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{{short description|1981 book by Stephen Jay Gould}} | |||
] | |||
{{Infobox book | |||
| name = The Mismeasure of Man | |||
| image = Gouldmismeasure.jpg | |||
| caption = Cover of the first edition | |||
| author = ] | |||
| illustrator = | |||
| cover_artist = | |||
| country = United States | |||
| language = English | |||
| series = | |||
| subjects = ], ], ], ], ], ] | |||
| publisher = ] | |||
| pub_date = 1981, 1996 | |||
| media_type = Print (] and ]) | |||
| pages = 352 | |||
| isbn = 0-393-01489-4 | |||
| oclc = 7574615 | |||
| dewey = | |||
| congress = | |||
| preceded_by = ] | |||
| followed_by = ] | |||
}} | |||
'''''The Mismeasure of Man''''' is a 1981 book by paleontologist ]. The book is both a ] and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying ], the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily ], ], and ]es—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that ], in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology".<ref name=TMoMp20>Gould, S. J. (1981). ''The Mismeasure of Man'', p. 20; 1996, .</ref> | |||
Gould argues that the primary assumption underlying biological determinism is that "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by ''measuring ]''". Biological determinism is analyzed in discussions of ] and ], the two principal methods used to measure intelligence as a single quantity. According to Gould, these methods possess two deep fallacies. The first fallacy is ], which is "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities".<ref name="TMoMp24">Gould, S. J. (1981). ''The Mismeasure of Man'', p. 24. 1996, .</ref> Examples of reification include the ] (IQ) and the ] (''g'' factor), which have been the cornerstones of much research into human ]. The second fallacy is that of "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale".<ref name="TMoMp24"/> | |||
'''''The Mismeasure of Man''''' (]) is a ] written by the ] ] ] (]-]). The book is a ] and critique of the methods and motivations underlying ], the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily ]s, ], and ]—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that ], in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology."<ref>Stephen Jay Gould, ''The Mismeasure of Man''. W.W. Norton & Co., 1981, p. 20.</ref> | |||
The book received many positive reviews in the literary and popular press, while scientific reception was highly polarized.<ref name=Davis1983/> Positive reviews focused on the book's critique of scientific racism, the concept of general intelligence, and biological determinism, while critics accused Gould of historical inaccuracy, unclear reasoning, or political bias.<ref name=Davis1983/> ''The Mismeasure of Man'' won the ].<ref name=Davis1983/> Gould's findings about how 19th-century researcher ] measured skull volumes were particularly controversial, inspiring several studies debating his claims. | |||
The book also attempts to critique the principal theme of biological determinism, that "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by '']''." Gould discusses two prominent techniques used to measure such a quantity, ] and ]. According to Gould these methods suffer from "two deep fallacies." The first fallacy is of ''reification'', that is, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities." These entities include ] (the intelligence quotient) and ] (the general intelligence factor), which have been the cornerstone of much intelligence research. The second fallacy is one of ''ranking'', or our "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale." | |||
In 1996, a second edition was released. It included two additional chapters critiquing ] and ] book '']'' (1994). | |||
''The Mismeasure of Man'' ] "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status."<ref>''ibid''. pp. 24–25.</ref> | |||
==Author== | |||
The book's second edition (]) has been revised and challenges the arguments of ] and ] '']'', which has also generated much controversy. | |||
{{main|Stephen Jay Gould}} | |||
Stephen Jay Gould ({{IPAc-en|g|uː|l|d}}; 1941 – 2002) was one of the most influential and widely read authors of ] of his generation.<ref name=Shermer2002>{{Citation|last1 = Shermer|first1 = Michael|year = 2002|title = This View of Science|url = http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/shermer_sjgould.pdf|journal = Social Studies of Science|volume = 32|issue = 4|pages = 489–525|postscript = . |doi=10.1177/0306312702032004001|pmid = 12503565|s2cid = 220879229}}</ref> He was known by the general public mainly for his 300 popular essays in '']'' magazine,<ref name=tatt>{{cite web| author= Tattersall I |title=Remembering Stephen Jay Gould |url= http://naturalhistorymag.com/perspectives/302413/remembering-stephen-jay-gould| access-date=June 7, 2013}}</ref> As in ''The Mismeasure of Man'', Gould criticized biological theories of human behavior in "Against ''Sociobiology''" (1975)<ref>Allen, Elizabeth, et al. (1975). '']'' 22 (Nov. 13): 182, 184–186.</ref> and "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm" (1979).<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Gould | first1 = S. J. | last2 = Lewontin | first2 = Richard | year = 1979 | title = The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme | journal = Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. | volume = 205 | issue = 1161| pages = 581–98 | doi = 10.1098/rspb.1979.0086 | pmid = 42062 | bibcode = 1979RSPSB.205..581G | s2cid = 2129408 }} for background see Gould's {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150414021048/http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/i-Ch.2.html |date=2015-04-14 }} in John Brockman '' {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160130235501/http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/d-Contents.html |date=2016-01-30 }}''. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1996, pp. 52–64. {{ISBN|0-684-82344-6}}.</ref> | |||
