Word: belle
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scholar Charles A. Murray '65 and the late Harvard Professor Richard J. Hernstein have hit the country's raw nerve with the publication of The Bell Curve, a book which suggests a link between race and intelligence...
...early August, the Boston Globe was predicting that the book would provoke an "intellectual fire-fight" upon its October publication. When it hit the bookstands, over one hundred articles in newspapers and magazines immediately questioned whether The Bell Curve was solid scientific research or racist propaganda...
...theories behind The Bell Curve aren't new, although social Darwinism isn't exactly trendy nowadays. But notions of racial supremacy were the justification for such barbarous acts as slavery and the Nazi genocide, and Murray and Herrnstein's views are chillingly reminiscent of the most divisive of racial theories...
...past month, major political and academic figures have reacted with cautious outrage. And while basic criticisms against The Bell Curve have been leveled--namely that it is absolutely ludicrous to use the two scholars' data as justification of scrapping social programs such as welfare and Head Start--many of the fundamentals of its research have remained unchallenged...
Until Harvard Professor of Geology Steven Jay Gould launched an attack in the November 28 issue of The New Yorker. Gould, a leading evolutionary biologist, hit the mark when he denounced The Bell Curve as a "manifesto of conservative ideology." The book is not an academic treatise in social theory and population genetics, he argues, and furthermore "the book's inadequate and biased treatment of data displays its primary purpose--advocacy...