More Reflections in Natural History - The Panda's Thumb

Ok, some people think that writing pop science without being bombastic is impossible. Well, for all those people who think this way, and for all those scientists who produce bombastic nonsense and thus mislead the public about science, this book serves as a powerful reminder that it need not be that way. Popular science can be written honestly, and yet still engage the public's imagination. If you don't believe me, just give this book a try!

Steven J. Gould is most famous among the general public for his collections of essays from his long Natural History series, "This View of Life". But the best of Gould's writing is perhaps to be found in his single-theme books. And The Mismeasure of Man is arguably the finest among them. The volume is about the long history of the search for scientific justification of racism, and the many faux pas that science has committed when it comes to the study of human intelligence. The 1996 edition of the classic 1981 book also contains some interesting addenda: "Critique of the Bell Curve", and "Three Centuries' Perspective on Race and Racism" (as well as a new introduction), just in case you were not convinced by the arguments lined out in the main text. The Mismeasure can conceptually be divided in two parts: the first deals with the misapplication of measurements of the human body (cranial capacity and facial features), the second one is concerned with the mind (IQ and generalized intelligence). In both cases, Gould follows the same approach that has been so successful in some of his technical opuses, such as Ontogeny and Phylogeny: he tracks the history of a discipline or scientific question, highlights the contributions and discusses the motives of the major players, while simultaneously plunging into the technical aspects of the science behind the problem. So, for example, in order to find out why measuring the cranial capacity of the human head does not tell you much about intelligence, we are introduced to biologists of the caliper of Louis Agassiz (Gould currently holds his chair at Harvard), Samuel George Morton, Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin), and - of course - Paul Broca, the father of craniometry. It is indeed fascinating to find out that theories of the origin of human races actually preceded Charles Darwin and evolutionary thinking, with the "polygenic" school apparently providing solid basis for racism: if the term "human" comprises different species, it is only natural that we rank them according to their biological worth (needless to say, the "objective" ranking invariably ended up putting the author's race - and gender - in pole position, and somewhat ahead of everybody else). The supporters of the opposing theory of "monogenism" were by no means kinder to other races, though. Their argument was that there was only one Adam, and that every human race descended from him, and degenerated to a greater or lesser extent (again, you guess who degenerated more and who the least). Regardless of the premise, all we needed to know according to craniometrists was the size of the brain (as estimated by the internal volume of the cranium) and we will know how intelligent (and thereby "worthy") any individual or race really is. Now, one could object that there is indeed a good correlation between cranial capacity and what we intuitively think of as intelligence among animals. After all, biology textbooks report diagrams showing that carnivores have larger brains than herbivores, regardless of body size. And the accompanying explanation makes sense: carnivores need larger brains because they have to process more information and more quickly, they have to face a larger variety of situations, and be able to make a larger number of vital decisions. In other words, they need to be smarter. Gould acknowledges this, but quickly - and correctly - points out that variation across species does not have to have the same cause and meaning as variation within species. He illustrates this with an array of definitely intelligent people whose brain sizes covered almost the whole gamut displayed by non-pathological individuals. However, this is indeed one of the troublesome aspects of this book and, I dare say, of Gould's writing in general. He dismisses contrary evidence or arguments so fast that one gets the impression of seeing a magician performing a trick. One cannot avoid the feeling of having being duped by the quickness of the magician's movement, instead of having observed a genuine phenomenon. In this particular instance, I can vouch for Gould as a biologist, but I'm not so sure that the general public is willing to trust him on his word. After having dismissed both craniometry and the aberrant work of Cesare Lombroso on the anthropological stigmata of criminals, Gould moves on to his main target: IQ and intelligence testing. IQ testing was originally introduced by the French psychologist Alfred Binet with the intention of spotting children who were falling behind in the curriculum, so that teachers could pay particular attention to them. Alas, such a noble intent soon fell victim to the human tendency of ranking everything, and led to an astounding series of "scientific" enterprises characterized by deep racist overtones. H.H. Goddard saw the feeble-minded (the technical term being "moron") as a menace to society; we should care for him, but we should not allow him to reproduce. One of the ghastly consequences of the eugenic movement in the US was the enactment of immigration restriction laws based on perceived racial inferiority, and the actual forced sterilization of individuals deemed genetically inferior: for a few years the United States teetered on the brink of the same precipice over which Nazi Germany readily dove around the same time. One of the chief obstacles to the use of IQ scores is that there are several ways to devise an IQ test, and the results of different tests are not always congruent when performed on the same subjects. But if we have to use a battery of tests, and then somehow weigh their discrepancies, we lose one major attraction of IQ testing: the ability of ranking human beings on a simple, uni-linear scale of worth. Charles Spearman and Cyril Burt set out to accomplish the feat of reducing multiple-tests complexity once again to a single magical number. Burt was a disciple of Spearman (himself one of the founding fathers of modern statistics) and later claimed to have made contributions to the theory of factor analysis which where in fact Spearman's. Gould plunges into one of the best explanations I have ever come across of the multivariate statistical technique of factor analysis, fundamental to both Spearman's and Burt's work. This allows the reader to gain some understanding of a very important tool in modern biostatistics (one that Gould himself uses for his own technical research), while at the same time being able to follow Gould in highlighting the fundamental problems which Spearman and Burt incurred. Simply put, factor analysis is a statistical technique based on the rotation of orthogonal axes in multivariate (i.e., multidimensional) space. This reduces a complex data set (say, made of the results of ten different IQ tests) to a manageable number of linear combinations of the original variables. This smaller set of dimensions identifies the principal "factors" which explain the correlation structure in the original data. Spearman's suggestion was that all IQ tests have one principal factor in common. That is, the scores on each test are correlated to each other, because they all reflect one underlying quantity, which Spearman named "g", or general intelligence. Spearman therefore provided one of the two pillars of the eugenic movement: there seemed indeed to be one way to rank individuals by their intelligence with the use of one number: this was the score on the g-factor, instead of the score on any of the available IQ tests. Burt's major achievement was a supposed confirmation of the second fundamental piece of the puzzle eugenic puzzle: his studies of genetically identical twins suggested a high heritability (incorrectly read as a high level of genetic determination) of intelligence. So, not only do individuals differ in intelligence, but this is easy to measure and genetically determined. Environment, and with it education and social welfare, cannot alter the innate difference among individuals, genders, and races. QED Well, not really.

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the seminal figures in evolutionary biology of the 20th century. He not only made major contributions to the field, particularly with his notion of "punctuated equilibrium" and his conceptual refinements to evolutionary theory such as the notion of "exaptation," but he was a world class essayist and did more to spread knowledge of evolutionary theory to the general population than probably any other scientist of his day. This is one of his finest works and the title essay, The Panda's Thumb, probably contributed more to my understanding of contingency in the evolutionary process than any other book or journal article. This book should be required reading for everyone on earth.

This book relates in exquisite detail the history of intelligence testing in the US and, in its early stages, in France. Bluntly, the enterprise of intelligence testing, whether by crude measurement of skull volume or in the supposedly more sophisticated form of testing by psychological instrument, was historically driven by a racist agenda -- which Gould is extremely persuasive in uncovering. From systematic bias in "error" to outright departure from the empirical method, Gould uncovers it all for the world to see, in his eminently readable style.
Gould also makes clear that the intelligence-testing psychological instruments in use today, however free modern practitioners may be of racial bias, are directly derived from instruments designed either for racist purposes or for the strict purpose of identifying developmental pathology (rather than the measure of normal intelligence). Thus, while the famous "IQ test" can truly be said to be measuring some statistical regularities in human performance, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that what is being measured is what we think of as "intelligence" -- or even anything particularly well-correlated with it.
Left for the reader to ponder for him- or herself is whether the central question of intelligence testing can even be intelligibly posed, or whether the whole enterprise is best relegated to the same slag-pile as phlogiston research and the search for the philosopher's stone [*sorcerer's* stone to American readers ;) ].
The 1993 revised and expanded edition contains Gould's rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Once one accepts the concept of Reification, it becomes obvious that one cannot construct a reality from mere metrics and numbers, regardless of the mathematical tools used. If one does, the "reality" obtained is in fact just opinion based on personal esthetics, bias, prejudice, or sociopolitical agenda. Gould demonstrates this time and again in reviewing a century of racist and classist-tainted research. IQ will forever lie outside true science because numbers boiled down from test scores will never be convincingly tied to any tangible, objective, repeatable reality.
Correlation matrices, factorial analyses and bell curves are beside the point, Gould maintains, since the basic concept of IQ is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. IQ's practical use is always to establish or reaffirm hierarchies, to winnow and discriminate. Binet's original goal for the IQ was to merely identify clearly subnormal school children so they could be helped. Once it was out of his hands, however, other, less lofty uses were found for the metric.
Gould shows convincingly that IQ testing was seized upon as a eugenics-based rationale to restrict US immigration from Eastern Europe beginning in the 1930's. Up to 6 million people, including many Jews and other undesirables, may have been denied entry into the US as a result. Go figure.
This reified acceptance of IQ's validity is alive and well today. Books like The Bell Curve and other hereditarian racist-by-definition works sell like hotcakes, yet are merely rehashings of the same old stuff. Many private schools use IQ testing to exclude undesirables (as if their five-figure tuitions weren't exclusionary enough!). Reading Gould's book will open one's eyes to the nasty, flawed basis and uses of all IQ testing, past, present and future.

I first read Gould as his articles appeared in Natural History Magazine in the early 1980’s and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Revisiting these articles 30 years later I now have major criticism regarding many of Gould’s views and writing. Firstly, in the current release SJG references “my buddy Alan Dershowitz”. What? Google “Alan Dershowitz and sleaze” and you will get over 300K hits. Dershowitz has left a slime trail more galactic than the Deep Water Horizon. My respect for SJG has plunged to zero for his profound blindness of character — both his as well as AD.

Rereading The Mismeasure of Man is equally disappointing. The writing style is “pompous tangentiality” … disjointed and arcane text makes it difficult to wade through all the superficial and inane drivel. Despite the extensive ‘word salad’ key information is lacking. For example, SJG states the brain of Anatole France weighed a meager 1,017 gm. OK, but what was AF’s height? Neuroanatomists know that brain weight sans height is nebulous.

What else is missing from this essay discussing brain size vs intelligence? Albert Einstein’s brain weighed only 1,230 gm — key unmentioned information. Scholarship? Not even close. PS: Height of AE was 67.5”.

I was unable to read past 25% of my Kindle version — I kept mind-drifting away trying to separate the tonnage of wheat from the overload of chaff. The chaff eventually narcotized me sufficiently to move on to more worthwhile reading.

