THERE ARE NO DARWINISTS:

Eugenics is the spectre haunting this debate. It arose from the application of Darwinian ideas to human society in times when the science was too immature for the flawed reasoning to be apparent. Darwin discovered that biological traits - including human behaviours and abilities - were subject to the influence of invisible factors (genes) that we inherit. This led some - notably, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton - to conclude that people could in principle be bred for intelligence or good looks just as racehorses were bred for speed or cows for milk-producing capacity. (The idea remains in vogue among the aristocracy today - recently a clip surfaced of Dominic Cummings' baronet father-in-law Humphrey Wakefield asserting that genetic greatness runs in elite families, if they keep the bloodline "pure" - an idea straight out of Galton's 1869 work Hereditary Genius.)

But in modern societies where traits such as athleticism and intelligence were not subject to natural selection - where "poor genetic stock" could flourish and breed - scientists such as the eminent biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of Darwin's advocate Thomas Huxley), as well as the likes of HG Wells, Marie Stopes and George Bernard Shaw, believed that social and legal controls and incentives were needed to prevent bad genes from overwhelming the "good".

The horrific direction eugenics took under the Nazis has made it almost synonymous with inhuman social engineering and prejudice today. Yet there is still a great deal of confusion about it. Richard Dawkins took to Twitter in the wake of the Sabisky affair to say: "It's one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It's quite another to conclude that it wouldn't work in practice [for humans]. Of course it would." That prompted a dispute among experts about whether he was correct in the light of what we now know of human genetics. One key fact that confounds Dawkins' argument is that the genetic element of "desirable" but complex traits such as intelligence tends to be spread so widely and thinly across the genome, and so entwined with other attributes, that it would be all but impossible to select for them.

Remarkably, eugenics is not mentioned once in Murray's book. For someone setting himself up as a brave soul prepared to say the unsayable, this seems deplorably craven. Murray might argue that the book is not taking any position on eugenics, indeed not addressing the topic at all. But he knows perfectly well that any discussion of, say, the volatile intersection of genes, IQ and class must inevitably happen within the legacy of 20th-century debates on this issue. The word is ubiquitous in the far-right and supremacist channels to which Murray knows he will be speaking. It has been raised both by Sabisky (who has past links to alt-right forums) and Toby Young, who in 2017 attended a secret conference series on intelligence hosted - without the university's knowledge - at University College London, and which attracted white supremacists and eugenics advocates.

Those who believe in innate differences in ability and behaviour between "human populations" (for which, read "races") style themselves today as "race realists", much as climate-change deniers call themselves climate realists. It's a rhetorical stratagem implying that they are on the side of science, evidence and reason rather than ideology. In that narrative, academia is now in thrall to a woke liberal orthodoxy that censors and punishes any suggestion that gender and race are biological. Race realists and eugenicists defend their right to spread their views under a banner of free speech.

Take Young's new Free Speech Union, which seems primarily a vehicle for opposing "self-righteous social media bullies" like the "offence archaeologists" who in 2018 scuppered his own government appointment by unearthing his sexist tweets from a few years back; it has already proved to be a magnet for the hard right. Or take the case of Nathan Cofnas, a philosophy doctoral student at Oxford who published a sober-sounding article condemning the suppression of free enquiry into topics such as "group differences in intelligence", yet turns out to be a race realist and enemy of "political correctness", with links to the alt-right. And so they go on, these white men to whom freedom of speech apparently means the freedom to go on asking the same question - might the privileges that they happen to enjoy themselves be a part of the natural order? - and never to take no for an answer.

Murray, too, wears this mantle of victimhood and oppression. Yet somehow - his funding by the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute has something to do with it - he is able to defy stifling orthodoxy by producing hefty books hyped by mainstream publishers (this one, like The Bell Curve, was not released to reviewers before publication and so was presented as an "event") and writing editorials in the Wall Street Journal.

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