16 ii 1995

To the Editor, Scientific American

In his review, "Behind the Curve" [Scientific American, February], Leon Kamin seems to have lost sight of the main novelty of the "eight dense chapters" of The Bell Curve about which he complains. He writes: "The significant question is not whether socioeconomic status, as defined by Herrnstein and Murray, is more or less statistically associated with success than is their measure of IQ." Yet that is precisely the significant question, even if Kamin would rather haggle over Herrnstein & Murray's "questionable" use of statistical regression.
      By the early-1980's, there were about a hundred decent studies showing that the SES levels of children's parents correlated at only around .22 in post-1945 USA with educational achievements by age twenty. Now, Herrnstein & Murray (using entirely conventional, sociologists' criteria of SES) have not only confirmed the unimportance of parental SES from an up-to-date, nationally representative sample of thirty-year-olds, but also shown that substantial prediction of occupational level in young adults is provided by earlier IQ differences, especially across the lower half of the IQ range (and still more, perhaps, in interaction with SES).
      Perhaps still in shock, Kamin may have more trouble in seeing cause and effect here than will most of your readers; but there is no need for him to continue to worry quaintly about "the children of laborers." They are doing pretty nicely, on average, both on IQ tests and on economic indices in the modern USA. Instead, Kamin should re-focus on the largely distinct problems of young adults who have a low IQ.

I am yours faithfully,

Chris Brand.

P.S. {for Editor only} I enclose some Figures based on The Bell Curve, and the reference re 'a hundred decent studies' in case you would like it.

The Figures supplied were as used later in Brand, 1996, 'The importance of intelligence' in J. Biosocial Science. The reference is to White's article of 1982 in Psychological Bulletin.

So was the letter published? Of course not! Its receipt was not even acknowledged. -- Scientific American has been on an anti-heredity, anti-IQ tack for the past decade.

For much more on Leon Kamin and other critics of IQ (e.g. Stephen Rose, Stephen Ceci and Stephen J. Gould), see The g Factor and PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY AND SOCIETY (Sections 8-11).
For the fate of Kamin's last big effort to assert his preferred 100% environmentalism about IQ difference, see What about Sir Cyril Burt?

Last modified: 4 xii 1997.