The Bell Curve: preface, acknowledgements & introduction

Before getting into The Bell Curve proper, I have some notes on the sections that come before:

Preface

The preface contrasts the wealthy overclass against the poor underclass and states that the true cause of social inequality is intelligence.

What good can come of understanding the relationship of intelligence to social structure and public policy? Little good can come without it. 

In a 2014 New Yorker article Piketty’s Inequality Story in Six Charts the first chart demonstrates the change in the top 10% of income over one hundred years.

Did the intelligence of those in the top ten percent suddenly drop in 1940? Did they start to suddenly rapidly gain intelligence between 1980 and 2000, which is to say in the span of a single generation?

And what made the top ten percent relatively stupid between 1940 and 1980?

Maybe the book will provide genetics-based answers to these questions.

Acknowledgements

Richard Lynn and Arthur Jensen are thanked for their advice. Also thanked for advice were others I was unfamiliar with:  Robert Forsyth, Len Ramist, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt

I was unable to find via Google any references to the Robert Forsyth mentioned in The Bell Curve, but while looking for that I found something of interest, because by coincidence Forsyth is also the name of a town where another violent attack by a white majority against prosperous blacks occurred. I had been aware of the Memphis riots of 1866 but the Forsyth story had apparently been little known outside the area until Patrick Phillips wrote a book.

In 1912, white mobs set fire to black churches and black-owned businesses. Eventually the entire black population of Forsyth County was driven out, says Blood at the Root author Patrick Phillips.

It makes you wonder what other stories are out there, known only to locals, of white mob attacks on black businesses, and, as the interview makes clear, black property owners.

Len Ramist is best known for a paper co-written with Rich Morgan and published in 1998 entitled "Advanced Placement Students in College: An Investigation of Course Grades at 21 Colleges."

As to Frank Schmidt and Malcolm Ree, according to the Slate article from 1997 The Bell Curve Flattened:

...the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.

No acknowledgement of Rushton or The Pioneer Fund.

Introduction

The Introduction begins by stating:

...for the last thirty years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas. The attempt to measure it with tests has been variously dismissed as an artifact of racism, political reaction, statistical bungling, and scholarly fraud.

This is followed with the history of intelligence conceptualizing and testing from Darwin to Galton to Charles Spearman and the development of the concept of general intelligence. They seem to consider Arthur Jensen something of a hero, first writing:

In 1969, Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist and expert on testing from the University of California at Berkeley, put a match to this volatile mix of science and ideology with an article in the Harvard Educational Review. Asked by the Review's editors to consider why compensatory and remedial education programs begun with such high hopes during the War on Poverty had yielded such disappointing results, Jensen concluded that the programs were bound to have little success because they were aimed at populations of youngsters with relatively low IQs, and success in school depended to a considerable degree on IQ. IQ had a large heritable component, Jensen also noted. The article further disclosed that the youngsters in the targeted populations were disproportionately black and that historically blacks as a population had exhibited average IQs substantially below those of whites.

Then later:

As far as public discussion is concerned, this collection of beliefs, with some variations, remains the state of wisdom about cognitive abilities and IQ tests. It bears almost no relation to the current state of knowledge among scholars in the field, however, and therein lies a tale. The dialogue about testing has been conducted at two levels during the last two decades - the visible one played out in the press and the subterranean one played out in the technical journals and books. 

The case of Arthur Jensen is illustrative. To the public, he surfaced briefly, published an article that was discredited, and fell back into obscurity. Within the world of psychometrics, however, he continued to be one of the profession's most prolific scholars, respected for his meticulous research by colleagues of every theoretical stripe. Jensen had not recanted. He continued to build on the same empirical findings that had gotten him into such trouble in the 1960s, but primarily in technical publications, where no one outside the profession had to notice. The same thing was happening throughout psychometrics. In the 1970s, scholars observed that colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out. Why speak out when there was no compelling reason to do so? Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, hut only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower.

Three approaches to intelligence assessment are described:

• The Classicists: Intelligence as a Structure
• The Revisionists: Intelligence as Information Processing
• The Radicals: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

And they identify Jensen and then later, themselves as proponents of the first:

We will be drawing most heavily from the classical tradition. That body of scholarship represents an immense and rigorously analyzed body of knowledge. By accepted standards of what constitutes scientific evidence and scientific proof, the classical tradition has in our view given the world a treasure of information that has been largely ignored in trying to understand contemporary policy issues. 

Idiot Savants

They discard the usefulness of "idiot savants" in telling us anything about human intelligence in the box on page 22:

To add one final complication, it is also known that some people with low measured IQ occasionally engage in highly developed, complex cognitive tasks. So-called idiot savants can (for example) tell you on what day Easter occurred in any of the past or future two thousand years [45] There are also many less exotic examples. For example, a study of successful track bettors revealed that some of them who used extremely complicated betting systems had below-average IQs and that IQ was not correlated with success.[46] The trick in interpreting such results is to keep separate two questions: (1) If one selects people who have already demonstrated an obsession and success with racetrack betting systems, will one find a relationship with IQ (the topic of the study in question)?versus (2) if one selects a thousand people at random and asks them to develop racetrack betting systems, will there be a relationship with IQ (in broad terms, the topic of this book)?

Nowhere in the book do they mention autism, a condition that is sometimes associated with an ability to perform complicated calculations as well as "an obsession" with various subjects. Those with autism appear to vary in levels of competence, but are united generally by an inability to "read" other people and a seeming lack of interest in the emotional states of other individuals. They lack what might be called "emotional intelligence" which Herrnstein and Murray have previously dismissed in the section on "The Radicals: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences" saying (my highlight):

...we confess to reservations about using the word intelligence to describe such factors as musical abilities, kinesthetic abilities, or personal skills. It is easy to understand how intelligence (ordinarily understood) is part of some aspects of each of those human qualities-obviously. Bach was engaging in intelligent activity, and so was Ted Williams, and so is a good used- car salesman - but the part intelligence plays in these activities is captured fairly well by intelligence as the classicists and revisionists conceive of it... In the case of intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, conventional intelligence may play some role, and, to the extent that other human qualities matter, words like sensitivity, charm, persuasiveness, insight-the list could go on and on-have accumulated over the centuries to describe them. We lose precision by using the word intelligence to cover them all. Similarly, the effect that an artist or an athlete or a salesman creates is complex, with some aspects that may be dominated by specific endowments or capacities, others that may be the product of learned technique, others that may be linked to desires and drives, and still others that are characteristic of the kind of cognitive ability denoted by intelligence. Why try to make intelligence do triple or quadruple duty?

