Charles Murray has a new book out: Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.
From the blurb at Amazon:
The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas:
– Gender is a social construct.
– Race is a social construct.
– Class is a function of privilege.
The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in.
(I had to pause for a moment at “rich texture”. Some thought went into that, surely!)
Whether advances in genetics and neuroscience (and obvious common sense, and the evidence of all human experience) are actually “overthrowing” anything, or just battering themselves bloody against the ramparts of an invulnerable orthodoxy, remains to be seen, but it is brave of Mr. Murray to gird himself and take the field yet again. For his prior sins of truthfulness, he has been reviled and ostracized for decades, denounced while being interviewed by Congress, and was physically assaulted on a college campus just a couple of years ago.
No doubt the book will receive hostile reviews aplenty from that stifling keep within the ramparts, but here are two from the clearer air outside: one by Steve Sailer, and one by John Derbyshire.
4 Comments
Remember, sex is mutable but sexual preference is immutable. Why? Because science says so, in sentences that begin with “Studies show that…”
Try to argue with a leftist and you’ll get the one-size-fits-all reply, “That’s been debunked!”
Alien to the realities of human reproduction, leftism will depopulate and die in the next 50 years, so that our descendants won’t have to hear such drivel.
I’m enjoying it, but like the Derb says it’s a challenging read. I find myself going through the work slowly and methodically, doing my best to absorb and assimilate the myriad of detail.
– Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.
(To pile on: “Boas’ influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” – Carl Degler, Stanford historian)
chedolf,
In the decades before the war the social sciences also featured such luminaries as Harvard’s Lothrop Stoddard (see, for example, his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man.
It wasn’t until after WWII that the general culture made its remarkable volte-face on these matters.