Fifty years from now, I bet those claims about “The Bell Curve” will be used as a textbook case of the hysteria that has surrounded the possibility that black-white differences in IQ are genetic. Here is the paragraph in which Dick Herrnstein and I stated our conclusion:The solution set doesn't sound like the hardest-right radicalism either. He proposes a guaranteed basic income for all Americans, for one thing.
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)
That’s it. The whole thing. The entire hateful Herrnstein-Murray pseudoscientific racist diatribe about the role of genes in creating the black-white IQ difference. We followed that paragraph with a couple pages explaining why it really doesn’t make any difference whether the differences are caused by genes or the environment. But nothing we wrote could have made any difference.
"The Bell Curve" +20
Joseph W. sometimes refers to this book by names like 'Mephistopheles' Handbook of Evil,' but the authors say that their intent was to make a very limited, modest claim. The explosion results from the fact that even a modest amount of antimatter doesn't mix:
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Chickens on an industrial farm are guaranteed a daily income of food too.
That's a bad analogy. Chickens are fed so that they can better serve our purpose of being eaten. He wants to pay everyone precisely because he thinks they'll have no use to most of us: many people of low and even moderate intelligence will no longer be needed for anything. His plan may not be the right one, but it's not about fattening the chickens: it's about providing for them, out of a sense of respect for human dignity, even though society has no need of them.
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