==Summary |
==Summary== | ||
===Craniometry=== | |||
] | |||
] | |||
''The Mismeasure of Man'' is a critical analysis of the early works of ] which promoted "the theory of | |||
unitary, innate, linearly rankable ]"—such as ], the measurement of skull volume and its relation to ] faculties. Gould alleged that much of the research was based largely on ] and social prejudices of the researchers rather than their scientific objectivity; that on occasion, researchers such as ] (1799–1851), ] (1807–1873), and ] (1824–1880), committed the ] fallacy of allowing their personal '']'' expectations to influence their conclusions and analytical reasoning. Gould noted that when Morton switched from using bird seed, which was less reliable, to ] to obtain endocranial-volume data, the average skull volumes changed; however, these changes were not uniform across Morton's "racial" groupings. To Gould, it appeared that unconscious ] influenced Morton's initial results.<ref name="Kaplan et al">{{cite journal | last1 = Kaplan | first1 = Jonathan Michael | last2 = Pigliucci | first2 = Massimo | last3 = Banta | first3 = Joshua Alexander | year = 2015 | title = Gould on Morton, Redux: What can the debate reveal about the limits of data? | url = http://philpapers.org/archive/KAPGOM.pdf | journal = Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences | volume = 30 | pages = 1–10 }}</ref> Gould speculated, | |||
<Blockquote>Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.<ref>Gould, SJ (1981). ''Mismeasure of Man''. New York: Norton & Company, p. 97.</ref></Blockquote> | |||
===Historical bias in biological sociology=== | |||
The first parts of the book are devoted to a critical analysis of early works on a supposed biologically inherited basis for intelligence, such as ], the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties. Gould argues that much of this research was based more on prejudice than scientific rigor, demonstrating how in several occasions researchers such as ], ], and ] committed the fallacy of using their expected conclusions as part of their reasoning. The book contains a complete re-working of original data for one of these studies, showing that the original results were based on biases and manipulations, mostly by selection of data. When these biases are accounted for, the original hypothesis—an ordering in skull size ranging from Blacks through Mongols to Whites—is not supported in any way by the data. | |||
In 1977 Gould conducted his own analysis on some of Morton's endocranial-volume data, and alleged that the original results were based on ''a priori'' convictions and a selective use of data. He argued that when biases are accounted for, the original hypothesis—an ascending order of skull volume ranging from Blacks to Mongols to Whites—is unsupported by the data. | |||
===Claims of bias and falsification=== | |||
The following chapters present a historical evaluation of the concept of ] and of the '']'', which are measures of intelligence used by psychologists. Gould argues that most race-related psychological studies have been heavily biased by the belief that human behavior is best explained by ]. Gould notes that the often cited ] by ] on the genetic heritability of intelligence used falsified data. According to L. S. Hearnshaw (1979), fraud had also been found in Burt's studies in kinship correlations in ], and declining levels of intelligence in Britain. Burt had also attempted to declare himself the father of "factor analysis," rather than his predecessor and mentor ] (who invented the technique in ]).<!-- This is a very weak section and needs to be improved. --> | |||
=== |
===Bias and falsification=== | ||
] | |||
Gould devotes a large part of the book to an analysis of ], which is used by psychologists to assert the validity of IQ tests and the heritability of intelligence. For example, to claim that an ] measures ] relies on the fact that the answers to various questions correlate highly, the heritability of ''g'' requires that the scores of respondents who are closely related exhibit higher correlation than those of distant relations. To criticise such claims Gould points out that correlation is not the same as cause. As he puts it, measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of ], the price of ], my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between ]" have a high positive correlation, but that does not mean that Stephen Jay Gould's age goes up ''because'' the population of Mexico goes up. Second, and more specifically, a high positive correlation between parent and child IQ can be taken as either evidence that IQ is genetically inherited or that IQ is inherited through social and environmental factors. Since the same data can be used to argue either side of the case, the data in and of itself is not useful. | |||
