ReThink History: The Politics of Intelligence

society, culture, history · EN-US

In 1969 a single journal article reopened a question many believed WWII had closed: is the racial gap in IQ scores genetic? The Politics of Intelligence tells that story in full — Arthur Jensen, the Nobel physicist William Shockley, Richard Herrnstein and Hans Eysenck, and the Pioneer Fund that bankrolled them — and then does what they did not: it tests the claim. We walk through the unreliable and, in Cyril Burt's case, fabricated data; the logical error at the center (heritability within a group says nothing about why two groups differ); and the counter-evidence they ignored — the Flynn effect, transracial-adoption studies, the cultural bias of the tests, and the finding that most human genetic variation lies within so-called races, not between them. We end with the verdict the scientific community reached, and the uncomfortable fact that the claim keeps coming back — The Bell Curve, James Watson, today's online race science. We explain the people and their era fairly, while stating