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The Bell Curve Wars, edited by Steven Fraser. New York: Basic Books, 1995. 216 pp. $ 10.00 paper. (ISBN: 0-465-00693-0.
The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opin ions, edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman. New York: Times Books, 1995. 720 pp. $15.00 paper. ISBN: 0-8129-2587-4.
Financial backing from the Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute combined with decisions by national news magazines such as The New Republic, the National Review and Newsweek to make the publication of The Bell Curve (hereafter TBC) a media event. Herrnstein and Murray were able to short-circuit the process of peer review that usually precedes public discussion of an argument in the social sciences. The Bell Curve Wars (hereafter TBCW) and The Bell Curve Debates (hereafter TBCD) are edited collections that summarize the first reactions to its publication, but they do not constitute peer review. The two books suffer from the disadvantage of being written, in response to a media blitz, about an 800-page book prepared out of the public eye. Reviewers had no time to analyze Murray's data, little time to check his sources, and often barely time to read the book. In short responses (an average of less than 5 pages in TBCD and 10 pages in TBCW) reviewers were not able to deal with the methods, models, or data of TBC.
Moreover, the essays in TBCW and in TBCD also suffered from the additional disadvantage of addressing a peculiarly amorphous, vegetative work. Contrary positions or qualifications are admitted in one place, only to be ignored in others (e.g., Patterson in BCW: 191). The effect of education on IQ is ignored in the analyses of Part II (TBC: 127-269; see Heckman 1994; Hauser 1995) but admitted, after the fact later (TBC: 393-402). Herrnstein and Murray grant that a high heritability for IQ would not tell us that group differences are genetic (TBC: 298), but they immediately imply that it can tell you that differences are not environmental. Heritability, of course, can tell you neither, and this sort of two-faced approach is typical of Herrnstein and Murray's genetic argument. The connections among different parts of the argument are diffuse and ideological. There is no deductive argument that can get from the historical account of...