Race and Culture.

• Author: Fallows, James

This is a better book than its often-crabby reviews would indicate. The New York Times Book Review said that despite the book's scholarly pose, "what animates it is preconception rather than investigation, cultural determinism rather than cultural inquiry." The Washington Post said that "it reads like a book that was not quite finished," since it did not match its many anthropological observations with a satisfying overall theory. The arguments Thomas Sowell makes in it shold have received about as much attention as those by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve--which means that in an ideal world, each book would have gotten about one-tenth as much attention as The Bell Curve actually received.

The chapter of Sowell's book dealing directly with inherited differences in ability, called "race and Intelligence," was written long before anyone had heard of The Bell Curve. Still, it is a very effective rebuttal to the Murray-Herrnstein argument that inherited and unchangeable differences in intelligence play a major role in deciding which races succeed and which fail.

Sowell's discussion of this subject starts, as Murray and Herrnstein do, with the long-established observation that average IQ scores vary among races, with Asians and whites scoring higher than blacks. Some of the difference is very likely genetic, he says. "When the Chinese tested in Hong Kong, Singapore, Boston, New York, and San Francisco repeatedly show a superior sense of spatial conception, it is difficult to deny that there is something there, whatever its origin might be."

But Sowell goes on to say that if genetics were the principal factor determining IQ score, it would be very difficult to explain a number of other well-established observations. For instance, in the last several decades the IQ scores of many ethnic groups in America have changed. In the twenties, the median IQ of Italian-Americans was 92. In the sixties, it was 103. For Polish-Americans, the median IQ rose from 91 in the twenties to 109 in the seventies. Sowell points out that both these groups tended strongly to marry within their own group during the period when their IQ was rising. Therefore, an improvement in genetic stock could not explain the IQ rise; it had to be environment.

Similarly, Sowell says the IQ scores for black Americans have varied heavily with region for many years--lowest in the South, highest in the North. This difference applies even with blacks who migrated...