SOURCE: "Curveball," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 39, November 28, 1994, pp. 139-49.

[A paleontologist, educator, and critic, Gould is the author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981). In the following review, he charges that the authors of The Bell Curve used inadequate and biased data and that their conclusion "that minority groups exhibit lower IQs which are both hereditary and immutable and a threat to America's intellectual pool" is highly questionable.]

The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, subtitled "Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," provides a superb and unusual opportunity to gain insight into the meaning of experiment as a method in science. The primary desideratum in all experiments is reduction of confusing variables: we bring all the buzzing and blooming confusion of the external world into our laboratories and, holding all else constant in our artificial simplicity, try to vary just one potential...