Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

Rating

7.5

The Pequod Review:

Charles Murray's book Human Diversity continues his argument that genetic-based factors are the primary cause of differences in human personality, intelligence, and occupational success. His evidence is unfortunately a mix of the obvious and the unsupported, but along the way he cities interesting studies and makes a number of wholly unique observations:

I think at root is the new upper class's conflation of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. But the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is better in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is better than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is better than a neighborhood of high school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn't be any relationship with these things and human worth. And yet, among too many in the new upper class, there is.

The conflation of intellectual ability with human worth helps to explain the new upper class's insistence that inequalities of intellectual ability must be the product of environmental disadvantage. Many people with high IQs really do feel sorry for people with low IQs. If the environment is to blame, then those unfortunates can be helped, and that makes people who want to help them feel good. If genes are to blame, it makes people who want to help them feel bad.

Recommended.