Sorry this is a bit behind the curve but I thought it might still be useful 
for some. Richard Betting

This review is from: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in 
American Life

reviewed on Amazon . com

75 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

***** More facts and less name-calling, please.  October 14, 2005.

By Paul Magnussen (Campbell, CA USA)

Since you're reading this, I assume you're thinking of buying -- or at least 
reading -- this book. That being so, you'll probably want to read other 
reviews than mine. This is in principle a good idea; but having just read 
all of them (147 at the time of writing) I should warn you that you'll need 
both considerable stamina and a strong stomach: there are indeed thoughtful 
and informative reviews, but they are islands in a sea of drivel. By 
"drivel" I mean the following:

1) Reviews consisting entirely (or almost entirely) of expostulation rather 
than information ("racist garbage", "most important book of the 20th 
century")

2) Asserting what the book doesn't deny and denying what it doesn't assert.

3) Distortions of the book's content, and other disinformation, for 
instance:

- "the panel criticized the authors for not explaining what intelligence is" 
(intelligence is defined on page 4 (!) ).

- "The Bell Curve ignores bad diet" (Nutrition is explicitly dealt with on 
pp. 391-3).

And so on.

Many of the critics appear not merely to have misunderstood the book, but 
not even to have read it; amusingly, this is actually admitted in one review 
("Although Head has only browsed through the book, she has seen this kind of 
pseudo-science before")

For myself, I found this a strange book in some ways, but only one other 
reviewer (Jennifer Kerns, I think the name was) touched on the reason. And 
that is that the book falls logically into three parts, which by their very 
nature are of varying reliability.

The first, and by far the largest, covers the available evidence on IQ and 
heredity. The second and third parts extrapolate present trends to the 
future (with unpleasant consequences) and make policy recommendations to 
deal with these projected consequences. Thus almost by definition these are 
on shakier ground.

- The first section, which excited by far the most controversy, is 
(ironically), easily on the firmest ground scientifically -- as confirmed 
(for example) by an American Psychological Association task force explicitly 
set up to investigate it; and by a letter to the Wall Street Journal by 
fifty-two leading psychometricians, a copy of which can be found on the Net 
("Mainstream Science on Intelligence").

It seems to me a very able summary: it defines its terms, states its 
assumptions, produces its evidence and argues the merits of the various 
theories purporting to explain it. So there's no need for you to take my 
word (or anyone's) as to whether the thesis is justified; the evidence and 
the arguments are both there; if you're capable of rational thought, you 
should be able to decide for yourself. And this is what I advise you to do.

- The second part envisages the potential stratification of society by 
intelligence into a hereditary élite and underclass. Here the authors start 
to part company with some (at least) of the aforementioned psychometricians. 
H.J. Eysenck, for instance -- certainly in the "hereditarian" camp as 
regards IQ -- writes of an earlier article in Atlantic Monthly:

"Here Herrnstein is definitely beginning to run off the rails in his 
predictions (...) he disregards the importance of regression, the genetic 
factor which causes children of very bright and very dull parents to regress 
towards the mean of the whole population (...) [R]egression makes it quite 
impossible that castes should be created which will breed true -- that is, 
where the children will have the same IQ as their parents. Within a few 
generations, the differences in IQ between the children of very bright and 
very dull parents will have been completely wiped out." (The Inequality of 
Man, ISBN 0-912736-16-X, pp.213-219)

Richard Lynn, however, disagrees, pointing out that if regression operated 
in all cases, then dog-breeding, and indeed evolution as a whole, would be 
impossible.

- The third part, the policy recommendations, is well outside my area of 
competence, so I offer no comment.

I should, however, like to make one further comment on other reviews, those 
containing the recommendation: "People wanting an honest scientific analysis 
of the claims of racial superiority should read Stephen Jay Gould's The 
Mismeasure of Man".

Gould's writing certainly has many admirable qualities, but honesty and 
scientific impartiality are not conspicuous among them -- for specifics, see 
(for example) Chapter 3 of John L. Casti's Paradigms Lost (ISBN 
0-380-71165-6). Or see J. Philippe Rushton's review of "Mismeasure", or 
Arthur Jensen's review, both of which you can find on the Web.

I've been following the debate over IQ for 40 years, and The Mismeasure of 
Man has more factual errors per page than any book I've ever read.

For a critical but still rational review of Herrnstein & Murray, I suggest 
Thomas Sowell's from American Spectator, which can also be found on the Web 
("Ethnicity and IQ").

If you want balanced account of the IQ field, try Intelligence: The Battle 
for the Mind, half of which is written by H.J. Eysenck and half by Leon 
Kamin, with a final rejoinder from each.

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