The Bell Curve Case For Heredity

PHILOSOPHY
Hocutt,
Levin /OF
BELL
THE
CURVE
SOCIAL
CASE
SCIENCES
FOR HEREDITY
/ September 1999
The Bell Curve Case for Heredity

MAX HOCUTT
University of Alabama
MICHAEL LEVIN
City College of New York
The hereditarian theory of race differences in IQ was briefly revived with the
appearance of The Bell Curve but then quickly dismissed. The authors attempt a
defense of it here, with an eye to conceptual and logical issues of special interest
to philosophers, such as alleged infirmities in the heritability concept. At the
same time, some relevant postBell Curve empirical data are introduced.
Intelligence potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same

proportion and pattern as among Icelanders or Chinese, or any other
group. There is absolutely no question of any genetic differential.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1965
INTRODUCTION
Some scientific disputes are momentous enough to raise philosophical questions about the measurability of key concepts, the causal
interpretation of data, and the relation of facts to social policy. One
such dispute, we believe, concerns the 15-point gap between the average IQ of blacks and that of whites.
The existence of this largeone standard deviationand important difference can no longer be questioned,1 and it calls for an explanation. One hypothesis holds that the difference2 is due entirely to
past and present disadvantages imposed on blacks by whites. In Lyndon Johnsons vivid metaphor, blacks trail because they have been
made to run the race while hobbled. This social-environmental (or,
following E. O. Wilson [1998], nurturist) hypothesis has been conventional wisdom for nearly half a century, and those who have challenged it have been made objects of public derision. The assertion
Arthur Jensen and Margarita Garcia made helpful comments about earlier drafts.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 29 No. 3, September 1999 389-415
1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
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PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 1999
quoted at the head of this article was made without supporting evidence, indicating that proponents of the social-environment theory
regard it as beyond dispute, even self-evident. If they are right, the
gap in IQ can be completely eradicated by a determined and massive
effort to equalize opportunities.
A second hypothesis, favored by, for instance, Thomas Sowell
(1995), holds that lower black IQ is the result not of impediments currently facing blacks but of habits that have taken root in black communities, perhaps not only as the long-term residue of slavery and Jim
Crow but also perhaps as the result of ancient African traditions. On
this cultural theory, black poverty, crime, illegitimacy, and
dependence on welfare are not imposed on blacks by whites but are
freely chosen by blacks themselves. These counterproductive habits
are thus not the consequence but the cause of lower black IQ: the children of lower IQ blacks are being raised and educated in ways that
ensure they too will develop low IQ. On this hypothesis, the gap in IQ
can be closed, but only if blacks adopt new forms of behavior.
The third hypothesis, cautiously reintroduced a few years ago by
Herrnstein and Murray (1994) in The Bell Curve (henceforth BC) and
immediately dismissed by hostile critics as not merely baseless but
morally and politically unworthy, is that the difference in IQ is partly,
though not wholly, hereditary. We will also refer to this theory as BC.3
(It could also be called the hereditarian theory; its critics use less neutral names.) Itself taken to be beyond dispute a century ago, the BC
hypothesis was gradually abandoned under the onslaught of charges
that belief in hereditary differences is a myth created by a ruling class
to justify its power and privileges. If BC is correct, efforts at equalizing
opportunity might reasonably be expected to diminish the gap in IQ
to some extent but not close it. On this hypothesis, moreover, policies
meant to compensate blacks for what is thought to be harm done them
by whites are misconceived since black competitive failure is largely
due to genetic factors for which whites are not responsible.
We wish to revive the brief-lived and unsatisfactory debate over
the merits of these hypotheses,4 especially the third. It is our view that
there is more to be said for it than is presently allowed. Since, as suggested, the debate over BC is to a considerable extent conceptual and
methodological, we believe the participation of philosophers is particularly appropriate.
We claim not that BC is demonstrably correct but that, correctly
construed, it is more plausible and its alternatives less so than critics
have acknowledged. Although interest in the issue has been
Hocutt, Levin / BELL CURVE CASE FOR HEREDITY
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heightened by its relation to public policy, we emphasize the scientific questions. Policy must be posterior to well-founded scientific
beliefs. The facts come first.
WHAT DOES BC MAINTAIN?

It would be well to make sure at the outset that the question is clear.
Nobody, certainly not Herrnstein and Murray (1994), maintains that
all 15 points of the racial gap in IQ is hereditary. By contrast, advocates of the social-environment hypothesis do appear to believe that
the entire gap is environmental. They certainly argue as if they believe
this, vehemently opposing all suggestions that any part might be
hereditary.5 The issue, then, is not between those who say that all is
genes and those who say none is. Nor, in strictness, is it over how
much of the gap is hereditary and how much environmental.
Although they clearly think it may be substantial, Herrnstein and
Murray venture no estimate of the portion of the gap that is genetic.
They do offer 60% as a middling guess at the heritability of IQ, but this
is a within-race, not a between-race, estimate. The proposition they
endorse is some of the gap is hereditary, the contradictory of which
is not that some of the gap is environmental but that all of it is. The
question, then, is whether we have reason to believe that any part of
the gap is hereditary, as Herrnstein and Murray claim, or whether we
should presume that it is all environmental, as proponents of the
other two hypotheses believe.
It should also be noted that, despite a widespread impression to
the contrary, The Bell Curve is not primarily about race, nor is its central thesis that the racial gap in IQ is (in good part) genetic. The book
concerns the statistical distribution of intelligence and how it relates
to social and economic class; race takes up only 120 pages of 555 pages
of text, only 48 of which concern heredity. In accordance with these
larger aims, BCs first 12 chapters document the importance of IQ
among whites to poverty, schooling, employment, family relations,
welfare dependency, parenting, crime, and citizenshipvariables
chosen for study because they are known to correlate with IQand
the authors want to decide in each case which is cause and which is
effect.
They conclude that, for whites, IQ makes a huge systematic difference. Smart people earn more, achieve higher grades in school, perform better on the job, have more satisfactory personal relationships,
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depend less on public assistance, commit fewer crimes, and make a

greater contribution to their communities. Smart folk are also more
dependable, more likable, and healthierprobably better looking
too. Although these are things most people already suspect, they are
also frequently disputed, perhaps in part because being more intelligent is still often confused with being better educated. Herrnstein and
Murray (1994) do not insist that IQ is all that counts. This thing we
know as IQ is important but not a synonym for human excellence,
they say. Character, personality, health, and luck matter too, but these
are correlated with IQ. Smart people, as the saying goes, have all the
luck.
REGRESSION ANALYSIS
To illustrate BCs methodology, consider IQ and poverty. Nobody
doubts the two are connected, but many deny that low IQ is a cause of
poverty. The prevailing view, in fact, reverses the causal arrow: people are stupid because they are poor. To test this view, Herrnstein and
Murray (1994) plot (see Figure 1) both IQ and parental socialeconomic status (SES) against the probability of being in poverty,
using standard scores to allow comparison. (That is, the scale for both
IQ and parental SES is the distance from each variables mean in standard deviation [SD] units; thus, the prospects of someone 1 SD below
the mean in parental SES can be compared to those of someone 1 SD
below the mean in IQ. Statisticians know this technique as z scoring.) Results: an increase in IQ from low to high (with SES kept constant) predicts a much greater reduction in the likelihood of poverty
than a corresponding increase (with IQ kept constant) in parental
SES. A similar graph compares schooling with IQ to similar effect:
low IQ is far more likely than minimal schooling to result in poverty.
Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge the importance of other factorsfor example, the presence of a responsible father in the
homebut leave little doubt that IQ is the variable of greatest
significance.
Note here the implicit use of two methodological rules to disambiguate correlational data: (1) causes (at least above the subatomic
level) precede effects, and (2) variation in the cause must be followed
by variation in the effect. Given (1), the nurturist must hold that it is
childhood environmentmeasured by parental SESthat causes
both adult IQ and adult poverty, with the IQ/poverty correlation an
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Figure 1: IQ versus Parental SES in Determining Poverty

SOURCE: Herrnstein and Murray (1994, 134).
induced artifact. Hence, by (2), he must expect the probability of poverty to vary widely in those cases across which parental SES varies
widely but IQ turns out about average; conversely, where parental
SES is average but IQ varies widely, the chances of later poverty
should vary very little. That the reverse pattern is observed undermines the nurturist interpretation of the data. This themecorrelation
versus causationwill recur.
The principal objections to this phase of the BC argument have
been, as implied, conceptual rather than empirical. Thus, two economists, Goldberger and Manski (1995, 769), complain that they can
find no substantively meaningful way to interpret normalized
comparisons. In place of causal analysis by regression of dichotomous life outcome variables, they propose that the effect on a dependent variable of spending some fixed resource to change socioeconomic status be compared with the effect of spending the same
resource to change IQ.
This criticism proves too much and too little. As noted parenthetically, regression on normalizations to compare the effects of two variables, thus obviating the objection that you cannot compare apples
with oranges, is commonplace in statistics. It is the financial
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experiment described that makes little scientific sense: one might as