But since they believe in the essential role that intelligence plays in economic success, why would they dismiss the skills of a good used-car salesman? Given the importance of sales in any capitalist society, surely the interpersonal skills involved - skills not possessed by the most accomplished autistic computer programmer - should count as "intelligence." After all, where would Apple be if the company had been founded only by programmer Steve Wozniak without the charisma and salesmanship of Steve Jobs?

And what about the earnings potential for successful track bettors. Are only some kinds of economic success evidence of "intelligence" as defined by The Bell Curve?

Six conclusions

Towards the end of the introduction they discuss "six conclusions."

To draw the strands of our perspective together and to set the stage for the rest of the book, let us set them down explicitly. Here are six conclusions regarding tests of cognitive ability, drawn from the classical tradition, that are by now beyond significant technical dispute:

1. There is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ. 
2. All standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general factor to some degree, but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately. 
3. IQ scores match, to a first degree, whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligent or smart in ordinary language. 
4. IQ scores are stable, although not perfectly so, over much of a person's life. 
5. Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups. 
6. Cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent. 

I am especially curious to learn what evidence they have that supports conclusion 3. I've never heard of a methodology that tests colloquial designations of "smart" per individual against the same individual's test scores, but perhaps The Bell Curve will have some support for this. We shall see. 

Sam Seder v IDW

Sam Seder's channel is really good at keeping tabs on the more outrageous and media-centric members of the Intellectual Dark Web:

• Mike Cernovich
• Alex Jones
• Charlie Kirk
• Candace Owens
• Jordan Peterson
• Joe Rogan
• Ben Shapiro
• Milo Yiannopoulos

and of course Dave Rubin who has a feud going on with Seder.

Shermer celebrates the IDW, is ratioed and mocked

For those who are not involved in Twitter, getting ratioed is what happens when there are significantly more comments than likes in response to your Tweet. In Shermer's case the ratio is 412 comments to 199 likes as of the time this screen cap was made. An almost exact 2:1 ratio.

The image Shermer so proudly shares is made of the photos from the original Bari Weiss article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, turned into a collage.

In case you're keeping score, the members of the IDW in the image are, from left to right, Michael Shermer, Eric Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein.

The IDW is so tolerant that Jordan Peterson has sued people for insulting him, so in favor of free speech Charlie Kirk advocated for Donald Trump to regulate tech companies over "viewpoint discrimination" and loves liberty so much that Christina Hoff Sommers and Dave Rubin never mention how they are supported by Charles Koch.

What the IDW actually stands for is the same as the editorial positions of Quillette: anti-trans, pro-nuke, Islamaphobic, anti-socialist, anti-left, anti-feminist, pro-race science and constantly banging the drum about free speech in Academia over rude college students while ignoring plutocrats buying themselves their own academic hacks.

Ultimately the IDW is about is the grift.

The influence of The Bell Curve

To get a sense of how influential The Bell Curve is on contemporary race science, we can look at Google Scholar which reports that the book is cited 10220 times.

It is cited multiple times by race science proponents including Linda Gottfredson, Richard Lynn, J. P. Rushton, Noah Carl, Emil Kirkegaard, Kevin Beaver, John Paul Wright, the Winegards, Brian Boutwell and Steven Pinker.

According to STAT an online publication devoted to "reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine":

In the 1990s, (James) Watson became smitten with “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book that argued for a genetics-based theory of intelligence (with African-Americans, it contended, having less of it) and spoke often with its co-author, conservative political scholar Charles Murray. The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser, in his view) scientists studied. 

It's curious that so many race science proponents cite The Bell Curve to support their race-related views - as when the Winegards and Boutwell use it to make an argument in favor of genetic-based Ashkenazi intelligence in Human Biological and Psychological Diversity, while Murray himself likes to minimize the racial component. I think this is what Ezra Klein was referring to when he described San Harris's goalpost shifting as "a strong version and a weak version of Murrayism."

Murray did an interview with the American Enterprise Institute (where he is a resident scholar) with another American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis published in October 2014 when the AEI celebrated the 20th anniversary of the book (my highlights):

The flashpoint of the controversy about race and IQ was about genes. If you mention “The Bell Curve” to someone, they’re still likely to say “Wasn’t that the book that tried to prove blacks were genetically inferior to whites?” How do you respond to that? 

Actually, Dick and I got that reaction even while we were working on the book. As soon as someone knew we were writing a book about IQ, the first thing they assumed was that it would focus on race, and the second thing they assumed was that we would be talking about genes. I think psychiatrists call that “projection.” Fifty years from now, I bet those claims about “The Bell Curve” will be used as a textbook case of the hysteria that has surrounded the possibility that black-white differences in IQ are genetic. Here is the paragraph in which Dick Herrnstein and I stated our conclusion: 

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)

That’s it. The whole thing. The entire hateful Herrnstein-Murray pseudoscientific racist diatribe about the role of genes in creating the black-white IQ difference. We followed that paragraph with a couple pages explaining why it really doesn’t make any difference whether the differences are caused by genes or the environment. But nothing we wrote could have made any difference. The lesson, subsequently administered to James Watson of DNA fame, is that if you say it is likely that there is any genetic component to the black-white difference in test scores, the roof crashes in on you. 

On this score, the roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning. 

The best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of Nicholas Wade’s recent book, “A Troublesome Inheritance.” We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable? It should be interesting to watch. I confess to a problem with schadenfreude.

