the bell curve

     

The Bell Curve is a controversial, best-selling 1994 book by the late Harvar professor Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray. Its central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than parents' socioeconomic status or education level. Also, the book argued that those with high intelligence, which it called 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 concerned Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote about the enduring racial differences in intelligence and discuss implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, and they did indeed write in chapter 13 "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."

Trivia about the bell curve

  • The title of this 1994 book about group differences in intelligence refers to a shape on a graph

Found pages about the bell curve