well seek to gauge the nutritional value of various foods by measuring the vitamins in a dollars worth of each. The econometric proposal
also assumes an ability to boost IQ that we do not have.6 To follow that
design amounts to abandoning tried-and-true methods for an experiment we have no idea how to conduct.
Goldberger and Manski (1995) stress7 that in a normalized regression, the slope of the regression line depends on the regressors SD;
SES would predict poverty as well as IQ were its SD larger. This is so,
but it in no way makes the greater predictiveness of IQ a scaling artifact: the actual slope difference is just another way of saying that IQ
covaries with poverty more than does SES. It is also true, as Goldberger
and Manski state, that the slopes will equalize if IQ and SES stratify as
BC predicts they will. But again, far from being an embarrassment to
BC, this just restates BCs conclusion that as IQ becomes more important, it displaces other determinants of status.
OBJECTIONS TO IQ TESTS
BCs measure of IQ is the Armed Forces Qualification Test component of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which supplies
the data for its analyses. An inevitable complaint is that such tests do
not measure the highly varied manifestations of intelligence.8 Herrnstein and Murrays (1994) use of cognitive ability in place of intelligence does not avoid verbal issues, since anyone who denies that
IQ measures intelligence will also deny that it measures cognitive
ability. The proper answer to these doubts (also given in BC) is the
ample evidence of the validity of standardized IQ teststheir welldocumented ability to predict success in a variety of academic, economic, and social activities calling on what plain folk call intelligence.9
People who do well on IQ tests also do well in school and go far in the
professions. Any well-defined claim of the form test T does not register the presence of trait P must cite a task intuitively requiring P that
does not correlate with T. We know of no criticism of IQ tests that satisfies this constraint.
It will be replied that evidence concerning whites does not show
that IQ tests also measure intelligence for blacks, but between-race
validity is also well confirmed, as BC also points out.10 High-IQ blacks
also make better students, better employees, better parents, and better citizens; they are also convicted of fewer crimes, get more years of
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schooling, and are more successful financially and socially than their
lower IQ counterparts. An IQ of 120 means the same thing no matter
the race of the person who achieves it.
From a logical point of view, this fact is sufficient to rebut the oftheard claim that IQ tests are culturally biased. To the extent (which
we suspect is considerable) that this claim is based on the simple fact
that blacks do not score as high on IQ tests, it patently begs the question. It assumes precisely what is at issuenamely, whether blacks
are on average as intelligent as whites. IQ tests measure the same trait
for blacks and whites so long as test results continue to correlate
highly with other indices of ability and success when blacks and
whites are included in the same population. And, to repeat, not one
careful study has shown that a standardized IQ test given to both
races either overpredicts white success or predicts success in a different pattern.11
What of those items on some IQ testsfor example, questions
allegedly using words more familiar to whitesthat appear to penalize black testees? Surprising as it may be from the nurturist point of
view, it is not these items that depress black scores. Blacks do even
worse on culture-neutral items that measure pure acuitywhat the
followers of Spearman call g. For instance, blacks fall much more than
one SD below whites on the backwards digit span test, which measures the capacity to remember and repeat strings of characters backwards. Another telling example involves tests of reaction timethe
interval between the presentation of a stimulus and the onset of a
response to it. (Time of reaction is presumably related to the speed
with which a situation is perceived, a good index of intelligence.)
Jensen (1989) has shown that black reaction time is slower, although
black motion time is faster. The intraindividual variation in reaction
time is also higher for blacks than whites, and variance in reaction
time correlates quite strongly with IQ within both races. None of
these data is easy to explain on the hypothesis that the IQ gap is environmental or cultural.
It may also be objected that while IQ tests are fair in the psychometric sense, race disparities in performance on them reflect bias in
the larger society: discrimination, lack of stimulating early environments, and so on. But that nurturist hypothesis, whatever its merits, is
irrelevant to the issue of test fairness. Since the trait measured by IQ
tests is intelligence, whatever causes the race difference in this trait
causes a difference in intelligence. That is what those tests faithfully
reveal. To the extent that they do, they are no more biased than an
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X-ray of a torture victim that accurately reveals his wrongfully broken bones.
Is it circular to validate a test by its ability to predict education and
income and then cite variation in the trait measured by the test as a
(proximate12) cause of variation in educational and vocational success? No. Scientists often explain phenomena by posits the sole evidence for which, at the time, are the phenomena themselves. Why
isnt Uranus where it is supposed to be? A new planet. How do we
know a new planet is there? Uranuss deviant orbit. No circle exists so
long as the explanans yields testable consequences beyond what it is
enlisted to explain, and this is the trait measured by IQ tests. It predicts all manner of intuitively intellectual abilities not involved in the
initial validation of IQ. To put the general point in terms congenial to
philosophers, when explanandum e is introduced to account for phenomenon P, the cause of P is an accidental designator that fixes the
reference of e. The unknown influence on Uranus fixes the reference of Neptune without defining it, so Neptune is influencing
Uranus remains nontrivial.
HERITABILITY OF INTELLIGENCE
The discussion up to now has concerned phenotypic intelligence,
as distinguished from intelligence insofar as it is innate. Many people,
if few psychometricians, conflate the two, assuming that if Ann is
smarter than Brad, she must have been born so. However (as Herrnstein
and Murray 1994 fully recognize), differences in IQ or any other trait
may be real without being inherited. The claim that a difference is
genetically based needs separate argument.
BC summarizes what is known of the genetic control of IQ, tentatively estimating it at 60%. We must now attend to the heritability of
IQ and the role of this difficult concept in BCs overall argument, for it
is on this concept that virtually all serious criticisms of BC focus.13
Heritability measures how much of the variation in a trait in a
population is due to variations in genetic endowment, the rest being
assumed due to variation in environment.14 If all the variation is due
to genes, heritability is 1; if none is, heritability is 0; numbers between
0 and 1 indicate the proportion of variation attributable to genes.
Heritability may be estimated directly by comparing blood relatives (for example, monozygotic twins) sharing some known proportion of genes but reared apart or indirectly by comparing related
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orthe most interesting caseunrelated persons reared together.

Direct studies have yielded estimates of heritability as high as .8 for
IQ, while indirect studies have yielded estimates as low as .4.15 To
apply these numbers to individual differences, we must take their
square roots.16 A low-end heritability of .4 for IQ suggests that, on
average, 63% of the difference in IQ between any two individuals is
attributable to heredity9.5 of every 15 points that separate them can
be attributed to genetic variationwhile a heritability of .8 raises that
figure to 89%. The estimate ventured in BC of .6 implies that, on average, 77% of the difference in IQ scores between pairs of whites in the
United States can be attributed to differences in genes.17 Thus, even
conservative estimates of heritability leave us attributing most variation in IQ to genetic differences.
A more formal definition of heritability is needed to engage fully
with the issues BC raises. In any population, the values of a quantifiable phenotype P will vary. The variance of the distribution of Ps values is Ps phenotypic variance in that population. Consider next that a
genotype of P may express itself differently in different environments. The yield of a variety of wheat raised in Iowa will exceed the
yield of the self-same variety cultivated in the Mojave, according to
variations in temperature, moisture, and fertility of soil.18 This variation is the genotypes reaction range.19 Each genotype for P in a population will have a mean expressed value over its reaction range; the
variance of the distribution of these mean genotypic values is Ps
genetic variance in the population. Intuitively, the smaller the genetic
variance in a populationthe more the reaction ranges of the genotypes for P resemble each otherthe more Ps phenotypic variation is
due to variation in the environments to which the various genotypes
are exposed. If, on the other hand, every gene for P reacts dissimilarly
to the same environments, yielding a large genetic variance, the more
individual differences in P will be due to genetic differences. Hence,
the ratio of Ps genetic to phenotypic variance is defined to be the heritability of P, or h2 (P). At one limitthe same environment for everyoneall phenotypic variation is due to genetic variation, and h2 is 1; at
the other limitthe same heredity for everyoneh2 is 0.
It is important to emphasize that even an h2 of 1 does not mean that
an individual must develop the same IQ no matter what, since the
reaction range of his genotype may still be quite wide, so that his IQ
depends on the environment he finds himself in. The situation, as in
Figure 2, is the following.
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Figure 2:
Heritability versus Fixity
If genotype g1 for IQ develops in environment e1 while genotype g2

develops in e2, the difference between their phenotypic expressions
is due mostly to their genetic difference, implying a large h2; were g2
also in e1, the gap would still be g. (So one can think of e = g as
the difference made by the environment.) Nonetheless, the reaction
ranges R1 and R2 for both genotypes are still wide, and g1 would yield
a lower phenotypic value in e2a phenomenon closely related to
gene/environment interaction.20 By contrast, to say that just one or
a few phenotypic expressions is possible for a genotype is to say that
the genotypes reaction range is extremely narrow. Eye color, for
instance, is predictable from genotype alone; it does not vary with the
environment. In such cases, behavioral geneticists speak of ontogenetic fixity, and what many people seem to have in mind when calling
a trait genetically determined is that it is ontogenetically fixed.21
HERITABILITY: WELL OR POORLY DEFINED?

