Coulter, Ann - Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Coulter Ann

Author:Coulter, Ann [Coulter, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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7 - THE LEFT'S WAR ON SCIENCE: BURNING BOOKS TO ADVANCE

SCIENCE"

Listening to liberals invoke the sanctity of "science" to promote their crackpot ideas creates the same uneasy feeling as listening to Bill Clinton cite Scripture. Who are they kidding? Liberals hate science. Science might produce facts impervious to their crying and hysterics. Even at college re-education camps, it's striking that the chemical engineering and economics departments are jam-packed with Republicans, while liberals are all taking French. As with their sudden new interest in the military, liberals invoke "science" only as a cudgel to end debate. Actual science excites them only if it involves some sort of Nazi experimentation with human embryos.

When Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life landed on the shelves in 1994, liberals responded with their usual open-mindedness to scientific facts. The 850-page book represented eight years of collaboration between Herrnstein, a Harvard psychology professor, and Murray, a political scientist. The Bell Curve synthesized mountains of data culled mostly from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a federal study testing the intelligence of more than 10,000 Americans beginning in 1980, with regular follow-ups for many years thereafter. Contrary to the party line denying that such a thing as IQ existed, the book methodically demonstrated that IQ exists, it is easily measured, it is heritable, and it is extremely important.

The book—all but one chapter—dealt exclusively with the influence of IQ on white people's lives. After years of censorship on the subject of IQ, the entire book was a stunning revelation. Once the taboo was shattered and the unspeakable was spoken, IQ turned out to be an extraordinary commodity. Among many other things, IQ is a better predictor than socioeconomic status of poverty, unemployment, criminality, divorce, single motherhood, workplace injuries, and high school dropout rates. The ability to speak different languages is not correlated with IQ, but nearsightedness is. Spouses tend to have closer IQs than siblings. Although other factors influence IQ, such as a good home environment and nutrition, The Bell Curve authors estimated that IQ was about 40 to 80 percent genetic.

In a rare editorial about a book, the New York Times said The Bell Curve was "a flame-throwing" book with "a grisly thesis."' The Times was suspicious of the "aura of scientific certitude" to The Bell Curve, calling the scientific findings "ugly" and vowing that they would soon be challenged by other experts in the field. Not yet—but soon! The Times denounced Murray as "a political ideologue who uses social science data to support his policy preferences," and then launched into an irrelevant tirade on the "long and sordid history" of "bigots" who used " `scientific' evidence that blacks, or American Indians, or Jews, to name three targets, were of inferior stock."2

Having spent decades rigorously enforcing the taboo against any mention of IQ in any context, ever—with a narrow exception for remarks about the IQs of Republican presidential candidates—the Times complained that The Bell Curve "belabor[s] the well-known fact that the average IQ of blacks is 15 points below that of whites.

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