desired.
Beginning in 1995, people began publishing the results of actual analyses of the work. Some synopses follow (most of the actual analytical reviews are in print and I have not been able to find them in their entirety on-line):
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/featured/bellcurv.htm (A pre-peer review criticsim of the book in which several points are noted where Murray and Herrnstein “switched” the values being measured in order to make a point or dismissed data that was uncomfortable to their thesis.)
http://www.skeptic.com/04.3.siano-bellcurve.html
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v3n2.html
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-bellcurvescience.htm
(Which notes that a team, including both pro- and anti-Murray members, assigned by the American Psychological Association to review the work found enough errors throughout the book that they actually labeled one section “fraudulent.”)
http://www.srv.net/~msdata/bell.html
Now, are there any scientific reviews of (rather than opinion pieces discussing) The Bell Curve subsequent to 1994 that actually support it?
There wasn’t, of course, an end to all research on this subject with the publication of the Bell Curve. There’s been plenty more.
Including work doen by Neal and Johnson have cast real doubt on the idea that test scores measure inherent abilities: their research has shown that the gap between the intelligence tests of blacks and whites seems to widen with age: that’s a pretty hard thing to explain if you think intelligence tests are really measuring what they claim to: inherent, inherited, immutable traits.
You can find N and J’s work in Journal of Public Economy in the 1996 era.
This canard was repeated endlessly by critics who apparently had not read the book, but who had an ax to grind. The statement is completely false. E.g., TBC quotes leaders in the field as attributing intelligence between environment and heredity in various percentages, ranging around 50-50.
In addition, TBC over and over makes the point that one cannot conclude that blacks and whites have different IQs due to genetics, because their environments are so different.
The difficulty with IQ as measured by Stanford-Binet seems to me to be that it can’t be demonstrated that it measures inate intelligence.
For example, anthropologist Marvin Harris in the book Our Kind points out that the test was designed to make the IQ of men and women come out the same.
It was long known that men and women answered various types of questions differently. Using the assumption that men and women have the same inate intelligence on average, the test designers gave tests with various mixes of different types of questions to sample groups of men and women. They then selected as their final tests those that gave equal results for the two sexes.
I believe that if I used that method I could prove that street gang members and Oxford PhD’s had the same inate intelligence.
I’m not up on the latest info in this field, or any other for that matter. So does anyone have any new dope on this? What do IQ tests mean? And what exactly are we discussing when we speak of IQ?
I for the sake of argument suppose that IQ means something important and is correlated with physical characteristics. What then should we do about it? I think that even The Bell Curve authors would admit that there is some overlap between the populations. That is some in the group they claim has a lower average IQ still have one that is higher than some in the supposedly “superior” average IQ group. Are those in the upper end of the “low” group to be denied opportunity? Are those in the lower end of the “high” group to be favored just because of a theoretical “superiority” of the average of their group? I read the book years ago and it didn’t make any sense then and it doesn’t now because I don’t see how it contributes in any way to a sensible public policy about how we get along with each other or solve any of the existing social problems.
Dave:
*"It was long known that men and women answered various types of questions differently. Using the assumption that men and women have the same inate intelligence on average, the test designers gave tests with various mixes of different types of questions to sample groups of men and women. They then selected as their final tests those that gave equal results for the two sexes.
I believe that if I used that method I could prove that street gang members and Oxford PhD’s had the same inate intelligence."*
I’m not sure I see the logic of that comparison, although I do agree that “IQ” is highly questionable.
There are, to be sure, many different kinds of ability that can count as “intelligence.”
One may believe that discernible differences between the sexes on some of these abilities are the effect of nature, or nurture, or a complex interplay of the two. Yet one can surely say the same about gang members vs. PhDs.
I think your underlying point, which is an important one, is that anyone–male or female, gang member of Oxford don–will do better on a test that is designed to emphasize his/her strengths.
But given that that is so, if intelligence must be generically tested in some fashion, (and I’m not arguing that it should be), doesn’t it make sense to use a test that measures the broadest range of human abilities?
As to your last set of comments, also very important, I also agree. I don’t for one second believe that there is anyone born with mental capacities in the typical range who lacks the ability to learn what is required to lead a productive and satisfying life including (to use an old-fashioned phrase) cultivating “the life of the mind.”
Nurture is not all: not everyone can be a prodigy. But human beings are extraordinarily adaptible. Given all the things that humans have done throughout history, it would absurd to think of the potential of any group of people as physiologically limited.
I’d also be interested in hearing what people know on the matter of IQ tests.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned The Bell Curve Debate:
All the criticism you want in one easy-to-carry package.
tomndeb’s last paragraph sums up the problem with TBC in one simple, if flip, package. The authors of TBC appropriated data from vastly different tests, tortured the data to “compensate” for the differences, and presented the results as truth. I wouldn’t calibrate my spectrophotometer that way, let alone base public policy on it.
