THE BELL CURVE WARS: Race, Intelligence, and...

THE BELL CURVE WARS: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America edited by Steven Fraser (Basic Books: $10; 216 pp., paperback original). “The Bell Curve” by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray provoked furious debate for purportedly demonstrating the genetic intellectual inferiority of African Americans. The essays in this collection attack the book’s assumptions and conclusions. New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier concludes his attack on Murray: “After his psychometrics, there will be other psychos and other metrics.” In the volume’s most cogent essay, Stephen Jay Gould, who has written extensively about the misuse of anthropology to bolster racist ideology, exposes gaping errors in the book’s premise, methods and use of statistics, stating that “ ‘The Bell Curve’ is scarcely an academic treatise in social theory and population genetics. It is a manifesto of conservative ideology; the book’s inadequate and biased treatment of data displays its primary purpose--advocacy.”