Heritability is thus relative to given groups and ensembles of environments.22 The hard part is using data on heritability for one group
to compare groups that may live in markedly different environments
or to predict how a trait will be expressed for the given group in new
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environments. Stated abstractly, the problem23 is this. While a genotypes reaction range should ideally be defined over all possible environments, it can be known only over environments to which the genotype has actually been exposed. In particular, a genotypes response
to observed environments entails nothing about its response to unobserved ones. As one critic of BC has observed with regard to IQ in particular, no one know[s] how any human genotype may react to environments that involve new intellectual machinery (Block 1995, 124).
Genotypes for IQ (e.g., those characteristic of blacks and whites) that
diverge in some environments (e.g., the United States) may converge
or reverse24 in other, as yet unrealized ones, such as serious remedial
efforts might create. High heritability across known environments
does not close this possibility since heritability is determined by
genetic variance and not vice versa. Genotypic variance will decrease
in new equalizing environments, and should it decrease faster than
phenotypic variance, the mathematical result will simply be a drop in
heritability for IQ. Since, by hypothesis, the typical white and black
genotypes for IQ express themselves identically in these new environments, the proportion of between-race variance explained by
genetic difference (i.e., the between-race heritability) would also fall.
Stated more concretely, the problem is that since there are no
monozygotic twins, one of whom is wholly white and one wholly
black, heritability is usually estimated within raceswhites being
compared with other whites, blacks with other blacksin the same or
different environments. These estimates, however high, say nothing
about the role of genes in variations between members of different
races. To conclude that between-race variance is due to heritable
variation, blacks and whites would have to be raised in demonstrably
identical environments. Even then the inference would be incomplete, for while whites and blacks might react differently to the same
known environments, there might be an unknown environment in
which black IQ would equal or even exceed white IQ. This is why
many authors criticize BCs invocation of heritability, and one goes so
far as to advise that we should ignore heritability . . . and simply try
out improved environments.25
This criticism is misplaced. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) themselves do not claimin fact, they denythat within-race heritability
of IQ provides any basis for concluding that the IQ gap between races
is hereditary. It is always possible that the between-race mean difference is due entirely to environmental factors. On the other hand, the
sheer possibility that the BC hypothesis is false does not constitute
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any sort of evidence that it actually is false. By the same token, the
sheer possibility that environmental intervention might equalize
black and white IQ, the logical consistency of this supposition with
what we now know, does nothing whatever to establish that there are
presently unknown environments in which black and white IQs
would emerge the same.26
The question of substance, which we now address, is the evidence
for BCs conclusion that genes are implicated in the race difference.
BETWEEN-RACE COMPARISONS
This question has already been partly answered. As Herrnstein
and Murray (1994; see, e.g., p. 302) observe, no purely environmental
or cultural difference hypothesis yet envisioned explains the racial
patterning of differences in IQ scoresthe fact that blacks score
worse on items heavily laden with g while doing relatively better on
other items. Environmentalists need to explain why the black environment lengthens black reaction time and causes blacks to do worse
on the backwards digit span test, as well as why black performance on
culture-loaded tests (e.g., of vocabulary) exceed black performance
on more culture-neutral ones (e.g., of spatial visualization).27
The prospects for a purely environmental explanation of the racial
IQ gap have been further weakened by evidence appearing since BC28
that the gap is fully in place by age 3, when the dominant socializing
agent is still the mother. There is the further striking fact that black
infants are more advanced in motor and, apparently, mental development for the first 15 months of life.29 It is extremely difficult to imagine
environmental influences that would accelerate black development
ahead of white for a year or so after birth and then retard it.30
Of course, these data all involve comparisons of persons reared in
radically different environmentsthe basic problembut (as BC
points out, pp. 309-10) not all between-race studies do so. In the wellknown transracial adoption by Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg
(Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman 1992), the IQ of adopting white parents was found to correlate much more closely with that of their natural children than with that of their black adoptees. Indeed, by age 17,
the mean IQ of the cohort of black adoptees was more than 1 SD below
the mean IQ of the birth children of the adoptive family, 1 SD below
the mean IQ of white children adopted by these families, and .7 SD
below the white mean. These results have no obvious explanation on
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the black culture theory, and to explain them on the social environment hypothesis, we have to suppose that adopting white parents
make a point of treating their adopted black children in a radically
inferior wayan assumption that does not comport with the usual
motives for adoption. It is true that the cited transracial study does not
quite satisfy the assumptions of the classical model for independence
of variables, but they come as close as adoption policy allows, which
is close indeed. Rejecting it on grounds of imperfection is the scientific
equivalent of burying ones head in the sand.
In any event, advances in statistics since the appearance of
BCunnoticed, so far as we know, by all of its criticsdo permit
inferences from within-group to between-group heritabilities under
appropriate conditions (Rowe and Cleveland 1996). The basic technique is to compare the patterns of correlations between test performance and genetic relatedness within each group; if an environmental factor is depressing the performance of one group but not the
other, it should manifest itself somewhere in a difference between the
within-group patterns. Applied to black and white academic performance, this technique indicates that the causes of between-group differences resemble the causes of within-group differences (i.e., are significantly genetic).
SUPPORTING CONSIDERATIONS
Supporting the evidence just surveyed are several other less formal
considerations. One is the failure of Asians and Jews, who have also
frequently grown up in disadvantaged environments, to show evidence of diminished IQ as a result; in fact, their average IQ is slightly
higher than that of more privileged whites. Another of some relevance is the marked improvement over the past 30 years in the social
and economic environment of blacks. If that environment is not yet
equal to the white environment, it is surely less unequal than
beforeat least in the ways that social environmentalists, if not black
culture theorists, think matter to IQ. Blacks now get better nutrition
and better housing, go to the same public schools, see the same movies and television shows, shop in the same stores, and vote in the same
elections as whites. Yet the IQ gap remains constant, and (see n. 21)
genetic factors become more salient as environments converge. Head
Start and other early intervention programs are especially designed
to provide enriched environments, yet these have failed. Early
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reports that they had raised IQ for blacks have been followed by
notices that all gains are lost after a few years.31
It might be argued that since the environment of whites has also
improved, there is no reason to expect closure in the IQ gap, but this
reply will have to contend with a striking statistic mentioned by
Dinesh DSouza (1998): data from the College Board show that whites
and Asian Americans who come from families earning less than
$15,000 a year score higher on both the verbal and math sections of the
SAT than African Americans from families earning more than $60,000
a year.
The SAT is so highly g-loaded it might be considered a virtual IQ
test, so this datum would be predicted by BC. It is, however, not obviously consistent with either the social-environment hypothesis or the
black culture theory.32
The considerations of this and the preceding section are, of course,
not conclusive. As we acknowledged, the logical possibility always
remains of some unknown environment in which whites and blacks
would do equally well on IQ tests or in which blacks would have
higher average IQ than whites. However, given what we knowthat
white IQ exceeds black IQ in all environments so far examined (and
that the principal reason seems to be genetic differences in reaction to
these environments)to deny that we may expect this to hold in as
yet unspecified environments is not to offer an argument against BC;
it is to challenge induction. As Cleanthes reminds Philo in Humes
Dialogues, one cannot withhold assent to a hypothesis to which one
has nothing particular to object simply because it might be false.
To be sure, attempts to equalize environments do not exhaust all
the practical possibilities. We might, for instance, also try to achieve
equality by enriching the environment for blacks while degrading it for
whites.33 Think of a variation on Lewontins horticultural example
two strains of wheat, A and B, such that (1) A grows to 8 feet while B
grows to 7 when both are planted in Iowa, and (2) A grows to 7 feet
and B to 6 when both are planted in the Mojave. We cannot equalize
their growth in any one environment, but we can equalize it by planting A in the Mojave, B in Iowa. Likewise, we might try to equalize
black and white IQ by putting blacks in environments that raise their
IQ while putting whites in environments that reduce theirs.
The moral objections to this proposal should be obvious. It contradicts the demands for equal treatment of the races made from all
points on the political spectrum34 and would require totalitarian
intrusion into the lives of both whites and blacks. And, empirically, to
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repeat one of BCs main lessons, no one has any good idea how to
boost anyones IQ; the proposition that we can is wholly speculative.
There is, to take just one example, no evidentiary support for the
proposition that formal education raises IQ. Instead, the evidence
provided by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) suggest that IQ leads to
additional schooling, not the reverse. We do have some idea how to
depress IQ or prevent its emergence: cause brain damage or interfere
with cerebral development. If we started early enough to starve the
brains of white infants or administer blows to the head, we could
reduce their IQ as much as desired. But these actions, apart from their
moral repugnance, would be premised on the well-founded belief
that IQ is related to brain development, which is clearly and indisputably mediated by genes, a fact that returns us once again to BC.
THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE FLYNN EFFECT

There is an idea that all of this cumulative evidence is refuted
somehow by the Flynn effect, the apparent 15-point rise in average IQ
for whites from 1930 to the present (Flynn 1984, 1987). Since this
period of time is too short for a diachronic rise to have an obvious
genetic explanation, a natural presumption is that it is environmental.
This encourages the inference that the synchronic race difference is
also environmental, but this inference is too hasty, for several reasons.
First, the Flynn data are highly puzzling. The present generation
does not appear to be markedly more intelligent than its parents and
grandparents. As Flynn (1987, p. 182) observes, there do not appear to
be many more people these days who find school easy and can succeed in virtually any occupation, [whose] achievements are so clear
that they fill the pages of American Men of Science, [who] resemble
the famous geniuses. A possibility suggested by these facts is that IQ
tests, which appear to measure intelligence within generations, does
not measure it across generations. Deciding whether this is so will
require further study. The last word on Flynns data remains to be
spoken.
Second, even taken at face value, the Flynn effect fails to warrant an
environmentalist explanation of the racial gap in IQ and is in fact consistent with a genetic explanation of the continuing difference. The
geographic scope and uniform rate of the general rise in IQ suggest
that whatever environmental factor is producing it reaches almost
everyone, black and white alike. Yet the racial gap in IQ is as large as
404
ever before, leaving the Flynn effect irrelevant to whether this gap is
hereditary. At best it suggests that unknown improvements in the
environment can raise IQ, but that is not a proposition BC denies.
Social-environmentalists may reply that the constant IQ difference
is an effect of constant environmental inequalities; everybodys environment has improved, but average black IQ continues to be lower
because the environmental gap between blacks and whites has stayed
constant. Unfortunately, this reply does not specify the particular
improvements in the environment that both demonstrably alter IQ
and are enjoyed differentially by whitesso it too is an argument
from ignorance or an appeal to sheer possibility. A lockstep increase
in black and white IQ over time shows at most that blacks and whites
respond identically to the Flynn factor, whatever it may turn out be.
That IQ may be altered by environment does not imply that IQ differences can be (recall Figure 1). Unless we conflate the malleability of a
trait with the malleability of a trait difference, improvements in the
Flynn factor for blacks are irrelevant to eradicating the gap in IQ
between blacks and whites.
GENE/ENVIRONMENT CORRELATION
There is a further difficulty with the heritability concept that seemingly undermines the significance of even a high between-group heritability for IQ.
Genes do not distribute randomly through environments. A gene
disposing its carrier to exercise, for instance, may also dispose its carrier to seek opportunities for exercise, perhaps by moving to a warm
climate or building a tennis court, so it will occur more frequently
where there are opportunities for exercise. Genes thus help create
environments, blurring the line between genetic and environmental
effects.
A gene may also influence its environment less directly by eliciting
reactions from others via its phenotypic expression. The standard
example is a curiosity gene that makes a child ask questions,
prompting his parents to buy him books, thereby making him more
curious. Such feedback can just as well be negative, however. Were a
society to starve its blond children while giving ample food and athletic training to its brunettes, the brunettes would grow far larger and
sturdier. Yet, since hair color is highly heritable, betweenhair color
physique variation would be highly heritable as well. More to the
405
present point, perhaps genetically controlled dark skin triggers white

(mis)treatment, which inhibits mental development, creating a spuriously high between-race heritability for IQ.35 In this way, one can
explain the failure of Head Start (white supervisors discourage black
children) and transracial adoption (black adoptees are treated differently by their adoptive parents and the wider society despite rearing
in nominally the same environments as their adoptive siblings).
These possibilities show that a high between-race heritability for IQ
does not necessarily indicate that the race difference in IQ is genetic
in any reasonable senseany sense that absolves whites from blame
for the black shortfall or shows that environmental intervention is
doomed.
The point underlying this objection is that heritability, both individual and between-group, is a correlational statistic. It tells us in
effect that certain genes are associated with certain phenotypes but
not why the association holds, hence implying nothing about the
direction of the causal arrow. Nonetheless, here, as previously, competing causal interpretations of the correlational data give rise to differential predictions, which can be and have been tested.
To begin, the supposition that mistreatment is what reduces the IQ
of black children predicts that the racial gap in IQ will be fairly constant over a wide range of mental functions. One would not expect
random acts of bigotry, for instance, to do more damage to the mental
module controlling verbal fluency than to that controlling numerical reasoning. In particular, if various IQ subtests exhibit differential
heritabilities among whites, one would expect the white-black difference on these tests to be constant, for there is no obvious mechanism
by which bigoted responses can discriminate brain functions on the
basis of heritability. And in fact (although this is not mentioned in
BC), it has been found that black-white score differences on IQ subtests correlate positively with score heritability within races: the more
heritable an IQ subtest is among whites and among blacks, the wider
the black-white difference, whether within-group subtest heritability
is determined by standard sibling comparisons or by response to
inbreeding depression (Rushton 1989). For our blond-brunette analogy to be sustained, it would have to be supposed that whites somehow calibrate their negative responses to black performance phenotypes by performance heritability, with white discouragement of
black performances becoming more effective as the performances
become less susceptible to environmental influence. The improbability of such preestablished disharmony leaves it reasonable to suppose
406
that the black-white IQ difference is functionally related to the genes

