The Bell Curve 2.0: First excerpts

For the past several years, Charles Murray has been working on a shocking sequel to his shocking-enough book about race and intelligence, “The Bell Curve,”

As I blogged here, Murray worked on the book from two angles, both designed to try to refute his critics, who said he woefully underestimated environmental influences of various types on expressions of intelligence, as well as the class-based structure of common IQ tests.

Murray’s first angle was to look at class and intelligence. For various reasons, that led him to Great Britain. His second angle was to analyze people from a clearly genetically-controlled population, one readily definable and not subject to social changed. For a man not afraid of controversy, homosexuals made an ideal population group.

Looking at homosexuals moving from Great Britain to the United States, with a focus on intelligence, Murray naturally had Andrew Sullivan squarely in his cross-hairs.

And, now, we have our first set of excerpts from the book.

Quoting Charles Murray:

Andrew never did know how much Marty Peretz and I were leading him down the primrose path of his almost blank-check endorsement of “The Bell Curve,” and his almost cult-like insistence that the entire editorial staff of The New Republic sign off on that endorsement.
It’s ironic isn’t it, especially in light of the fracas over the Middle East [see Murray’s online appendix for additional comments on the Iran elections] that forcing this endorsement down TNR staff’s collective throat led to what he probably, today, considers a “neoconservative takeover.” I certainly found it ironic, given his agreement with me about how smart Jews are.

And, although Mr. Sullivan refers to himself as British, we know he’s really Irish by ethnicity. Given how few intellects Erin has produced, it is not surprising that, in his lust to be considered an intellectual, despite the huge genetic basis for intelligence, both within individuals and within ethnic groups, he never stopped to consider that he was hiking uphill on this issue.

Sullivan was unavailable for interviews or response.

UPDATE, Nov. 28, 2011: Jokes aside, Sully is still, apparently, a full-on racialist. Ta-Nehesi Coates has a roundup of reaction to his pseudointellectual bigotry.