Word: murrayism
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...extremely ironic that the outcry over The Bell Curve has emanated mostly from liberal circles, since it is precisely the liberal ideology of group rights and governmental social engineering which could make the facts which Murray and Herrnstein point out so terribly dangerous...
...last Harvard faculty Nobels were both in 1990: Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry Elias J. Corey in chemistry and Harvard Medical School Professor Joseph E. Murray in medicine or physiology...
...Charles Murray, the influential conservative social scientist, is resigned to the fact that a lot of the people who pick up his new book will turn immediately to Chapter 13 -- the one blandly titled "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability." It's a rare sociological text that gets rifled for the dirty parts, but The Bell Curve (The Free Press; $30), 845 pages of provocation-with-footnotes that Murray co-authored with the late Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, touches upon what the authors say is a great taboo of American life: IQ differences between the races and the degree to which...
...tests is not disputed by anyone who has studied the scores. (The cumulative test results form a bell curve on a statistician's graph.) Everything from that point on is subject to challenge, including whether IQ tests are a valid measure of intelligence or even what intelligence is. Murray and Herrnstein side with those who believe IQ is real and reasonably measured by the available tests. Their truly inflammatory notions are in what follows. While they acknowledge that intelligence is shaped by both heredity and environment, they say heredity plays the larger role -- perhaps 60%, perhaps more -- and insist that...
Since Herrnstein died in September, Murray is facing the new round of uproar alone. Not that he's sheepish. After Reaganites discovered his 1984 book Losing Ground, which said poverty programs actually worsened the problems of the poor, he became the sociologist liberals loved to hate. More recently he introduced himself into the debate on welfare reform by insisting that unwed motherhood, not joblessness, was the key problem. His solution was to get rid of welfare altogether. Murray says when he and his co-author started work on The Bell Curve, "((Herrnstein)) said to me, 'You know...