---
category: "Ideology"
aliases:
  - "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life"
tags:
  - Book
  - Eugenics
  - PioneerFund
  - HumanBiodiversity
  - 1990s
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."
start: 1994
relations:
  - type: participant_in
    with: "[[Charles Murray]]"
    reverse: true
    role: "co-author"
    start: 1994
    fn: 1
  - type: participant_in
    with: "[[Richard Herrnstein]]"
    reverse: true
    role: "co-author"
    start: 1994
    fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
---

*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]], who died of cancer in September 1994 shortly before publication, and [[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 [[Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation|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]],* 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]], established in 1937 with the money of [[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]], 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]] and the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] current, and in April 2017 [[Sam Harris]] presented him on his podcast as the victim of a taboo in an episode titled "Forbidden Knowledge."[^6][^7]

### Footnotes

[^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.