that distinguish the two groups.
Second, to use terminology favored by Reichenbach (1938) and
more recently Salmon (1984), we can try to screen off a correlation
between variables B and C by observing the relation between them in
the absence of a purported underlying cause A; if the correlation is
spurious, it will then vanish. Thus, if low black IQ is an effect of negative white reactions to genetically black pigmentation, mean black IQs
should approximate whites in mostly or entirely black societies, such
as those of Africa. As BC points out, however (pp. 288-89), the mean
IQ of blacks is reported to be if anything lower than that of American
blacks. Critics (e.g., Kamin 1995) have dismissed these data, but more
have come to light since BCs appearance. Zindi (1994), a black Zimbabwean, administered the Revised Wechsler for Children and the
Ravens Progressive Matrices to 202 Zimbabwean secondary school
children and 204 white London children matched for age and, as far as
possible, background. The two groups differed overall by about 2 SD,
roughly the gap reported in BC. Also, 15-year-old Ethiopian Falashas
in Israel have been found to score 2 SD below Israelis of the same age
(Kaniel and Fisherman 1991). The correlation between race and IQ
survives removal of its hypothesized underlying cause.
Finally, recent research (again not mentioned in BC) has begun to
clarify the mechanisms that produce intelligence. IQ has been found
to correlate inversely with the rate of cortical glucose metabolism
(Haier et al. 1988). A critic might of course reply that any betweenrace differences in this factor would merely show that racism reduces
the brains metabolic efficiency. However, several studies36 have
found within-race correlations in the .4 range between brain size and
IQ; since adult brain size is predictable from brain size in infancy and
set by the closing of the cranial sutures early in life, it is hard to see
how social practices might affect it. Head size, an approximator of
brain size, correlates significantly with IQ both within and between
races (Jensen and Johnson 1994), implicating brain size in individual
differences across races. Furthermore, it is now widely conceded that,
on average, Caucasoid crania are larger than Negroid crania (Beals,
Smith, and Dodd 1984).37 Finally, specific chromosomal sites associated with high intelligence have recently been announced (Plomin et al.
1995), although the proportion of variance in overall IQ they explain
remains small.
Methodologically speaking, while the environmental effects of
genes should be discounted when gene/environment correlation
407
leads to an overestimate of the role of genes in phenotypic differences

(as in the blond-brunette case), such discounting can also lead to what
is, intuitively, an underestimate. Applying this caution to the racial
case, many of the environmental factors said to retard black intellectual development may themselves be further effects of black genotypes. If, for instance, black babies are handicapped by inadequate
nutrition, one might argue that the failure of black parents to provide
appropriate food is itself an effect of lower mean black IQ, in turn
under genetic control. Similarly, the unsalubriousness of many
ghetto neighborhoods may better be viewed as a consequence of the
genetically controlled behavior of their inhabitants than as an exogenous imposition.
To put the issue in quantitative terms, suppose the correlation for
health (by some measure) for identical twins raised apart was found
to be .4. Conventional behavioral genetics would assign health a heritability of .4. But suppose that the co-twins in the sample tended to eat
similar diets and that the concordance of health of the co-twins fell to
.3 when diet was controlled for. This might lead us to reduce the estimated heritability of health to .3 and chalk up 10% of the total variance to the environmental factor of diet. But then suppose we were to
determine by some independent means that the heritability of diet is
.35. Disregarding gene/environment correlation would require us to
ignore the 35% of the 10% of variance in health explained by diet that,
in turn, is explained by genetic variance. In such a case, it would certainly be plausible to add a .35 .1 correlation term to the adjusted
estimate, for a final value of .335.
Cause is to some extent context sensitive, and on occasion the
pronouncement that genes as opposed to environment (or vice versa)
are the cause of something does represent a verbal decision rather
than an empirical claim. Our general point is that, nonetheless, ascriptions of causality in behavioral genetics are not hopelessly relative to
interest, purpose, or ideological bent. In particular, a causal interpretation of the between-race heritability of IQ is well motivated.
BLACK CULTURE AND HEREDITY

The discussion of the last section should make clear why we have
said relatively little about the differences between black and white
culture: the culture in which one develops is an aspect of his environment, so the cultural explanation of individual and group differences
408
inevitably reduces to the nurturist or BC hypothesis or some combination thereof. Let us see how.
It is safe to say at the outset that culture is itself a function of intelligence. This is clear enough when we are talking about individuals.
Smart people behave more intelligently; that, in fact, is how we know
they are smarter. But if this is true of individuals, why not also of
groups? One would not expect a social group to continue to behave
less intelligently than the mean level of intelligence of its members
predicts, leaving us with the problem of explaining the cultural disparities, mentioned earlier, that were supposed to explain black
behavior. At this point, it is of course natural to reply that even though
blacks are not less intelligent, their behavior has been made to look so
by slavery and Jim Crow in the United States and colonialism in
Africa. Oppression created environments in which intelligence does
not thrive because it cannot; the soil and climate wont let it. But to say
this is to hand over the job of explaining mean black/white differences to the social environment hypothesis. Simply saying that individual blacks behave less intelligently on average because other
blacks and some whites encourage them to do sowhile Jews and
Asians, who value intelligence, make a point of encouraging its developmentdoes not tell us why some groups value intelligence more
than others. How, if blacks are as inherently intelligent as Asians, did
they acquire counterintelligent habits? To answer, Because they
were punished for acting smart under slavery is to give up the black
culture hypothesis and return to the social environment one.38
As we have seen, of course, this hypothesis is riddled with difficulties. In the present context we may ask why, if African cultures had
not already been inferior in technology or energy or resourcefulness
to the cultures of their European conquerors, they were so easily
dominated. Why would blacks have so quickly internalized a negative self-image? Why has this self-image persisted despite massive
private and governmental efforts to enforce equality? An alternative
hypothesis, which we think has been shown to be highly plausible, is
to construe black culture as an environmental correlate of the genetic
potential that created it. Since this genetic potential has expressed
itself as lower (than white) individual phenotypic intelligence in
every environment of which we have any experience, it is natural that
the cultures created by the interaction of these individual phenotypes
should be less advanced scientifically and technologically. But again
the main point is that the job of explaining cultural variation has been
409
taken over entirely by the hereditarian hypothesis, and culture has