Clearly Murray does believe that IQ differences in whites and blacks are genetic - he simply refuses to say how much of the difference is caused by genetics. His theory seems to derive from Richard Lynn's northern superiority hypothesis, an idea that goes back to at least the mid-19th century.

He doesn't explain why he thinks the decoding of the genome establishes that race is not a social construct. Although, in fact I would say it's the opposite, as illustrated by the NYTimes article by Carl Zimmer, White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier which points out that many people have cultural race identities that are not the same as their biological ancestry. The article caused race science proponent Razib Khan to write a defensive response "American racial boundaries are quite distinct (for now)" in pro-race science publication Unz Review, in which he alludes to the race science strategy of "removing all that history," the first time I picked up on the strategy (my highlight):

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 

Khan followed up on the history-removing project recently and Sam Harris confirmed it in his interview with Ezra Klein, discussing Harris's support for The Bell Curve, with Harris explaining that history is irrelevant compared to genetics.

While researching this blog post I discovered something odd about the way The Bell Curve determines what is environmental vs. what is genetic in the section of the Bell Curve that Murray mentions in the AEI interview as:

a couple pages explaining why it really doesn’t make any difference whether the differences are caused by genes or the environment.

Pinkerite will address these couple of pages later in this Bell Curve series.

Evolutionary psychology is wrong again

As I have often said, evolutionary psychology and race science are the easiest possible "scientific" disciplines to practice since they basically involve the following:

1. Identify a social phenomenon
2. Declare it is due to evolutionary adaptation
3. Publish it in Quillette - or Areo, Unz, American Renaissance, etc.
4. Done

I had thought that even evolutionary psychologists had dropped the "women want less sexual variety than men" by now, given the unintended consequences of genetic testing recognized over a decade ago:

When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can’t help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold.

But some just-so stories are just too pleasing to the evolutionary psychology-inclined as we can see with Quillette's favorite proponent of hereditarianism, Bo Winegard banging that drum in Arc Digital in 2018:

 If tomorrow scientists uncover strong evidence that in most societies for most of history, women preferred more sexual variety than men, or if they discover compelling evidence that socialization plays a strong role in sexual desire, then we would have to decrease our confidence in the adaptive hypothesis.

Now it's a fact that there is a sexual double-standard for most of recorded history and right up to the present. Men have always been able to have sex outside of marriage with fewer negative consequences (if any) than women.

And yet Winegard thinks there only might be a chance that socialization plays a strong role in (the expression of) sexual desire.

Throughout much of history in most cultures, women's sexual desires were an inconvenience to the social machinery determined to marry off each woman to a man who could afford to support her and children.

Only now, that women can increasingly support themselves, are we learning about female sexuality. And it's likely not what people like Bo Winegard want to hear:

Marta Meana of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas spelled it out simply in an interview with me at the annual Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in 2017. “Long-term relationships are tough on desire, and particularly on female desire,” she said. I was startled by her assertion, which contradicted just about everything I’d internalized over the years about who and how women are sexually. Somehow I, along with nearly everyone else I knew, was stuck on the idea that women are in it for the cuddles as much as the orgasms, and—besides—actually require emotional connection and familiarity to thrive sexually, whereas men chafe against the strictures of monogamy.

But Meana discovered that “institutionalization of the relationship, overfamiliarity, and desexualization of roles” in a long-term heterosexual partnership mess with female passion especially—a conclusion that’s consistent with other recent studies.

“Moving In With Your Boyfriend Can Kill Your Sex Drive” was how Newsweek distilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults aged 16 to 74. It found that for “women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship of over one year in duration,” and that “women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories.” A 2012 study of 170 men and women aged 18 to 25 who were in relationships of up to nine years similarly found that women’s sexual desire, but not men’s, “was significantly and negatively predicted by relationship duration after controlling for age, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction.” Two oft-cited German longitudinal studies, published in 2002 and 2006, show female desire dropping dramatically over 90 months, while men’s holds relatively steady. (Tellingly, women who didn’t live with their partners were spared this amusement-park-ride-like drop—perhaps because they were making an end run around overfamiliarity.)

Winegard's article is from 2018, but the Newsweek article is from 2017 and studies demonstrating female sexual boredom with long-term relationships go back as far as at least 2002.

Winegard doesn't mention any of these findings, even to argue that they are wrong. He just ignores them - if he even made an effort to find anything contrary to his evolutionary psychology just-so stories at all.

Winegard can wonder "If tomorrow scientists uncover strong evidence that in most societies for most of history, women preferred more sexual variety than men" and meanwhile they've been saying close to that very thing since at least 2002.

The Winegard article was written to argue against the notion that evolutionary psychology is a collection of "just-so stories" but what he demonstrated was that he likes those just stories so much he won't let them be ruined by data.

Please note that I was blocked on Twitter by Winegard's fellow Quillette author Lee Jussim, the graphophobic, immediately after I scoffed at his tweet declaring this article to be "a brilliant defense of evolutionary psychology."

Because that's what evolutionary psychology is - remaining inside a bubble, where you can keep retelling the same old just-so stories, ignore data and avoid critics.

For a more in-depth discussion of why evolutionary psychology is wrong thanks to its over-reliance on adaptation see the P. Z. Myers video.

Ben Shapiro demonstrates the utter clownishness at the heart of the IDW

Daily Beast: Ben Shapiro Storms Out of BBC Interview: ‘I’m Popular and No One’s Ever Heard of You’

Michael Brooks on the Sam Harris v Ezra Klein debate

Pinkerite has mentioned this debate before in I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" and Michael Brooks, sometime co-host with Sam Seder, offers some very worthwhile commentary. BONUS: he mentions The Pioneer Fund.

The Bell Curve and Ashkenazi Jews

The New York Times' review of three hereditarian books published in 1994,  "The Bell Curve,"  Rushton's "Race, Evolution and Behavior" and Itzkoff's "The Decline of Intelligence in America" makes this observation:

Although their books vary in viewpoint, the authors share a suite of controversial convictions. They believe that intelligence in some deep but ill-defined sense is a real attribute of human beings, not some artificial construct of the psychometricians who invented intelligence tests. (Mr. Itzkoff's loose definition of intelligence, very similar to that of the other authors, is expressed as the capacity "to think abstractly, to reason. . . . to organize large quantities of information into meaningful and useful systems.") 

