HERRNSTEIN'S TRICKS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In his letter to the Editor of December 15, Richard Herrnstein has reached once again into his dusty bag of tricks, this time pulling forth that favorite of the high school debating team, the quotation-out-of-context. The passage from my article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (March, 1970), an article which I urge everyone to read, was designed, in its context, precisely to show that heritability must be referred to particular populations and, more important, that for the question of genetic differences between races, it really makes no difference what value of heritability you suppose for the white population. Indeed, at one point in the article I even allowed that the heritability of IQ among white Americans could be 100 per cent for all the difference it makes to the question of race. I was willing to grant a high heritability of IQ for American whites because, for the purpose of exposing Mr. Jensen's particular brand of nonsense, it was not worth disputing.

To expose Mr. Herrnstein's brand of nonsense, I again did not challenge any particular estimate of heritability in any population, because none of these estimates is relevant to the causes of the difference between social classes. Just to make things crystal clear, however, let me state again that no current estimate of the heritability of IQ can be validly referred to the white population of the United States as a whole, not to any identifiable sub-section of it. We do not know to what real population, if any, these estimates are to be referred, and they are all irrelevant to the differences between social classes.

Mr. Herrnstein has refused my invitations to discuss and debate these issues at length on a public platform. For the sake of Psychology students, I trust that quotations out of context and refusals to have open discussions of his writings are not generally characteristic of Mr. Herrnstein's intellectual armamentarium. R.C. Lewontin   Professor of Biology