The botanist, eugenicist, and peace activist David Starr Jordan wrote in 1903 that the Civil War had delivered "the best" of the "race" unto death; those Americans who took their place and sired the youth of his own day, he thought genetically inferior. The wrong kinds of Americans predominated in 1903, because the right kinds of Americans had been needlessly sacrificed between 1861 and 1865. When he wrote his pamphlet, Jordan was president of Stanford, the university's first. In 1965 a Stanford professor gave a long interview to U.S. News & World Report with a similar thesis. In the United States, he claimed, the "abundant welfare state" all but insured that unfit and less intelligent people "will be multiplying at an enormously faster rate than more intelligent people do."' That professor was none other than William Shockley, who had begun teaching at the university after his company failed. And who had turned his yen for hierarchies into speculations about race, the welfare state, and intelligence.

This argument attained its modern form in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. The two made the same argument as Shockley before them-that the welfare state subsidized "births among poor women ... who are disproportionately at the lower end of the intelligence distribution" - but this time under the banner of "group 10."* According to Quinn Slobodian, this marked the comeback of the IQ concept among American conservatives. And even during times when Silicon Valley Presented itself as far more liberal than it does today, it could still be enthusiastic about IQ.