Modern Mind

migration,’ the ‘secession of the successful,’ and the blending of the interests of the affluent with the cognitive elite that Herrnstein and Murray see as the most important, and pessimistic, of their findings. This elite, they say, will fear the ‘underclass’ that is emerging, and will in effect control it with ‘kindness’ (which is basically what Murray’s rival, J. K. Galbraith had said in
The Culture of Contentment).
They will provide welfare for the underclass so long as it is out of sight and out of mind. They hint, though, that such measures are likely to fail: ‘racism will re-emerge in a new and more virulent form.’ 68
    Herrnstein and Murray are traditionalists. They would like to see a return to old-fashioned families, small communities, and the familiar forms of education, where pupils are taught history, literature, arts, ethics, and the sciences in such a way as to be able to weigh, analyse, and evaluate arguments according to exacting standards. 69 For them, the IQ test not only works – it is a watershed in human society. Allied to the politics of democracy and the homogenising successes of modern capitalism, the IQ aids what R. A. Fisher called runaway evolution, promoting the rapid layering of society, divided according to IQ – which, of course, is mainly inherited. We are indeed witnessing the rise of the meritocracy.
    The Bell Curve
provoked a major controversy on both sides of the Atlanric. This was no surprise. Throughout the century white people, people on the ‘right’ side of the divide they were describing, have concluded that whole segments of the population were dumb. What sort of reaction did they expect? Many people countered the claims of Herrnstein and Murray, with at least six other books being produced in 1995 or 1996 to examine (and in many cases refute) the arguments
of The Bell Curve.
Stephen Jay Gould’s
The Mismeasure of Man
was reissued in 1996 with an extra chapter giving his response to
The Bell Curve.
His main point was that this was a debate that needed technical expertise. Too many of the reviewers who had joined the debate (and the book provoked nearly two hundred reviews or associated articles) did not feel themselves competent to judge the statistics, for example. Gould did, and dismissed them. In particular, he attacked Herrnstein and Murray’s habit of giving the
form
of the statistical association but not the
strength.
When this was examined, he said, the links they had found always explained less than 20 percent of the variance, ‘usually less than 10 percent and often less than 5 percent. What this means in English is that you cannot predict what a given person will do from his IQscore.’ 70 This was the conclusion Christopher Jencks had arrived at, thirty years before.
    By the time
The Bell Curve
rumpus erupted, the infrastructure was in place for a biological project capable of generating controversy on an even bigger scale. This was the scramble to map the human genome, to draw up a plan to describe exactly all the nucleotides that constitute man’s inheritance and that, in time, will offer at least the possibility of interfering in our genetic makeup.
    Interest in this idea grew throughout the 1980s. Indeed, it could be said that the Human Genome Project (HGP), as it came to be called, had been simmering since Victor McKusick, a Boston doctor, began collecting a comprehensive record, ‘Mendelian Inheritance in Man,’ a list of all known genetic diseases, first published in 1966. 71 But then, as research progressed, first one scientist then another began to see sense in mapping the entire genome. On 7 March 1986, in
Science,
Renato Dulbecco, Nobel Prize-winning president of the Salk Institute, startled his colleagues by asserting that the war on cancer would be over quicker if geneticists were to sequence the human genome. 72 Various U.S. government departments, including the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, became interested at this point, as did scientists in Italy, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and France (in roughly that order; Germany was backward, owing to the controversial role biology had played in Nazi times). A major conference, organised by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was held in Washington in July 1986 to bring together the various interested parties, and this had two effects. In February 1988 the US. National Research Council issued its report,
Mapping and Sequencing the Human