Gould takes Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve out for a public unmasking (and a much deserved rhetorical flogging), and shows us the racist garbage that most people probably suspected or knew intuitively it was. Then book goes much further; actually, this is a second edition, the first having been written before The Bell Curve.
This book is an indictment of the very concept of "Intelligence Quotient" as something ontological and fixed. It is also a debunking of the children and step-children, nieces and nephews of IQ testing.
The examples are so many: immigrants at Ellis Island were given IQ tests, and though the tests were non-English dependent, they were very much American culture dependent, and were given to people who might never have held a pencil before. White European men are the standard, and test which demonstrate them to be superior are assumed to be fair tests.
Gould recounts in a thoroughly readable, and even enticing style, several slices of history where terrible wrongs were done because IQ was assumed to exist as something quantifiable. The eugenics movement was just one, and it bore forced sterilisation based on supposed measurements of intelligence. Another is the ages old denial of education to women either under the delusion that it was a waste of time, or the crazy medical hypothesis that by using her brain, a woman would cause her uterus to shrink.
This is a brilliantly conceived book, thorough, enjoyable and provocative. It is polemic, so if you disagree, you will have to form your own argument, but Gould is forthright that he is not just reciting history, and rather arguing a position in the IQ debate.
If you disagree with Gould, and that will put you in a bad mood, don't read this book, because his argument is like the Rock of Gibralter. If you just want to read this end of the debate, this is the only book you need.

I agree with the grad student whose review recommends reading both this book and The Bell Curve. Gould does an excellent job shooting down work that claims to find racial differences in intelligence. However, that is not the same thing as proving that those differences don't exist. But Gould superbly points out the degree to which preconceptions can influence "science," even subconsciously, and points out the need for a generous dose of skepticism when research purports to divine the intelligence (or cognitive) ability of groups. This skepticism should be heightened when the researcher goes beyond attempting to identify measurable aspects of intelligence and relate them to groups, and takes the additional step of suggesting social policy.

Gould effectively exposes and obliterates the assumptions underlying the neo-racist Bell Curve. His approach is careful and straightforward, and -- like all his writing -- lucid and enjoyable. If you need further evidence of the significance of this book, note that the only negative reviews posted here are by folks whose reviews are, shall be say, less than erudite in their approach. (Don't ask me why the store chooses to post reviews that dismiss Gould as another "Jew of the leftist school", but at least it tells you what buttons Gould manages to push!). The composite rating of four stars should be higher, since the average has been brought down by the abnormally low votes of those who likely haven't even read the book, but are threatened by its theme.

This is a splendid book for its historical (some not so ancient history!) treatment of biased measures of intelligence. I recommend this book for scientists and for students of social and physical sciences. It is important to evaluate interpretations drawn from research and statistics critically, and this book is a good place to start. It is written at a very non-technical level, so pretty much anyone can appreciate it.

Actually quite an important book, charting the history of misguided but determined attempts to rank people in one way or another. You need to slog through the statistics to really understand; take the time--helps you to argue with those who throw statistics around for their own purposes. Teaches an important and eye-opening lesson: just because you can measure it doesn't necessarily mean it's there. Also see Gould's "Full House" for more insight into variability as the essence of biology.

Gould does an excellent job in demonstrating a basic misconception of many psychologists and economistsabout the measurement of intelligence which leads them to fall into the reification and quantitative fallacies.The misconception is that IQ can be precisely and exactly measured by the use of multiple choice,pattern recognition tests.Intelligence is ,in fact ,complex and multifacted.It is not a simple,unique entity .One of the great problems that one encounters in the social sciences and liberal arts,psychology and economics in particular,is the misbelief that in order to be scientific the researcher MUST be able to come up with a single ,unique,numerical answer.The physical and life sciences can ,in some instances,achieve this goal.It is rarely the case in the social sciences.The best that can usually be accomplished in these fields is to establish intervals/bounds , and/or regions/areas in a phase space, where the solution lies.Inexact measurement should be the goal whenever one is confronted with evolving,complex processes ,which are functions of many independent variables ,many of which exhibit irregular feedback mechanisms over time depending on the particular combinations of parameters that are interacting at one particular period.

Given the obsession that psychologists and economists(or psychometricians and econometricians)have with single number answers, which are unique and stable,it is not surprising that the normal probability distribution is always assumed to be applicable.Suppose that IQ is in fact a shifting interval that reflects the dominance of particular subsets of interacting independent variables.Psychometricians would not know where to start.They would be unable to use their logistic regression analysis.Perhaps a few of them would eventually decide to use the ,lets say, range and median or nonparametric analysis.However,the vast majority would say that the problem was not tractable.They would then go ahead anyway and assume normality.Data would be restricted to variables which are additive.

Gould demonstrates that the current tools used by psychologists are unable to measure intelligence by a longshot.The reader will come away with an understanding of the very limited repertoire of analytical tools currently in use in psychology and other social sciences.

Like the better known Carl Sagan (and now Neil deGrasse Tyson), Gould was a scientist who made important contributions, but was also able to write books that could be understood by people who weren't science specialists. Like the others I mentioned, he was also socially conscious. In Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, Gould argues against against the naming of human "races." He wasn't the first to make this argument, but he was once of the most influential. Humans have been migrating and mixing with other gene pools from the beginning. The fact that many of us have Neanderthal DNA should be sufficient to prove that. In the US, if you're noticeably Black, you get characterized that way, even if you have more white ancestry. It's a political concept, not a biological one.

I read the first edition of this in 1981, when it was published. It's a wonderful critique of "measuring intelligence" from skull size to IQ tests.I'm just now working on the second edition.

Follow this up with Evelyn Reed's Sexism and Science, in particular the chapter entitled "sociobiology and pseudoscience"; Are They Rich Because They're Smart?: Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism,Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, and The Clinton's Anti-Working-Class Record.

The Mismeasure of Man is more than a historical account of the inaccuracies of intelligence testing; it is an epic illustration of the pitfalls of an uncritical scientific approach. The thrust of the recounting is that scientists must not delude themselves into believing that they are objective measurers of a well-defined world. Political and social biases are inherent parts of our humanity, and as such are unavoidable influences on how we interpret data. Gould thus suggests that the only way to compensate for our biases is to acknowledge them. Otherwise we are fated to repeat past errors: designing experiments to fit preconceived conclusions rather than setting forth disprovable hypotheses.
The history of intelligence testing is riddled with these mistakes. The most striking is the capacity for scientists to explain away data that does not fit their original notion. For example, when skull size failed to show a positive correlation with the traditional white-asian-black intellectual heirarchy, different measurement procedures were used, unrelated races were grouped together, and gender effects were ignored. All in an effort to (often subconsciously) restore the comfortable position of white superiority.
The most fulfilling aspect of the book is how far Gould has researched the environments and lives of those who played a role in this drama. Although some passages may be construed as ad hominem attacks, the vast majority of the information is necessary to understand -- and, in some cases, sympathize with -- otherwise seemingly cold, evil, or ignorant scientists. In the end, Gould redeems many of these figures while also castigating their behavior, so that we may learn from their mistakes. Indeed, this book gives a clear understanding of how statistics, prejudice, and self-delusion can alter the course of research.

Gould's _Mismeasure of Man_ is a remarkable text. Not only does has it addressed a critical contemporary scientific (and societal) debate, but it has done so with commendable historical acumen and clarity. Few scholars so successfully cross academic boundaries. As a historian with considerable grounding in physical anthropology, I consider it to be a standard against which other inter-disciplinary works should be judged.

Stephen Jay Gould presents a highly readable debunking of intelligence testing over the years. He argues that the mistake of researchers in this field right from the beginning has been the belief that intellectual capacity is a fixed measureable quality that follows inevitably from one's heritage. The white European males who started this line of inquiry naturally saw themselves as fine exemplars of intelligence and a worthy standard of comparison. Therefore, results that favored other racial groups and women were invalidated, finagled, or explained away--usually without any overtly dishonest intent. This dynamic presents a fine example of the dangers that arise when scientists become too complacent about the (ideally) dispassionate nature of science and cease to see themselves as individuals embedded in culture.

I have to admit that I was often lost in the section on factor analysis, but even this experience of cluelessness was instructive. Beware of those who use statistics in the service of oppression. They may be running a rigged game that few are equipped to recognize.

Not a light read by any stretch, but nevertheless a great book about an interesting topic, namely, the history and procedural/logical flaws underlying the deterministic conclusion that our intelligence is a unitary, hereditary, and unchangeable "thing." I really enjoyed the first few chapters describing the efforts over the last couple hundred years to conclusively link mental inferiority with race and/or sex. The 7th chapter, which delves into the basics of factor analysis and why "correlation is not causation" was a bit of a slog, but well worth understanding.

Gould is a very interesting speaker and writer. This work systematically beats the absolute living poop out of the practice of intelligence testing. However, me thinks this brilliant author who is said to have sired a disabled child doth have a very serious axe to grind and may not be giving "equal air time" to the opposing viewpoint. This book reads more like an all out attack than a pro vs. con treatise. Still, the book is worth reading for anyone who contemplates doing a factor analysis and would like to get some broad perspective on the history of same.

This is a necessary book during the current climate of high-stakes testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind stipulates that test results should be publicly reported for each subgroup (i.e., African American, Hispanic, White, etc). What is not being discussed though is how the current test results might be influenced by the culturally and linguistically biased nature of the tests. Gould's books serves as a reminder of the historical misuse of culturally and linguistically biased tests, and how the tests have historically been used to "prove" the inferiority of African Americans, immigrants, etc. The current mandate that "subgroup" test results are to be publicly reported reeks of the era of using the measurement of skulls as "proof" of African American intellectual inferiority (as delineated in Gould's book).

Jerry Pournelle has stated that Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" wasn't science. In a way, I have to agree with Pournelle because the book doesn't do what science does, viz state a hypothesis and present data and arguments to support it. Rather, it debunks an entire field of study, namely IQ testing.

Gould starts by reaching back a couple of hundred years to show early attempts to objectively define and determine intelligence, for example by the shape or volume of the skull. Gould shows conclusively that early studies were hopelessly biased to show whites were superior to non-whites and men to women. Sometimes the academics didn't realize their bias and honestly believed they were being objective, other times they were guilty of fraud by selecting specific test subjects to support their thesis.

Gould argues that today's program of intelligence testing is as misguided as craniometry was then. He argues against biological determinism and against the abstraction of intelligence as a single number, as a single thing. Does it make any sense when speaking of Newton, Mozart, or Darwin that one is more intelligent than the other? But that is what IQ tests do: they line up people along a single dimension.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Until about a century and a half ago, serious studies were published in respectable scientific journals regarding the correlation between the skull sizes of people and their intelligence. Some people went even further and inferred the mental abilities of people from the shape of their face.