They believe that I.Q. can be quantitatively measured, and that intelligence is at least partly heritable. They say that numerical measurements of intelligence are statistically (albeit weakly) correlated with job performance, as well as with rates of birth, marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, crime, welfare dependency and participation in the political process. 

MOREOVER, they say, intelligence test scores tend to vary with ethnic groups. In the United States, Asians generally score a few points higher than whites and blacks some 15 I.Q. points lower than whites. (Mr. Herrnstein and Mr. Murray mention in passing that "Ashkenazi Jews of European origins . . . test higher than any other ethnic group.") 

The last paragraph illustrates the typically careless terminology used in race science. It identifies "ethnic groups" as "white," "black" and Asian although "race" is more often applied to those three terms when used together, while the term "ethnic groups" is most often used to refer to groups that are subsets of those classifications, for example ethnic groups of Europe are considered part of the "white race": Italian, German, Irish, Swedish, et. al.

And then there is the claim that "Asians generally score a few points higher than whites" along with "Ashkenazi Jews of European origins... test higher than any other ethnic group."

What does that mean? That Jews are a subset of Asians? And that Jews are not "white"? How else can you say that Asians test higher than whites while Jews test higher than any other ethnic group? Yet they are "of European origins"?

Eleven years after The Bell Curve was published, a paper "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochrane, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending was published. The paper suggested that one of the reasons Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent group is in-breeding:

From roughly 800 to 1650 CE, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were a mostly isolated genetic group. When Ashkenazi Jews married non-Jews, they usually left the Jewish community; few non-Jews married into the Jewish community.

As discussed earlier this week, Steve Sailer is a fan of this theory, while at the same time believing that Iraqis are incapable of having a democracy due to in-breeding. His paper on the subject, The Cousin Marriage Conundrum, was included by Steven Pinker, who apparently wholeheartedly agrees with it, in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004.

Steven Pinker is also a fan of the Ashkenazi theory as discussed by R. Brian Ferguson in his paper which debunks the theory:  How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"

 Prominent commentators lined up behind NHAI. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done much to legitimize and publicize NHAI, while remaining carefully agnostic on its truth value.  

In the Times:"'It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard... Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well argued-paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright" (Wade 2005). His article about NHAI in The New Republic concluded that it "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken"(pinker2006:27). 

A blogger (Your Lying Eyes 2006) reported a public talk by Pinker on NHAI ("Jews, Genes, and Intelligence"). "Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the author's hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge." Pinker is credited with formulating Edge's Annual Question for 2006: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea... dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?" His own answer is "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." Of his four illustrations, one is Cochran and Harpending's argument on Ashkenazi intelligence.

Ferguson is a former student of Marvin Harris and currently professor of anthropology at Rutgers.

We will be discussing his paper again later in this series on The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve & its critics

As promised here is the first of what will likely be many posts examining The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein.

The entire text of The Bell Curve is currently available online and can be found here.

I don't know how long this text will be available online since I assume it is posted and available for free without permission of Murray and the heirs of Herrnstein. The Bell Curve is also available in print, used, for as little as $1.45 (plus shipping) on Alibris. This is the recommended route for those interested in the complete text of The Bell Curve since it is legal yet does not provide Charles Murray with additional profit.

The Bell Curve is hugely influential in the world of hereditarianism, which I will more often refer to here as "race science." The term race science does not indicate that there is legitimate science involved, but rather that proponents of the notion that there are human "races" and that such races have uniquely evolved moral and intellectual capacities believe that their claims are based on science.

The Bell Curve was published in 1994 and the New York Times reviewed it together with two other books:

"Race, Evolution and Behavior A Life History Perspective" by J. Philippe Rushton and "The Decline of Intelligence in America A Strategy for National Renewal" by Seymour W. Itzkoff

The review doesn't mention Rushton's or The Bell Curve's connections to The Pioneer Fund, nor that The Bell Curve cites Rushton's work eleven times (see bottom of this post).

It does mention that Murray and Herrnstein defended Rushton:

In their book, Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein do not support Mr. Rushton's theories of human evolution, but they comment that "Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot, as many of his critics are given to charging... As science, there is nothing wrong with Rushton's work in principle; we expect that time will tell whether it is right or wrong in fact."

Not long after this review in the New York Times came Charles Lane's New York Review of Books article The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve in which he mentions Mankind Quarterly, which received money from The Pioneer Fund.

Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.3 

Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.”4

Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.5 In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.”6 The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;7 and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”8

In between the NYTimes and NY Review of Books pieces, ABC World News Tonight did a story on the connection between The Bell Curve and The Pioneer Fund. The transcript is available online and includes the following:

As for The Bell Curve's co author, Charles Murray, when we told him what we'd found out about the Pioneer Fund, he accused us of being on an intellectual witch hunt that would have a pernicious effect on research.

This blog will review The Bell Curve in-depth, but it should be said that anthropologist Marvin Harris got there first. In his last book, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times published in 1998, Harris included a chapter called "Biologizing Inequality" which focused on The Bell Curve. Harris has many scathing criticisms of the book which this series will discuss from time to time. One of the most interesting is a section that Harris entitles "Learning to Live with Inequality:

According to Herrnstein and Murray, once it is realized that IQ sets unalterable, genetically determined limits on the kinds of remedial programs that can be implemented on behalf of the underclass by well-meaning members of the cognitive elite, the way will be cleared to get rid of long-standing conceptual errors about the human condition. At last the cognitive elite and the cognitive middle will awaken to the fact that the underclass is simply not smart enough to function effectively in the increasingly complex and technical postmodern social milieu. A new and more realistic attitude toward inequality will emerge in which the centuries-old Enlightenment doctrine that equality can be achieved and practiced by everyone will be driven from our minds and from our institutions. (Note that this disparagement of the Enlightenment gives Scheper-Hughs and other advocates of critical anthropology strange bedfellows.) Once everyone learns that people are not created equal in intelligence and that intelligence increasingly determines class identity, the blinders will fall from our eyes and we will be able to design a better America. In other words, Herrnstein and Murray want us to believe that our basic problems arise from having too much equality in our lives. We need to learn to live with more inequality:

