The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to the invention of the transistor but had turned his attention to human variation toward the end of his career. As eccentric as he was brilliant, he often recalled the eugenicists of the early decades of the century. He proposed, as a “thought exercise,” a scheme for paying people with low IQs to be sterilized. 23 He supported (and contributed to) a sperm bank for geniuses. He seemed to relish expressing sensitive scientific findings in a way that would outrage or disturb as many people as possible. Jensen and Shockley, utterly unlike as they were in most respects, soon came to be classed together as a pair of racist intellectual cranks.
    Then one of us, Richard Herrnstein, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, strayed into forbidden territory with an article in the September 1971
Atlantic Monthly. 24
Herrnstein barely mentioned race, but he did talk about heritability of IQ. His proposition, put in the form of a syllogism, was that because IQ is substantially heritable, because economic success in life depends in part on the talents measured by IQ tests, and because social standing depends in part on economic success, it follows that social standing is bound to be based to some extent on inherited differences. By 1971, this had become a controversial thing to say. In media accounts of intelligence, the names Jensen, Shockley, and Herrnstein became roughly interchangeable.
    That same year, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the use of standardized ability tests by employers unless they had a “manifest relationship” to the specific job in question because, the Supreme Court held, standardized tests acted as “built-in headwinds” for minority groups, even in the absence of discriminatory intent. 25 A year later, the National Education Association called upon the nation’s schools to impose a moratorium on all standardized intelligence testing, hypothesizing that “a third or more of American citizens are intellectually folded, mutilated or spindled before they have a chance to get through elementary school because of linguistically or culturally biased standardized tests.” 26 A movement that had begun in the 1960s gained momentum in the early 1970s, as major school systems throughout the country, including those of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, limited or banned the use of group-administered standardized tests in public schools. A number of colleges announced that they would no longer require the Scholastic Aptitude Test as part of the admissions process. The legal movement againsttests reached its apogee in 1978 in the case of
Larry P.
Judge Robert Peckham of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that it was unconstitutional to use IQ tests for placement of children in classes for the educably mentally retarded if the use of those tests resulted in placement of “grossly disproportionate” numbers of black children. 27
    Meanwhile, the intellectual debate had taken a new and personalized turn. Those who claimed that intelligence was substantially inherited were not just wrong, the critics now discovered, they were charlatans as well. Leon Kamin, a psychologist then at Princeton, opened this phase of the debate with a 1974 book,
The Science and Politics of IQ.
“Patriotism, we have been told, is the last refuge of scoundrels,” Kamin wrote in the opening pages. “Psychologists and biologists might consider the possibility that heritability is the first.” 28 Kamin went on to charge that mental testing and belief in the heritability of IQ in particular had been fostered by people with right-wing political views and racist social views. They had engaged in pseudoscience, he wrote, suppressing the data they did not like and exaggerating the data that agreed with their preconceptions. Examined carefully, the case for the heritability of IQ was nil, concluded Kamin.
    In 1976, a British journalist, Oliver Gillie, published an article in the
London