''The Mismeasure of Man'' presents a historical evaluation of the concepts of the ''intelligence quotient'' (]) and of the ''general intelligence factor'' (]), which were and are the measures for ] used by psychologists. Gould proposed that most psychological studies have been heavily biased, by the belief that the human behavior of a ] of people is best explained by ] ]. He cites the ], about the oft-cited ], by ] (1883–1971), wherein Burt claimed that human intelligence is highly heritable. | |||
===IQ, ''g'', statistical correlation, and heritability=== | |||
Furthermore, Gould argues that even if it were demonstrated that IQ is highly genetically heritable within a group, this tells nothing about the causes of IQ differences between groups or whether those differences can be changed by environment. Gould gives the example of height, which is known to be determined mostly through genes within socioeconomic groups, but group differences in height may be due to nutrition as well as genes. ], a colleague of Gould's, is well-known for emphasizing this argument as it pertains to IQ testing. | |||
As an ] and ], Gould accepted ''biological variability'' (the premise of the transmission of intelligence via genetic heredity), but opposed '']'', which posits that genes determine a definitive, unalterable social destiny for each man and each woman in life and ]. ''The Mismeasure of Man'' is an analysis of ], the mathematics applied by psychologists to establish the validity of ] tests, and the heritability of intelligence. For example, to establish the validity of the proposition that IQ is supported by a ] (''g'' factor), the answers to several tests of ] must positively ]; thus, for the ''g'' factor to be a heritable trait, the IQ-test scores of close-relation respondents must correlate more than the IQ-test scores of distant-relation respondents. However, ]; for example, Gould said that the measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of México, the price of Swiss cheese, my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between galaxies" have a high, positive correlation—yet that correlation does not indicate that Gould's age increased because the Mexican population increased. More specifically, a high, positive correlation between the intelligence quotients of a parent and a child can be presumed either as evidence that IQ is genetically inherited, or that IQ is inherited through social and environmental factors. Moreover, because the data from IQ tests can be applied to arguing the logical validity of either proposition—genetic inheritance and environmental inheritance—the ] data have no inherent value. | |||
Gould pointed out that if the genetic heritability of IQ were demonstrable within a given ] or ], it would not explain the causes of IQ differences among the people of a group, or if said IQ differences can be attributed to the environment. For example, the height of a person is genetically determined, but there exist height differences within a given social group that can be attributed to environmental factors (e.g. the quality of nutrition) and to genetic inheritance. The evolutionary biologist ], a colleague of Gould's, is a proponent of this argument in relation to IQ tests. An example of the intellectual confusion about what ] is and is not, is the statement: "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100 percent because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin",<ref>Gottfredson, Linda (1994). "Mainstream Science on Intelligence." ''Wall Street Journal'' 13 December, p. A18.</ref> which Gould said is misleading, at best, and false, at worst. First, it is very difficult to conceive of a world wherein every man, woman, and child grew up in the same environment, because their spatial and temporal dispersion upon the planet Earth makes it impossible. Second, were people to grow up in the same environment, not every difference would be genetic in origin because of the randomness of molecular and genetic development. Therefore, heritability is not a measure of ] (physiognomy and physique) differences among racial and ethnic groups, but of differences between ] and phenotype in a given population. | |||
Furthermore, he dismissed the proposition that an IQ score measures the general intelligence (''g'' factor) of a person, because cognitive ability tests (IQ tests) present different types of questions, and the responses tend to form clusters of intellectual acumen. That is, different questions, and the answers to them, yield different scores—which indicate that an IQ test is a combination method of different examinations of different things. As such, Gould proposed that IQ-test proponents assume the existence of "general intelligence" as a discrete quality within the ], and thus they analyze the IQ-test data to produce an IQ number that establishes the definitive ] of each man and of each woman. Hence, Gould dismissed the IQ number as an erroneous ] of the statistical mathematics applied to the raw IQ-test data, especially because psychometric data can be variously analyzed to produce multiple IQ scores. | |||
