The Atlantic: Charles Murray Is WRONG

But we aren't talking about race and IQ like everybody assumes.

From The Atlantic:

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

By Eric Turkheimer

October 13, 2025, 8 AM ET

Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox.

Here’s the Vox article:

Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ

Podcaster and author Sam Harris is the latest to fall for it.

Updated by Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett May 18, 2017, 9:50am EDT

Charles Murray, the conservative scholar who co-authored The Bell Curve with the late Richard Herrnstein, was recently denied a platform at Middlebury College. Students shouted him down, and one of his hosts was hurt in a scuffle. But Murray recently gained a much larger audience: an extensive interview with best-selling author Sam Harris on his popular Waking Up podcast.

Turkheimer was more upset about Murray being allowed on a podcast than being violently attacked by a mob of Antifa ski bums.

Interestingly, Turkheimer’s article, when read carefully, is also about how Charles Murray is mostly so much more right than the Conventional Wisdom about IQ. But he’s still a Witch!

The bet’s premise was simple enough. Murray quoted himself on the podcast, arguing that “we will understand IQ genetically. I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks, but we’ll know basically what’s going on.” And he proposed that, in seven years, he’d sit through a lecture I gave on the topic: “Who Was More Right?”

It is now 2025, and I am here to declare that I was more right. (This article can sub in for the lecture Murray proposed.) We do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others. The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded. Even given a softer goal of predicting, rather than explaining, intelligence differences, we still can’t do it very well. If anything, we are further away now than in 2018 to knowing “basically what’s going on” with genetic influences on intelligence.

On the other hand …

Paywall here.