ceased to be a prime mover or even an independent variable.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Diagnosis of causes is related to questions about what it would
take to change effects, so it is unavoidably linked to issues of public
policy. We conclude with a few reflections.
We have seen in some detail that the high heritability of IQ, even
when distinguished from ontogenetic fixity, provides good reason to
doubt that environmental intervention is likely to end the racial disparity in IQ. We willingly grant that this conclusion has not been
established with certainty but ask in return where the burden of proof
now lies. Given the evidence cited, it would seem to lie with nurturists
who think that the entire gap can be eradicated by equalizing environments. It is they who must tell us clearly what would be involved
and why they think it would work.
It might be replied that despite the evidence, continued efforts at
intervention can be justified as a kind of Pascals wager: if the race gap
is incompressible for genetic reasons, these efforts will of course fail,
but if any of the difference is due to remediable environmental factors, experimenting gives us a chance to find them. One obvious flaw
in this reasoning is that the envisioned experiments (unlike a Pascalian
embrace of theism) carry costs. Remedial programs such as Head Start
have consumed hundreds of billions of dollars in resources that could
have gone elsewhere. From a purely utilitarian point of view, expected
returns on such investments must be taken into account. A related
flaw is that, as mentioned earlier, the rationale for closing the race gap
becomes unclear if the BC hypothesis is in fact correct. Individual and
group inequalities offend our sense of rightness primarilysome
would say onlywhen they are believed to have been wrongfully
caused. Given BC, the IQ gap is an outcome of the amoral action of
genes and, ultimately, natural selection, hence in no obvious way
improper. Indeed, diverting resources to counteract it threatens to
wrong those to whom the resources would otherwise have gone.39
The question, as so often in science, is the following: what is the
most reasonable hypothesis? We cannot safely assume that none of
the race difference in biophysical traits, such as hair color or susceptibility to high blood pressure, is hereditary. The relevant evidence in
410
BC and subsequent publications make that assumption about intelligence equally hazardous.
NOTES
1. For the data that support this claim, see Herrnstein and Murray (1994, 276ff).
2. We speak, of course, of a difference in mean IQ between populations. There is no
intention in this use of ellipsis to suggest that all blacks have lower IQs than all whites.
The distribution of black IQ, like that of white, takes the shape of the eponymous bell
curve. Still, the displacement of means is such that most whites have higher IQs than
most blacks.
3. Its most notable and abused proponent has been Arthur Jensen.
4. Our classification follows DSouza (1998).
5. An instance cited by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) is Lewontin, Rose, and
Kamin (1984).
6. Programs such as Head Start have encouraged the belief that we do have this
ability, but although such programs raise IQ very slightly at the outset, the gains soon
vanish (see below). There is a way to boost IQ in groupsnamely, selective breeding.
But this prospect is not only politically unacceptable, to say the least, but nurturists
who deny that heredity has anything to do with IQcannot consistently endorse it.
7. Goldberger and Manski (1995, 769).
8. As Herrnstein and Murray (1994) note, the variety of intelligences distinguished by Howard Gardner might better be called talents.
9. It is also noteworthy in this connection that judgments of comparative intelligence by teachers, employers, and others correspond closely to comparative scores on
standard IQ tests.
10. For confirmation, see Neisser et al. (1996).
11. There is some evidence that these tests overpredict success for blacks.
12. That is, with genetic differences then cited as a factor in trait variance.
13. The reader might also consult Sesardic (1993).
14. Environmental variance can indeed be defined as the total variation in a trait less
its heritability.
15. Devlin, Daniels, and Roeder (1997) argue from a meta-analysis of 212 studies
that 20% of the covariance between monozygotic siblings reared apart, usually attributed in toto to genetic similarity, is due to the identity of the maternal environment.
They conclude that the heritability of IQ is .48, unifying direct and indirect estimates.
They also urge that its narrow heritabilitywhich discounts epistatic interactions
unique to each genotypeis .34. The latter figure bears more closely on intergenerational similarity and BCs speculation about the emergence of intellectual castes, which
we do not consider here.
16. The variance of a trait is (SD)2. So a factor explaining n% of its variance explains
n% of individuals differences in that trait.
17. We trust that the canard, propagated by Kamin (1974) and Gould (1981, 1995)
that Cyril Burt established the nonzero heritability of IQ by faking data, has by now
been discredited. The correlations given by Burt for monozygotic twins reared apart
differ only trivially from those discovered in independent twin studies. For a thorough
airing of the dispute, see Mackintosh (1996).
411
18. The example is due to Lewontin (1976). Bouchard (1995) questions the accuracy
of Lewontins botany.
19. Block (1995, 123) attributes to BC the idea that genes determine the size of the
mental bucket and then the environment fills the bucket to one level or another,
whereas what genes truly determine is the reaction range, as every population
geneticist knows. Apart from this gratuitous implicature of ignorance, Block presents
no evidence that Herrnstein and Murray (1994) adopt the bucket idea or that BCs argument depends on it.
20. The tendency of different genotypes to react differently to the same environment, hence for the expressed difference between pairs of genotypes to vary as environment does. Figure 2 also illustrates interaction.
21. Ontogenetic fixity seems to be what Block (1995) has in mind when he says the
key to part of the fallacy of The Bell Curve is the distinction between heritability and
what he calls genetic determination. Block nowhere documents the charge that
Herrnstein and Murray (1994) confuse the two or that they ever talk of genetic determination. Rather, he says, without supporting evidence, People who read The Bell
Curve often suppose that a heritable characteristic is one that is passed down in the
genes (p. 104). It surely sets up a straw man to criticize writers for a confusion their
incautious readers might make. Having turned BCs claim about the heritability of IQ
into one about genetic determination, Block makes a great show of contrasting the
two notionsfor instance, that genetic determination (p. 104), unlike heritability,
depends on the idea of a normal environment (p. 104). (Actually, as noted, a trait is
ontogenetically fixed when it emerges in all environments. Also, behavioral scientists
tend to speak of an environment as normal for an organism when it resembles one in
which the organisms ancestors evolved [see, e.g., Daly and Wilson 1988], rather than,
as Block suggests, when it is one that allows [the organism] to thrive [p. 105].) What
he does not do is demonstrate that the BC argument itself depends on conflating the
two notions. As we will see, the argument needs nothing stronger than heritability. The
evidence Block offers for this conflation is that Murray made it in a TV interview with
Michael Kinsley. Murray freely confessed to one of the present authors that he did
indeed muddle the distinction on the air but immediately tried to clear it up.
22. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) are perfectly aware of this relativity. They write,
If, one hundred years ago, the variations in exposure to education were greater than
they are now (as is no doubt the case) and if education is one source of variation in IQ,
then, other things [being] equal, the heritability of IQ was lower then than it is now. As a
general rule, as environments become more uniform, heritability rises (p. 106).
23. Versions of it may be found in Block (1995), Jencks (1991, 94, 109), Layzer (1976),
Lewontin (1976), Block and Dworkin (1976), Hirsch (1970, esp. 93-94), Hirsch and
McGuire (1977, 68-80), and Feldman and Lewontin (1975). Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza
(1970) also link the interaction phenomenon to nurturism.
24. See Figures 4 and 5 in Block (1995). Layzer (1976), Hirsch and McGuire (1977),
and Block and Dworkin (1976) display similar hypothetical graphs.
25. Block (1995, 124-25). He not only repudiates formulating the genetic issue in
terms of heritability but also chastises Gould and other critics of BC for appearing to
accept the concept.
26. Block (1995, 115-17) notes that as both genes and environment contribute to any
given phenotypic outcome, there is no reason to denominate genes the cause. All that
follows, though, is that given an intervention to change environments so that black and
white IQs converge, it would be arbitrary to attribute race differences (or similarities) to
412
genes. However, this point has no bearing on the cause of race differences if there is
no such environment. Once again, a bare logical possibility has no bearing on what
causes are actually at work.
27. The ad hoc character of recent cultural approaches to achievement discrepancy is typified by a study by Harber (1998a, 1998b). When he asked two groups of students to evaluate identical essaysthe first group being told that the essays were by
fellow white students, the second group being told they were by fellow black studentsthe essays thought to be by blacks were graded more leniently. Harber (1988b,
9) interpreted this bias as harming blacks because it deprive[s] minorities of conditions [academic challenges] in which they are most likely to excel.
28. Peoples, Fagan, and Drotar (1995); Brooks-Gunn, Klebanov, and Duncan (1996).
29. See Lynn (1998) and references therein.
30. A hereditarian explanation would be that blacks have an overall faster life cycle
than whites. Corroborative evidence is the 5-year advantage in longevity enjoyed by
whites over blacks in the United States, which has persisted despite black access to
modern medical technology.
31. See Spitz (1986, 90, 103ff).
32. Diamond (1997) attempts to explain the attainments of all human groups wholly
in terms of geography and ecology (e.g., farming developed in southwest Asia but not
sub-Saharan Africa because of the presence in the former but not the latter of numerous
species of heavy-seeded grasses). However, Diamond neglects the selectional effects of
farming itself. He also assumes from the outset that primitive peoples are if anything
more intelligent than modern Westerners, leaving it unclear how his analysis can
accommodate the 2 SD difference between white and native African IQs reported
below.
33. Goldberger and Manski (1995, 764) hint at such a policy. After observing that
[BCs] thought experiment called for equalizing environments, they antiseptically
invite us to suppose instead that we make U [environment] perfectly negatively correlated with Z [genotype] by introducing an extreme compensatory policy.
34. Even compensatory preferences for blacks are justified as restoring to them what
they would have had their ancestors been treated fairly, so rest on a norm of equal treatment. We note, however, that Ronald Dworkin (1998) construes the maxim of equality
as a demand that people receive equal consideration, which can in practice mean quite
disparate treatmentfor instance, he says, preference for blacks over whites. So
Dworkin might regard the scheme described as constituting equal treatment.
35. See Block (1995), Jencks (1991, 99, 107), and, more informally, Hacker (1992, 27).
36. Willerman, Schultz, and Rutledge (1991); Andreasen et al. (1993); Raz et al.
(1993); Wickett, Vernon, and Lee (1994).
37. In a widely cited article, Gould (1978) accused the American craniotomist Samuel Morton of underestimating the size of Negroid crania from an unconscious desire
to prove white superiority. Michael (1988) has vindicated Mortons measurements,
showing that such errors as he made understate Caucasoid/non-Caucasoid differences. In his later work, Gould ([1981] 1997, 66) admitted that he had unconsciously
underestimated the size of the Caucasoid crania in his reanalysis of Mortons samples
out of a desire to minimize Caucasian skull size.
38. One might note as an aside that enslavement does not necessarily reduce IQ.
Jewish slaves often became teachers and scribes in Greek and Roman households.
39. The greater productivity and law-abidingness of more intelligent people are reasons to invest in raising everyones intelligence, assuming that were possible. The issue
413
here, however, is the rationale for closing the race gap, which entails raising the intelligence of just one group.
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Wilson, E. O. 1998. Consilience. New York: Knopf.
Zindi, F. 1994. Differences in psychometric performance. The Psychologist 7:549-52.
Max Hocutt (Ph.D. Yale), a former editor of Behavior and Philosophy and a specialist
in philosophical psychology, has published articles on a variety of topics in Psychological Review, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophia, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, American Philosophical Quarterly,
Review of Metaphysics, and other journals.
Michael Levin (Ph.D. Columbia) is the author of Why Race Matters (1997) and the
forthcoming Sexual Orientation and Human Rights (with Laurence Thomas). Among
recent publications is Putnam on Reference and Constructible Sets in the British Journal for The Philosophy of Science (1997).
PHILOSOPHY
Keita
/ THE BELL
OF CURVE
THE SOCIAL
AND SCIENCES
HEREDITY/ September 2001
Discussions
The Bell Curve and Heredity

A Reply to Hocutt and Levin
L. D. KEITA
Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone
In The Bell Curve Case for Heredity, Hocutt and Levin (1999, 389415) argued that the average black-white interracial difference of fifteen points registered on IQ tests is to be attributed maximally to
genetic inheritance. Hocutt and Levin began their discussion by noting three hypotheses concerning the 15-point differential: (1) the 15point gap is to be accounted for by social-environmental differentials
given the well-known differences in the sociology and history of
blacks in the United States; (2) the 15-point gap derives from cultural
practices specific to the sociological conditions blacks were constrained to adopt in environments configured for them by the majority, racial caste-conscious society; and (3) the 15-point gap is due primarily to genetic factors and is impervious to piecemeal egalitarian
gestures designed to narrow this gap. This is the position taken by the
Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) and fully supported by
Hocutt and Levin in their article.
The key point made by Hocutt and Levin was that IQ tests measure
intelligence (no matter what causal factors are involved) and that
such scores are causally correlated on the average with the so-called
races. Hocutt and Levin also argued that attempts to improve scores
by way of governmental programs such as Head Start have not been
successful. The reason for this, they claimed, is that since IQ scores are
reflective of innate intelligence, attempts to change them would be
unsuccessful.
In this rejoinder to Hocutt and Levin, I want to argue that there
exists ample empirical evidence to refute the claim that so-called
2001 Sage Publications
386
Keita / THE BELL CURVE AND HEREDITY
387
racial phenotype is necessarily a predictor of IQ and that the explanations usually advanced to support such a claim cannot withstand
epistemological scrutiny. I argue also that IQ scores, unlike ontic traits
such as eye color, are a function of tests subjectively designed within
specific cultural contexts (hence the evident meaningfulness and
validity of the Flynn effect).
IQ SCORES ARE NOT RACE SPECIFIC

Hocutt and Levin sought to support the Bell Curve hypothesis that
the black-white IQ difference may be partly if not totally due to heredity. This would mean, on Hocutt and Levins reckoning, that race as
determined by phenotype correlates with IQ. But I want to argue
contra Hocutt and Levin that racially designated phenotype does not
correlate with IQ. For example, the average IQ of Spaniards in Spain
has been calculated at 87; that of Greece, 89; Yugoslavia, 89; Iran, low
80s; Iraq (Baghdad), 80 (Lynn, 1978). Lynn also writes,
In India, there is considerable literature on intelligence testing. Fifty
years ago, the Stanford Binet was given to a sample of 25 postgraduate
students at the University of Calcutta. The mean IQ was found to be 95
(Maity, 1926). A more recent investigation, using a small sample of 25
postgraduate students at the University of Calcutta, who took Ravens
Test, produced an incredibly low mean IQ of 75 (Sinha, 1968) . . . .
Sinhas review provides data for 17 groups of children aged between 9
and 15 years drawn from a variety of Indian states and numbering in
excess of 5000 cases. All the mean IQs lay in the range from 81 to 94, the
overall mean being about 86. (1978, 269)
Obviously, Hocutt and Levins claim that Asians and Jews who
have also frequently grown up in disadvantaged environments
(p. 401) have IQ scores higher than those of more privileged whites is
false. The population of India constitutes approximately 40% of the
population of Asia. And the average IQ of Chinese from mainland
China (where another 42% of Asians live but where IQ testing is rare,
possibly because it is regarded an instrument of class oppression) is
no more than that of persons of European ancestry (Flynn 1991, 4).
In the case of Jews, there are reported IQ differentials of such magnitude between subgroups that Hocutt and Levins claim concerning
Jews cannot be supported. Jean-Pierre Hbert (1977) reported on an
IQ differential of seventeen points between Jewish youth of Ashke-
388
nazi and Sephardic ancestry living in the same social environment in

