I’ve mentioned Charles Murray rather a lot recently; this is because he is often in the news lately, and has been right on the frontlines of the culture war. The pillorying and excommunication of this meticulous and mild-mannered scholar also shows the extent to which ideological and cryptoreligious loyalties and prejudices have contaminated science as well as culture. The only upside to any of this is that his plight, as miserable as it must certainly been for him, has shocked a lot of other academics into a fresh realization of how bad things have gotten. (E.O. Wilson was subject to the same treatment back in the late 70’s, but I think that many might have imagined that things had got somewhat better since then. They haven’t, and I imagine Dr. Murray is, at this point, about three-quarters of the way to becoming a full-blown reactionary. We’ll be very proud to welcome him to the fold.)
Recently the young-adult website Vox posted a “debunking” of Dr. Murray’s work, here. It not only attacked Dr. Murray himself, but Sam Harris for being taken in by it all in his recent podcast with Dr. Murray (which we linked to here).
Here’s a response.