Critique of The Bell Curve; Three Centuries' Perspectives on Race and Racism

Critique of The Bell Curve

Gould starts his critique of The Bell Curve by stating it “contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism” and that it more reflects the “depressing temper of our time” (pg. 367). He is thus attributing the argument put forth in The Bell Curve falls into the same biological deterministic fallacy as his entire book Mismeasure of Man seeks to expose and eradicate.

The first half of Herrnstein and Murray’s book rehashes the 19^th century argument of social Darwinism by arguing that intelligence, depicted by a single number through IQ tests, puts groups of people in a hierarchical linear order based on their genetic inheritance of intelligence. Class-based and racially stratified society is ‘scientifically’ normalized by this old logic because of the faith in the objective truth of IQ testing. Thus, it is Lewis M. Terman’s argument modernized and therefore the argument of The Bell Curve fails because its basic premises are false.

The second half of the book then analyzes the “central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within group IQ … as an explanation for average differences between groups” (pg. 369). Gould is reusing the same argument posed in his book against the belief in difference through irrevocable genetics – this time against Herrnstein and Murray and their ‘pervasive disingenuousness’ of omitting facts, misuse of statistical methodology, and the unwillingness to admit the consequences of their own study.

Disingenuousness of Content:

Gould fights Herrnstein’s assertion that “what we hope will be our contribution to the discussion [of genetically based difference in intelligence] … [is that] The answer doesn’t much matter” (pg. 370) by showing the disingenuousness of such a statement when the known political ramifications in our society has been shown through studies just like this and the historical social response. Therefore, the supposed objective stance by just ‘stating the statistics’ is not just ignorance but complete disingenuousness of content.

Disingenuousness of Argument:

Gould here analyzes the scientism of the supposed statistical truths behind The Bell Curve and reviewers at the time ignorantly suspecting fallacies of argument, but not checking the actual statistics. Gould argues instead how one-dimensional the book actually is because it ignores the history of such a contentious subject. The bulk of the Herrnstein and Murray’s analysis (‘done in one computer-run’ (pg 371)) deals with multiple regression as a statistical technique and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth as the information source. Therefore, Gould argues that reviewers could have picked up on the errors of Herrnstein and Murray if they were not ‘frightened by numbers’ because the fallacies of argument come in two categories: omissions and confusions; and content.

Omissions and Confusions: Gould cites Herrnstein and Murray’s claim that the general factor of intelligence (spearman’s g) has been decided as the first failure of the study, which angers Gould because of how contentious this subject is with the author’s reporting it as a fact. The way they get away with it is by not explaining factor analysis, which leads Gould to ask: “how can authors base an eight-hundred-page book on a claim for the reality of IQ as measuring a genuine, and largely genetic, general cognitive ability – and then hardly mention, either pro or con, the theoretical basis for their certainty?” (pg 372). By using the same argument posed in Chapter 6 of his book, he shows how using factor analysis (and the people that have used factor analysis such as Spearman and Thurstone) is the only way to explain multiple regression, and by obfuscating this analysis they completely miss a central concept that can be refuted.

Secondly, Gould shows how cultural bias through the technical meaning of statistical bias (S-Bias) and vernacular bias (V-Bias), the entirely different concept that causes popular debate. S-bias means, “that the same score, when achieved by members of different groups, predicts the same consequence”, but V-bias is based on popular questioning and interpretation of the S-Bias, which is said not to exist. Therefore, cultural bias comes out of the interpretation of neutral statistics and the social problems it creates are extensive, to say the least.

Content: Gould analyzes how the authors graph their data of IQ and parental socioeconomic status based solely on the form of relationships through plotting only the regression curve without showing the variation around the curve – therefore showing nothing about the strength of the relationship that variation will either support or not support. It is because their relationships are weak, Gould analyzes, that Herrnstein and Murray hide their data – even going so far as to hide the goodness of fit for multiple regressions in Appendix 4 of the book because their relationships are so weak (to which Gould analyzes their correlation coefficients to find very low causal relationships – indeed not a coincidence).

