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31 C H A P T E R T W O Richard Herrnstein Stirs Up Controversy at Harvard Yard Less than two months before The Bell Curve was published in October of 1994, one of its coauthors, Richard Herrnstein, died. Herrnstein was thus spared the ordeal of having to endure the firestorm of controversy that he helped to create with that book. But Herrnstein was no stranger to controversy. In fact, the central argument of The Bell Curve was advanced twenty-three years before the book’s publication in a lengthy article by Herrnstein entitled simply ‘‘I.Q.’’ The article, which appeared in the September 1971 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, is interesting not just as a scientific, but also as a rhetorical, document .∞ By writing in the Atlantic Monthly, one of this country’s few popular magazines devoted to examinations of public issues on a broad but fairly high intellectual level, Herrnstein clearly hoped to reach a general audience of educated Americans who might be receptive to some reasonably fresh (or at least freshly formulated) ideas regarding the perennial nature-versus-nurture debate, especially as it applied to the issue of human intelligence. Herrnstein seems to have wanted to do at least three important things with his article. First, he wanted to convince his audience that IQ tests really did work at measuring something that could reasonably be called general intelligence—something that was di√erent from mere cultural knowledge. Second, he wanted to introduce to his audience, and to defend, the work of Arthur Jensen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose views on intelligence were at the time probably more controversial even than those of Herrnstein himself. And third, Herrnstein wanted to advance and defend the ironic but critically important claim that the more equality of opportunity a society provides, the more unequal the society has the potential to become. 32 The Evolution of a Controversy Whatever else he did, Herrnstein accomplished with his article the initial goal of anyone who seeks to influence public debate on an issue. He got noticed. As Ullica Segerstråle reports in her book Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, in the years following the appearance of Herrnstein’s article, ‘‘his lectures were interrupted, and posters around Harvard yard pictured him as ‘wanted’ for racism.’’≤ While this reaction may not be representative of the overall response to Herrnstein’s article by most of his readers, there is no question that Herrnstein angered many people. But what angers a person or a culture tells us more about that person or culture than perhaps any other piece of information. Thus it is worth examining exactly what Herrnstein was doing in his article in order to see precisely why it was so controversial. The first thing Herrnstein does is advance the dual claim that intelligence can in fact be measured and that what is being measured as intelligence is more than simply book-learning or cultural knowledge. He begins by noting the interesting connection between the study of human intelligence and the study of evolution. It turns out that the Darwinian family tree was central to both studies. Many people know that in 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, thereby inaugurating the modern study of evolution. But exactly a decade later, Charles’s younger cousin, Francis Galton, published Hereditary Genius, a book whose title presents its central argument: that intelligence is hereditary and thus genius runs in families. There is some indication that Galton got the idea for his book from his (unbiased?) observation that genius seemed to run in his own family. There is no question that Galton hoped to use the insights in Hereditary Genius for political and social ends. He coined the term eugenics and firmly believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.≥ The big problem with Galton’s research, however, was that it begged the absolutely critical question of what, exactly, constituted intelligence. One would think that without a precise answer to this question the measurement of intelligence would be impossible. But a precise answer was very di≈cult to obtain. Everyone agreed that intelligence was more complicated than height or weight, which could be observed and measured directly with extremely simple instruments. But beyond that no one was quite certain what he was talking about, or even whether he was talking about the same ‘‘thing’’ as his colleagues who also happened...

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