New York City. The only phenotypical difference between both
groups was that the Ashkenazi environment did not stress the acquisition of material goods while the Sephardic households emphasized
wealth acquisition. According to Hbert, The Ashkenazi mothers
state that the wealth of their children was not their main concern; the
Sephardic mothers hoped that their children live in conditions of
great wealth (p. 156). Hbert reported that the average IQ score of
Jews is 103 (p. 162).
HOCUTT AND LEVIN AND THE

HERITABILITY OF INTELLIGENCE
The black box question concerning the issue of IQ is what portion of the variability of IQ scores between individuals and groups
could be attributed to genetic differences. Hereditarians want to
argue that the estimate ventured in BC of .6 implies that, on average,
77% of the difference in IQ scores between pairs of whites in the
United States can be attributed to difference in genes (Hocutt and
Levin, p. 397). The influence of genetics on IQ scores is generally
assumed to range from the highest heritability for monozygotic twins
to the lowest for unrelated individuals of the same racial group.
On account of the assumed genetic equality between monozygotic
twins, theorists concerned to determine the influence of the environment on behavioral phenotypes have sought to compare the IQ scores
of monozygotic twins reared apart. Jensen (1970) and Bouchard,
Lykken, et al. (1990) offered such comparisons. The approximate
heritability factor (h2) for all these tests was put at .75, but there are sufficient exceptions to warrant caution. Newman, Freeman, and
Holzinger (1937) pointed out in their study of monozygotic twins
reared apart that socially divergent environments could yield h2 factors of less than .45.
But again, even heritability factors as high as .75 cannot be shown
to exhaust the environmental range. After all, most of the
monozygotic twin studies were conducted in societies where cultural, sociological, and economic differentials between individuals
are reduced on account of concerns for general social welfare. These
tests were conducted in Denmark, Britain, and the United States
(where the cultural, economic, and sociological differentials between
389
individuals of European ancestry are less than those concerning other

groups). The deliberate choice of home for monozygotic twins reared
apart is also a factor to be considered.
What is most important, though, is that in the Jensen study (I exclude the suspect Burt study), 10% of the twins had IQ divergences of
at least 15 points. The Bouchard et al. study (1990) demonstrated that
there was a reported IQ divergence of 29 points for one pair of the
monozygotic twins. These divergences do cast doubt on the hereditarian thesis that the 15-point black-white difference must contain a
genetic component.
HOCUTT AND LEVIN ON

GENE/ENVIRONMENT CORRELATION
Hocutt and Levin sought to justify their claims about the heritability of intelligence by arguing that the IQ scores of Zimbabwean
children and 15-year-old Ethiopian Falashas are reportedly two standard deviations below their peers in England and Israel. There is a
problem with the results here, given that it is not known how culturally compatible such tests were. Yet Lynns study (1978) stated that IQ
tests on some Africans reported scores ranging from 75 to 88. The calculated average of these scores is 84, which is higher than that of
Native Americans, reported at 70 (Garth 1921) and 67 (Hunter and
Sommermier 1922). Lynn (1978) also claimed that IQ tests on Eskimos
were reported as 70 to 80 in one set of tests. And Kamin (1995) stated
that the average IQ score of Soweto South Africans was higher than
that of the white mean for comparable subjects.
What is evident from the above is that the IQ scores from industrialized nations are higher than those of nonindustrialized nations,
which are not limited to those of Africa. Asian Indians (86), Eskimos,
Native Americans, Mexicans (IQ 83.4, see Hbert 1977), Iranians (83),
Greeks (89), and so on score approximately one standard deviation
below the norm of industrialized nations. This explanation is borne
out by the fact that the reported IQ scores of black army recruits
(World War I) from four northern American states were higher than
those of white recruits from eleven southern states (Shuey 1966, 32425). These facts would seem to presage aspects of the Flynn effect
given that the northern states of the United States were more industrialized than those of the South during World War I.
390
HOCUTT AND LEVIN ON CULTURE AND HEREDITY

Hocutt and Levin argued that since in the case of individuals culture is itself a function of intelligence, it should follow that the same
principle could hold for groups of individuals. In the case of African
Americans, a reasonable counterargument has been that the oppressive conditions under which they were forced to survive led to their
being not as equally exposed to the kinds of environmental conditions
that prepare individuals for the more advanced levels of education.
To support their hypothesis, Hocutt and Levin made the claim that
persons of African descent in Africa are naturally disposed to
counterintelligent habits. The authors attempt to substantiate this
questionable assumption with the following:
In the present context we may ask why, if African cultures had not
already been inferior in technology or energy or resourcefulness to the
cultures of their European conquerors, they were so easily dominated.
(P. 408)
This argument is specious. First of all, one could make a similar argument in the case of the Native Americans, the Inuit (Eskimos), the
Australian Aborigines, and the Maori of New Zealand, who were
completely overwhelmed and dispossessed by their European conquerors. Second, would Hocutt and Levin argue that the Roman conquest of the Vandals, Celts, Saxons, and Visigoths of Europe, and the
subsequent imposition of Roman customs, technology, and language
on the conquered constitute proof that the Romans were more intelligent than the people they conquered? Would Hocutt and Levin also
accept the spurious argument that the Nazi decimation of the Jewish
people of Germany and Polandwho allowed themselves to be
herded into concentration campsconstitute evidence of the intellectual inferiority of the Jewish people?
Hocutt and Levin made the related argument (which they claimed,
without any proof, to be highly plausible) that one can construe
black culture as an environmental correlate of the genetic potential that
created it [and that] since this genetic potential has expressed itself as
lower (than white) individual phenotypic intelligence in every environment of which we have any experience, it is natural that the cultures
created by the interaction of these individual phenotypes should be less
advanced scientifically and technologically. (P. 408)
391
This hypothesis is false. The technological environments of parts of

Africa were much more advanced than any environment in Europe
for at least three thousand years in some cases. The technological environments of ancient Egypt and Nubia were much in advance of those
in Europe for millennia. Hocutt and Levin might note the fact that Greek
writers such as Herodotus (History, Book 2, 115) and Aristotle (Problems [XIV], 909a, and Physiognomica [VI], 812a) depicted the ancient
Egyptians and Nubians as being black skinned and woolly haired
obvious markers of the African phenotype. The technological environments of medieval Africa (Ghana, Mali, and Songhay) were also at
least as technologically advanced as parts of Europe in the tenth century A.D. and similarly for other parts of the African continent (the
environments of Nok, Benin and Zimbabwe, are obvious examples).
IS THE HOCUTT-LEVIN HYPOTHESIS SCIENTIFIC?

Hocutt and Levin accepted the very questionable Jensen and Johnson hypothesis that cranial capacity correlates significantly with IQ
both within and between races (as cited in Hocutt and Levin, 406). To
accept this hypothesis would be tantamount to accepting the very
questionable hypothesis that male humans are more intelligent than
female humans because male crania are on the average larger than
female crania. By the same logic, elephants and whales should be
more intelligent than humans. This is not the case. The authors also
support the claim that caucasoid crania are larger than Negroid crania (p. 406). This claim cannot amount to much, given the diversity of
body types and head shapes found in Africas diverse populations.
And C. A. Diop, for example, wrote that the largest skulls discovered
to this day are those of these Negroids of Southern Africa. (1981, 31).
Again, the crania of Neanderthal man were larger than those of Homo
sapiens Africanus who migrated into Europe from Africa. Yet, Homo
sapiens is assumed to be more cognitively able than the bigger-brained
Neanderthals.
HOW TO REFUTE THE HOCUTT-LEVIN HYPOTHESIS

BY A CRUCIAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Although not stated in Hocutt and Levins essay, the explanatory
hypothesis offered by those who support the hereditarian hypothesis
392
is what might be called the environmental challenge hypothesis

(Jensen 1998; Lynn 1991). The claim is made that the arctic and temperate zone environments in which Europeans and East Asians
evolved were more cognitively challenging than the tropical and subtropical areas where Africans evolved. The ice-age conditions of Eurasia not only produced the lightly pigmented skin color of Europeans
and East Asians and the epicanthic eye fold of East Asians, as the
argument goes, but also more developed cognitive abilities. The
explanation is that the cold climate of the last glacial age and the
changing seasons of the Eurasian landmass made survival more difficult and therefore more challenging. According to this theory, the
forces of natural selection operating in these more challenging environments produced human types that were more cognitively able
than those of the tropical regions of the world.
This theory is purely speculative and can be refuted with a crucial
thought experiment. Neanderthals lived much longer (they lived
and adapted to the environmental conditions of Eurasia for at least
300,000 years) under severe glacial conditions than did Homo sapiens
Africanus migrating from Africa, yet were not cognitively more able
than the latter. In fact, the ice-age-adapted Neanderthal eventually
became extinct while Homo sapiens survived. Furthermore, according
to this hypothesis, the Inuit (Eskimos), having survived the longest of
all human groups in the coldest environments known, ought to have
the highest IQs. This is not the case. In fact, their reported IQs approximate those of Africans, Asian Indians, and others.
Finally, Hocutt and Levin would have to admit that the most technologically advanced areas of the globe five thousand years ago were
found in tropical and subtropical areas. It is also evident from the
archeological evidence that the originators of the civilizations of
ancient Egypt, Nubia, Mesopotamia, and Harappan were indigenous
to the tropical and subtropical areas where those technological cultures developed.
SCIENCE AND THE HOCUTT-LEVIN HYPOTHESIS