A few decades later, when Darwinism entered the mainstream, many known researchers were pushing purely hereditary systems of intelligence, proposing to sterilize mentally ill, or just "funny looking" people in order to prevent them from reproducing.

Finally, in the 20th century (and probably up until today) research has been focusing on devising test that will assess intelligence in a single number, nowadays called IQ.

These are the topics discussed in great detail in this book. Prof. Gould obviously took this issue seriously, and produced an amazing scope of research on the subject of measuring human intelligence. Actually, the book is so packed with information and facts, that it almost feels like a long scientific paper, which makes some portions burdensome to read. Along with presenting the history of intelligence testing in detail, Gould focuses on two important topics which are the main theme of the book.

One is the unavoidable skew and prejudice that inevitably seeps into many scientific researches, and more often than not reflects the cultural patterns of the era in which the research was conducted. For example, in the 19th century when craniometry was the leading "tool" to try and measure intelligence, many works were skewed by racial prejudice. Researches would, knowingly and unknowingly finagle data to try and "prove" that blacks are inherently inferior to whites, French are superior to Germans, Germans are superior to French, et cetera. In the early 20th century, crude written and oral intelligence tests (which later evolved into the Stanford Binet IQ test) were used as a weapon of people who tried to prove that immigration into America is bad because it lowers the average intellectual level of the residents.

The other is the inherent will of humanity to reify everything (Reification is the attempt to treat abstractions as concretes), sometimes unjustifiably. In the context of the book, an especially unforgivable reification is trying to quantify something as obviously complex and multi-dimensional as human intelligence in a single number. Here is a quote from the book (pp. 252) that describes this well:

"The temptation to reify is powerful. The idea that we have detected something "underlying" the externalities of a large set of correlation coefficients, something perhaps more real than the superficial measurements themselves, can be intoxicating. It is Plato's essence, the abstract, eternal reality underlying superficial appearances. But is is a temptation we must resist, for it reflects the ancient prejudice of thought, not a truth of nature."

Although this book is a bit heavy, it still makes an interesting read, since it gives a rare insight into the sometimes forgotten motives that invariably involve themselves into science. Although in theory science is objective, quite often personal motives, prejudices and just plain subjective patterns of thought creep in, and it is important to know when this happens in order to be able to see the facts clearly.

`The Mismeasure of Man' by the famous and recently deceased scientist / essayist, Stephen Jay Gould is possibly one of the finest essays in science in the last few decades, close, but not quite equal to the great `Silent Spring' by Rachael Carson. If there is any regrets to be felt about this book, it is that it did not appear twenty-five years before its 1981 publication date.

This book appeared after the publication of Gould's second collection of `Natural Science' columns, collected in the volume `The Panda's Thumb'. It was my purchasing this book of the `New Non-Fiction' display of my local bookstore, which lead to my discovery of Gould and my lifelong admiration of his essays. Oddly, when this book first came out, I gave it less attention than I did his collection of essays, as I sensed that this was, indeed, `old news', as I felt the civil rights battles, had been won. At the very least, I believed that the false anthropology underlying discrimination had been firmly put to death, at least in the United States. I did not yet appreciate the lessons in this book of how science can be biased, either intentionally or unintentionally, to support political beliefs.

Having now read the book through and through, I must recommend it to anyone who deals with the intersection of fact and policy. The book gives several object lessons in how `scientific' experiments can be biased, sometimes without even thinking. As an aside, I must plug the TV show, `CSI', as if it needed the recommendation, as a great showcase of how science can be twisted and how hard it can be to undo the damage done by cleverly corrupted science. In contrast, it is depressing to see how transparent are the misrepresentations of politicians and how weak are the efforts of journalists and intellectuals in correcting political misrepresentations.

The primary subject of this book is the efforts of largely competent scientists, some of them quite famous, to show by scientific means that one or more races of man are inferior to the white race by a mistaken measure of either physical or psychological characteristics. In each case, Gould shows how either the measurements were biased or the protocol of the experiments was biased or basic assumptions about the effect of the physical on the mental was mistaken.

While I have recently resumed a conversation with a long lost philosophical colleague who has a substantially poorer opinion of Gould than I, and while I have not explored his objections in depth, I think this book in particular has more of value than any three of his collections of essays. It is quite possibly his most important popular writing.

Stephen Jay Gould continues to do solid work tying his love of paleontology and social justice. He understands the history of science quite well. He actually went back and looked carefully at the work of "race scientists" like Morton and went through their calculations carefully documenting their errors. He deserves praise not only for this book but for the Panda's Thumb, Ever Since Darwin and his other work. As someone with ancestry from the American holocausts, with Native American and Afro-American ancestry, and more importantly as a human being, I appreciate Gould's deep humanity. Thanks Dr. Gould! There are other great books with a similiar commitment like Rutgers Psychologist, William Tucker's contribution, The Politics and Science of Racial Research, which doesn't get as much acclaim.

This book is nothing but a politically correct propaganda piece. I had to use it for a class in college, and I found myself rolling my eyes through much of the reading. It's scary to think that this book is actually used in educational institutions. This was nothing more than Gould's politically correct opinion. It completely throws out all scientific facts, and tries to convince everyone that every human being is the same, we are the world, Kumbaya, etc., etc. Unfortunately, this isn't reality. It's nothing but an indoctrination tool, nothing more.

It is peculiar that the science of measuring cranial capacity has found a new respectability. Gould expounds at length on the wrong-headedness of Morton's efforts in the mid 19th century to find a correlation between brain size and intelligence. Morton was, of course, handicapped by the fact it would be another fifty years before another intelligence researcher, Spearmen, would invent the science of statistics.

Gould, reediting this book in 1996, responded to "The Bell Curve's" Murray and Herrnstein and in so doing chose to ignore the work of major contemporary researchers in the area of intelligence, among the most important of whom are Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen and Arthur Jensen. Three quarters of "Mismeasure" focuses on work that was decades old at the time of his writing. He dismisses "The Bell Curve" with an argument to the effect that the "g" which intelligence tests measure does not measure everything, as he would have his antagonists claim, and therefore really measures nothing. The answer is of course in between. "g" is a far from perfect predictor of individual performance. It is, however, the result of a century's science. It is the best available predictor and has a high statistical correlation with success in education and professional life. Gould's task is not to prove it is not perfect. That much is conceded. He needs to disprove the significance of the above correlations or devise a better measure.

It is ironic that recent intelligence researchers have revived cranial measurement as one device for studying differences among populations, along with traditional intelligence tests, reaction time measurements, pitch discrimination tests and almost every other metric that might make sense to the Howard Gardners of the world. Their studies show consistent correlations among these metrics, and between measured intelligence and worldly accomplishment.

Resisting the science of intelligence is becoming untenable on scientific grounds. Gould's modern-day villains have arrived at their positions through elaborately constructed analyses controlling for nutrition, educational environment, parental involvement, different types of intelligence and different methods of testing. His supporters should do the same; within the realm of science, it is time to conduct some major statistical studies to support the thesis of equal intelligence or cede the argument.

But, as Gould acknowledges throughout, it is primarily a moral argument. Egalitarian authors find it "hurtful" and "unutterable" even to discuss the possibility that there are differences among the average abilities of different races. On the other hand, observing the vast difference in the accomplishments of different races, not only in the U.S. but between and within countries throughout the world, a great many observers have come to one of two moral conclusions:
1) Certain peoples do not achieve because they are morally deficient: lazy, given to vice or whatever, or,
2) "Hegemonists" such as European nations or Caucasian people systematically and immorally frustrate the aspirations of other peoples through subtle racism.

Either way it is a blame game. And profoundly immoral, if the blame is not deserved.

Rejection of the insistence of equality would clear the way for some difficult but needed discussions of public policy. If we acknowledge that averages of the peoples of the world differ not only, as we can easily observe, on every visible trait, but also on latent traits such as temperament and certain cognitive abilities, we may find that the vast sums spent attempting to force equal average outcomes in, say, education are simply wrongheaded. We may be blindly trying to force some kids to achieve above what they are able, and withholding from others the preparation they could use to make the most of their abilities. The way to overcome these difficulties is to see each person as an individual. There are smart people and high achievers of every hue... why get preoccupied with percentages? Simply attempt to enable each person to achieve his or her potential.

To put it bluntly: This book is fantastic. Gould makes incredibly cogent arguments as to the fallacies in logic made by IQ testers and those that tried to brand criminals with race or apperances.
He is very verbose, but the beautiful language, and multipel tangents, just add to the reader's knowledge, and impress on the read the author's immense authority of the subject at hand.
Admittedly, Gould loses the general reader in the chapter on Factor Analysis, but the rest of the book is quite accessible to the layman.
If you want to know why the Bell Curve blows, and why conservatives are so wrong, read this book!

I read this book many years ago, and was disappointed. Gould writes so well, yet his logic is fundamentally flawed IMHO. He shows (or purports to show) that various measurements of intelligence that used in the past were biased or flat-out wrong. He shows that inheritable intelligence is hard to measure accurately. Fine, but, so what? Does that mean that inheritable intelligence doesn't exist, or that every human being has the identical native intelligence? Of course not. Yet, without saying so, Gould leaves the reader to infer that one or the other of these conclusions.

Whenever The Bell Curve is mentioned, someone is likely to claim that it has been "decisively refuted" by Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, makes three assertions. First, intelligence is the single most important factor in determining academic success and prosperity, and it is highly important in determining other beneficial outcomes in life. Second, intelligence is primarily determined by genes. Third, the average intelligence of some races is higher than it is for other races, for reasons that are again genetic.

These assertions infuriate many liberals. Nevertheless, few conservatives embrace them. This may be because they imply that there is little moral significance to the distribution of wealth and income. Charles Murray has acknowledged, "science is demonstrating that no one deserves his IQ." The Bell Curve suggests that the rich are not better people than the rest of us. They are more fortunate in a way the rest of us would rather not think about. Moreover, their achievements are out of reach for most of us.

Rich conservatives want us to believe that we can achieve what they have achieved if only we apply ourselves. They fear that if we don't believe that, we may believe that raising their taxes is a good idea.

Therefore, The Mismeasure of Man has received a positive reception. Unfortunately, Professor Gould's arguments are so erroneous as to indicate deliberate deception.