Gould argues that heritability is not a measure of phenotypic differences between groups, but rather differences between genotype and phenotype within a population. Even within a group, if all members of the group grow up in exactly the same environment, it does not mean that heritability is 100%. All Americans (or New Yorkers, or upper-class New Yorkers – one may define the population in question as narrowly as one likes) may eat exactly the same food, but their adult height will still be a result of both genetics and nutrition. In short, heritability is almost never 100%, and heritability tells us nothing about genetic differences between groups. This is true for height, which has a high degree of heritability; it is all the more true for intelligence. This is true for other reasons besides ones involving heritability, as Gould goes on to discuss. | |||
===Second edition=== | |||
Gould's most profound criticism is his rejection of the very thing that IQ is meant to measure, "general intelligence" (or ''g''). IQ tests, he points out, ask many different kinds of questions. Responses to different kinds of questions tend to form clusters. In other words, different kinds of questions can be given different scores – which suggests that an IQ test is really a combination of a number of different tests that test a number of different things. Gould claims that proponents of IQ tests assume that there is such a thing as general intelligence, and analyze the data so as to produce one number, which they then claim is a measure of general intelligence. Gould argues that this one number (and therefore, the implication that there is a real thing called "general intelligence" that this number measures) is in fact an artifact of the statistical operations psychologists apply to the raw data. He argues that one can analyze the same data more effectively and end up with a number of different scores (but valid, meaning they measure something) rather than one score. | |||
The revised and expanded second edition (1996) includes two additional chapters, which critique ] and ] book '']'' (1994). Gould maintains that their book contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data; it merely refashions earlier arguments for biological determinism, which Gould defines as "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the ], its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status".<ref>Gould, S. J. (1981). ''The Mismeasure of Man'' pp. 24–25. 1996, .</ref> | |||
Finally, Gould points out that he is not opposed to the notion of "biological variability" which is the premise that heredity influences intelligence. Instead, he does criticize the notion of "biological determinism" which is the idea that genes determine destiny and there is nothing we can or should do about this. | |||
==Reception== | ==Reception== | ||
===Praise=== | |||
{{wikiquote}} | |||
The majority of reviews of ''The Mismeasure of Man'' were positive, as Gould notes.<ref name="MMM44-5">Gould, S. J. (1996). ''The Mismeasure of Man: Revised edition''. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. .</ref> ], a celebrated evolutionary biologist who held positions at both the University of Chicago and Harvard, wrote a glowing review of Gould's book in '']'', endorsing most aspects of its account, and suggesting that it might have been even more critical of the racist intentions of the scientists he discusses, because scientists "sometimes tell deliberate lies because they believe that small lies can serve big truths."<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1981/10/22/the-inferiority-complex/|title=The Inferiority Complex|last=Lewontin|first=Richard C.|work=The New York Review of Books|access-date=2018-11-13|language=en-US}}</ref> Gould said that the most positive review of the first edition to be written by a psychologist was in the ''British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology'', which reported that "Gould has performed a valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most important debates in the social sciences, and this book should be required reading for students and practitioners alike."<ref name="MMM45">Gould, S. J. (1996). ''The Mismeasure of Man: Revised edition''. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. .</ref> In '']'', journalist ] wrote that the critique of ] "demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning, of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract".<ref>.</ref> The British journal ''Saturday Review'' praised the book as a "fascinating historical study of ]", and that its arguments "illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case".<ref>''Saturday Review'' (October 1981 p. 74).</ref> In the American ''Monthly Review'' magazine, Richard York and the sociologist ] praised the book's thematic concentration, saying that "rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims".<ref>York, R., and B. Clark (2006). "Debunking as Positive Science". ''Monthly Review'' '''57''' (Feb.):315.</ref> ''Newsweek'' gave it a positive review for revealing biased science and its abuse.<ref name=Davis1983/> ''The Atlantic Monthly'' and Phi Beta Kappa's ''The Key Reporter'' also reviewed the book favorably.<ref name=Davis1983/> | |||
