Quotes from Richard J. Herrnstein

merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this, Mokita. It means 'truth that we all know, but agree not to talk about.

The documentation becomes especially extensive when we come to a topic so controversial that many readers will have a "This can't possibly be true" reaction.

Regarding those pesky impersonal third-person singular pronouns and other occasions when the authors must assign a gender to a fictitious person used to illustrate a point, it seems to us there is a simple, fair solution, which we hereby endorse: Unless there are obvious reasons not to, use the gender of the first author. We use he throughout.

This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's future.

The relationships we will be discussing are among the most sensitive in contemporary America—so sensitive that hardly anyone writes or talks about them in public. It is not for lack of information, as you will see.

In trying to think through what is happening and why and in trying to understand thereby what ought to be done, the nation's social scientists and journalists and politicians seek explanations.

But there can be no real progress in solving America's social problems when they are as misperceived as they are today. What good can come of understanding the relationship of intelligence to social structure and public policy? Little good can come without it.

and one other who asked to remain anonymous out of his wish to preserve, as he put it, a viable political future.

That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human.

Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.

Gossip about who in the tribe is cleverest has probably been a topic of conversation around the fire since fires, and conversation, were invented.

Darwin had asserted that the transmission of inherited intelligence was a key step in human evolution, driving our simian ancestors apart from the other apes.

he was led to put in formal terms what most people had always taken for granted: People vary in their intellectual abilities and the differences matter, to them personally and to society.

People differ in their talents, their intellectual strengths and weaknesses, their preferred forms of imagery, their mental vigor.

in 1904, a former British Army officer named Charles Spearman made a conceptual and statistical breakthrough that has shaped both the development and much of the methodological controversy about mental tests ever since.5

a curious result kept turning up: If the same group of people took two different mental tests, anyone who did well (or poorly) on one test tended to do similarly well (or poorly) on the other. In statistical terms, the scores on the two tests were positively correlated.

The course of learning is affected by intelligence, in Spearman's view, but it was not the thing in itself. Spearmanian intelligence was a measure of a person's capacity for complex mental work.

By 1908, the concept of mental level (later called mental age) had been developed, followed in a few years by a slightly more sophisticated concept, the intelligence quotient.