The Revenge of the Nerds by Steven Lagerfeld When Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 10 years ago, the book provoked a more violent response than any other in recent memory. Enough heated reviews and articles appeared to fill several anthologies. Yet the critics said very little about one of Murray and Herrnstein’s central contentions: that a high-IQ “cognitive elite” is consolidating a dominant position atop American society. Maybe that silence is understandable, given that the two men made several far more incendiary arguments—about IQ as a source of intractable...