That would be tragic. Though "The Bell Curve" contains serious scholarship, it is also laced with tendentious interpretation. Once unlike-minded scholars have time to react, they will subject its findings to withering criticism. At its best, the Herrnstein-Murray story is an unconvincing reading of murky evidence. At its worst, it is perniciously and purposely incendiary. The graphs, charts, tables and data admit of less dire conclusions. But less dire would not have put Mr. Murray on the cover of news magazines, though it would have given America's disadvantaged a more accurate, hopeful glimpse of their future.

The authors argue that there is an underlying core to intelligence, separate from individual talents or skills, that is well measured by I.Q. tests. I.Q. scores are largely inherited and after childhood immutable. In their view, high I.Q. leads to high income and respectable behavior. Low I.Q. leads to social pathology -- poverty, welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births and crime.

The book says low-I.Q. parents produce large families, dragging average I.Q.'s lower. Its authors belabor the well-known fact that the average I.Q. of blacks is 15 points below that of whites and dismiss arguments that these low test scores reflect little more than biased testing. Their implication is that blacks are trapped at the bottom of society.

But many experts reject these chilling conclusions. For starters, the authors' statistical techniques are insufficiently powerful to distinguish the impact of I.Q. from talents or skills, some of which can be taught. Here, terminology matters. Were Mr. Murray parading around town with a story about skills, he would sound like everyone else who has tried to explain the explosive increase in income inequality in the last two decades. By blaming low I.Q. for poverty, he makes remediation look silly; by blaming skills for poverty, he would have invited society to try. The first finding is obviously the more attractive for Mr. Murray, who has built his career on arguing for the elimination of social programs.

The authors give short shrift to explanations for low I.Q. scores that are less bleak than their own. Some remedial programs have raised I.Q.'s, even if temporarily. I.Q.'s for blacks, as well as whites, are moving higher over time. Black educational achievement is catching up. And other countries do a better job integrating minorities in the economic mainstream than the U.S. does. One of the authors' key measures of innate intelligence, scores on the military's qualifying test, has been shown to be a product of education, an environmental factor. The issue is balanced interpretation. Mr. Murray has created an act of advocacy; he has not built a scientific case.