Functional or futile?: the (in)utility of methodological critiques of genetic research on racial disparities in health. A commentary on Kaufman's "Epidemiologic analysis of racial/ethnic disparities: some fundamental issues and a cautionary example".

In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book that used a range of statistical techniques to posit racial differences in intelligence (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). According to Hammonds (2006), there have been two different types of reactions to the publication. On one hand, the book generated a host of detailed critiques that were devoted to carefully dissecting the statistical analyses and describing every methodological flaw and inconsistency in an effort to debunk the book’s findings (Devlin, Fienberg, Resnick, & Roeder, 1997; Fischer et al., 1996; Heckman, 1995). The second type of reaction not only acknowledged the importance of the first, but also pointed to its futility. This camp argued that methodological critiques will fail to discredit theories on racial difference in intelligence because they ignore the fact that the research is being driven by more ideological forces (Aronowitz, 1996). Extending Hammond’s typology, Kaufman’s (2008) article falls squarely into the first camp in terms of the way it responds to research that posits genetic