A Major Flaw in the work of Charles Murray, one of Scrooge McDucey's heroes

Recently, the Arizona Republic's Bob Robb wrote a short blurb for a quick hit on the opinion page of its print edition. He said something to effect that those who would trash academic Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) say more about themselves than about Murray.

Recall that Scrooge McDucey, when speaking to the June 2014 gathering of Koch brothers' cronies, lauded Murray who was in the room at the time. A quick Google search returns several references Robb has made to Murray and his work over the years.

Murray's controversial work has been used as justification for treating low-income and minority Americans as unworthy of the full rights due any other citizen. This is, disturbingly, the antithesis of an egalitarian America.

Arizona Eagletarian reader Lee Poole thinks there's a different way to view Murray and his work.

When conservative commentators like Robert Robb defend the work of academic Charles Murray (whose degrees are in History and Political Science), they fail to understand that their error has little or nothing to do with "political" correctness, and everything to do with scientific correctness. 

This debate mirrors the debate about Darwin vs. Genesis--namely, are we going to accept as intellectually valid the act of equating science with religious or cultural mythology?

The simple fact which Dr. Murray dances around -- and which is brilliantly confronted head-on in such scientific literature as "The Race Myth" by Dr. Joseph L. Graves* (his PhD. is in human biology) -- is that "race" is a fundamentally anti-scientific (and therefore, fundamentally mythological) concept. 

There is no such thing as Negroid DNA, Caucasian DNA, Asian DNA or Hispanic DNA, period. This isn't just a matter of personal opinion, regardless of what anyone sitting on any editorial board anywhere on the planet may choose to believe. 

"Race" is a fundamentally pseudo-scientific mash-up of notions which have their origin in geography and regional culture, and any attempt to classify humans according to such notions is inevitably an example of "garbage in/garbage out" analysis, regardless of the credentials of the analyst. In this case, it is too easy to point out that Dr. Murray is operating outside his skill set. It really is just that simple. 

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*NOTE:

Most Americans still believe that there is some biological legitimacy to our socially constructed racial categories. However, our modern scientific understanding of human genetic diversity flies in the face of all of our social stereotypes. -- Joseph L. Graves

Additional Note:

At the beginning of 2014, John Kavanagh was enthusiastically spouting nonsense about how we should NOT make a state university education available to all who want it, who would be academically capable of succeeding. That notion appears linked to the work of Charles Murray and has been written about by Robert Robb in 2002, 2007 and 2009.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Fred DuVal rebutted Kavanagh's views in a guest post on the Arizona Eagletarian calling it an attack on opportunity.