It is time for America once again to try living with inequality... (551)

There are two ways to interpret this exhortation. One is that we have not really been living in a society plagued by racism, sexism and poverty where the average CEO makes over one hundred times what the average worker (NOTE: it's now 361 times) does, and 10 percent of the households have a net worth more than two times greater than the net worth of 90 percent of the remaining households (Kennichel 1996) (NOTE: it's worse now). The other is that we are being exhorted to return to the good old days when people of wealth and status felt no shame for not feeling responsible for advancing the welfare of the underclass. 

Speaking of strange bedfellows is Pinker's defenses of The Bell Curve with its anti-Enlightenment values positions in contrast to his recent incarnation as champion of the Enlightenment.

Finally, in this introduction to The Bell Curve and some of its critics, is Al Franken when he was the invited comedian to the 1996 White House Correspondents Dinner.

The Bell Curve's Rushton citations

1. Rushton, J. P. 1985. Differential K theory: The sociobiology of individual and group differences. Personality and Individual Differences 6 441-452.
2. Rushton, J. P. 1988. Race differences in behaviour: A review and evolutionary analysis. Personality and Individual Differences 9:1009-1024.
3. Rushton, J. P. 1990a. Race and crime: A reply to Roberts and Gahor. Canadian J. of Criminology 32:315-334.
4. Rushton, J. P. 1990h. Race differences and r/K theory: A reply to Silverman. Ethnology and Sociobiology11:131-140.
5. Rushton, J. 1990c. Race, brain size and intelligence:A rejoinder to Cain and Vanderwolf. Personality and Individual Differences 11:785-794.
6. Rushton, J. P. 1990d. Race, brain size and intelligence: A rejoinder to Cain and Vanderwolf. Personality and Individual Differences 11:785-794.
7. Rushton, J. P. 1991a. Do r-K strategies underlie human race differences? A reply to Weitzmanetal. CanadianPsych. 32:2942.
8. Rushton, J. 1991b. Mongoloid-Caucasoid differences in hrain size from military samples. Intelligence 15:351-359.
9. Rushton, J. P. In press. Cranial capacity related to sex, rank, and race in a stratified random sample of 6325 U.S. military personnel. Intelligence
10. Rushton, J. P., and Bogaert, A. E 1987. Race differences in sexual hehavior: Testing an evolutionary hypothesis. J. of Research in Personalirv, 21:529-55 1.
11. Rushton, J. P., and Bogaert, A. E 1988. Race versus social class differences in sexual behavior: A follow-up test of the r/K dimension. Res. Per. 22:259-272.

The influence of anthropologist Marvin Harris on Pinkerite

The most important influence on Pinkerite's view of human culture, society, race etc. is Marvin Harris and his "research strategy" called cultural materialism.

I had a web site,  cultural-materialism.org  which can still be seen via the Wayback Machine. But I didn't update it often enough.

On the site were clips from an interview that Harris gave to Charlie Rose in the late 1980s and to Hazel Henderson in the 1990s.

About these clips of  Marvin Harris interviews...

1. The interview with Charlie Rose was recorded by a friend on VHS tape in the late 1980s.
2. The interview with Hazel Henderson was recorded in the mid-1990s and sold on VHS tape.
3. Another friend transferred both from VHS tapes to digital in the early 2000s.
4. I edited and posted the clips to the cultural-materialism web site in the mid-2000s.
5. They were then grabbed by the person associated with this languagevirus YouTube channel in the late 2000s, who, when contacted, asked permission from me to post, which I granted.
6. I stopped posting to cultural-materialism.org and let the domain name lapse and took the web site down and lost the original digital video files.
7. And now here they are back again to me. 

All the Harris videos are posted on this Pinkerite page.

Presumably because of his age and gender, Harris was spared the Crusty Paw of Charlie Rose.

Strangely enough, Steven Pinker claimed to like Marvin Harris, although he thought Harris thought too much about sustenance.

Since Marvin Harris is dead and his only heir, as far as I know, is a daughter named Susan who has no interest in anthropology, I don't mind sharing these online PDFs of his books:

• Cow, Pigs, Wars and Witches, The Riddles of Culture
• Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture

Unfortunately some of Pinkerite's comrades in arms against the IDW and race science on Twitter have negative attitudes towards science, in one case even favoring the anti-science views of Paul Feyerabend.

In his "Cultural Materialism, the Struggle for a Science of Culture" published in 1979, Harris had plenty to say about the obscurantism and "anarchy" promoted by Feyerabend:

Science is a unique and precious contribution of Western civilization. This is not to deny that many other civilizations have contributed to scientific knowledge by inventing weights and measures, classifying plants and animals, recording astronomical observations, developing mathematical theorems, voyaging to distant lands, experimenting with chemical and physical processes. But it was in western Europe that the distinctive rules of the scientific method were first codified, given conscious expression, and systematically applied to the entire range of inorganic, organic, and cultural phenomena. 

It is both foolish and dangerous for intellectuals in any society to minimize the significance of this achievement. We must recognize that there are many ways of knowing, but we must also recognize that it is not mere ethnocentric puffery to assert that science is a way of knowing that has a uniquely transcendent value for all human beings. In the entire course of prehistory and history only one way of knowing has encouraged its own practitioners to doubt their own premises and to systematically expose their own conclusions to the hostile scrutiny of nonbelievers. Granted that discrepancies between science as an ideal and science as it is practiced substantially reduce the difference between science, religion, and other modes of looking for the truth. But it is precisely as an ideal that the uniqueness of science deserves to be defended. No other way of knowing is based on a set of rules explicitly designed to transcend the prior belief systems of mutually antagonistic tribes, nations, classes, and ethnic and religious communities in order to arrive at knowledge that is equally probable for any rational human mind. 