In much of the book he describes and refutes nineteenth century explanations of racial differences in intelligence and behavior. Think about that for a moment. During the nineteenth century everyone knew that the sun provided the earth with warmth and light. Nevertheless, physicists and astronomers had no concept of the nuclear fusion that made this possible. Disproving a nineteenth century theory on how the sun provides warmth and light does not mean that the sun does not provide warmth and light.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Samuel George Morton used lead shot and a large number of skulls in order to argue that Germans, English, and Anglo Americans have larger brains on the average then other races. Professor Gould claims that Samuel Morton fudged his results.

However, a study by an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, John S. Michael, concluded that it was Professor Gould who fudged his results.

When a 1996 edition of The Mismeasure of Man came out Professor Gould did not mention John Michel's study. This led Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia to say, "I just didn't trust Gould. I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme...I just felt he was a charlatan."

Professor Gould did make a few legitimate observations about Samuel Morton's research. For example, larger people tend to have larger brains than smaller people, even though larger people do not tend to be more intelligent than smaller people. When comparing Caucasians with Mongoloids, Samuel Morton included Peruvian Indians, who tend to be small with the Mongoloids. He omitted East Indians. East Indians are considered to be Caucasians. They are also small.

Nevertheless, more recent brain measurements with larger samples and more advanced methods demonstrate that when body size is held constant there is still a strong correlation between brain size and intelligence. Moreover, Orientals (inhabitants of China, Korea, and Japan) tend to have larger brains than whites, who tend to have larger brains than Negroes. Finally, Orientals tend to have higher IQ's than whites, who tend to have higher averages than Negros.

Professor Gould points out that nineteenth century theories of racial differences overestimated the comparative intelligence of white Gentiles of north western European origins. Contemporary race realists like Jared Taylor, Professor J. Philippe Rushton, and Richard Lynn freely acknowledge that Orientals tend to be more intelligent than white Gentiles. Richard Lynn has written a book describing the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews that is entitled The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement.

In their book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution University of Utah professors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending explain how the Ashkenazi evolved to have the highest average IQ of any racial group.

By not acknowledging this, Professor Gould leaves some of his readers with the illusion that those who inquire into individual and racial differences in intelligence are motivated by white racism and anti-Semitism.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke wrote, "an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact, or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other."

Early hereditarians overestimated the average intelligence of those of north western European ancestry, while underestimating that of Italians, Orientals, and Ashkenazi Jews. Professor Gould draws attention to this. Unfortunately, he does this in order to suggest that differences in average intelligence are insignificant and easily bridged by social reform and social welfare spending.

Professor Gould devotes a chapter exposing errors and weaknesses in IQ testing among military recruits during World War I. During World War I the entire concept of IQ and the practice of IQ testing were very new. Testing the ability to learn, rather than what has been learned, is difficult. It should not surprise us that methods used during the First World War were inexact.

Stephen J. Gould wants us to believe that IQ testing during World War I was a politically malevolent waste of time and money. If this was true, the U.S. military would not have continued the practice. The U.S. military has remained solidly committed to intelligence testing because it has proven its ability to separate recruits who can quickly learn complex skills from those who cannot.

In 1984 George Orwell wrote: "All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four."

It is all right for the dean of admissions of a university to pretend that IQ differences do not matter, and that blacks and Hispanics do not have less ability; they have different ability. Inadequate blacks and Hispanics pay the same tuition as do competent whites and Asians. When beneficiaries of affirmative action drop out or flunk out, the university still deposits their tuition money in the bank. The university can encourage blacks and Hispanics who do not belong on campus to take useless puff courses in black and Hispanic studies. When they graduate and end up in minimum wage jobs the university has still not lost. It can brag about having a student body "that looks like America," and it can continue the scam.

Those in charge of the U.S. military cannot afford these delusions. That is why they have continued to perform intelligence testing, despite pressures to lower standards for blacks and Hispanics.

Over the years mental aptitude testing has become better able to predict intellectual outcomes. You will not learn this by reading The Mismeasure of Man.

Professor Gould obliquely acknowledges a strong correlation between different mental abilities. Then he spends much time arguing against those who he claims maintain a one to one correspondence. He argues that the lack of a one to one correspondence between intellectual abilities somehow means that the concept of IQ is invalid. Nevertheless, intellectual abilities correlate in ways that intellectual talent and athletic talent do not. This is why elite universities sometimes give athletic scholarships to football and basketball players who can't read at a sixth grade level.

Stephen Gould quietly acknowledges that intelligence is partly determined by genes. Then he ignores the fact that those on the other side of the dispute accede some importance to environment. In the process he leaves his more naïve readers with the assumption that intelligence is highly malleable.

When reading Professor Gould's book I was reminded of Voltaire's letter to Rousseau after reading Rousseau's "Essay on the Arts and Sciences." Allow me to paraphrase: Professor Gould, never before has anyone used so much intelligence to encourage us to believe that intelligence does not matter.

A candid, public debate on this subject has been effectively suppressed. Those who agree publicly with The Bell Curve and similar books often jeopardize their careers. Many college students are required to read The Mismeasure of Man. I suspect that most are required to agree with it in order to get a good grade. The Mismeasure of Man would be more valuable as part of the reading list of a college course on logical fallacies. Many fallacies are committed in this book, including an appeal to the consequences of a belief, appeal to emotion, guilt by association, and the straw man fallacy.

Any teacher who has taught for very long in a multi racial public school that practices social promotion, but that does not segregate students into ability levels knows that some students learn faster with less effort than other students. They know that those in the first group can learn what those in the second group cannot. They know that students in some racial groups tend to learn faster than students in other racial groups. They know that while learning ability correlates with parental income, there are notable exceptions. The logical conclusion to be drawn from these observations is consistent with the thesis of The Bell Curve, rather than that of The Mismeasure of Man.

You don't need to read The Bell Curve to know that The Mismeasure of Man was written by an ideologue with a political agenda. Spend several months as a substitute teacher in a predominantly black public school. You will find that the problem is not that the toilets don't flush. The problem is that white students who try to use the toilets get beaten up. You will find that the great majority of the black students are several years behind, that many are rude and disrespectful, and that a fairly large minority of the boys are dangerous and criminal.

SAT and ACT scores are not equivalent to IQ scores. Nevertheless, they correlate. From 1987 to 2012 the race gap in SAT scores between whites and blacks increased. The ACT scores in 2005 show a similar gap.

Charles Murray put it best when he wrote in "The Inequality Taboo," "specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm." The Mismeasure of Man is an articulate expression of the delusions which have since 1960 inspired government policies that have wasted several trillion dollars while raising rates of crime and illegitimacy.

Stephen Jay Gould used Darwinian evolution as a weapon against Protestant Fundamentalists. Nevertheless, Charles Darwin believed that innate differences between individuals, and average differences between sub species and human races are of critical significance. He was sympathetic toward blacks, but his sympathy was motivated by pity. He believed that blacks are inferior. Professor Gould ignored Charles Darwin by arguing that innate intelligence differences are unimportant.

The Mismeasure of Man does not decisively refute The Bell Curve and similar books. Those books will be decisively refuted when a method is developed that significantly and permanently raises the intelligence of poor children of low intelligence, and when the race gap in intellectual performance is closed. Head Start failed to achieve the first goal. No Child Left Behind failed to achieve the second goal. Two generations of failed policies are enough.

Those who believe that IQ differences between individuals and average differences between nations and races are unimportant or significantly changeable believe something for which there is no evidence at all.

Gould's book had two main lines of attack against hereditarian IQ theory. The first is disguised as history, as Gould unearths the flaws of 19th-century cranology and early 20th intelligence testing and the biases of the scientists. While making for fascinating history, this deconstructive process could be launched against any 'science', and amounts to little more than a diversionary strawman.
The second line of attack is stronger. Dealing with the inherent difficulties in measuring intelligence (for example, what fraction of intelligence is mathematical? verbal? spacial? musical?....how you weight the test will affect the scores of different people differently), Gould destoys the idea of an linear intelligence factor.
But...in reading this book, I got the same feeling I always get when enduring a post-modern deconstructive argument - that this line of argument can be used to refute ANYTHING, and that the author fears that he might not like the truth.
Overall, it is still a worthy book containing a succinct review of the history of intelligence testing and the associated prejudices of those behind the tests, as well as powerful arguments as to the dangers of taking intelligence testing too seriously.

It is amazing that an expert in a particular domain of science feels expert outside of their domain. Psychologists have been refining IQ and intelligence for many years now....the current theories are reliable and valid and allow highly accurate prediction....a good test of a theory. But this is not the domain of paleontology. For a good current review of intelligence...get Hans Eysenck's "Intelligence:A New Look"

An oldie but goodie. Pop anthropolgy icon S.J.Gould examines how the pseudoscience of intelligence testing was conceived, and has almost always been practiced as, a tool of social oppression. From early phrenology to modern standardized testing, IQ and aptitude testing has provided a scientific-appearing justification for racist and social class-based injustices.

I have an extensive library of Stephen Jay Gould's books. He is easily my favorite writer.

In this book he tries to show the history of the use of evolution for deterministic purposes. He shows the use of cranial measurement and the horrible abuses of the past (particularly racism) in the name of evolution. This should be an interesting and controversial work. But the different chapters seem like disjointed essays (which they probably are). There is really very little central moderation to his arguments to weave together a thought of "why this is wrong and why we need to guard against it today". Anyone reading chapter one on the use of evolution to justify racism against blacks may come away thinking that SJG actually believes it. He states facts without injecting the moderator's voice.

His case against biological determinism is better played out in his other book Full House.

Another problem is - does society really still use biological determinism for racism? Maybe in the South. But I see just the opposite - the preaching of "rights" in an egalitarian society

to the point where everyone is equal and are guaranteed success, with the dumbing down of college courses, tests, etc. to prove it.

It's full a fascinating detail about how the Victorians misused science to justify imperialism and racism. Gould writes wonderfully. He's not making the claim that all Victorians or their science was racist. He points out that at the time Europe was colonising Africa most aggressively during the Scramble for Africa was when scientific racism took off most. This was, of course, boosted by Darwin's work being misused too. The influential eugenics movement built on scientific racism and we all know where that led to.

Stephen J. Gould's book is a fascinating read that investigates the long history of bias and pseudo-science has shaped public policy regarding the relationship between ethnic, genetic, gender and IQ for the past 150 years, with special focus on the Eugenics movement in the 1920's. The book traces the history of measuring intelligence and shows how it has been a biased practice from the beginning, citing biological rationale for differences in the successes and statuses of particular individuals and groups in society.

Gould's writing is engaging, accessible and erudite as he thoroughly and systematically dismantles past practices by using scientific theory and statistical correlation to rework the data and re-analyze past results. Gould emphatically rejects that there is any basis for a relationship between race and I.Q.