Those who reject the thesis that interracial IQ differences are
genetic explain this difference by appeal to environmental considerations. Yet the only explanation offered by Hocutt and Levin is one
based on a logical fallacy: the fact that blacks and whites may differ on
certain ontogenetic traits such as hair color, pigmentation, and so on
393
does not imply that there are no traits (cognitive abilities being one of
them) on which both groups do not differ.
One might consider in this regard the fact that the genic differences
between blacks and whites is no more than .005 (genic intraracial difference is .0857 while genic interracial difference is .0852) (Nei and
Roychoudhury 1982). The same authors wrote concerning the genetic
differences between European, African, and Japanese populations:
The gene differences between ethnic groups are of the same order of
magnitude as those between local populations of the house mouse
and Drosophila pseudoobscura (Nei and Roychoudhury 1972, 434-36).
Matters are compounded by the fact that the genetic divergences
between the diverse peoples of Africa are at least as great as the
genetic divergences between these groups and individual groups
from other continents.
Given the diverse ways in which the Hocutt-Levin hypothesis
could be falsified, the most reasonable hypothesis is that human
populations are equal in cognitive abilities everywhere in the world,
given that the hereditarians have not been able to explain plausibly
why there should be such natural differences for large population
groups from any geographical environment. I have pointed out above
that the hereditarian hypothesis founded on the principle of climate
challenge is refutable, given the example of the Neanderthals of the
Eurasian landmass. The nurturists, on the other hand, do offer confirmable explanations.
To determine the plausibility of their hypothesis decisively, Hocutt
and Levin might argue instead for social transformations that would
leaven environmental differences. This has already been attempted in
the Scandinavian countrieswell-educated populations with enviable social tranquilitywith admirable results. The investments in
human capital in this instance have been very cost-beneficial, contrary to what Hocutt and Levin might assume. We are well aware that
approximately 50% of Scandinavias populations would score less
than 100 on IQ tests. Yet, no one argues that expenditures on the education and domestic well-being of the members of this sector of the
population uses up resources that could have been spent elsewhere
(Hocutt and Levin, p. 409).
The challenge to Hocutt and Levin is that if they wish truly to prove
their hypothesis, they should begin to argue vigorously for social
engineering policies that would reduce social environmental differences to a minimum.
394
REFERENCES
Bouchard, T. J., D. T. Lykken, M. McGue, N. L. Segal, and A. Tellegen. 1990. Sources of
human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science 250:223-28.
Diop, C. A. 1981. Civilization or barbarism. New York: Lawrence Hill.
Flynn, J. 1991. Asian Americans: Achievement beyond IQ. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Garth, T. 1921. The results of some tests on full and mixed blood Indians. Journal of
Applied Psychology 5:359-72.
Hbert, J -P. 1977. Race et intelligence. Paris: Copernic.
Herrnstein, R., and C. Murray. 1994. The bell curve. New York: Free Press.
Hocutt, M., and M. Levin. 1999. The Bell curve case for heredity. Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 29:389-415.
Hunter, W., and E. Sommermier. 1922. The relation of degree of Indian blood to score on
the Otis intelligence test. Journal of Comparative Psychology 2:257-77.
Jensen, A. 1970. IQs of identical twins reared apart. Behavior Genetics 1:133-48.
. 1998. The g factorThe science of mental ability. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Kamin, L. 1995. Behind the curve. Scientific American, 272 (February): 99-103.
Lynn, R. 1978. Ethnic and racial differences in intelligence: International comparisons.
In Human variation, the biopsychology of age, race, and sex, edited by R. T. Osborne,
C. E. Noble, N. Weyl, and C. D. Darlington. New York: Academic Press.
. 1991. The evolution of racial differences in intelligence. Mankind Quarterly
32:99-121.
Nei, M., and A. Roychoudhury. 1972. Gene differences between Caucasian, Negro, and
Japanese populations. Science 4047:177.
. 1982. Genetic relationship and evolution of human races. Evolutionary Biology
14:1-59.
Newman, N., F. Freeman, and K. Holzinger. (1937). Twins: A study of heredity and environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shuey, A. 1966. The testing of Negro intelligence. New York: Social Science Press.
PHILOSOPHY
Levin,
Hocutt /OF
REPLY
THE TO
SOCIAL
KEITASCIENCES / September 2001
Reply to Keita
MICHAEL LEVIN
City College of New York
MAX HOCUTT
University of Alabama
There is much wrong in Keita (2001 [this issue]; all references

thereto unless otherwise stated).
1. It is a rule of logic that stronger evidence is needed to support a
weightier conclusion. By adding weight to our conclusions, Keita
makes our argument appear weaker than it is. This, in fact, is his main
tactic. For instance, according to Keita we say that the 15-point gap is
due primarily to genetic factors and is impervious to piecemeal egalitarian gestures designed to narrow this gap (p. 386, emphasis added).
In fact, we say no such thing. We limit our skepticism to belief that the
whole gap can be closed by environmental changes. Our acknowledgement that only the major part of the gap is hereditary implies that
there is a part due to environment, a part that (by definition) can be
eliminated by environmental means. By page 392, Keita is referring to
the thesis that interracial IQ differences are genetic, not, notice, to
the hypothesis that they may be partially genetic. Thus, despite our
clear protestations to the contrary, we are represented as holding that
the entire difference is hereditary. (We repeat that the underlying normative issue is not the forward-looking one of ways to close the racial
gap but the backward-looking one of the gaps causeswhether it is
wrongdoing or factors for which no one is to blame.)
Of a piece with this overstatement is a construal of our position as
the claim that so-called racial phenotype is necessarily a predictor of
IQ (Keita, p. 387, emphasis added). What is the word necessarily
doing here? It is certainly not ours; we speak only of probability and
possibility. The same misrepresentation occurs again when Keita
attributes to us the claim that the 15-point black-white difference
must contain a genetic component (p. 389, emphasis added). Where
did this must come from? We claim only that the genetic hypothesis
has great explanatory merit. Thus, again despite our protestations to

2001 Sage Publications
395
396
the contrary, we are represented as having offered not a hypothesis

but a demonstrated conclusion.
In this connection, note Keitas argument that we cannot explain
the conquest of Africans by Europeans unless we are prepared to
attribute the conquest of the Celts by Rome as proof of inferior Celtic
intelligence. May has again morphed into must to short-circuit our
point, namely, that conquest is an indicator of superior culture, which
may be due to superior intelligence. (Is Keita sure that British Celtics
were as smart as imperial Romans?) Sometimes other contingencies
are plainly at work. For instance, one obvious German advantage
over Jews was vastly superior numbers, a factor not at work in the colonization of Africa. (We also call attention to Jewish overrepresentation in pre-Nazi German banking, journalism, music, law, mathematics, and medicine, without counterpart in black/white relations.)
Incidentally, Keitas counterexample to the superiority of European to
African cultures, the Muslim parts of northern Africa during the middle ages, is an irrelevancy. What is at issue is the cultures of the Negroid
peoples of the African subcontinent, not the semitic cultures of Jews
and Arabs.
Finally, Keita objects that we claim plausibility without any
proof that (black) culture can be construed as an environmental
effect of genes. But you need proofs only when claiming necessity. A
hypothesis is shown to be plausible when it is shown to explain the
data in question better than its rivals, and our section Gene/Environment Correlation makes clear the virtues of pointing the causal
arrow from genes to environment. Onewhich seems to have eluded
Keitas radar altogetheris that black/white differences with respect
to a cognitive trait vary directly with the traits heritability. Asecond is
that placing the origin of the arrow at genes correctly predicts (as
reversing it does not) the result of screening off alleged underlying
causal factors, as in cross-fostering designs.
Contrast the view of culture as an extended phenotypic expression
of a populations genes with Keitas own rather diffuse proposal that
industrialization explains group differences in IQ. To repeat a point
made in our article, Keitas proposal leaves it a mystery why some
groups rather than others industrialized. If the English have high IQs
because of the industrial revolution, where did the industrial revolution come from? Did it just alight in England out of the exogenous
blue? Our proposal explains industrial technology. This is not
proof, but it enhances plausibility.
Levin, Hocutt / REPLY TO KEITA
397
2. Keita betrays further confusion about our view by attacking the

climatic theory of race differences. He describes the latter as the
explanatory hypothesis offered by those who support the
hereditarian hypothesis (p. 391), as if the two stood or fell together.
Surely the fact that (as he admits) we never mention climate should
have told Keita that is not so. As a general matter, since an explanation
H entails its explanandum E but not conversely (lest H just repeat E in
other words), E is bound to be consistent with ~H. This is why, in general, the evidence for an explanandum is distinct from that for any
proposed explanations. In particular, while an explanation of genetic
race differences would be welcome, assuming the races do in fact differ, whether they do is to be resolved by twin and adoption studies,
genomic analysis, and other data to which evolutionary history is
irrelevant.
Alleged facts may reasonably be discounted only when by current
lights they could not be explained. Clairvoyance and extragalactic visitations come to mind. Keitas challenge to hereditarians to explain
plausibly why there should be intelligence differences for populations from any geographical environment lowers the stakes
considerably.
In any case, this particular shoe belongs on Keitas foot. The current
consensus holds that ancestral Caucasoids left Africa 100,000 years ago
or more, and that ancestral north Asians left Europe at least 40,000 years
ago. Evolutionary theory virtually requires that populations experiencing different environments and hence disparate selectional pressures over thousands of generations will differentiatejust how, to
repeat, being a matter for independent empirical determination. If
anything, identification of genetic race differences can be expected to
throw light on evolutionary processes. The races have obviously
diverged in overt morphology and only ultra-Cartesian body/mind
dualists would doubt that the mind as well adapts. As usual, Keita
sets up a straw man when he claims to diagnose the central logical
fallacy of such reasoning: the fact that blacks and whites may differ
on certain ontogenetic traits such as hair color, pigmentation, and so
on does not imply that there are no traits (cognitive abilities being one
of them) on which both groups do not differ (p. 393). Rectifying the
triple negation, he has imputed to us the absurd tenet that if the races
differ genetically on one trait, they (must) differ on all. Such hyperbole plays no role in our argument.
We note in passing that neither Eskimos nor Neanderthals discredit the climatic theory. Eskimos do about as well as European refer-
398
ence populations on the Ravens Matrices (Berry 1966), as the climatic