Those who doubt that science can do this must be able to show how some other tolerant and ecumenical alternative can do it better. Unless they can show how some other universalistic system of knowing leads to more acceptable criteria of truth, their attempts to subvert the universal credibility of science in the name of cultural relativism, however well-intentioned, is an intellectual crime against humanity. It is a crime against humanity because the real alternative to science is not anarchy, but ideology, not peaceful artists, philosophers, and anthropologists, but aggressive fanatics and messiahs eager to annihilate each other and the whole world if need be in order to prove their point."

And specifically about Feyerabend:

As long as Feyerabend deals with mountains on the moon or quantum mechanics, his views cannot inflict too much damage. But there are other domains of knowledge in which epistemological relativism poses a grave threat to our survival. Medicine is one such domain, and there are many others in the social sciences. One cannot remain indifferent to whether cancer is caused by witchcraft or some defect in cellular chemistry. Nor can one let unbridled imaginations determine the causes of poverty, or establish the existence or nonexistence of a ruling class in the United States. It cannot be a matter of taste whether you believe or do not believe that pollution is a menace, that the underdeveloped countries are getting poorer, that the multinationals are promoting a nuclear arms race, that war is instinctual, that women and blacks are inferior, or that the green revolution is a hoax. Let Feyerabend stand before the ovens of Dachau or the ditch at Mylai and say that our scientific understanding of sociocultural systems is ultimately nothing but an "aesthetic judgement."

Feyerabend can be found comparing the Malleus Maleficarum favorably to science textbooks in his essay in defense of astrology called "The Strange Case of Astrology" That's how obscurantist he was.

It's breath-taking that Feyerabend could claim that science and reason were the causes of the Holocaust while preferring a book that advocates genocide on the basis of witchcraft to science textbooks.

Steven Pinker defends the natural order of women doing more housework than men

Because of course he would. The article he is referencing in the NYTimes.

Sam Seder & crew on the DW - IDW connection

Especially Dave Rubin.

What the IDW really believes about the free market

Steve Sailer and his odd use of the term Platonic

During the multi-day arguments with Steve Sailer and his Twitter followers I discovered there are three questions that Steve Sailer won't answer:

1. Why does Steven Pinker refuse to acknowledge your existence now?
2. How do you reconcile your belief in the inferiority of Africans in view of the fact that Africans are less likely to have Neanderthal DNA than other humans, so they are purer homo sapiens than everybody else as well as less diluted by a species that was a failed, unfit, evolutionary dead end?
3. Where did you get your use of the term Platonic as in "Platonic essences" or "Platonic biological family tree?"

Of the three, he was by far the touchiest about the last question. The first two questions he strictly ignored when I asked. The third made him mad and flounce off. For a couple of minutes.

A year ago I discussed Sailer's odd use of the term Platonic and  linked to all the times Sailer used the term in his Unz columns - his usage is frequent and variable and in some cases appears to be completely his own.

Sailer returned a few minutes after he flounced off and he didn't offer any clarification for where he got his use of the term "Platonic" - probably because he invented it himself.

Rather he commented on a definition provided by one of his followers. Here is Sailer's follow-up tweet:

Sailer is offering "precision" to the claim by a Twitterer named Glaivester, an extreme rightwinger who, bizarrely, quotes liberal Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn on both his Twitter account and his blog. Cockburn is the author of a song considered by Conservepeidia to be among The Worst Liberal Songs.

Glaiver's defines "Platonic biological family tree" as "the idealized family tree"  without consanguinity. 

But in his follow up, Sailer states "everybody, ultimately must be partly inbred."

This application of "Platonic" to the biological reality of human descent is utterly pointless at best. What possible use to biology is a "Platonic biological family tree"? The only way I can figure that it would make sense is if Sailer is claiming that a completely non-consanguineous structure is the "ideal" in some eugenic sense.

But that can't be right, since Sailer believes that Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent "race" due to consanguinity, a theory described in a paper "A Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochrane and promoted by Sailer and Steven Pinker, and debunked by anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson.

But as I am coming to realize, race science uses the most extreme sort of "postmodern" methodology so that, for instance, you can make claims about race and intelligence while insisting that the classification of race itself be completely subjective, per Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell, writing in Quillette; and in the case of Sailer, consider consanguinity to be responsible for a "race" having superior intelligence in the case of Ashkenazi Jews and at the same time being responsible for preventing Iraqis from having a democracy, as he wrote in an essay which Steven Pinker included in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004.

Demonstrating that not only is there no science in "race science," there is also no coherence nor logic.

Fighting with Steve Sailer and his racist pals on Twitter

Extremist Steve Sailer is not an official member of the IDW, as he was not named in the Bari Weiss article.

But given that Bari Weiss has identified Steven Pinker as the exemplar of IDW respectability, and given how much Sailer has influenced Pinker - as Sailer himself will tell you - not to mention his likely influence on the race science proponents at Quillette with their talk of Platonic essences, it's fair to talk about him on this blog.

Sailer, described by Malcolm Gladwell as "a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people" has, I believe, spent his entire career on wingnut welfare working for Ron Unz at the Unz Review as well as writing for VDare (fun fact - Virginia Dare was probably eaten by her fellow colonists) and American Renaissance and really, probably any racists who will have him. 

The pure essential evil of the brain of Steve Sailer was on special display this past week. Sailer was squawking about a woman of color talking about her appearance. It doesn't concern Sailer that perhaps women of color think about their appearance because racists like Steve Sailer say nasty things about their appearance. And make a living doing it thanks to scum like Ron Unz. 

Now the item I quoted was from two decades ago, but Sailer made it clear in my exchanges with him in the past few days that he still stands by his unsupported opinions, and which many of the gullible losers who follow him on Twitter take as fact.

Sailer is well aware of the one-drop rule as I discuss here.

