I belong to what must be the least exclusive club in the country: People who have written critical reviews of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. I counted 20 in The Bell Curve Wars, and 40 in Measured Lies. The number in The Bell Curve Debate is hard to calculate because, as in many numerical quantities, it all depends on the definition. As best as I can figure, there are 46 named authors, eight anonymous authors -- newspaper and magazine editorial writers -- and ten named writers who defend The Bell Curve, plus 17 who wrote on the subject before the book was written. Indeed, the last-mentioned category goes back to an 1865 publication of Galton -- the founder and creator of the name "eugenics" -- and includes as well several 1922 articles of Walter Lippmann on the nurture side of the debate. Clearly, not much is all that new under the sun.

Nevertheless, every dawn is unique, so to speak, and Murray and Herrnstein somehow captured the Zeitgeist of our time without really anything fresh to say on the subject. Or, so claim the many critics who point out that the arguments put forward are rehashes of plausibly quaint racialist ideas such as craniometry and I.Q. equals destiny which have long since been discredited. While craniometry is unlikely to make a comeback, I.Q.'s congruence with destiny fits neatly into the current hereditarian calculus of explaining the American universe in which some are affluent and many more are not.

Most critics of The Bell Curve fasten on its assertions about race and the I.Q. inferiority of African Americans. In actuality, most of the book is about class structure, a subject often avoided in the U.S. because we are in theory a mobile, classless society. Murray and Herrnstein claim that we have lost the mobility of bygone days because the low-I.Q. people keep begetting low-I.Q. children who will form an increasing threat to the peaceful existence of the "cognitive elite," the high-I.Q. people. The obvious threat comes in the shape of crime; the not-so-obvious threat is affirmative action and other social programs which will put inappropriate persons into positions that should be reserved for the properly qualified who, it just so happens, usually are white and male.

Of the three books, Measured Lies is the least interesting both from a statistical-mathematical and polemical point of view despite its publication being the latest of the three. For what it is worth, nine of the authors work at Penn State University and six at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The essays are original but decidedly uninteresting compared to the contributions in the other two books. I read The Bell Curve Wars first and had seen most of those articles previously in the New Republic issue devoted exclusively to The Bell Curve when it first came out. However, the best piece is Gould's "Curveball," which is taken from his New Yorker review. I liked that the best because it is one of the only reviews that challenges the statistical quackery directly and doesn't leave the mathematical high ground to Murray and Herrnstein. Besides, Gould is a terrific writer on any subject.

Gould's article appears again in The Bell Curve Debate and once more is the lead article but this time it is entitled "Measure by any Measure". In fact, many of the articles in this book have rechristened titles from the original, presumably for copyright reasons. Rechristened or otherwise, the one I enjoyed the most was "Blacktop Basketball and the Bell Curve," née "The Case Against the Bell Curve," by Gregg Easterbrook. He recounts the time when he was looking for a job and was forced to live in "seedy neighborhood" of Washington, D.C. To pass the time, "I played basketball on the local court several hours each day. I was the only white player in the game, accepted at first as a charity case... After two months of daily basketball, I found myself able to hold my own in one-on-one matches against the hot players... I had never been able to do before and have not been able to do so since."

Easterbrook attributes his increase and his subsequent decrease in skills to practice or lack thereof whereas "Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein would say I had suddenly acquired basketball genes. Then just as suddenly I lost them!" He is in effect revealing that it is amazing that we are so willing to believe in physical training and to pay exorbitant sums to coaches of athletes and then claim that intellectual achievement is entirely formed at birth and is totally immutable, beyond adjustment. Blacks do well at basketball because "many black kids practice the sport intensely. For good or ill, thousands of black kids spend several hours per day through their youth playing basketball". For me, "Blacktop basketball offers an entry point for understanding why [The Bell Curve has] common-sense faults" despite its plausible appeal to those comfortable with the status quo. It is now over two years since The Bell Curve was published and, therefore, I doubt that there will be another compendium of critiques. My not-so-little club has perhaps gotten pretty close to its asymptote but then again, I wouldn't have wagered the farm on the financial and popular success of The Bell Curve in the first place. As statisticians are wont to say, randomness is everywhere and who knows, we may get Son of the Bell Curve, or for the cognoscenti elite, Raus mit Gauss.