Conrad: The late Richard Herrnstein of Harvard and Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote the book The Bell Curve in 1994. The book's central thesis declares that there are measurable genetic differences in intelligence levels between races.  This has little scientific merit. It just seeks to make racism socially acceptable (Site 4).

A book opposing The Bell Curve by Brookings declares that race is not a determining factor in the heritability of intelligence.  The author also found that IQ is a small factor in income distribution and that anti-poverty programs such as Head Start are both cost-effective and do help to slightly improve IQ levels, proving that other influences do have an effect on IQ (Site 4).

A team of sociologists from the University of California at Berkeley led by Claude Fischer is working on another book entitled, Inequality By Design: Cracking The `Bell Curve' Myth. The book argues that intelligence is not the main determining factor of socioeconomic status, showing how small the impact of economic inequality is to the increasing gap between certain IQ levels (Site 4).

Moralists still argue that if eugenicists get their way, many things would change for the worse.  Human genes could predetermine human life, dictating what is perfect and what is not, promoting widespread genetic discrimination (Lander).

 

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