===Awards=== | ===Awards=== | ||
The first edition of ''The Mismeasure of Man'' won the non-fiction award from the ]; the Outstanding Book Award for 1983 from the ]; the Italian translation was awarded the ''Iglesias'' prize in 1991; and in 1998, the ] ranked it as the 24th-best English-language ] book of the 20th century.<ref>American Library (1998). . July 20. Gould was one of the judges..</ref> In December 2006, '']'' magazine ranked ''The Mismeasure of Man'' as the 17th-greatest ] of all time.<ref>''Discover'' Editors (2006). . ''Discover'' '''27''' (Dec. 8).</ref> | |||
* 1981 – ] Award for nonfiction | |||
* 1983 – Outstanding Book Award from the ] | |||
* 1991 – Iglesias Prize (Italian translation) | |||
===Reassessing Morton's skull measurements=== | |||
===Praise=== | |||
In a paper published in 1988, John S. Michael reported that Samuel G. Morton's original 19th-century study was conducted with less bias than Gould had described; that "contrary to Gould's interpretation ... Morton's research was conducted with integrity". Nonetheless, Michael's analysis suggested that there were discrepancies in Morton's ], that his data tables were scientifically unsound, and he "cannot be excused for his errors, or his unfair comparisons of means".<ref name="jsmichael">{{cite journal | last1 = Michael | first1 = J. S. | year = 1988 | title = A New Look at Morton's Craniological Research | journal = Current Anthropology | volume = 29 | issue = 2| pages = 349–54 | doi=10.1086/203646| s2cid = 144528631 }}</ref> Michael later complained that some authors, including ], selectively "cherry-picked facts" from his research to support their own claims. He lamented, "Some people have turned the Morton-Gould affair into an all or nothing debate in which either one side is right or the other side is right, and I think that is a mistake. Both men made mistakes and proving one wrong does not prove the other one right."<ref name="jsmichael2013">Michael, J. S. (2013) michael1988.com.</ref> | |||
*], ] ], ]. | |||
:"Far-ranging and incisive, rigorous and simple...a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes." Leon Kamin also praised it as a "masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits." | |||
:"When published in 1981, ''The Mismeasure of Man'' was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to ''The Bell Curve'', whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould traces the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through ''The Bell Curve''. Further, he has added five essays, in a separate section at the end, on questions of ''The Bell Curve'' in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the claim of this book to be 'a major contribution toward deflating pseudobiological "explanations' of our present social woes.'" | |||
In another study, published in 2011, Jason E. Lewis and colleagues re-measured the cranial volumes of the skulls in Morton's collection, and re-examined the respective statistical analyses by Morton and by Gould, concluding that, contrary to Gould's analysis, Morton did not falsify craniometric research results to support his racial and social prejudices, and that the "Caucasians" possessed the greatest average cranial volume in the sample. To the extent that Morton's craniometric measurements were erroneous, the error was away from his personal biases. Ultimately, Lewis and colleagues disagreed with most of Gould's criticisms of Morton, finding that Gould's work was "poorly supported", and that, in their opinion, the confirmation of the results of Morton's original work "weakens the argument of Gould, and others, that biased results are endemic in science". Despite this criticism, the authors acknowledged that they admired Gould's staunch opposition to racism.<ref name="plosbiology.org">{{Citation |title=The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias |date=2011 |journal=PLOS Biol |volume=9 |issue=6 |pages=e1001071+ | doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071 |last1=Lewis |first1=Jason E. |last2=Degusta |first2=David |last3=Meyer |first3=Marc R. |last4=Monge |first4=Janet M. |last5=Mann |first5= Alan E. |last6=Holloway |first6=Ralph L. |pmid=21666803 |pmc=3110184 |doi-access=free }}</ref> Lewis' study examined 46% of Morton's samples, whereas Gould's earlier study was based solely on a reexamination of Morton's raw data tables.<ref>Kaplan et al. (2015) note that, "Gould did not 'bother' to re-measure the skulls, because Gould explicitly stated that, once Morton developed a method that made the unconscious 'fudging' of the results difficult, the results became reliable."</ref> However Lewis' study was subsequently criticized by a number of scholars for misrepresenting Gould's claims,<ref name="Kaplan et al"/> bias,<ref name="Kaplan et al"/><ref name="SciAmerican">Horgan, John (2011). ''Scientific American'' Cross-Check (24 June 2011).