Charles Murray

Having read only descriptions of his work and articles related to it, I used to wonder why Charles Murray provoked such a backlash, and why people viewed his work as racist.

Matt Yglesias points me to this article in Commentary, in which Murray explores the various causes of Jewish overrepresentation in Science, Medicine, Law, etc, and you can almost sense his urgency to come to the his final (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) determination that Jews are the chosen people.

Obviously the overrepresentation he's talking about is indisputable, but while he is meticulous in establishing the fact that Jews seem to overachieve in these areas, he ignores and glosses over alternative explanations to get to his favored cause: inherited intelligence.

While I'm open to the idea that some degree of selection could result in higher average IQ in some groups, it's not hard to see why Murray's single minded focus on intelligence's genetic component and casual conclusion lead one to suspect he really wants it to be true.

For the record, I do believe intelligence has a large inherited component, and though I can hardly claim to be familiar with relevant empirical data, I know that IQ tests are hardly reliable indicators of your intellectual horsepower, and that high achievement in any field involves not only ability, but opportunity, connections, etc, all of which are entirely social phenomonen.

While I don't think we should axiomatically accept that all groups of people everywhere have the same average intelligence (do they all have the same average height?) based on our belief in equality, I would be surprised if those differences were very large. And while height certainly has a genetic component (as well as being correlated with things like income), we should remember that the average height has been steadily increasing in Japan and China over the last several decades, and I hardly think there's been a great deal of natural selection or evolution during that time.