The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, a collection of essays edited by Steven Fraser, attempts to demolish almost every aspect of the earlier work The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class structure in American Life, by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray. The latter book set forth the notion that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidenced by comparative IQ scores, and that the class structure, crime, unemployment, unwed mothers, and almost every social or economic problem in the country was an inevitable result of the allegedly lower IQ scores of blacks. The two authors presented their arguments in a dispassionate and statistics-immersed approach which delighted conservatives and enraged liberals. All we can do, suggested Hernstein and Murray, is accept the fact that blacks are inferior and do what little we can to reduce "the fertility rates of the 'cognitive underclass'":
Here [Hernstein and Murray] are more sanguine about the efficacy of public policy [which they reject as a solution to correcting socioeconomic inequities], suggesting, albeit with some tentativeness, given the extreme delicacy of the subject, that changes in immigration law and welfare and public health reforms targeted particularly at unwed mothers might arrest the genetic degradation of the national stock (Fraser, 1995, 3).
The tone of the essays attacking such ideas in Fraser's book may vary, but the point remains the same: Hernstein and Murray's book is untrue, dangerous, racist, and must be destroyed. The essays are largely effective in accomplishing this destruction of Hernstein and Murray's assumptions, theories, statistics, methodology, and conclusions.
Stephen Jay Gould argues that the four basic premises underlying the use of IQ as a trustworthy test and measurement of intelligence are "false." For example, one premise holds that IQ is unchangeable. Gould acknowledges "the fifteen-point differen...