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Do I know if Jencks was right? No, but I find particularly interesting one early chapter in the Brookings collection, "Race, Genetics, and IQ," by Richard Nisbett, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. In his essay, Nisbett reviews all the studies that might weaken Murray and Herrnstein's beloved thesis that blacks, taken as a group, are less intelligent than whites, taken as a group. He reviewed studies of skin color, blood group indicators, reported white ancestry, mixed-race children, adoption studies, and, most intriguingly, a study of the children of American soldiers and German mothers in post-war Germany. (The cohort of the children of black soldiers had the same IQ as the cohort of the children of white soldiers, indicating that the relatively depressed IQs of American-born blacks are an artifact of an environmental factor—the intractability of white American racism, maybe?) Like any prudent scientist, Nisbett admits when his evidence is vague, incomplete, or contradictory. But on one score he was unequivocal: "By conventional academic standards, Herrnstein and Murray's review of the evidence on the heritability of the IQ difference between blacks and whites is shockingly incomplete and biased."