Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

When we look at the differences between races, we can account
for only about 6.3% of the differences between individuals.
Almost all of the variability we see in the entire human race—
93.7%—occurs within races.
realities are psychological. Perhaps the difference isn’t in the genes
but in the functioning of the brain. At the turn of the 20 th century,
craniologists and phrenologists sought to determine intelligence
from the size of the skull and its characteristic bumps and to
that were supposed to be found in this study weren’t.
After Alfred Binet developed the IQ test, H. H. Goddard brought
it to America, altering its original purpose—an instrument to
determine what resources would be needed to educate individuals
with lower IQs—to use it as a judgment of innate intelligence.
Goddard developed tests to show that immigrant groups contained
inferior people would require greater cultural resources and give
back much less to society. Immigration, Goddard argued, must be
stopped for the good of the country.
This sort of argument—that there are inherent differences in
intelligence in different races and that this difference ought to have
the early part of the 20 th century. In 1994, the psychologist Richard
Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray published the
book , in which they argue that intelligence tests
strongly suggest that there are genetic differences in intelligence
between races.
concept, but at every one of the three steps in the argument, the
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