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