Charles Murray: Why I'm Taking Religion Seriously

You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. All right everybody, it's Michael Sirmer and it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. I got a special guest for you today. It's the great Charles Murray. policy analyst educated at Harvard and MIT, and is presently the Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of his book Losing Ground, American Social Policy, 1950 to 1980, which changed the national conversation about the so-called war on poverty and its aftermath. In 1994, his best-selling book, The Bell Curve, co-authored with Richard Hernstein, argued that the increasing role of intelligence over the 20th century was transforming America's social structure. By the way, uh, Charles, we covered that in Skeptic. Here's a the cover story of 1994 Skeptic magazine. I had a uh I had a hard time finding anybody to defend it.

I mean, to make the case for you. I finally got Vince Sarich at UC Berkeley because he was pretty uh fearless about being criticized by the. He was very competent to defend it too. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But everybody else, oh boy, they didn't want to touch it, except for the critics.

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