In the first half of the Mismeasure of Man, Gould presents an overview of the studies of cranial capacity, findings which are very convincing in their biases and debunks the misuse of statistical models. The work is a firm rebuttal of the findings of The Bell Curve, a study that presented test results that surmised that I.Q. scores are the most reliable statistical indicator for measuring social class and economic success in the U.S.

This book is excellent reading for anyone with a desire to understand the origins of I.Q. and other standardized tests and why the science behind these measurements of intelligence are at best questionable and at worst, social oppression. Gould's work reminds us that we should be suspicious political uses of scientific research. A noble book and very highly recommended.

Jason Lewis of Stanford University and his colleagues concluded that every major accusation Gould lays in Samuel Morton to be wrong and frauduelent. After remeasuring the same skulls that Morton did, the anthropologists showed there was NO statistical differences between what Morton measured and what they measured. Additionally, Gould did exactly what he accused Morton of: dishonestly ignored inconvenient portions the data in order to make his case. Gould, also, either completely misunderstood the purpose behind Morton's research or he simply lied. The latter seems more likely given the recent investigations into Gould's claims that routinely showed him to be an all around scientific fraud.

Stephen Jay Gould, in his zeal to discredit The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, committed academic fraud in writing this book. Gould's methods of massaging data until it fit with his world view has been roundly condemned in the NY Times and numerous science magazines. Columbia University's Ralph Holloway called him a fact-fudging "charlatan".

Don't waste your time or money.

Yale University's Stephen Jay Gould de-bunks the entire standardized testing industry as he reviews the history of intelligence testing and removes the credibility of the IQ test. It is not difficult to conclude from this eminently readable book that standardized tests are given because they produce numbers that are PRESUMED to have meaning, and because it's easy. It also feeds a money-hungry testing industry, but it hurts all kids and all schools. This is worth reading.

Some critics complain that in The Mismeasure of Man Stephen J. Gould attacks a straw man: craniometry is, after all, no more than fin-du-siècle quackery with which no self-respecting scientist would dream of having truck these says. Likewise, the naïve early attempts at to link IQ with heredity that Gould spends so much time recounting have long since been soundly and uncontroversially demolished, so Gould at best is shooting fish in a barrel, and many suspect him of something more mendacious than that. Some suspect a political agenda. The late Stephen Jay Gould, you see, was a *Marxist*, after all.

That particular, ad hominem, charge has mystified me the more I've read of Gould's work. I first encountered Gould in discouraging circumstances where his evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium was subjected to a contumelious lambasting at the hands of (usually) mild-mannered philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his (otherwise) wonderful and thought-provoking book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.

Taken as I was by Dennett's general argument at the time (I'm less swooned by it these days), I thought his vituperative treatment of Gould was out of character - from what I can tell Dennett is a positively genial chap - but otherwise thought nothing of it, other than supposing Gould to be part of the problem and not the solution.

There I surely would have left it, and Stephen J. Gould, were it not for Richard Dawkins' silly entry to the "religious wars" The God Delusion - as good an example as one could ask for of how perfectly thoughtful, sensible and smart scientists tend to make arses of themselves when they stray from their stock material. About the only interesting thing in Dawkins' book was how, again, poor old Steve Gould, now sadly deceased, got another shoeing, this time for his pragmatic attempt to reconcile science and religion in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life.

This time I had the BS radar switched on, found Dawkins' attack to be pretty obviously misguided (Dawkins may be a great biologist but his epistemology would have had him kicked out of PHIL 101) and wound up being more, not less, persuaded by Gould's concept of "non-overlapping magisteria".

In any case, at the very least this Gould chap seemed like the sort of contrarian agitator who was clearly a good sport and an interesting critter, but more to the point it sounded like he had something interesting to say. And so, it transpired, he does. I've since read a number of his books and articles, all of them articulate, beautifully written, witty, erudite and excellent in substance, and never once have I seen any suggestion of Marxist bias (eager followers of my reviews will know I have no particular sympathy with left wing politics).

As regards The Mismeasure of Man such insinuations would be especially ironic, since Gould's very point is to illustrate that well-meaning and well respected scientists are all too prone to be deceived into equating their wilful interpretations as scientific truths. In fact, I suspect Gould would even concede to some bias: that, he would say, is the point.

Against all the odds, there seem to be a few brave souls who hold out hope for a hereditary aspect to intelligence: indeed a couple seem to be active on this site. Gould's only substantive point for them is to say that, whatever we even mean by "intelligence", it is so obviously situational and environment-dependent (this shouldn't be news to anyone who's seen Crocodile Dundee) - in other words *socially constructed* - that seeking to tie it to something like biology - which by its very definition isn't - is on its face a waste of time. Gould the liberal then adds, by way of political commentary, that the harmless if silly conclusion that the two *are* related is liable to be misinterpreted by unscrupulous (or simply unsuspecting) people, particularly if they have a particular social agenda which would find it convenient to establish innate differences between - for which read "innate deficiencies in certain (other)" - racial groups. That isn't a scientific point, it's a political one, and to my (un-Marxist) mind, Gould is perfectly right to make it.

Now a different objection to Gould's enterprise might be that such a point doesn't require 300 pages of careful demolition of unequivocally bunk science to make (unless your correspondent is funded by the Pioneer Foundation, apparently: and for those lucky souls, not even 300 pages of argument will do it). But the methodological point is the one that interests Gould: how the hypothesis conditions the evidence sought but even the interpretation placed upon it. Gould's patient history would function as a case study for Thomas Kuhn's superb essay on the contingency of Scientific knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Gould also sees analogy between the hereditarian's linear view of intelligence with the naive ordering of all creation to accord with a supposed evolutionary progression from bacterium to homo sapiens sapiens. Again, it's not the Marxist but the Paleontologist who patiently explains that evolution doesn't work like that: it is better viewed as an expanding bush that a linear progression.

To be sure, in the early parts of this book there is a level of detail that seems superfluous, but the later aspects, and particular Gould's insight into statistical correlation and factor analysis are fascinating and well explained for a layman, and the handsomeness of his turn of phrase and the constancy of his erudition - scientists tend to be poorly read outside their fields, but this was most certainly not the case of the late professor Gould - make this a fascinating and enjoyable work by a profoundly wise and sadly missed thorn in the establishment's side.

They don't make them like this anymore, alas.

Olly Buxton

When it comes to evolution, the interesting "leit-motiv" of Stephen Jay Gould seems to be: "I ain't got a witness, and I can't prove it, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it". By repeating and recycling the mantra of Charles Darwin again and again, Stephen Jay Gould keeps convincing himself and others that evolution gives the final account of all that is. Of course he couldn't be further from the truth. This point is clearly made by man like William Dembski, Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, among others, whose books are available and are much more promising than Stephen Jay Gould's. This Harvard Professor takes the same view of Occam's razor as Richard Dawkins: "as long as we can speculate freely about natural causes of all there is, we will keep ignoring all evidence of intelligent design, no matter how strong, even if that requires engaging in scientific acrobatics". Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" is just an example of such acrobatics. This theory came as response to the huge problems that darwinism faces, and to the fact that many darwinists are coming to the conclusion that they have been "climbing mount impossible" in their quest to explain life with the tools of chance and necessity, leaving intelligence, information and design aside. Of course to some darwinists, these huge problems are just minor detais that their own "naturalism of the gaps" can quickly fix and hold together. But the equilibrium is getting harder and harder to maintain. This is the man who knows well that the lack of correspondence between the fossil record and the theory of evolution is the trade secret of paleontologists. It is true that Stephen Jay Gould has a problem with darwinian mechanism of matter, mutations and selection. He also seems to have a problem with The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins autobiography). How can this mechanism explain the huge amounts of information generation that are needed in the evolutionary process? How can it explain the mythological prebiotic soup? How can this mechanism account for being and matter in the first place? What about the Cambrian explosion? What about the "black holes" in the fossil record? This mechanism is not even adequate to legitimate extrapolations from micro to macroevolution? Stephen Jay Gould seems to realize that the only way for science to evolve is to criticize the theory of evolution. Still he sticks to his story, presenting the thumb of the Panda as evidence against design. If he is right, then the tower of Piza wasn't designed either. Of course Stephen Jay Gould and all the scientists together are not able to design a Panda, but that is just another detail.

This book refutes many core arguments racial realist use to dehumanize people.

If you read the 1 star reviews of this book you see just how fragile many of their beliefs are.

Racial realist are on par with creationists, climate change deniers, and conspiracy theorist.

I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking strong arguments against racial realism.

Stephen Gould is an excellent writer and has a great command of language. His books are generally considered well written and are consistently given excellent reviews by the publishing "Establishment"--in other words, the New York Review of Books. Although Gould excels in his writing, he is severely deficient in logic and science. The theme of his book is that the science of racial mental ability is flawed due to prejudices and mistakes of scientists of the past. He devotes a large portion of his book to describing the flawed science of 19th century scientists who tried to prove racial supierority of whites over other races and whose science was flawed due to these prejudices. ....

Folks considering reading this book should know that Gould is now well known to have been an academic fraud who falsified his work to suit his radical left-wing ideology. He overtly lied about the results of early IQ tests and (worse) doctored the results of skull size measurements. Type 'Gould Fraud Merton' into Google for a number of accounts for his deceptions and distortions. He claimed that Merton distorted his skull size data to suit his (Merton's) racist views. In fact, Merton was meticulous and Gould committed all of the (academic) crimes he accused Merton of.

This book fascinated me from beginning to end. It definitely stands up to its reputation. I'd always been interested in the eugenics and testing movement and, more than anything else I've read, this work captures the entire discussion and history. It is amazing how far Western society has come during the past 100 years and Gould does a great job of laying out the past so a reader can understand the present day.

Another reviewer wrote that "The Mismeasure of Man" contains more errors per page than any other book he has read. I can more or less concur with that assessment. Certainly as far as supposedly serious books by well-known academics go, Stephen Jay Gould's effort is sui generis. Because of space limitations, in what follows I can unfortunately describe only the main philosophical errors and a sampling of the numerous misrepresentations, falsehoods, and omissions in the book.

A STRANGE NEW PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The philosophical idea undergirding the book is that today's scientists are destined to repeat the errors of their predecessors. Gould argued that his refutation, such as it is, of early attempts to measure intelligence and discover its biological underpinnings applies with equal force to modern research on these topics. This idea is at variance with the generally accepted view of science as a progressive project where the works of one generation of scientists are amended and expanded by the next one. The acknowledgement that even great scientific geniuses were wrong about many things and must be superseded is a defining feature of science. In contrast, one of the characteristic features of nonscientific discourses is their preoccupation with the writings of long-dead authors.

