The Jensen report (as this article has come to be miscalled} dealt with intelligence and inheritance in general, not only with racial questions. Other writers in the past four centuries – from Thomas Hobbes to Konrad Lorenz- have agonized over the complex and fascinating interplay of nature and nurture in shaping man’s psyche. It is only lately in America that public discussion requires physical, not to mention intellectual, courage, for the subject is close to taboo. But The Atlantic believes that it is not only possible but necessary to have public discussion of important, albeit painful, social issues. The subject of intelligence is such an issue – important because social legislation must come to terms with actual human potentialities, painful because the actualities are sometimes not what we vainly hope.

Emil O.W. Kirkegaard has posted the famous but long-lost 1971 article in The Atlantic “I.Q.” by Richard Herrnstein, future co-author of The Bell Curve 23 years later. The editors wrote an introduction that concluded:The decline in The Atlantic raises doubts about the Flynn Effect, does it not?

[Comment at Unz.com]