theory predicts. In any case, the theory can only be tested against
specifications of the environments to which the ancestors of various
modern populations were subject. Perhaps the major stressors operated on ancestral Europeans and northern Asians after the founding
Amerinds left for the New World. As for Neanderthals, the direction
of their evolution is currently conjectural: we certainly cannot say that
early Neanderthals were as smart as later ones. There is in fact some
evidence of an increase in the size of Neanderthal braincases from
about 100 to 1,400 cubic centimeters during their tenure on earth (In
The Stone Ages 2000). They seem to have been replaced by the more
intelligent Cro-Magnons.
3. Like many Bell Curve critics, Keita calls attention to within-race
differences, mentioning that Spaniards in Spain have an average IQ
of 87, Greeks 89, and so on, varying cultures in order to show that
racially designated phenotype does not correlate with IQ (p. 387).
This is poor reasoning. The variation in genetic height within the male
sex does not, for instance, negate the genetically based between-sex
height difference. Why could IQ not vary both within and between
racial groups? What reason has Keita for thinking the cultures he
mentions are genotypically identical? The standard work on the subject, Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (1994), documents genetic
variation within European, north Asian, and sub-Saharan populations (while dividing the human race as a whole into the standard
Caucasoid/Mongoloid/Negroid clusters). However wide, withinCaucasoid varianceLynn (1978, cited by Keita) conjectures that some
may be artifactualis irrelevant to variance between group means.
This variance emerges most clearly when the IQs of the various
European, north Asian, and African populations are aggregated. The
most pertinent study here is Lynns 1991 study, on which Bell Curve
relies, not the earlier Lynn 1978 study cited by Keita. Where 100 is the
mean for a reference population of white Americans, Caucasian IQs
tend toward the 90s, with northern Europeans at just about exactly
100; those of northern Asians tend to be a bit higher than 100; and
those of Negroids fall in the 70s and 80s. Bear in mind that the highest
Negroid scores are achieved by American blacks, hybrids with significant (10 to 20 percent) white ancestry. Keita misleadingly cites Kamin
(1995), who in turn cited one study in which Sowetan adolescents did
as well as whites on the Ravens Matrices, which is a decided singular-
399
ity in the data. Remember, we are not talking of necessity, but of what
is true by and large and for the most part.
Keita denies that attributing the whole 15-point IQ difference to
heredity is consistent with the small known genetic difference
between blacks and whites. (We have been unable to find the precise
figure in Nei and Roychoudhury [1982] that Keita attributes to them.)
But he nowhere offers an argument to support the claim that the two
are inconsistent. To put the issue in perspective, recall the old farmer
William James quoted as saying, There is very little difference
between one man and another, but what there is can be mighty important. Genic differences that are small by Keitas measure, namely,
variation in heterozygosity, might suffice to produce the seemingly
large difference in IQ. Keitas contention, common as it in fact is,
involves highly questionable shifts in comparison class. Bear in mind
that chimpanzees are also very close to humans in terms of gene frequency, simply because most mammalian genes are dedicated to
building hearts, lungs, and other structures common to all mammals.
Bear in mind too that even if on average whites and blacks differ only
in one of every two hundred genes, there are thought to be more than
3 billion genes in the human genome, meaning the races differ on
average in 15 million genes. By Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazzas
measure of FST distance (1994, 79-83, especially Figures 2.3.2.A,
2.3.2.B, and 2.3.3. and Table 2.3.2), sub-Saharan Negroids are about
three times farther from Europeans as they are from each other, and
any African population is FST farther from any non-African population than any two non-African populations are from each other.
4. Keita also (mis)uses outliers when noting the large IQ differences
between some monozygotic (MZ) twins.1 Nothing we say rules out
this possibility, which might be caused by, for example, brain damage
to one twin. Heritability is a group statistic rather than a record of
individual cases. A divergence of 29 IQ points for a single pair of MZ
twins reared apart is not excessively improbable given the sample
size, even for a heritability of .7.
Highly divergent MZ pairs in the literature Keita cites are young,
whereas more recent studies (e.g., Pedersen et al. 1992) indicate that
the IQs of MZ twins converge with age. The most popular behavioral
genetic explanation for this invokes our old friend, the genetic shaping of environments. Preadolescents are situated where others put
them, but as individuals age they choose environments more congru-
400
ent with their own genetic predispositions. So people with like genes
eventually select like environments. Treating environment as an
extended phenotype thus predicts the otherwise surprising increase
of h2 with age; nurturism wrongly predicts its decrease under the
cumulative impact of experience.
5. A crucial question is what nurturism actually maintains. Citing
our argument that a difference in culture is as well explained by a difference in intelligence as conversely, Keita replies that in the case of
African Americans, a reasonable counterargument has been that the
oppressive conditions under which they were forced to survive led to
their being not as equally exposed to the kinds of environmental conditions that prepare individuals for the more advanced levels of education (p. 390). Notice how extremely vague this claim is. What, specifically, are these environmental conditions supposed to be? Why
have they been so hard to identify? In particular, why does the race
difference persist even where blacks seem to have the cultural advantage? A point we made to which Keita does not respond is that the
children of middle-class blacks do worse than economically less fortunate groups. Another point he ignores is that the race differences
appear in early childhood, which rules out most standard environmental suspects such as teacher expectation. Another unaddressed
point is the results of transracial adoption described in our article.
Keita seems not to have understood that by Asians and Jews who
have frequently grown up in disadvantaged environments, we
meant American Asians and Jews who have suffered poverty and discrimination comparable to that of blacks but have managed to overcome these disadvantages. So this point too gets passed over.
Without wishing to seem to endorse positivism, a view we are told
is pass, we wonder what if any empirical content remains in a notion
as untestable as environmental condition.
6. Keita muddles brain size and IQ, the correlation between which
is not a hypothesis but by now a well-established datum (see references in Hocutt and Levin 1999, note 36; we expect replications to
appear by the time the present exchange is published). It does not follow that by the same logic, elephants and whales should be more
intelligent than humans (p. 391), since IQ rises with brain size when
body size is controlled for. There is indeed a puzzle about the sexes,
because they appear identical in mean IQ although male brains out-
401
weigh female brains slightly when body mass is fixed (Ankney 1992).
It is natural to connect this discrepancy to the specific male advantage
in spatial processing, but this interesting issue is not the one Keita
raises.
7. Recurring to a topic mentioned in (2), Keita opposes IQ to what
he rather obscurely calls ontogenetic or ontic traits like eye color.
He says IQ scores, unlike ontic traits such as eye color, are a function
of tests subjectively designed within specific cultural contexts (p. 387).
Granted, interpreting a verbal analogy test for Australian aborigines
is less than straightforward, but Keita ignores all of the validating correlations we presentedthe vast number of other measures of aptitude and achievement that IQ tests predict. These correlations make it
reasonable to think IQ tests measure the real, ontic comparative
intelligence of people within the same or similar societies. Keita may
well reply that the culture is always different if the mean IQ is, and
there is no a priori way to refute this. But it begs the question unless
Keita can specify the precise environmental variables that, according
to him, produce the difference, and this, unfortunately, neither he nor
anyone else has been able to do.
8. Keita concludes, To determine the plausibility of their hypothesis decisively, Hocutt and Levin might argue instead for social transformations that would leaven environmental differences (p. 393). We
are far from clear on what determine the plausibility of a hypothesis
decisively means. Is Keita asking us to show that what we claim is
evidence really is evidence? Or is he again asking us to prove the Bell
Curve position beyond question? The positive cash value of his proposal is that, since we have not conclusively proved that all of the
racial gap in IQ is hereditary, we should get on the side of those who
are trying to change it by altering the environment. This is Blocks
idea, discussed in our original article: forget heredity; try improved
environments.
We put aside the fact that this proposal would be more reasonable
if we knew precisely what environmental improvements we should
make and what differences in IQ we could expect them to effect
which we do not. What is more fundamentally wrong with it is that
the converse argument would be just as good. If we wanted to do so,
we could just as well argue that, since the nurturists have not proved
it is all environment, they ought to forget environment. They ought to
402
get on the side of the hereditarians and take up a program of eugenics,

or at least forget all intervention programs. We do not endorse that
argument, but it would be just as good.2
We might summarize the dispute between Keita and ourselves in
this way: our hypothesis is that part of the racial gap is hereditary, and
Keita replies, in effect, Since you have not conclusively proven that
all of the gap is hereditary, you ought to conclude that none is. This
combines misrepresentation with fallacy.
NOTES
1. Keita like others worries about environmental correlations due to selective placement. Bouchard (1990) maintains that, empirically, such correlations run about .1, and
that overall they distort heritability estimates by about 1 percent.
2. It is often instructive to invert nurturist arguments, for many of them, if made by
naturists, provoke ridicule. Suppose a hereditarian claimed that, since environmental
causes of within-group clothing differences do not imply environmental causation of
between-group clothing differences, the Scots might have a kilt-wearing gene.
REFERENCES
Ankney, C. 1992. Sex differences in brain size: The mismeasure of woman? Intelligence
16:329-36.
Berry, J. 1966. Temne and Eskimo perceptual skills. International Journal of Psychology
1:207-22.
Bouchard, T. 1990. The genetic architecture of intelligence. In Biological approaches to the
study of human intelligence, edited by P. Vernon. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Cavalli-Sforza, L., P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza. 1994. The history and geography of human
genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hocutt, M., and M. Levin. 1999. The Bell curve case for heredity. Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 29:389-415.
In the stone ages: Back to prehistoric roots. 2000, 7 June. In Human origins. London: BBC
TV/The Learning Channel.
Kamin, L. 1995. Behind the curve. Scientific American 272 (February): 99-103.
Keita, L. 2001. The Bell curve and heredity: A reply to Hocutt and Levin. Philosophy of the
Social Sciences 31: 386-394.
Lynn, R. 1978. Ethnic and racial differences in intelligence: International comparisons.
In Human variation, edited by R. Osborne, C. Noble, and N. Weyl. New York: Academic Press.
. 1991. Race differences in intelligence: A global perspective. Mankind Quarterly
31:254-96.
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Nei, M., and A. Roychoudhury. 1982. Genetic relationship and evolution of human
races. Evolutionary Biology 14:1-59.
Pedersen, N. L., R. Plomin, J. R. Nesselroade, and G. E. McClearn. 1992. A quantitative
analysis of cognitive abilities during the second half of the life span. Psychological
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The Bell Curve Case For Heredity

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The Bell Curve Case For Heredity

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PHILOSOPHY

The Bell Curve Case for Heredity

Intelligence potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same

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Hocutt, Levin / BELL CURVE CASE FOR HEREDITY

WHAT DOES BC MAINTAIN?

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depend less on public assistance, commit fewer crimes, and make a

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Figure 1: IQ versus Parental SES in Determining Poverty

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experiment described that makes little scientific sense: one might as

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Hocutt, Levin / BELL CURVE CASE FOR HEREDITY

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orthe most interesting caseunrelated persons reared together.

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Heritability versus Fixity

If genotype g1 for IQ develops in environment e1 while genotype g2

HERITABILITY: WELL OR POORLY DEFINED?

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Hocutt, Levin / BELL CURVE CASE FOR HEREDITY

THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE FLYNN EFFECT

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present point, perhaps genetically controlled dark skin triggers white

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that the black-white IQ difference is functionally related to the genes

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leads to an overestimate of the role of genes in phenotypic differences

BLACK CULTURE AND HEREDITY

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taken over entirely by the hereditarian hypothesis, and culture has

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