Gould tried to defend his odd philosophy by arguing that "a cogent refutation of a bankrupt theory will hold, with all its merit intact, if someone tries to float a dead issue with no new support at some future moment." But this assumes that there has been no progress in understanding human intelligence. Gould never even attempted to show that this was the case. He simply ignored the huge accumulation of empirical evidence and the great advances in methodological sophistication in the research on human intelligence. For example, he paid no attention to developments in psychometrics since Louis Thurstone's work in the 1930s and almost completely ignored behavioral genetics.

Gould's argument is self-refuting because to the extent that he identified undeniable errors in the works of the scientists of previous eras, the same errors had already been pointed out a long time ago by researchers in the relevant fields and survive, at best, as cautionary tales in textbooks. Often, as Gould admitted, these scientists themselves found their earlier claims wanting and abandoned them.

Gould also criticized "biological determinists" for having a priori hypotheses before data collection, and for explaining away inconvenient findings to save their theories from falsification. Gould was faulting his targets for doing what all scientists do. Firstly, the idea that the method of science is to collect data and then derive theoretical laws from them through some kind of mechanistic induction, without any predefined hypotheses, is a naive view that bears scant resemblance to how scientists actually work. Secondly, not abandoning otherwise well-founded theories in light of a seemingly disconfirming piece of evidence is not necessarily unscientific, either. If the other parts of the theory work well, a finding that might appear damning to it may sometimes quite reasonably be discounted as, say, an experimental error. The demarcation problem of when the reasonable defense of a theory turns into unreasonable dogmatism is not always an easy one, and ultimately the justifiability of such decisions is seen only in retrospect, in the long-run progress of the particular domain of knowledge.

Another one of Gould's bugaboos was what he called reification. In particular, he argued that the use of factors derived in psychometric factor analysis as potential causal variables is illegitimate. Again, Gould castigated psychometricians for doing what scientists in all fields do. A psychometric factor is not in principle different from theoretical constructs used in other sciences, such as mass, atom, gene, or molecule. The empirical evidence for a particular hypothesized factor may currently be thin, but that does not mean that it's illegitimate to advance a realist interpretation of the factor and to seek to substantiate its existence with additional evidence. If Gould's strictures against "reification" were accepted, it would be the end of not only psychometrics but all science. The researchers that Gould excoriated for reifying psychometric factors as "things in the head" in fact always argued that the reality of factors must be substantiated by evidence that is independent of factor analysis.

Gould argued that the unconscious biases that allegedly corrupted the theories and findings of "biological determinists" reflected the interests of groups in power, helping to justify the prevailing social order. However, as he admitted in passing, many of these scientists were liberals and socialists who presumably had no particular interest in preserving the status quo. Indeed, many of them indisputably wanted to remake society by eliminating unearned privilege and helping talented individuals from deprived backgrounds succeed. Gould failed to make the case that the conclusions of these scientists reflected their political preferences. All he had were some vague notions about how the spirit of the times made scientists adopt certain positions, but this argument lacks explanatory value as the same spirit apparently caused different scientists to adopt contrary positions. For example, the claims of the early hereditarian psychometricians could not have been more contrary to those of behaviorism and Boasian anthropology, yet the three fields developed contemporaneously.

Gould's attack on "biological determinists" might have had some intellectual coherence if he had been an epistemic relativist who thought that any reliable knowledge of subjects like human intelligence was impossible. However, he identified himself quite clearly as a scientific realist. He did not think that intelligence does not exist or is not influenced by heredity, yet he was hostile to all research that seeks to measure it and understand it in biological terms. His faulting of "biological determinists" for doing what is routinely done in other sciences evidences an epistemological double standard.

The philosophy of science on which Gould built his critique is foreign to all genuine scientific endeavors. Nevertheless, his book might still have some value as a history of research on topics like physical anthropology and psychometrics. Unfortunately, he did a very bad job in this respect, too. Gould's reading of the history of these sciences was highly selective and tendentious. Instead of trying to understand the breakthroughs and limitations in the work of pioneering researchers, he had a preconceived narrative of evil "biological determinists" and their noble antagonists into which he wanted to shoehorn everyone. In the service of this goal, he thought nothing of misrepresenting the views of his targets.

MISREPRESENTING MORTON

The best-known of Gould's historical misrepresentations is his allegation that the pioneering craniometric work of the 19th century American physician Samuel Morton was corrupted by "unconscious bias." In his reanalysis of Morton's published data, Gould claimed that Morton "fudged" and "finagled" his skull measurements so that the average cranial capacities of different races appeared to align with Morton's preconceived ideas of racial hierarchy, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. According to Gould, Morton's raw data, when properly analyzed, reveal almost no differences between races.

In 2011, a group of anthropologists headed by Jason Lewis published a study reporting their remeasurements of Morton's skull collection and their re-examination of Gould's and Morton's craniometric analyses. They found, firstly, that Morton's measurements of the skulls closely matched their own, and, secondly, that Gould's reanalysis of Morton's data (contrary to what some believe, Gould never measured any skulls himself) is ridden with mistakes, unsupported allegations, and arbitrary analytical choices that enabled him to arrive at his conclusions about Morton's supposed errors. Morton's measurements and the way he reported on them show no signs of bias and appear to be uninfluenced by whatever preconceptions he had. It was in fact Gould who fudged and finagled his way to his preconceived conclusions in his reanalysis of Morton's work.

A few examples of Gould's subterfuges help illustrate his tactics:

1) Gould claimed that Morton never published data on the mean cranial capacities of different Native American groups because Morton wanted to conceal the fact that some of them had high means. However, these "missing" mean values are presented in at least 12 different places in the book Gould refers to.

2) Gould argued that the differences between Morton's early and imprecise as contrasted with his later and more objective methods of cranial measurement reveal unconscious finagling, with the earlier, more easily manipulable methods showing a larger downward bias for non-white samples. However, Gould arrived at his estimates of method-dependent racial differences through pure guesswork on what skulls Morton did or did not remeasure with different methods. The discrepancies between the two methods are most plausibly explained not by bias but the two factors identified by Morton himself: the first method was inherently unreliable, and the assistant used (and later dismissed) by Morton was sometimes careless. Gould's frequently quoted reimagining of how Morton, while filling skulls so as to measure their volumes, "picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes", and then "takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb" is a calumny grounded in no evidence whatsoever.

3) Another of Gould's claims was that Morton artificially depressed the measured mean volume of his Native American skulls, as reported in his 1839 book "Crania Americana", by calculating a "straight mean" of all the skulls, regardless of subgroup affiliation. Gould argued that Morton should have used the "grouped mean" (where the means of all subgroups are averaged), calculating that this would have increased the Native American mean by almost four cubic inches. However, Lewis and colleagues show that the two methods give almost identical answers, with the straight mean actually producing a slightly higher value (80.2 versus 79.9 cubic inches). The higher mean that Gould calculated was an artifact of his choosing to exclude almost 25% of the Native American skulls based on his completely arbitrary decision that only subgroups with sample sizes of four or more (why not three or five or ten?) should be included. Additionally, Gould excluded a further six skulls, all with small cranial volumes, giving no rationale for these additional exclusions.

4) Contra Gould, Morton did not actually believe that brain size determined intelligence.

Morton's published rank-ordering of races by cranial capacity is correct in the sense that it's the one that exists in his skull collection. Modern research concurs that human populations differ in mean brain size, corroborating Morton's conclusions at least broadly. Moreover, IQ and brain size are robustly correlated at around 0.3-0.4, the evidence for which Gould studiously ignored in his book. (To be sure, the correlation is unlikely to represent a direct causal effect, and in any case cannot account for observed population differences in IQ.)

Lewis and colleagues were not the first to conclude that Morton's measurements and calculations were conducted with integrity and that it was Gould who was massaging his numbers. Back in the 1980s, John Michael remeasured a large sample of skulls from Morton's collection and analyzed Gould's claims, concluding that the allegations against Morton were unsupported. Michael's report was published in Current Anthropology in 1989. Gould, however, ignored this re-analysis, repeating his claims about Morton verbatim in the second edition of "Mismeasure."

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IQ TESTING

The French psychologist Alfred Binet is credited with devising the first IQ-type tests around 1905. His American colleague Henry Goddard translated the tests into English and began using them in clinical practice. He found Binet's tests to be a superior way to diagnose "feeble-mindedness", or mental retardation (MR). Goddard came to believe that MR was a central cause of crime and other social problems. He thought that IQ tests reliably measured "innate intelligence", and that MR was usually caused by a single Mendelian gene. The latter claim was made famous by his study of the Kallikak family. Goddard believed that the menace of the feeble-minded should be addressed by curtailing their fertility, preferably by institutional segregation. He was soon joined in many of these convictions by other psychologists, such as Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes, and Carl Brigham.

It's easy to criticize the men who dominated intelligence testing in America for its first decade or two. They made sweeping claims based on the scantiest of evidence. They missed glaring shortcomings in their methodology. They advocated draconian social policies based on poorly supported theories. Starting in the 1920s, they came under heavy criticism, prompting most of them to reconsider their views. These men and their research constituted an easy target for Gould's critique of "biological determinism", but he ended up painting them with far too broad a brush.

The early phase of IQ testing and its attendant eugenicist overtones can be best understood in the general social and political context of the early decades of the 20th century. In those days, the idea of improving heredity was an unquestioned part of the social reformist agenda. Widespread support for eugenics and immigration restriction, for example, was found across the political spectrum, from socialists to conservatives. The preoccupation with heredity did not, however, preclude other reforms. From Gould's account, you would never guess that Goddard was an early and influential lobbyist for state-funded special education, while Terman campaigned in favor of free health care for all schoolchildren.

Gould argues that Goddard and others started with the assumption of the innateness of measured intelligence and ran with it, rather than arriving at that conclusion through research. This claim does not seem to be fit the facts, at least as far as Goddard is concerned. In her carefully researched biography of Goddard (see my review), Leila Zenderland notes that Goddard's assumptions about intelligence and MR were initially starkly environmental. However, after several years of work in the field he concluded that MR was usually an irreversible genetic condition. It seems that his strict hereditarianism resulted from many years of failed attempts at rehabilitating mentally retarded children. Gould chided Binet's American followers for not having the Frenchman's optimism about amelioration, but in fact Goddard's experience in this area vastly exceeded Binet's.