</ref><ref name="Nature2011">Editorial (2011). ''Nature'' 474 (June 23): 419.</ref> faulted for examining fewer than half of the skulls in Morton's collection,<ref name="Kaplan et al"/><ref name="SciAmerican"/> for failing to correct measurements for age, gender or stature,<ref name="SciAmerican"/> and for its claim that any meaningful conclusions could be drawn from Morton's data.<ref name="Kaplan et al"/><ref name="Weisberg">{{cite journal | last1 = Weisberg | first1 = Michael | year = 2015 | title = Remeasuring man | url = https://cbs.asu.edu/sites/default/files/PDFS/remeasuring-man.pdf | journal = Evolution & Development | volume = 16 | issue = 3 | pages = 166–78 | doi = 10.1111/ede.12077 | pmid = 24761929 | s2cid = 10110412 | access-date = 2015-08-23 | archive-date = 2015-11-17 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20151117031309/https://cbs.asu.edu/sites/default/files/PDFS/remeasuring-man.pdf | url-status = dead }}</ref> | |||
*Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, ''The New York Times'', Section C; Page 29. | |||
:"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called ''factor analysis,'' developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearman—and demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract. It is this sort of performance that makes the book's eventual refutation of Arthur Jensen seem incidental, for it is far more absorbing to have our powers of reason challenged than it is to have our social consciences shaken." | |||
*''Saturday Review'', London. | |||
:"A rare book—at once of great importance and wonderful to read. . . . Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology, recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case. . . . A major addition to the scientific literature." | |||
*''Sunday Times'', London. | |||
:"The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology ''stops'' us doing and those who are impressed with what it ''allows'' us to do." | |||
* Richard York and Brett Clark. | |||
:"The power of Gould's analysis lies in his focus on particulars. Rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims." | |||
In 2015 this paper was reviewed by Michael Weisberg, who reported that "most of Gould's arguments against Morton are sound. Although Gould made some errors and overstated his case in a number of places, he provided ''prima facie'' evidence, as yet unrefuted, that Morton did indeed mismeasure his skulls in ways that conformed to 19th century racial biases".<ref name="Weisberg"/> Biologists and philosophers Jonathan Kaplan, ], and Joshua Alexander Banta also published a critique of the group's paper, arguing that many of its claims were misleading and the re-measurements were "completely irrelevant to an evaluation of Gould's published analysis". They also maintain that the "methods deployed by Morton and Gould were both inappropriate" and that "Gould's statistical analysis of Morton's data is in many ways no better than Morton's own".<ref name="Kaplan et al"/> | |||
===Criticisms=== | |||
''The Mismeasure of Man'' has been highly controversial. The popular and literary press have mostly praised the book, while most scientific journals have been critical.<ref>The biologist Bernard Davis (1983; see also Gould, 1984; Davis, 1984) called attention to the fact that reviews in the popular and literary press, such as The ''New York Times Book Review'', ''The New Yorker'', and ''The New York Review of Books'', were almost universally effusive in their approbation, whereas most reviews in scientific journals, such as ''Science'' (Samelson, 1982), ''Nature'', and ''Science '82'', tended to be critical on a number of counts. Davis cited Jensen's (1982) review in ''Contemporary Education Review'' as "the most extensive scientific analysis," but mentioned, as an exception, a generally laudatory review by Morrison that appeared in ''Scientific American'' because that joumal's editorial staff had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice" (Davis, 1983, p. 45).</ref> Among psychologists, the reaction has been largely negative. ]'s<ref>Hans Eysenck and Stephen Jay Gould debated the issue in an exchange of letters to ''The New York Review of Books''. See "Jensen and Bias: An Exchange" ''NYRB'' (October 23, 1980) and ''NYRB'' (December 18, 1980).</ref> review called the book "a paleontologist's distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science." | |||
Critics have accused Gould of selective reporting, distorting the viewpoints of scientists, and letting his viewpoints be influenced by political and ethical biases, and allege that many of Gould's claims about the validity of intelligence measures, such as ], contradict mainstream ]. | |||
A 2018 paper argued that Morton's interpretation of the data was biased but that the data itself was accurate. The paper argued that Morton's measurements were similar to those of a contemporary craniologist, ], who had interpreted the data differently to argue strongly against any conception of racial hierarchy.<ref>Mitchell, Paul Wolff. "The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton's cranial race science." PLoS biology 16, no. 10 (2018): e2007008.</ref> | |||
*] (]–]), former professor at the Harvard Medical School, and former head of the Center for Human Genetics, indicates that "While the nonscientific reviews of ''The Mismeasure of Man'' were almost uniformly laudatory, the reviews in the scientific journals were almost all highly critical." Davis describes the book as "a sophisticated piece of political propaganda, rather than as a balanced scientific analysis." On Gould's use of ] and his understanding of intelligence testing, Davis states "Gould would prefer to combat the ] of naive, 'pure' determinism, he fails to note that the science of genetics has altogether replaced this concept with ]." | |||
===Criticism=== | |||
On Gould's use of the concept of "]" Davis adds: | |||
In a review of ''The Mismeasure of Man'', ], professor of ] at Harvard Medical School, said that Gould erected a ] argument based upon incorrectly defined key terms—specifically '']''—which Gould furthered with a "highly selective" presentation of ], all motivated more by politics than by science.<ref name="Davis1983">{{cite journal | last1 = Davis | first1 = Bernard | year = 1983 | title = Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press | journal = ] | volume = 74 | issue = 2| pages = 41–59 | pmid = 11632811 }}</ref> Davis said that ]'s laudatory book review of ''The Mismeasure of Man'' in '']'' was written and published because the editors of the journal had "long seen the study of the ] as a threat to social justice". Davis also criticized the popular-press and the literary-journal book reviews of ''The Mismeasure of Man'' as generally approbatory; whereas, he said that most scientific-journal book reviews were generally critical. Davis accused Gould of having misrepresented a study by ] (1866–1957) about the intelligence of Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants to the U.S., wherein Gould reported Goddard's qualifying those people as "feeble-minded"; whereas, in the initial sentence of the study, Goddard said the study subjects were atypical members of their ]s, who had been selected because of their suspected sub-normal intelligence. Davis also argued that Goddard had proposed that the low IQs of the sub-normally intelligent men and women who took the cognitive-ability test likely derived from their social environments rather than from their respective genetic inheritances, and concluded that "we may be confident that their children will be of average intelligence, and, if rightly brought up, will be good citizens".<ref name="davis">{{cite journal | last1 = Davis | first1 = Bernard | year = 1983 | title = Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press | url = https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/neo-lysenkoism-iq-and-the-press | journal = The Public Interest | volume = 74 | issue = 2| page = 45 | pmid = 11632811 }}</ref> Gould pushed back against some of Davis' claims in a 1994 revised edition of the book. While Davis characterized the book's reception as negative in the scientific journals, Gould argued that of twenty-four academic book reviews written by experts in psychology, fourteen approved, three were mixed opinions, and seven disapproved of the book.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Gould|first=Stephen Jay|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33276490|title=The mismeasure of man|date=1996|publisher=Norton|isbn=0-393-03972-2|edition=Rev. and expanded|location=New York|pages=45|oclc=33276490}}</ref> | |||
:"Gould's argument on reification purports to get at the philosophical foundation of the field. He claims that general intelligence, defined as the factor common to different cognitive abilities, is merely a mathematical abstraction; hence if we consider it a measurable attribute we are reifying it, falsely converting an abstraction into an 'entity' or a 'thing'—variously referred to as 'a hard, quantifiable thing,' 'a quantifiable fundamental particle,' 'a thing in the most direct, material sense.' Here he has dug himself a deep hole. . . . Indeed, this whole argument is fantastic. The scientist does not measure 'material things': He measures properties (such as length or mass), sometimes of a single 'thing' (however defined), and sometimes of an organized collection of things, such as a machine, a biological organ, or an organism. In a particularly complex collection, the brain, some properties (i.e., specific functions) have been traced to narrowly-localized regions (such as the sensory or motor nuclei connected to particular parts of the body)" | |||
In his review, psychologist ] said that Gould did not understand "the nature and purpose" of ].<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Carroll | first1 = J. | year = 1995 | title = Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould's the mismeasure of man (1981): A retrospective review | doi = 10.1016/0160-2896(95)90022-5 | journal = Intelligence | volume = 21 | issue = 2| pages = 121–34 }}</ref> Statistician ], of the ], said that Gould erred in his use of ], irrelevantly concentrated upon the fallacy of ] (abstract as concrete), and ignored the contemporary scientific consensus about the existence of the ].<ref>{{cite book |title=Measuring Intelligence: Facts and Fallacies |url=https://archive.org/details/measuringintelli00bart |url-access=limited |last=Bartholomew |first=David J. |author-link=D. J. Bartholomew |date=2004 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge |isbn=9780521544788 |pages=, 145–46 }}</ref> | |||