I did a Google search on "women from Kenya" and "women from Iceland" and "women from China" and the results refute Sailer's claim that "black" women are more masculine-looking than "white" women or Asian women.

Now it's not a great methodology - it's clear that plenty of African-American women, who have a typically high degree of European ancestry thanks to all the slave-raping, are included in the mix for women from Kenya.

But even that is a better methodology than Steve Sailer's, since his methodology is to simply pull it out of his ass.

It's important to realize that Steven Pinker admired and supported the career of Steve Sailer after he felt the need to express his idiotic opinions about "blacks" and "whites" and Asians in public. David Duke is also a fan of Steve Sailer. PDF version here.

James Lindsay, Major Grifter and his secret funding sources

When we last saw James Lindsay, Major Grifter (although he seems to have dropped the honorific in his Twitter handle) he had discovered that women's studies are actually sleeper cells from the 1960s who have metastasized, as they always intended, and have begun to rot society from within!

More recently Lindsay was discussing the money he received for perpetrating the "grievance studies" grift. And just like Claire Lehmann he is unable to reveal his funding sources. Hat tip to Twitterer Chrisi for the leads:

per Vox

At first, their papers were rejected. The content was too obviously silly, too much of a joke. But then they committed to studying the kinds of papers that had been written on the topic in the past, and improved their ability to mimic the arguments in them. This was a full-time job for Lindsay: He secured funding from a group of donors whose names he would not reveal to spend, in his words, “90 hours a week” on this project.

per Lindsay himself in Quillette

per Lindsay himself on Twitter

Big surprise, Lindsay turns out to be a standard IDW weasel.

Although it's odd, his mention of money from "undesirables" since he claims above that his funding, from "a handful of private donors" spans the political spectrum.

chrisiousity Youtube channel

Where Quillette gets its money - from a right-wing plutocrat, of course

Claire Lehmann has also worked for
Canadian right-wing extremist Rebel Media

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

...Roughly half of Quillette's audience lives in the US. Australian investment banker and venture capitalist Mark Carnegie is also a supporter and has poured money into a funding round scheduled to end this week. 

"[The backers] see that my long-term project has some merit and value and they want to support it," Ms Lehmann said. "It’s not exactly philanthropy, but no one who is investing is expecting to make a huge sum of money in the next 12 or 24 months." 

Mr Carnegie, a proponent of independent publishing, was a donor before becoming an investor this year and organised to meet Ms Lehmann after reading a series of Quillette articles and discovering the founder was Australian.
...
Quillette's operations have so far largely been financed from reader donations and some online advertising, but Ms Lehmann recently sought more substantial funding as the site looks to grow. She says she has raised a "few-hundred-thousand" dollars and won't name other investors.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that one of the unnamed other investors is Charles Koch.

Mark Carnegie appears to be a garden-variety right-wing plutocrat who is a fan of British eugenicist Toby Young.

From The University of Melbourne Magazine:

Carnegie believes the nation has got the wrong end of the stick on education policy. “Education is an investment,” he asserts. “It’s not an expense even though it turns up in the national accounts. All the evidence is that money spent on education returns to society and if you under-invest in education that’s bad policy. Of course that’s unpopular with an ageing population. When there’s a choice between spending on healthcare and education, health gets the votes.” 

But there’s a caveat, and it bears on Carnegie’s strict cultural conservatism. “I’ll fund anything at university so long as it doesn’t end up in the word studies – cultural studies, women’s studies.”

Mass-murderer Bissonnette's favorite IDWs

As Sam Seder discusses recently, the Montreal mosque mass-murderer Alexandre Bissonnette was a huge fan of several members of the Intellectual Dark web: Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux and Ben Shapiro.

James Lindsay, Major Grifter, discovers grievance studies sleeper cells

James Lindsay, author at Quillette of "Why No One Cares About Feminist Theory" cares very much about the people who care about feminist theory - the kind of theory discussed in the publications that he and his IDW-adjacent colleagues Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian (notable for being one of Stefan Molyneux's most frequent guests) targeted as part of their grievance studies grift.

The IDW has a tendency to get hysterical about anything controversial in Academia (except for when the Koch brothers are involved) but James Lindsay, Major Grifter, is really over the top here, apparently claiming that "grievance studies" have been festering for fifty-plus years, waiting to metastasize "as it always intended to."

Maybe Lindsay is hoping for a senate subcommittee to investigate and to call forward fellow travelers to name names of those who have been nefariously planning for half a century to rot society from within.

ROT SOCIETY FROM WITHIN!

American Renaissance admires Lee Jussim's work

Lee Jussim, chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers, and author at Quillette wrote a book that caught the fancy of the white supremacists at American Renaissance in 2015 in their review entitled "A Blow Against Anti-White Science."

Lee Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Oxford University Press, 2014, 404 pp., $84.00.
This is a very important book. It is an extensive and painstaking refutation of a set of mistaken assumptions that have dominated social science research since the 1950s, and continue to bias the thinking of most professionals in the field. It is a book for specialists–exhaustive and meticulously documented–but it systematically dismantles the illusions that helped give rise to today’s reflexive suspicion of whites. The author, Lee Jussim, is chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers University, and has spent his entire professional life as a social psychologist.

I hadn't noticed Lee Jussim until running into him on Twitter in April, but since then have been keeping an eye out. His promotion of the idea that stereotypes are real struck me as pointless, but on reflection suspected it was one more trick from the evolutionary psychologists to biologize inequality.

Then I found Steven Pinker quoting him and knew I was right.

Pinker had his ass handed to him by Elizabeth Spelke in their debate in 2005 reprinted in Edge.org although he calls on Jussim to help him out:

There is a widespread myth that teachers (who of course are disproportionately female) are dupes who perpetuate gender inequities by failing to call on girls in class, and who otherwise having low expectations of girls' performance. In fact Jussim and Eccles, in a study of 100 teachers and 1,800 students, concluded that teachers seemed to be basing their perceptions of students on those students' actual performances and motivation... 

...Likewise, Alice Eagly and Jussim and Eccles have shown that most of people's gender stereotypes are in fact pretty accurate. Indeed the error people make is in the direction of underpredicting sex differences.

Spelke's response (my highlights)

So, what's causing the gender imbalance on faculties of math and science? Not differences in intrinsic aptitude. Let's turn to the social factors that I think are much more important. Because I'm venturing outside my own area of work, and because time is short, I won't review all of the social factors producing differential success of men and women. I will talk about just one effect: how gender stereotypes influence the ways in which males and females are perceived. 

Let me start with studies of parents' perceptions of their own children. Steve said that parents report that they treat their children equally. They treat their boys and girls alike, and they encourage them to equal extents, for they want both their sons and their daughters to succeed. This is no doubt true. But how are parents perceiving their kids?

Some studies have interviewed parents just after the birth of their child, at the point where the first question that 80% of parents ask — is it a boy or a girl? — has been answered. Parents of boys describe their babies as stronger, heartier, and bigger than parents of girls. The investigators also looked at the babies' medical records and asked whether there really were differences between the boys and girls in weight, strength, or coordination. The boys and girls were indistinguishable in these respects, but the parents' descriptions were different.

At 12 months of age, girls and boys show equal abilities to walk, crawl, or clamber. But before one study, Karen Adolph, an investigator of infants' locomotor development, asked parents to predict how well their child would do on a set of crawling tasks: Would the child be able to crawl down a sloping ramp? Parents of sons were more confident that their child would make it down the ramp than parents of daughters. When Adolph tested the infants on the ramp, there was no difference whatever between the sons and daughters, but there was a difference in the parents' predictions.

My third example, moving up in age, comes from the studies of Jackie Eccles. She asked parents of boys and girls in sixth grade, how talented do you think your child is in mathematics? Parents of sons were more likely to judge that their sons had talent than parents of daughters. A panoply of objective measures, including math grades in school, performance on standardized tests, teachers' evaluations, and children's expressed interest in math, revealed no differences between the girls and boys. Still, there was a difference in parents' perception of their child's intangible talent. Other studies have shown a similar effect for science.

There's clearly a mismatch between what parents perceive in their kids and what objective measures reveal. But is it possible that the parents are seeing something that the objective measures are missing? Maybe the boy getting B's in his math class really is a mathematical genius, and his mom or dad has sensed that. To eliminate that possibility, we need to present observers with the very same baby, or child, or Ph.D. candidate, and manipulate their belief about the person's gender. Then we can ask whether their belief influences their perception.

It's hard to do these studies, but there are examples, and I will describe a few of them. A bunch of studies take the following form: you show a group of parents, or college undergraduates, video-clips of babies that they don't know personally. For half of them you give the baby a male name, and for the other half you give the baby a female name. (Male and female babies don't look very different.) The observers watch the baby and then are asked a series of questions: What is the baby doing? What is the baby feeling? How would you rate the baby on a dimension like strong-to-weak, or more intelligent to less intelligent? There are two important findings.

First, when babies do something unambiguous, reports are not affected by the baby's gender. If the baby clearly smiles, everybody says the baby is smiling or happy. Perception of children is not pure hallucination. Second, children often do things that are ambiguous, and parents face questions whose answers aren't easily readable off their child's overt behavior. In those cases, you see some interesting gender labeling effects. For example, in one study a child on a video-clip was playing with a jack-in-the-box. It suddenly popped up, and the child was startled and jumped backward. When people were asked, what's the child feeling, those who were given a female label said, "she's afraid." But the ones given a male label said, "he's angry." Same child, same reaction, different interpretation.

In other studies, children with male names were more likely to be rated as strong, intelligent, and active; those with female names were more likely to be rated as little, soft, and so forth.

I think these perceptions matter. You, as a parent, may be completely committed to treating your male and female children equally. But no sane parents would treat a fearful child the same way they treat an angry child. If knowledge of a child's gender affects adults' perception of that child, then male and female children are going to elicit different reactions from the world, different patterns of encouragement. These perceptions matter, even in parents who are committed to treating sons and daughters alike.

I will give you one last version of a gender-labeling study. This one hits particularly close to home. The subjects in the study were people like Steve and me: professors of psychology, who were sent some vitas to evaluate as applicants for a tenure track position. Two different vitas were used in the study. One was a vita of a walk-on-water candidate, best candidate you've ever seen, you would die to have this person on your faculty. The other vita was a middling, average vita among successful candidates. For half the professors, the name on the vita was male, for the other half the name was female. People were asked a series of questions: What do you think about this candidate's research productivity? What do you think about his or her teaching experience? And finally, Would you hire this candidate at your university?

For the walk-on-water candidate, there was no effect of gender labeling on these judgments. I think this finding supports Steve's view that we're dealing with little overt discrimination at universities. It's not as if professors see a female name on a vita and think, I don't want her. When the vita's great, everybody says great, let's hire.

What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve's and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, "good productivity" when the name was male, and "less good productivity" when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not.

A couple other interesting things came out of this study. The effects were every bit as strong among the female respondents as among the male respondents. Men are not the culprits here. There were effects at the tenure level as well. At the tenure level, professors evaluated a very strong candidate, and almost everyone said this looked like a good case for tenure. But people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, "This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?" Now that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.

So there's a pervasive difference in perceptions, and I think the difference matters. Scientists' perception of the quality of a candidate will influence the likelihood that the candidate will get a fellowship, a job, resources, or a promotion. A pattern of biased evaluation therefore will occur even in people who are absolutely committed to gender equity.

I have little doubt that all my colleagues here at Harvard are committed to the principle that a male candidate and a female candidate of equal qualifications should have equal chance at a job. But we also think that when we compare a more productive scholar to a less productive one, a more experienced teacher to a less experienced one, a more independent investigator to a less independent one, those factors matter as well. These studies say that knowledge of a person's gender will influence our assessment of those factors, and that's going to produce a pattern of discrimination, even in people with the best intentions.

From the moment of birth to the moment of tenure, throughout this great developmental progression, there are unintentional but pervasive and important differences in the ways that males and females are perceived and evaluated.