Gould assumed an unanimity of motives and beliefs among the early IQ researchers that just wasn't there. For example, he portrayed all of them as racists and ethnic chauvinists determined to stop the immigration to America of what they presumably saw as the feeble-minded hordes of Eastern and Southern Europe. Gould considered Goddard as the epitome of this attitude, dedicating the book to the memory of his grandparents, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe "who came, struggled, and prospered, Mr. Goddard notwithstanding." Ironically, unlike most of his colleagues Goddard showed no interest in immigration restriction or racial and ethnic differences. In his study of the intelligence of a sample of Eastern and Southern European immigrants (which was grossly misrepresented by Gould), Goddard dismissed a hereditarian explanation of their low IQs, asserting that it is "far more probable that their condition is due to environment than that it is due to heredity" and that "we know their environment has been poor [which] seems able to account for the result." Gould also portrayed the intelligence testers as prime movers behind the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act, but in their study of the immigration reform Mark Snyderman and Richard Herrnstein found that the "testing community did not generally view its findings as favoring restrictive immigration policies like those in the 1924 Act, and Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing."

An argument that runs through much of "Mismeasure" is that Goddard, Terman, and other American IQ testers betrayed Alfred Binet's benign legacy. According to Gould, Binet only intended his tests to be used to identify poorly performing students so that they could be offered special instruction, "vigorously reject[ing]" any hereditarian interpretations of the test results. In contrast, his American followers claimed that IQ tests measured innate intelligence and adapted them to be used as a general-purpose instrument for measuring all levels of intelligence. Most damningly in Gould's mind, the Americans used the tests to argue that that there were differences in intelligence between social classes, ethnic groups, and races.

However, a perusal of Binet's published papers reveals that the contrast Gould drew between the "good" Binet and his "bad" American followers is largely illusory. For example, Binet believed that his tests should be used to study the mental subnormality of criminals, "the relation of the mental functions with the cranium development", and--yes--sex, race, and class differences. Even the project to use IQ tests to select military recruits during WWI, on whose failings Gould spent much ink, may have had its origins in Binet's suggestion that the French army use his tests to weed out low intelligence recruits. When it comes to heredity, Binet wrote that the purpose of his tests was to reveal "the natural intelligence of the child, and not his degree of culture, his amount of instruction", although he was uncertain whether the tests actually achieved this goal. On top of this, Binet envisioned a future society organized by the means of intelligence testing "where every one would work according to his known aptitudes in such a way that no particle of psychic force should be lost for society." Far from betraying Binet's legacy, the pioneers of American intelligence testing can be seen as the rightful successors of the French psychologist. In his search for a "pure" hero to serve as a foil to his designated villains, Gould ended up misrepresenting Binet's views, too.

While the first generation of intelligence testers greatly overestimated the validity and reliability of their tests as measures of "innate intelligence", they were not completely wrong. A hundred years later we know that IQ tests, when properly designed and administered, have a predictive validity that is greater and more universal than that of any other psychological or sociological variable. Moreover, IQ test results reflect genetic differences between individuals to a very substantial degree.

SPEARMAN VERSUS THURSTONE

Charles Spearman developed a theory according to which individual differences in intelligence can be explained in terms of a single general factor (or g) which contributes to performance in all intellectual domains and a large number of narrow abilities each of which has utility in only one limited domain. He invented an early version of factor analysis and concluded that it supported his model of intelligence.

Louis Thurstone, in his turn, applied a method of multiple factor analysis to mental test data in order to show that, contra Spearman, intelligence consisted of a number of uncorrelated dimensions with no general factor. Essentially, he tried to demonstrate that it's possible to find a factor axis in high-dimensional space on which (for example) verbal ability tests "load" (i.e., correlate with), but which at the same time is uncorrelated with the axis on which (for example) spatial ability tests load. The problem with Thurstone's exercise was that all intelligence tests are in fact correlated, which gave rise to cross-loadings, e.g., verbal ability tests had substantial loadings not only on the verbal factor but also on the spatial factor even though the factor axes themselves were uncorrelated. If tests of a particular ability correlate with factors that are meant to represent other abilities, what grounds are there to speak of uncorrelated ability factors? Thurstone's solution to this was the oblique rotation which allows the factor axes to be correlated with each other. This enabled him the find factor solutions that did not contain g but had multiple factors without substantial cross-loadings.

However, when the factor axes are allowed to correlate with each other, one can extract a so-called second-order g factor which summarizes the common variance of the axes. This gave pause to Thurstone because it showed that what he considered to be the most satisfactory way of rotating the axes caused the g factor to re-emerge, suggesting that Spearman was right after all. Gould wrote that "I confess that I do not understand why [Thurstone] wrestled so hard" with this second-order g, and claimed that Arthur Jensen, the leading intelligence researcher of the latter part of the 20th century, "badly misinterpreted" the debate when he argued that the idea of a second-order g brought the dispute between Spearman and Thurstone to an end, vindicating a modified form of Spearman's model. As usual, Jensen was right and Gould wrong. Gould's befuddlement was caused by the following, mind-bogglingly erroneous idea of his: "Second-order g [...] rarely accounts for more than a small percentage of the total information in a matrix of tests. On the other hand, [first-order] g [...] often encompasses more than half the information." The fact of the matter is that the g factor is largely insensitive to the method of extraction. If a first-order g accounts for half of the total variance in a correlation matrix, so will a second-order g that is based on oblique factors extracted from that matrix. This is the reason why Thurstone eventually accepted Spearman's g.

FACTORS AND CAUSES

After spending numerous pages arguing that it's absurd to try to rank people on a unidimensional scale of intelligence, Gould made this surprising statement: "The fact of pervasive positive correlation between mental tests must be one of the most unsurprising major discoveries in the history of science." Why was he then so hostile to the construct of g? He gave the following reason: "If the simple existence of g can be theoretically interpreted in either a purely hereditarian or purely environmentalist way, then its mere presence--even its reasonable strength--cannot justly lead to any reification at all." This reasoning indicates that Gould failed to understand the purpose of factor analysis. If it's true that the g factor reliably reflects some specific set of differences in brain structure causing differences in test scores and other indicators of intelligence, then the g factor is real regardless of whether people's brains differ in those ways due to hereditary or environmental reasons.

Factor analysis can be used to identify potentially causal variables but it does not say anything about what in turn causes those variables. For that, we need different methods, such as those of behavioral genetics which in fact show that whatever g is, it's mainly caused by genetic rather than environmental differences between individuals. Gould's contention that g could reflect socioeconomic and other differences between families is also readily falsified by the observation that the g factor can be identified from within-family sibling differences in IQ test performance.

Even if factor analysis had never been invented, any serious theory of intelligence would still have explain why all cognitive ability tests correlate positively with each other. It's probably the most consistent finding in psychology, invariably found across different cultures and time periods. If you reject the mainstream Spearman-Jensen theory of general intelligence, you must come up with something else to explain the empirical facts. Gould never addressed this fundamental issue, except to offer the aforementioned, easily refuted hypothesis of environmental causation.

"BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM"

Gould's favorite term of abuse was "biological determinist." He used this fuzzy term to label a large number of researchers in many fields holding vastly varying views about the nature and importance of heredity. Ironically, Gould relied on the imaginary opposition between "biological determinists" and "good scientists" throughout the book while at the same time decrying the human tendency to come up with dichotomies that obscure more than they reveal.

Gould defined the "hereditarian fallacy" as, firstly, the belief that "heritable" is the same as "inevitable", and, secondly, as the idea that heritability within groups proves that differences between groups are heritable. As to the first part of the "fallacy", it's true that the etiology of a disease or other deficiency does not, in itself, tell us anything about its curability or malleability. However, if a specific genetic disease or deficiency is not, in the light of current knowledge and technology, curable, it's not wrong to say that it's the inevitable consequence of a specific gene or genes. The fact that it's possible that a cure will be discovered at some future date does not make it wrong to assert that, say, Huntington's disease is incurable. More to the point, most forms of mental retardation remain as incurable today as they were in the days of Henry Goddard or Cyril Burt.

When it comes to the second part of the "fallacy", Gould asserted, falsely, that Arthur Jensen held this erroneous view of heritability. Gould made this strong claim: "Within- and between-group heredity are not tied by rising degrees of probability as heritability increases within groups and differences enlarge between them. The two phenomena are simply separate." Unfortunately for Gould, this is not true. Under any realistic model of genetic and environmental causation, explaining phenotypic differences between groups in strictly environmental terms means that you must assume larger environmental differences between the groups the higher the heritability of the trait is within groups. This logic had been explained by Jensen and others many times, but rather than address its implications, Gould chose to concentrate on a strawman version of the argument. Gould preferred to dwell on strawmen and irrelevant historical arcanae rather than engage in an honest scientific debate over contemporary theories and the evidence behind them.

Gould also claimed that the g factor provides "the only promising theoretical justification that hereditarian theories of IQ have ever had", asserting that this is the reason why Jensen defined intelligence in terms of g. This is, of course, nonsense, as multiple abilities can be as heritable as a single ability. Jensen defended the validity of g not because this view was in accord with some hereditarian agenda, but because he considered it as the model that best fit the empirical facts. Gould studiously ignored the reams of evidence that Jensen and others had presented in support of g.

THE BELL CURVE

Tucked at the end of the 1996 edition of "Mismeasure" is a review of "The Bell Curve", Murray and Herrnstein's (M&H) 1994 social science bestseller. Besides repeating many of the arguments criticized above, Gould faulted M&H for conceptualizing intelligence in terms of the g factor, for overstating the practical significance of their findings, and for presenting their results in a misleading way. None of these accusations hold up under scrutiny.

The reason why M&H talked about intelligence in terms of g is that it's the mainstream view among experts, supported by numerous lines of evidence. They used composite scores from several different tests as estimates of individuals' standings on the g factor. If one rejects the realist interpretation of g, these composite scores can instead be treated as average scores over different abilities. Thus, regardless of what the "true" theory of intelligence is, the validity of M&H's results is not under question.

Analyzing a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, M&H reported correlations between adolescent IQ and many adult social outcomes. The correlations were usually in the range of 0.20-0.40. Gould claimed that such effect sizes are too small to have any real-world significance. In fact, the effect sizes in "The Bell Curve" are on the high side for social science. For one thing, the predictive validity of IQ was almost always superior to that of parental socioeconomic status (SES). The IQ-outcome correlations can also be compared to the black-white income gap in M&H's data which corresponds to a correlation of about 0.17. If one wishes to dismiss the IQ-outcome correlations as insubstantial, then one must also contend that poverty is not an important social problem and that there are no black-white income differences to speak of--two claims that Gould would probably have angrily rejected. Moreover, M&H generally reported partial correlations between IQ and social outcomes, with the effect of parental SES held constant, which understates the real predictive power of IQ because the correlation between parental SES and children's IQ mainly reflects heredity.