Disingenuousness of Program:

Gould asserts that The Bell Curve is a manifesto of conservative ideology, to which the notion of ‘advocacy above all’ attempts to cover up its massive flaws in data. The second to last chapter proves this by providing a conservative apocalyptic vision of society wherein the lowly intelligent underclass is taken care of by the ‘custodial state’, making the higher class, higher IQ public have to take care of their inferior lower class. The last chapter then is a conservative call for ‘the good old days’ where higher class, higher IQ people have their roles use their high intelligence, while the lower class is used to maintain society through more menial tasks – all covering up the obvious historical inequality of the class-based system for the benefit of appealing to upper-middle class values.

Here, Gould evokes chapter 7 of his book to expose the fallacy of g as a single, innate, but reified ‘thing’ to be the basis for our understanding of intelligence; to which he (quite poetically) adds: “how strange that we would let a single false number divide us, when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry – thus undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can never stale. E pluribus unum.” (pg. 378)

Questions:

-Gould addresses at length the disingenuousness of Herrnstein and Murray’s argument, to which they simply argue ‘these are the facts, we didn’t make them, we don’t interpret them, we just report them’. How does this get culturally produced? And, what is so dangerous about this?

-Don’t Herrnstein and Murray’s last two chapters refute their central claim of ‘just reporting the facts’?

-Everyone knows the ‘I’m not a racist’ argument of ‘I have a bunch of black friends’. How is this fallacious argument like Herrnstein and Murray’s?

-What are modern examples of biological determinist arguments?

Ghosts of Bell Curves Past:

The second part of Gould’s critique of The Bell Curve deals with the historical nature of the biodeterminist belief in the ordering of the races by intelligence. Gould here analyzes Gobineau’s 19^th century writings and the relation to the argument formed by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994. Where Gobineau’s overt racism aligned the fate of civilizations being determined by racial composition, with decline attributed to the ‘dilution of pure stocks by interbreeding’ (pg. 380), the argument posed in The Bell Curve poses the same argument with a different technological and methodological approach in the modern age of factor analysis supporting a priori assumptions. This links Gobinist thought, through the measure of bodies in the late 19^th century, to the hereditary studies of IQ testing of the modern era.

Gould then gives us The Mismeasure of Man in a nutshell: that the ‘Gobinist’ version of mental testing that argues for an innate intelligence generalized across human groups relies on four interrelated premises. Any one premise deemed false and the whole scientific enterprise of biological determinism is ruined:

1. Intelligence rests upon a single factor of intellectual capacity, or g.

2. The amount of intelligence of every individual can be reduced to a single number, or IQ.

3. The single number measures an inborn quality of genetic makeup, which is highly heritable from generation to generation.

4. An individual’s IQ is stable, permanent, and subject to little change through social intervention or education.

Therefore, because Herrnstein and Murray commit all of these false premises, Gould’s argument throughout Mismeasure makes The Bell Curve just another example of biological determinism as an extension of a culturally biased Gobinist study.

Gould ends his critique with a 1994 Newsweek article about a Bronx high school committed to providing high educational standards to disadvantaged students. Gould is hopeful but distressed when the writers use the positive statistics that the high school has provided by their programs as defiance to ‘Darwinism’. This shows, much to Gould’s chagrin, how the writer’s misnomer of Darwin (in place of what they think to be ‘biology’ in terms of fixed genetic limits) symbolizes our social ignorance on many levels of the gains in evolutionary biology.

Questions:

- Dealing with the Newsweek article, is misinterpretation and misinformation still a problem for evolutionary biology? Or, have Gould’s arguments been placed in the realm of popular, factual discourse? (This is admittedly a red herring, but I think it brings up some good points.)

Three Centuries’ Perspectives on Race and Racism

Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking

The first part of Gould’s article deals with the 17^th century writings of the English writer Sir Thomas Browne, who refuted (at length) popular misconceptions of the day, much as science does to expose truths out of popular myth. Particularly, Browne is interested in the common 17^th century notion that Jews, as a racial group, stink. Gould uses this example to refer to what he calls ‘surrogacy’, or, how certain popular claims – from Jews stinking to Blacks being unintelligent – act as surrogates for the same kind of fallacious logic. He refers to the form of argument always being the same, being ‘permeated by identical fallacies over the centuries” (pg. 397).

