--- aliases: - 'The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life' category: Ideology created: 2026-09-22 relations: - fn: 1 reverse: true role: co-author start: 1994 type: participant_in with: '[[Charles Murray]]' start: 1994 summary: 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray on intelligence and class whose bibliography drew on thirteen Pioneer Fund grantees and seventeen contributors to Mankind Quarterly. tags: - Book - Eugenics - PioneerFund - HumanBiodiversity - 1990s updated: 2026-09-23 --- *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life* was published by the Free Press in 1994. Its authors, the Harvard psychologist [Richard Herrnstein](/people/richard-herrnstein/), who died of cancer in September 1994 shortly before publication, and [Charles Murray](/people/charles-murray/) of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that intelligence is substantially heritable, that it predicts life outcomes better than socioeconomic background, that a "cognitive elite" sorted by intelligence was stratifying American society, and that measured IQ differences between racial groups have a partly genetic basis.[^1][^2] The Manhattan Institute, where Murray had been a senior fellow from 1982 to 1990, parted ways with him after he began the work; the Bradley Foundation underwrote his research at both institutions.[^3] ### Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund Murray told *The New York Times* that "some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we're on planes and trains." In *The New York Review of Books* of December 1, 1994, Charles Lane found that no fewer than seventeen researchers in the book's bibliography had contributed to *[Mankind Quarterly](/organizations/mankind-quarterly/),* a journal founded in Edinburgh in 1960 whose founder, Robert Gayre, had written that the crimes of the Nazis did not justify "the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact"; ten were present or former editors or advisory board members. The authors cited no fewer than thirteen scholars who had received grants from the [Pioneer Fund](/organizations/pioneer-fund/), established in 1937 with the money of [Wickliffe Draper](/people/wickliffe-draper/), totaling more than 4 million dollars over two decades. Arthur Jensen, cited twenty-three times and in Lane's words "the book's principal authority on the intellectual inferiority of blacks," had received 1.1 million dollars from the fund. The authors thanked [Richard Lynn](/people/richard-lynn/), an associate editor of *Mankind Quarterly* who had received 325,000 dollars from the fund, only as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences."[^4] Morgan Guaranty Trust, which under Draper's will had managed the Pioneer Fund's money for two decades, closed the account after the book appeared and declined to say why.[^5] Murray's hereditarian argument was later taken up by [Steve Sailer](/people/steve-sailer/) and the [human-biodiversity](/concepts/human-biodiversity/) current, and in April 2017 [Sam Harris](/people/sam-harris/) presented him on his podcast as the victim of a taboo in an episode titled "Forbidden Knowledge."[^6][^7] [^1]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.* Free Press, 1994. [^2]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30." *Mad in America,* March 2024. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/ [^3]: "Charles Murray: A Life," American Enterprise Institute, and "Charles Murray," Bradley Foundation. https://www.aei.org/multimedia/charles-murray-a-life/ [^4]: Lane, Charles. "The Tainted Sources of 'The Bell Curve.'" *The New York Review of Books,* December 1, 1994, quoting Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?" *The New York Times Magazine,* October 9, 1994. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/ [^5]: Blackmon, Douglas A. "Silent Partner: How the South's Fight to Uphold Segregation Was Funded Up North." *The Wall Street Journal,* June 11, 1999, p. A1. [^6]: Sailer, Steve, columns on the "Sailer Strategy," 2000 onward; collected in *Noticing: An Essential Reader,* 2024. [^7]: Harris, Sam. "Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray." *Making Sense* podcast, episode 73, April 23, 2017.