" To put it another way, a very small percentage of people with low IQs will become criminals. However, a great many criminals have lower than average IQs."
Thanks very much Hentor, for your replies to TruthSeeker. (In other words, welcome 
).
I do want to add though that I think the above statement is more problematic than even you allow.
First of all, which criminals are we talking about here? Does Andrew Fastow have a low IQ?
Let me guess that when Truth Seeker says “criminal” he not only refers primarily to those who get caught, but to those who are serving or have served time in jail. As we know, this population is socio-economically as well as racially overdetermined by the penal justice system’s insistence on locking up non-violent offenders, especially for small-scale crimes involving drugs.
Let me ask you another set of hypothetical questions Truth Seeker:
Do you believe that if a sample of such drug offenders had been given the same pre-natal, infant and childcare, and education as yourself that some genetically determined lack of intelligence would have landed them in prison nevertheless? Do you believe that if you had enjoyed the environmental conditions of one of these incarcerated drug offenders that your genes would have insulated you against their fate?
These are rhetorical questions because you have already made some concessions to the impact of environment. And yet despite your concessions, with their patina of reasonableness, you still want to argue that the basic “structure” of the BC argument is redeemable. The basic argument goes like this: since “some portion” of success is attributable to genes, H & M’s thesis, despite flawed methodology and outright errors, must be somewhat right. Maybe just a little, but somewhat.
Let’s examine this more closely.
What is meant by “success” anyway?
If we set the bar fairly low–say, the ability to perform the kind of job that generally allows one to live somewhat comfortably–can we not agree from the start that the only people who lack the innate intelligence to perform such a job, given the right education, are those whom the welfare state already acknowledges are entitled to social support of some kind.
Can we not also agree that if we successfully educated all Americans to the level where they could compete for such jobs, one byproduct would be that fewer people would be willing to work for the kind of non-living wage that condemns working people to a life of industrious, non-criminal poverty?
These are the kinds of questions that really face us when think about social policy.
By contrast, any argument that implies that genetic determinism can justify “some portion” of a society that incarcerates its citizens at 7X the rate of W. Europe and 5X the rate of Canada–not to mention growing socio-economic disparities between rich and poor outside of the prison population–is a distraction. A distraction that gratifies people whose preexisting impulse is to feel satisfied with the status quo.
It may well be the case that no society today has the ability to deliver on equality of opportunity without sacrifices that some would consider too great an impingement of freedom (whether freedom of the market, or of individuals). But even if that is so, we are still left with a fundamental tension between equality and freedom: both central tenets of any liberal democracy since the dawning days, despite their inherent conflict.
It is always in this context–a deep-seated tension between values that are equally central to our self-understanding–that nature/nurture debates must be considered. And the debate is always really about that unknown “portion,” since very few people are arguing for either nature or nurture alone.
Any society that wants to think of itself as just, while tolerating vast socio-economic inequality has to come up a legitimizing rationale. Hundreds of years ago, that rationale was feudal hierarchy. Now, in our liberal-democratic times, genetic determinism is the last rationalizing bulwark.
As people with much more authoritative knowledge of the book’s flaws than I have at my command have demonstrated, in this thread and others, The Bell Curve seeks to shore up that bulwark. It purports to do that via good science; yet it can’t live up to that claim. All it can do–which it does very well–to exploit that unknown “portion”–blowing smoke in other words. Some will persist in hanging their hat on that: either because they are not equipped to conduct their own peer review, and so they are duped; or because, for whatever reasons, do not want to question status quo.