The Bell Curve is around 900 pages long. It addresses a host of issues. The work is thoroughly foot-noted.
Cal’s criticism may or may not be valid for certain specific points in the book, but it doesn’t invalidate the entire book. There’s a big difference between finding a few cases where incompatible data was compared and claiming that the entire book is wrothless and dishonest. People have different views about how to analyze statistics. To say that some critic disagrees with an analysis isn’t the same as saying that the analysis is wrong. Also, even if TBC is flat-out wrong in a few points, that doesn’t prove that they aren’t right most of the time. How could a book this long not have a few mistakes?
Whether or not they are typical, I will be happy to debate the specific issues alluded to by CalMeacham. Cal, please identify the particular points you’re referring to and why you consider the analysis to be flawed.
As to december’s claimed skill and background in statistical applications, given he has never in his debates here demonstrated even a passing critical acquaintance with critical data analysis, I feel quite comfortable characterizing him as utterly unqualified to comment. Perhaps with the proper tables set right out in front, but else, no.
As you like.
Part of academic debate is getting your underlying facts right. Idiot Boys I & II clearly massaged the data, and even misrepresented.
Dispassionate? What the fuck does dispassionate have to do with anything? This isn’t Star Trek. Lots of debates in science are passionate, I like my scientists to be passionate, if they get their data right.
I would expect passion on an area where two authors so clearly did not do science, they did a policy work masquerading as science.
Let me be explicit. Based on my somewhat limited background in human genetics, I have no doubt at all that human intelligence is genetically bounded.
The critics who question that, and they are few, deserve as much scorn as the idiot boys.
The question is the relationship btw intelligence, the underlying genetics and environment.
Everyone I know or read in the field (human genetics) proper has a highly qualified approach to this. One’s genetic inheritance is a template, which lays down a range of bounded possibilities. Regretably the lower end is less certain perhaps than the higher end, as environmental damage can quite clearly lower possibilities (i.e. one may not naturally be a moron, but poor nutrition gets one below the lower range that the genes might otherwise imply, ceteris paribus.). On the other hand, environment can also open up upper ends that might be closed off by poor nutrition.
Complex interactions.
Straw man: my problem with the Idiot Boys is not per se the concept of inheritance of IQ (abstracting away from the fundamental problems of (i) definition of IQ, (ii) complex feedback role of environement in genetic expression), but their dishonest use of differing data sets, many of highly suspect quality and definition, their dishonest massaging of their results etc.
This is like the moron race debates. Get the goddamned facts right to start with, understand the problems of inter-population versus intra-population (where population stands for the sample sets) comparisions and then get back to the Idiot Boys.
First, in order to attempt a characterization of the genetic inheritance by groups – and let us be honest that is what Bell Curve was attempting to do – one has to be sure that those groups make sense in some genetic sense. We already know the answer there.
Further that, one should be certain regarding the quality of the data- above all in issues of attempting to characterize a population. They used data from an era where ‘racial’ data collection was clearly compromised, above all in re the area of intelligence.
There is simply no way to massage compromised data into usable data. Compromised collection is compromised collection. Period.
In my business, if we found one of our scientists massaging his data to “adjust” for contamination in trials, we fucking fire his ass. (Or her). Garbage in Garbage out.
All this being said, yes the area is worthy of investigation, ** in a properly rigorous and scientific manner**, which the Bell Curve was not. The Bell Curve was inherently a political work, and was complete shit.
Bull fucking shit. Bad science and bad research IS dismissable out of hand. Period.
That, of course, leaves the wider point of how to research and characterize population level differences in achievement untouched. There are surely population level differences, depending on the population definition they may even be demonstrably linked to aggregate biologically based differences. To get at this one needs rigorous, well-conceived research, above all in an area prone to bias.
I have no patience for bullshit. Get the basic research right, build on current population-genetic data and in ten years you can write something meaningfull in a meta-analytical manner
Returning to december, his post above adequately illustrates my utter dismissal of his qualifications or capacity to address the topic, outside of ideological nattering on.
Collounsbury, I will make the same offer to you that I did to **Cal[b/]. Please choose some specific aspects that you disagree with and I will be happy to debate them with you.
I do admire your colorful use of words: passing critical acquaintance, what the fuck, properly rigorous and scientific, complete shit, bull fucking shit, fucking fire his ass, and ideological nattering. That latter phrase is reminscent of Spiro Agnew’s “Nattering nabobs of negativism,” except that he had the matching n’s.
OTOH, actual specific points with arguments and support might be more appropriate here in GD.
december, when you demonstrate some passing acquiantance with criticial thought, then I might be inclined to waste my time debating you.
Truthy, I’d be happy to enter into the discussion with him.