Homme Fatale

By SAURABH JHA, MD Halfway through the “Bell Curve,” which is an analysis of differences in intelligence between races, I realized what had been bothering me about Charles Murray’s thesis. It wasn’t the accuracy of his analysis, which concerned me, too. It was that he analyzed. The truth, I used to believe, was always beautiful, whether it was what happened in the multiverse at T equals zero, or the historical counterfactual if Neville Chamberlain hadn’t signed the peace accord with Adolph Hitler. After reading Murray’s book, I realized that the truth can be irrelevant, ugly, and utterly useless. Even if the average intelligence of races was truly different, so what? Surely, civilized people must judge each other as individuals, regardless of the veracity of the statistical baggage of their ethnicities. Murray was castigated, deservedly, for swallowing the bell curve uncritically. But his detractors missed one point. Murray wasn’t just wrong because he was factually wrong. He was wrong for inquiring. In fact, it was worse, because Murray, it turned out, was wronger than wrong. Stephen J Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man (man is gender-neutral here) – the most biting critique of the study of human intelligence –recognized the biggest weakness with Murray’s analysis. Gould always had an antipathy to statisticians – his life once depended on his dismissing bland statistics. Gould observed that when using an attribute, such as IQ, to distinguish between two g...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: OP-ED Physicians Source Type: blogs