Because M&H used an estimate of 60% for the heritability of IQ, Gould argued that they should have adjusted their IQ-outcome correlations downwards by 40%, i.e., the non-genetic variance of IQ. For some reason Gould thought that if intelligence is not genetic, then it's nothing. But if IQ variation causes differences in another variable, the effect is causal regardless of the etiology of IQ itself. Gould's point could have had some merit if the correlations were confounded with the effects of parental SES, but "The Bell Curve" reports partial correlations, as explained above. Moreover, the non-genetic variance in IQ is mainly of the "within-family" variety and therefore unrelated to SES and other between-families variables.

Gould also claimed that M&H were deceptive when describing their results because they did not report R squared statistics in the main text. This is nonsense. M&H rightly refused to fetishize the relatively useless and often misleading R squared. Instead, they presented tables and charts with percentages and standardized or binned variables, making it very easy to discern the strength of the relationships.

GOULD'S AGENDA

"The Mismeasure of Man" is an attack on what Gould termed "biological determinism." While the topics of the book are mostly historical, the real target of his assault nevertheless seemed to be the work of contemporary researchers. Gould sought to undermine the credibility of contemporary "biological determinism" not by criticizing the arguments and evidence presented by modern scientists but by assaulting research conducted mainly in the 19th century and the early 20th century and alleging that the (putative) errors of the researchers of previous eras had somehow rubbed off on their modern successors. This approach had the great advantage that he had plenty of leeway to defame and misportray people who could no longer defend themselves.

Gould made lofty promises of impartiality and objectivity in the book's introduction. If one were exceedingly charitable, the myriad errors in the first, 1981 edition could be put down to him being an extraordinarily sloppy researcher whose apparent scholarly misconduct was inadvertent. However, when he decided that the second, 1996 edition needed no substantial updating, the jig was definitely up. The publication of many detailed critiques of the first edition combined with the avalanche of new research on intelligence since 1981 rendered a large number of the book's claims indefensible. When preparing the new edition, Gould perfectly knew that he was perpetuating falsehoods, making a mockery of his solemn promises of scholarly objectivity. The accusations of bias, selectiveness, and finagling that Gould hurled at others must have come very easily to him because they were his own methods of choice.

Fraudulent propaganda. Gould has been debunked at this point and his reputation is in total ruin. His flimsy
defense of marxist ideology was never science in any form, and simply leftist rhetoric. There is too much scientific evidence
against Gould's denial of race. Radical egalitarians like Gould espouse their fake theories as a means to demonize the west
and blame Europeans for each and every failure of non-whites.
Thankfully, people are waking up to the lies.

If there's a last place in American academia reserved for pseudo-scientists, it belongs to left-wing Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. After re-reading his "The Mismeasure of Man" for the third time, I concluded that Gould's intention when writing this book was not to refute the legitimacy of hereditarianism, but to keep a firm grip on fantasy. A quarter of the work Gould cites in this book was carried out in the late 19th century (craniometry), and the the rest was carried out in the early 20th century (psychometry). Thus, Gould's cranky rebuke of "racist science" is targeted at "dotty Victorian eccentrics" like Sir Francis Galton, and the anachronistic technology they used to validate their theories. Anyone expecting critiques of the current research being conducted in the fields of behavioral genetics, differential psychology, and psychometrics is setting themselves up for a letdown of the Y2K Bug kind.
First of all, IQ may not be a perfect predictor of one's future success in life or an accurate appraisal of one's intelligence, but it does measure "something" in intelligence, or races wouldn't consistently differ with respect to it. American Indians, on average, enjoy the poorest living conditions and the lowest yearly income in the US, but they constantly outperform American blacks on IQ and SAT tests. University of Ulster psychologist Richard Lynn has found that the IQ scores of whites, blacks, and Asians is the same regardless of which country they're taken in, with whites achieving IQ scores of 100-105, blacks 70-85, and Asians 103-110. Moreover, Lynn and Glayde Whitney have found (based on Interpol data) that the crime levels of these groups are the same regardless of where they reside in the world, with Asians being the most criminally restrained, whites somewhere in the middle, and blacks coming in last (or first, depending on how one ranks it; either way they're going to come in at either ends of a scale or graph of crime data) as the most criminally unrestrained. (Egalitarians counter these plain statistical facts, explaing how the disproportionate amount of crimes that blacks commit are committed because "most people expect them to be criminals." If true, this begs an obvious question--namely, why people would expect that.) Most people accept that women are less prone to crime and violent behavior than men, which is most likely to be explained by testosterone levels. This suggests that not only are IQ tests are a reliable predictor of intelligence and criminal behavior, but that "race" is more than just "skin deep."
Before all the hullabaloo surrounding IQ tests surfaced, the US Department of Labor used them to tell how high one needed to score on one to determine if the profession they sought to enter was compatible with the score they attained. The IQ data Gould uses to support his argument that "it measures nothing," is culled from the primitive tests distributed to the US army in 1917. Gould's crude reasoning here is that "if the IQ tests given to the US army in 1917 produced wayward results, then all subsequent IQ tests must do the same." This is a non sequitur and Gould knows it.
Gould and his environmentalist lackeys at Harvard and abroad think that there's no such thing as "race." Race to them is just a fiction born of sinister racist ideology, "dotty Victorian eccentrics" and IQ tests. The response to this objection is simple: race is simply defined by place of ancestry--some people's ancestors came from Eurasia, N.E. Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. If one objects to this definition of race still, by virute of the interbreeding that has taken place between them, fine. Don't call them "races." Call them A, B, and C; call them Moe, Larry, and Curly--call them whatever you want. The question still lingers: are there hereditary differences between those whose "ancestors" came from Europe, Asia, and Africa? Gould says no, common sense says an unhesitating "Yes."
Contrary to what Gould asserts, race is not skin deep. For example, if you discovered bones from a human skeleton in your backyard and alerted the authorities, they would have a forensic anthropologist come in and determine what the race of the skeleton was, based on the structure of its bones. Recent research in the field of neurology has shown that the brains of intelligent people metabolize glucose slower. Also, recent discoveries using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which displays a three-dimensional image of the human brain, has shown a close correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (J. Philippe Rushton & Ankney, 1996). All of which is "recent" data, meaning that Gould avoids it like the truth.
Gould thinks that everybody is "already" the same, except that some people were "lucky" enough to have been born "by chance" into wealthy families (in effect, claiming that wealth just "happens," totally disregarding human ingenuity). This is clearly false. If you want to read what the "other side" has to say about this mega-taboo subject, don't get "The Bell Curve." Get J. Philippe Rushton's "Race, Evolution, and Behavior."

Gould is a very confused person! His ambitious goal was to prove that intelligence is not inherited but a product of environmental factors such as education. The only way one could do such thing is to find a way to measure intelligence and then prove that better education and better environment can increase it. This is where Gould's problem comes in.
He mocks all attempts to measure intelligence. The only clear point that he makes throughout the book is that intelligence can't be measured or even defined clearly.
I agree but just because we can't measure it, doesn't mean that we didn't inherit it from our parents. Measurement and heritability are two different things and they must not be confused. We can't say that the Milky Way Galaxy doesn't exist only because we can't account for every single star, planet, and satellite in it.
Gould points out that average height in a third world country may be lower than average height in the US due to poor nutrition. Then he goes on to say that if people in the third world were as well fed as Americans, their average height may turn out to be higher. Unconsciously, Gould has destroyed his own argument. If two populations receive equal amount of nutrition and yet one of them turns out to have lower average height then what else other than genes could account for the difference?
He points out that IQ test scores could be increased with more education but then he totally dismisses IQ as an indicator of how smart we are. He ends up with no argument against heritability. If we can't measure intelligence then we can't prove that education can increase it, and if we can't prove that education can increase it then we have no argument against heritability.
Why can't we turn chimpanzees into PhDs? Could it be because chimpanzee's genes do not allow them to build sophisticated brains like ours? And if the sophistication of our brain is determined by our genes then the capacity for high intelligence is clearly inherited.
Basketball players are tall not because they practice to be tall but because they inherited a collection of genes, which in the presence of healthy diet can build tall bodies. Others who eat equally healthy may not grow so tall. Jumping up and down on a basketball course won't make them any taller than they already are. I can use many other analogies but I think I proved my point.
The only good thing about this book is that it points out the silliness of trying to prove the intellectual superiority of one race over another. That was the only reason I gave it two stars.

If you've been reading these reviews, you've started to notice a stark polarization of opinions and that they tend to fall neatly within certain sets of political motives and agendas. The same criticisms return again and again, and the more I see them, the more I have to ask, "am I the only reviewer who's even READ this book?"

Take for instance: "Gould can't hide his political agenda" -- ladies and gents, Mr. Gould does not even TRY to hide his politics. He put them up-front and center, and I believe he did so to further reenforce his key point that we are all inherently biased (no matter how much we might try to hide it or to convince ourselves that we're not) and that we absolutely cannot make the mistake of assuming that the "scientific" works we read are absolutely dispassionate, objective and impartial. Anybody who claims to be these things should be eyed with a small degree of skepticism; those who are outraged at the suggestion that they might be biased ought have that skepticism heaped upon them.

I could go on and on over the objections people raise about this book and respond like I did in the previous paragraph, or outright discount them (ie: quote from the book direct disproof of the criticism), but it would be tedious and redundant.

Whatever Gould's predispositions, whatever the extensiveness of modern research, he has made it clear and undeniable that there are some serious faults in the science of human intelligence and the reasoning which supports it. Furthermore, it's worth noting that Richard Dawkins -- quoted as being critical of Gould -- flatly rejects any concept of racial superiority.

I highly recommend this book, not just for scientists or those interested in Science's implications for 'ordinary' people, but for everybody as a daily reminder that we all (at least on occasion) allow our prejudices to warp our perception of the world.

If you read this book and don't come away a little more sober and introspective of yourself, then you weren't paying attention.

This book is a perfect example of how anything can be made to sound convincing by a writer that is good enough. Gould uses a lot of smoke and mirrors to obscure his essentially political argument and present it as scientifically valid when it plainly isn't, whatever so many of the readers here represented may think.
The techniques of IQ testing that he criticizes have not been used for many years. He is recycling old material. There are many, many studies that show there are real, and therefore measurable, differences in people's intellectual capacity - and why would that be controversial? You meet smart and dumb people every day. Modern IQ tesing is not perfect but it is improving, it is at least based on scientific method and it can prove its results - something that Gould cannot.
Gould's book is reassuring to people who want to have their own preconceptions confirmed, but it's certainly not good science.