Editor’s note: This review appeared in The Occidental Quarterly in the Fall issue of 2013. This is the only online version at this time, and it seemed particularly appropriate to post it now because of China’s role in disseminating the Wuhan virus, as well as their cover-ups and lies about it. Given my interest in individualism, the […]
Editor’s note: This is the final installment of Devlin’s review of Murray’s Human Diversity. Human Diversity concludes with a consideration of the genomic revolution currently unfolding. Older Americans learned about genetics in Mendelian terms where each gene coded for some trait which was normally either dominant or recessive. The genome as a whole was thought of […]
Charles Murray’s Human Diversity contains little on the genetic basis of racial differences in average intelligence; it is clear Murray doesn’t want to be the subject of another moral panic like that which greeted The Bell Curve. He merely mentions that it is “tough” to defend the belief that “ethnic differences in IQ are meaningless,” […]
More is known about the influence of genes on social class than upon race and sex; indeed, Murray writes that “the basics have been known for decades.” (209) The technical literature treats socioeconomic status as the sum of heredity (genetic influence) and environmental influence. The latter component can be further divided into shared and nonshared […]
Go to Part 1, on gender differences. Social constructivist orthodoxy has been more successful at shaping popular perceptions of race than of sex. As Murray notes, the idea that “gender is merely a social construct” is widely perceived as too extreme, but many of our contemporaries labor under the mistaken impression that “significant racial differences […]
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020 “We are in the midst of a uniquely exciting period of discoveries in genetics and neuroscience (6),” notes Charles Murray near the beginning of his latest book Human Diversity, yet it remains something of a secret. Knowledgeable […]
Editor’s note: Christmas is a special time of year, and over the years TOO has posted some classic articles that bear on the season. This article by F. Roger Devlin was originally posted in December, 2013. It is an important reminder of the disastrous intra-racial wars of the twentieth century—wars that may yet deal a death blow […]
