As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
> As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one.
> (of which only a small bit relates to race)
It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
If it is definitional to your worldview, then replace it with a scientifically sound one.
The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
“That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. But just because there's a lot of variation in many traits among humans mean there's variation in all of them, in fact we all have the same organs with the same functions, the same number of chromosomes, the same metabolic pathway to produce energy from food, etc. There are as many things that don't have variations in humans as thing that do. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a genetic impact on cognitive ability, but this argument is really poor one.
> Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
When almost all your citations in your discussion about the link between “races” and intelligence, are taken from at best biased studies (from South Africa, Rhodesia or Southern US under segregation) when it's not openly racist (Richard Lynn, which has 20+ citations in the book!).
If you want quick look at the quality of the sources used in this book, I highly recommend you to watch just the five minutes starting at 1'52'28[1], about the “single best study of Negroid intelligence”.
http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversal...
Also genetically aren't all the different distinct populations found around sub-Saharan Africa anyway, with everyone else in the world all sharing a single genetic group that has very little genetic variance within it?
Is this obvious? I can't imagine what kinds of attributes you're talking about. I think if they were significant ones (courageousness, curiosity, etc) they would probably have really profound political effects you don't see in reality.
But, it doesn't mean that every attribute varies this way. That's exactly what I'm arguing against actually.
About psychological traits you mention, there's so much cultural influence I don't think genetics would have any visible impact even if it was a factor (I'd be surprised if genetics played zero role here, but I expect the genetic-induced variance to be much lower than the culturally-induced one).
Even a minute difference in something like this would change the mechanics of the formation. So stuff like Alexander's globe-spanning conquests would suddenly become impossible as he hit a different population regime where his tactics don't work anymore, or the Mongols would hit some barrier where they would start losing all their battles because people weren't reacting the way they should, etc.
In reality, of course, empires like the Roman one absolutely depended on the fact that the same social systems and techniques worked just as well in modern day scotland as they worked in modern day Iraq - a legionnaire was a legionnaire, whether they came from egypt or wales, and they could and were moved around and interchanged.
In fact, the whole purpose of the phalanx as a combat organization is to remove the weight of individual actions: you don't need “courage” (whatever that means[2]) to stand in a phalanx, because you're clumped up with every soldiers, and you have nowhere to flee (and btw those soldiers are your neighbors and relatives, so fleeing would destroy all your social life back home, putting an enormous social pressure on soldiers).
[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... [2] https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warr...
But aside from that, it seems like everything you wrote is pure conjecture and even if some of it was true, that absolutely does not prove a point about there being no genetic component to intellectual diversity.
P 2. An empire is a state that employs some policies across its entire territory.
P 3. Multi-ethnic empires with strong cohesion have existed.
So if you take 1, and 3, you see that for both to be true, people have to have very standardized reactions to policies across ethnic 'lines'. I state it with certainty because it's obvious.
Counter-example: people within a single ethnicity have a huge range of reactions to policies (based on all sorts of things, whether or not genetic).
It is.
None of the controversy over the book is about that orbital-level view.
I’m not making any statement about the conclusions in the work.
I’m making a statement about the controversy around the work, from observing that controversy, including reading extensive material from people objecting at the time it first became controversial.
The controversy was never over the broad idea that different populations have different distributions of different attributes.
It is by no means "the general argument" of the Bell Curve, and saying that pretty transparently shows that you have not read it. You are, of course, excused by the fact that the book has been the target of relentless smear campaign by media and many academics, which resulted in painting completely wrong image of what the book actually is about.
Bell Curve is almost entirely concerning the American society, and only in passing mentions issues and results from different parts of the world. The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ. Moreover, which will probably be shocking to people who only know Bell Curve through second hand accounts of people very loudly denouncing it, for the most part it explicitly restricts itself to results and data from the population of white Americans only, to show that these correlations are not a result of some sort of insidious ethnic or racial discrimination, as they also exist within white population. Only in last part of the book ethnic and racial disparities are mentioned, mostly to show that these are pretty much what you would expect if you assumed that correlations of intelligence and outcomes within population of white Americans are the same if you extend your analysis to population at large.
Except the data they use is not IQ (they are using AFQT Score because that's the available data) and they are artificially constructing an equivalent IQ. The original data doesn't even fit a bell curve (because there's no reason a given test should). For some reason, unjustified in the book, they assume that the AFQT score depends only from genetic factors and not from any kind of social determinism. The fact that the book liberally jumps from AFQT score to IQ to “genetic factor” is an enormous issue which completely destroys the credibility of their work.
Also, in their book it is “to a large degree, explained by their IQ”, because they controlled for almost no social or environmental factors: only the “parental socioeconomic status” (also a made-up metric) is taken into account.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG265/...
They literally say that they believe AFQT measures the same thing as WAIS (a standard IQ test) is measuring.
Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either).
And btw, the study you quote explicitly rules out the conversion done in the book:
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Alas, there have been other studies done, and it turns out that indeed, AFQT/ASVAB score and IQ correlation does in fact extend to areas on the left side of the distribution too, exactly as expected. To reiterate: this correlation exists across entire spectrum, not only among high IQ people. If anything, the correlation at high IQ is lower than expected, because of range restriction effect.
> Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone
Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
It can, though. The problem is that the population of military test takers is not representative of population at large. For one thing, its average intelligence will probably be higher, due to relative scarcity of mentally disabled people. However, if you know the parameters of IQ distribution among military test takers, you can easily convert AFQT/ASVAB to IQ.
Oh yes it is. Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud. Doing so in any hard-science topic would earn you an angry comment from your reviewers.
> Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
Oh, and I guess Herrnstein and Murray didn't publish that book? Because they definitely do so in The Bell Curve: They are literally plotting AFQT and SES (their bogus “socioeconomic factors”) against social outcome and since AFQT has a higher correlation than SES, they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
And if you read my previous comment, you'd notice that the AFQT -> IQ is only a part of the issue in the Bell Curve, the bigger part being how they assume AFQT -> genetics because they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics. (The last steps being an ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve so it's not really a surprise…)
No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study, but you can’t extrapolate that outside the sample, that would be a rookie mistake”. This is, of course, absurd. We do science precisely so that we can make useful predictions in day to day life, outside of studies.
> they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
> they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics
I don’t think they do, and it is contradicted by what you wrote in this very comment, where you say they claim genetics is “decisive factor”. This clearly makes no sense under assumption of equality/identity of concepts — you wouldn’t say that A is a “decisive factor” in B, if A and B are the same thing.
> ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve
Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not about not extrapolating to individual subjects outside of the test group, it's about not extrapolating to categories which aren't represented. That's why we don't conclude a vaccine is effective on all mammals after a trial on mouses! We experiment on humans, and we even try to get as much diversity as we can (age, gender, preexisting conditions etc.) so the result can be generalized to the entire population.
> I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
The argument made in The Bell Curve is that genetics is the single most important factor. I wrote “alone” not because there is not other factors, but because according to the authors there is no other factors as important.
> Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not. At least not according to the usual definition of “scientific knowledge” which imply some degree of consensus: this research field is strongly divided on that question, with a clear ideological split. BTW, even the mere existence of g is questioned.
This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance).
This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo