IQ and the Future of Equality

This article is the last of three dealing with the subject of Genetics, IQ, and Equality. The first, entitled “Race and IQ: Fallacy of Heritability,” appeared in our spring issue; the second, “The Pseudoscience of Arthur Jensen,” in the summer issue. The notes to this article appear on pp. 413-14.—Eds.

In the furor stirred up by the new inegalitarians’ contention that differences in intelligence are inherent, most of the notoriety has gone to Arthur Jensen’s allegation that heredity accounts for the average IQ gap between America’s blacks and whites. In two previous articles in these pages, I have demonstrated that Jensen’s theorizing is tendentious or incompetent and his “empirical” case fraudulent; if the argument about the supposedly genetic roots of inequality is to proceed any further on a rational basis, it must do so without reference to the subject of race.

A much more grandiose assault has ...