Here he makes the connection to the arguments posed in The Bell Curve of how peoples from African descent on average have less intelligence than every other group in the world. He ties this to the gains in the fields of paleoanthropology and human genetics, where various findings are pointing to the fact that Homo sapiens emerged from Homo erectus in Africa, then spread out to the rest of the world; or the out-of-Africa view. Specifically, Homo sapiens did not migrate out of Africa until 112,000 to 280,000 years ago, with evidence pointing closer to 112,000 years ago. So, non-African racial diversity has happened only over the last 100,000 years or so, with Homo sapiens having lived exclusively in Africa for a much longer time. This is supported by the fact that people of African descent have more genetic variation between each other than the rest of the supposedly ‘non-African world’ has combined.

Racial Geometry

The second part of Gould’s article deals with the 18^th century scientist J.F. Blumenbach and his taxonomic system of dividing humans into five groups or ‘varities’: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. These groups were defined by geographic location and appearance and they replaced the four divisions that Blumenbach’s mentor Linnaeus had devised (Americanus, Europeus, Asiaticus, and Afer). The switch by Blumenbach, Gould analyzes, was his attempt to order humans subjectively on putative worth, with Caucasians on top due to their physical beauty. The name ‘Caucasian’ itself derives from Blumenbach’s belief that the mountain range in Russia is where the people are most aesthetically beautiful and therefore where Caucasians originated.

This leads Gould to concede that he does not believe Blumenbach was being overtly racist in his geometric rankings -- in fact he believes Blumenbach to be the least racist and most egalitarian of the enlightenment age – but his taxonomy is based on societal beliefs influencing him at the time. In Gould’s words: “When scientists adopt the myth that theories arise solely from observation, and do not scrutinize the personal and social influences emerging from their own psyches, they not only miss the causes of their changed opinions, but may also fail to comprehend the deep and pervasive mental shift encoded by their own new theory” (pg 406).

Therefore, his model of Homo sapiens separating into different groups ‘degenerating’ from their perfect state of those from the Caucus Mountains to two symmetrical lines of racial categories, must be taken into context of the influence of his time on his own theories (of which is a major theme of Mismeasure) – that way we can see how in books like The Bell Curve how the society influences what is supposed to be scientifically objective, but just a product of the times.

The Moral State of Tahiti – and of Darwin

The last part of Gould’s article explores Darwin’s writings and its reflection of paternalism as popular sentiment at the time of his writing. Gould analyzes Darwin’s first published writing “The Moral State of Tahiti” co-authored with Robert FitzRoy, his colleague on The Beagle. The article was written in response to the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue’s argument that Christian missionaries were destroying native cultures by doing more harm than good. Darwin and FitzRoy countered with their paternalistic interpretations of the Tahitian people and how Christianity has made them better people from their savage beginnings.

By today’s standards, this is an ethnocentric, racist argument, but as Gould argues, Darwin was writing from the paternalistic nature of the society that he grew up in. Darwin goes on to write even in his mature years based on the same belief in a “hierarchy of cultural advance, with white Europeans on top and natives of different colors on the bottom” (pg 416). He particularly despised the Fuegians of South America and wrote at length of the superiority of men over women. But, as Gould states “Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a believer in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality” (pg 419). Therefore, because Darwin believed in improvement in mankind, from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’, Gould argues that without this belief – no matter how racist, sexist, and ethnocentric his paternalism is by today’s standards – Darwin would have “lost his date with history” (pg 420). In addition, it was his paternalistic morality that led him to be a fervent abolitionist and advocate of human rights, by believing in the equality of man – even if it did mean despising certain racial and ethnic groups – but it goes along with Gould’s argument all along, how society’s beliefs and standards influence our biases and practices.

Gould ends with an anthropological call-to-arms of the pluralistic study of cultural diversity in the face of conservative cynicism of leftist ‘political-correctness’ (finely showcasing his Marxist humanistic influences) in the goal of countering Darwin’s most famous line: “If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” (pg 424).

Questions:

-These three sections of the article deal with Gould’s argument of scientific logic being a product of their times, what are modern examples of this? Or, how is the scientific process dismantling popular logic?

-What do you think of Gould’s argument that Darwin’s British paternalistic thought processes as a rather fortunate timely logic for the creation of evolutionary biology? Where does this place human agency?

Links:

American Psychological Association's response to The Bell Curve: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/Correlation/Intelligence.pdf

Charles Murray's 2005 article The Inequality Taboo: http://www.bible-researcher.com/murray1.html

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve