Modern Mind

research holds out no prospect of a cure for the major illnesses that affect mankind – for example, cancer, heart disease and stroke – and thatthe whole edifice is more designed to reward scientists than help science, or patients. Most subversive of all, he writes, ‘It has been clear since the first discoveries in molecular biology that “genetic engineering,” the creation to order of genetically altered organisms, has an immense possibility for producing private profit…. No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.’ 63 He believes that human nature, as described by the evolutionary biologists such as E. O. Wilson, is a ‘made-up story,’ designed to fit the theories the theorists already hold.
    Given the approach of Gould and Lewontin in particular, it comes as no surprise to find them fully embroiled in yet another (but very familiar) biological controversy, which erupted in 1994. This was the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. 64
    Ten years in the making, the main argument of
The Bell Curve
was twofold. In some places, it is straight out of Michael Young’s
Rise of the Meritocracy,
though Herrnstein and Murray are no satirists but in deadly earnest. In the twentieth century, they say, as more and more colleges have opened up to the general population, as IQ tests have improved and been shown to be better predictors of job performance than other indicators (such as college grades, interviews, or biographical data), and as the social environment has become more uniform for most of the population, a ‘cognitive elite’ has begun to emerge in society. Three phenomena are the result of this sorting process, and mean that it will accelerate in the future: the cognitive elite is getting richer, at a time when everybody else is having to struggle to stay even; the elite is increasingly segregated physically from everyone else, especially at work and in the neighbourhoods they inhabit; and the cognitive elite is increasingly likely to intermarry. 65 Herrnstein and Murray also analysed afresh the results of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a database of about 4 million Americans drawn from a population that was born in the 1960s. This enables them to say, for example, that low intelligence is a stronger precursor of poverty than coming from a low socioeconomic status background, that students who drop out of school come almost entirely from the bottom quartile of the IQ distribution (i.e., the lowest 25 percent), that low-IQ people are more likely to divorce early on in married life and to have illegitimate children. They found that low-IQ parents are more likely to be on welfare and to have low-birthweight children. Low IQ men are more likely to be in prison. Then there was the racial issue. Herrnstein and Murray spend a lot of time prefacing their remarks by saying that a high ‘I Q ‘does not necessarily make someone admirable or the kind to be cherished, and they concede that the racial differences in IQ are diminishing. But, after controlling for education and poverty, they still find that people of Asian stock in America outperform ‘whites,’ who outperform blacks on tests of IQ. 66 They also find that recent immigrants to America have a lower IQ score than native-born Americans. And finally, they voice their concerns that the IQ level of America is declining. This is due partly, they say, to a dysgenic trend – people of lower IQ are having more children – but thatis not the only reason. In practice, the American schooling system has been ‘dumbed down’ to meet the needs of average and below-average students, which means that the performance of the average students has
not,
contrary to popular opinion, been adversely affected. It is the brighter students who have been most affected, their SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores dropping by 41 percent between 1972 and 1993. They also blame parents, who seem not to want their children to work harder anymore, and television, which has replaced newsprint as a source of information, and the telephone, which has replaced letter writing as a form of self-expression. 67 Further, they express their view that affirmative-action programs have not helped disadvantaged people, indeed have made their situation worse. But it is the emergence of the cognitive elite, this ‘invisible