Richard Herrnstein

Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) was a prominent researcher on comparative psychology who did pioneering work on pigeon intelligence. He became very controversial for his work with Charles Murray on the correlation between race and intelligence, discussed in their book The Bell Curve.

While the very idea of innate racial differences in intellectual abilities cannot be dismissed out of hand, and while some of the attempted refutations of The Bell Curve were politically motivated, some critics have managed to uncover serious flaws in the statistical techniques utilized in the book, most notably by the economist Thomas Sowell and the Nobel-prize winning econometrician James Heckman. In addition, the in-group heritability estimate of 0.60 promoted by Murray and Herrnstein seems far too high, as a 1997 meta-analysis by B. Devlin, M. Daniels and K. Roeder of 212 studies in the field argued for a much less compelling narrow-sense heritability figure of 0.34.