The Bell Curve Wars.

• Author: Hyatt, Ralph

Edited by Steven Fraser/Basic Books, 1995, pp. 216, $10 (paper)

Questions about the relative influences of heredity and environment on human behavior seem destined to interest, excite, or haunt all of us forever, especially psychologists, sociologists, and scientists of many other disciplines. It is a never-ending fascination to see how adult identical twins think, act, choose, and emote so much alike though they may have been separated early in life and reared quite differently or to observe an unmotivated student bloom with the chemistry of a master teacher.

Some behavior patterns are more predictable than others. Books are written for professionals and laypersons about adolescent development, as an example, that describe what can be expected of teens as they grow into adulthood. Another illustration is the current surge of information and best-selling books on gender differences in language usage and thinking processes that frequently hamper the interpersonal relationships between men and women.

The Bell Curve, written in 1994 by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, though, relates intelligence, race, and the future of America in such a way that, in the most onerous of possibilities, it literally could lead to much more than just verbal wars. The authors argue that individuals at the lower end of the IQ bell curve (also known as the normal curve) typically are poor, black, and less educated than whites. The limited economic resources of the U.S. are being squandered, they hold, by the magnitude of these individuals' educational, economic, and social service needs. Affirmative action "is leaking a poison into the American soul."

The authors overlook the fundamental difference in meaning between correlation and causation--two characteristics may be related without one causing the other. Accordingly, Steven Fraser, executive editor of Basic Books, assembled an elite group of 20 intellectuals, mainly university professors, to present an antidote to such attitudinal toxicity. The result is The Bell Curve Wars.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, writes that the environmental/genetic debate is "old, dreary, and indecent, philosophically shabby and politically ugly." Nathan Glazer, author of Limits of Social Policy, points out that Herrnstein and Murray are not concerned about the abandonment of an American affirmative action policy as it might affect blacks, but, rather, how important it is practically to the...