Charles Murray

curtiss_leung at ibi.com curtiss_leung at ibi.com
Wed Feb 3 16:14:33 PST 1999


Charles Brown writes of Murray:

> Murray seems rilly stuck on stupid, but he poses as an intellect. He

> is a profound liar...What of Boas and Stephen Jay Gould's historic

> refutations biological racism ?

Glad you mentioned Gould. I had read _Mismeasure of Man_ way before

_Bell Curve_ came out, and I was curious to see how Murray and

what's-his-name answered Gould's arguments against the sophisticated

statistical methods used by the new IQ racists. (In a nutshell: if I

add my waist size to the room temperature in degrees Kelvin and then

multiply by the number of Jaegermeister <uuukkk!> shots consumed by

high school teens within a five block radius of my house last night, I

will not have a meaningful measure of anything, and Gould argues

persuasively that the fancy IQ metrics are much the same stuff as

that.)

Well, _Bell Curve_ just dismissed Gould as an "historicist" and that

was that. So much for intellectual integrity.

Also: I remember a note in _Scientific American_ a few years back that

chased through _Bell Curves_ citations, and found that they

misrepresented the papers and studies cited -- or if Murray and

what's-his-name didn't, the secondary source they used did. Does this

ring a bell with anybody else?

--

Curtiss



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