Word: herrnsteins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this point, it almost goes without saying that the topic of the evening was the controversial new book The Bell Curve. Co-authored by the conservative political scientist Charles S. Murray '65 and the late Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein, the book argues that intelligence (as measured by I.Q. scores) differs among races, that these differences are in part genetic and that such differences have implications for American public policy...
...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...
Gould isn't afraid to challenge the basis of The Bell Curve's questionable research, something which many of his colleagues have shied away from. Lay reviewers, he notes, have let themselves become frightened by the statistics and charts thrown at them by Murray and Herrnstein, materials which are filled with errors and misapplied research...
...does seem strange that more attention hasn't been focused on the fact that the two scholars gathered much of their data from questionable sources. In the acknowledgments to The Bell Curve, for example, Murray and Herrnstein say they "benefited especially from the advice" of Richard Lynn, a scholar who in 1991 wrote in the neo-eugenicist journal Mankind Quarterly that "the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization." Then there's J. Phillipe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist who suggested in 1986 that Nazi Germany's military prowess was connected...
...modern liberals, of course, don't worship the god of the Founders," McGuire said. "They worship the god of egalitarianism. And liberals today are wailing, gnashing their teeth, staging demonstrations on the steps of Widener, all because Murray and Herrnstein dare to say that their god is dead...