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A few years ago, I started observing that policy debates consist of dueling lies. More recently, it occurred to me that when it comes to the social sciences, there are part-time liars and full-timers.

Right of center, you get part-time liars. In IQ in the Meritocracy (1968), psychologist Richard Herrnstein came up with what I call the rule of 81. He found that IQ is 81 percent heritable, leaving 19 percent that is environmentally determined. However, in The Bell Curve (1994), Herrnstein and his co-author, Charles Murray, claimed that IQ is 40-60 percent heritable, which rounds out to 50 percent, or 50-50. That’s a huge change.

Did the book explain the change? Was there some revolutionary intervening development in the science of mental testing? No, and no.

In 2014, Murray addressed the American Enterprise Institute. (Full disclosure: Yours truly used to review books for AEI’s wonderful magazine, American Enterprise, under Karl Zinsmeister’s editorship, in Bill Kauffman’s book section.) He brought up the heritability issue, and admitted that he and the dying Herrnstein (he didn’t make clear whether Herrnstein was in on it) had lied about the heritability rate. Did Charles Murray hang his head in shame? Not at all. He positively bragged about having “fudged” the numbers. And nobody rose to condemn him.

So, IQ is 81 percent heritable.

That’s momentous. Is behavior also 81 percent heritable? I don’t know. I’ll try and find out.

While I’ve never attended an AEI conference—I was invited, many years ago, to apply to become an AEI fellow, but got such a swell head over the invite, that I forgot to apply!—but I have attended many academic conferences over the years. Most were not at universities, but all had many attendees and speakers who were Ph.D.s and/or tenured professors, and many others who were researchers with all sorts of degrees. One thing I’ve seen repeatedly, is the slavish attitude the organizers and attendees have toward speakers from the Ivy League/Overpriced Private University (OPU) world. I have likewise seen the arrogance that OPUers feel toward those whom they consider their social inferiors. It’s not even class snobbery; these mooks and mopes think in terms of caste.

Now, I’m a simple man. I think that if Charles Murray had any sense of honor, he would have eaten the business end of a .38, and left a note apologizing for his sins against scholarship. (Or some other firearm; I’m not fixated on .38s.)

You have to understand that men like Murray (ditto, for Jared Taylor) think of themselves as men of honor, but the term “honor” has no moral meaning. It’s just a term denoting social status. To see it otherwise is to commit a category error, or to be hopelessly deceived.

According to F. Roger Devlin, Murray wrote a huge, dishonest book in 2012, The State of White America (which had been the title of my earlier, National Policy Institute report), crapping on working-class White men, for the sole purpose of getting back in the good graces of influential book editors and reviewers, who had ceased reviewing his books. It didn’t help him much, because those editors and reviewers refused to review his most recent book.

And in 2016, while admitting that he agreed with Donald Trump’s positions, Murray crapped all over the candidate, saying he’d never vote for him, citing the future president’s “temperament.” (As opposed to Hillary Clinton’s wonderful temperament. During the Q&A, I reminded Murray of the objective moral principle, whereby if you desire the ends, you desire the means. Trump was the means. I made no impression on him.)

Right-of-center people who slavishly worship caste, praise those like Murray, while maintaining silence in the face of his trespasses, when they are even aware of them. (Caste worship is not limited to any one political leaning.)

Socialist Zachary Karabell, who used to be a college professor, aptly described that world in his 1999 book on the antiversity, What’s College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education. (I worked full time for part-time, piece work wages as a college adjunct from 1992-1998.)

“The sensitivity of academics to hierarchy manifests itself in many ways, but if you want to observe one of the most unpleasant demonstrations of academic snobbery, go to a major academic conference and watch how people react to one another. Let’s say a panel delivers three papers to an audience of seventy-five. At the end of the formal presentation, the audience will ask questions. People stand and identify themselves. Those who have ‘respectable’ qualifications will elicit nods of agreement or sighs of disagreement, and others might approach them afterwards to continue the conversation. But if you stand up and say that you are from No-Name Community College, and even worse, if you say you are an adjunct, eyes glaze over. The sensation is palpable and familiar to anyone who’s attended these events.”

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Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix