Charles Murray (author) - The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) (ISBN 0-02-914673-9) is a controversial, best-selling 1994 book that Charles Murray wrote with the Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein. Its central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than one's parents' socio-economic status or education level. Also, the book argued that those with high intelligence (the "cognitive elite") are becoming separated from the general population of those with average and below-average intelligence, and that this was a dangerous social trend.

Much of the controversy erupted from Chapters 13 and 14, where the authors write about the enduring differences in race and intelligence and discuss implications of that difference. While the authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, they write in the introduction to Chapter 13 that "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved," and "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences."

The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of IQ scores. The normal distribution is the limiting distribution of a random quantity which is the sum of smaller, independent random phenomena.

Shortly after publication, large numbers of people rallied both to criticize and defend the book. Some critics denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism. A number of books were written in response, to criticize The Bell Curve. Those books included a revised edition of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, The Bell Curve Wars, a collection of essays reacting to Murray and Herrnstein's commentary, as well as The Bell Curve Debate, which contains essays that respond to the issues raised in The Bell Curve. Arthur S. Goldberger and Charles F. Manski critique the empirical methods supporting the book's hypotheses.