Book Review: Human Diversity by Charles Murray

This book makes me a bit sad because the people who most need to read it almost certainly won’t simply because of the author. Few writers have as many false claims attributed to them as Charles Murray. Murray has been a lightning rod of criticism in the social sciences for decades mostly due to his controversial work on intelligence The Bell Curve. Many believe his work endorses white supremacy based on average IQ scores. However as a black man who has actually read The Bell Curve, I know that this is not even remotely close to his view. Human Diversity is likely to get similar treatment in spite of all of his caveats and qualifications. I expect to see many sanctimonious, verbose, passionate denunciations of this work from people who have not read a single page of it.

So what is this latest work really about? Human Diversity is a book about the state of the science regarding the relationship between human biology and society. It is both a very humble and very radical book. It is humble in that it is not strongly polemical; most of the text is accessibly written reviews of science regarding our understanding of biology’s role in sex, race, and class differences. Spoiler alert: these things are not all 100% socially constructed. Differences between men and women, whites and blacks, the wealthy and poor — in all cases genetics and biology play a significant role. This is where the book gets radical; Murray believes that the scientific evidence to this effect is becoming so compelling that it will lead to all manner of intellectual revolution in the next decade or two. I am not quite convinced of this claim for a number of reasons I won’t get into here.

Murray saves the last part of the book for his own personal views but honestly I recommend this book for everything that comes before that last section. No other contemporary work will get you up to speed on the science of human differences as efficiently as this. If you take issue with any of his presentation, he happily gives you hundreds of references to chase down as well.

Grade: A-