On Gould's "highly selective" use of data, he adds: | |||
:"His historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers. . . . In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma. | |||
Reviewing the book, ], a senior lecturer in psychology at the ], wrote that ''The Mismeasure of Man'' was "a masterpiece of ]" that selectively juxtaposed data to further a political agenda.<ref>Blinkhorn, Steve (1982). "What Skulduggery?"] ''Nature'' '''296''' (April 8): 506.</ref> Psychologist ], then editor-in-chief of '']'' and '']'', wrote that ''The Mismeasure of Man'' was "science fiction" and "political propaganda", and that Gould had misrepresented the views of ], ], and ].<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Humphreys | first1 = L. | year = 1983 | title = Review of The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould | journal = American Journal of Psychology | volume = 96 | issue = 3| pages = 407–15 | doi=10.2307/1422323| jstor = 1422323 }}</ref> | |||
*Charles Murray in an interview in '']'', claimed that Gould misrepresented his views. | |||
In his review, psychologist Franz Samelson wrote that Gould was wrong in asserting that the ] results of the intelligence tests administered to soldier-recruits by the U.S. Army contributed to the legislation of the ].<ref>Samelson, F. (1982). . ''Science'' '''215''' (Feb. 5): 656–657.</ref> In their study of the ] and committee hearings related to the Immigration Act, Mark Snyderman and ] reported 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".<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Snyderman | first1 = M. | last2 = Herrnstein | first2 = R. J. | year = 1983 | title = Intelligence Tests and the Immigration Act of 1924 | journal = ] | volume = 38 | issue = 9| pages = 986–95 | doi=10.1037/0003-066x.38.9.986}}</ref> Psychologist ] wrote that Gould unfairly groups ] with "racist ] and misguided ]".<ref>{{cite book |author=Barash, David P. |title=The Hare and the Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature |publisher=Penguin Books |location=New York |year=1988 |page=329 |isbn=978-0-14-008748-2 }}</ref> | |||
*], a prominent educational psychologist, in a paper titled ''The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons''. made the following observation: | |||
:Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and offers a course at Harvard entitled, "Biology as a Social Weapon." Apparently the course covers much the same content as does the present book. Having had some personal cause for interest in ideologically motivated attacks on biologically oriented behavioral scientists, I first took notice of Gould when he played a prominent role in a group called Science for the People and in that group's attack on the theories of Harvard zoologist ], a leader in the development of ]. . . | |||
A 2019 paper argued that the Gould was incorrect in his assessment of the Army Beta and that, for the knowledge, technology and test development standards of the time, it was adequate and could measure intelligence, possibly even in the modern day.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Warne | first1 = Russell T. | last2 = Burton | first2 = Jared Z. | last3 = Gibbons | first3 = Aisa | last4 = Melendez | first4 = Daniel A. | year = 2019 | title = Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of the Army Beta test in The Mismeasure of Man: Distortions and misconceptions regarding a pioneering mental test | journal = Journal of Intelligence | volume = 7 | issue = 1| page = 6 | doi = 10.3390/jintelligence7010006 | pmid = 31162385 | pmc = 6526409 | doi-access = free }}</ref> | |||
Jensen also makes a complaint similar to Murray's when charging Gould with misrepresentations. | |||
:In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message. | |||
===Responses by subjects of the book=== | |||
Arthur Jensen, like Davis, suggested that Gould relies on information that is outdated while ignoring present research and information that does not support his conclusions. | |||
In his review of ''The Mismeasure of Man'', ], a University of California (Berkeley) educational psychologist whom Gould ] in the book, wrote that Gould used ] arguments to advance his opinions, misrepresented other scientists, and propounded a political agenda. According to Jensen, the book was "a patent example" of the bias that political ] imposes upon science—the very thing that Gould sought to portray in the book. Jensen also criticized Gould for concentrating on long-disproven arguments (noting that 71% of the book's references preceded 1950), rather than addressing "anything currently regarded as important by scientists in the relevant fields", suggesting that drawing conclusions from early human intelligence research is like condemning the contemporary automobile industry based upon the mechanical performance of the ].<ref name="jensen">{{cite journal | last1 = Jensen | first1 = Arthur | year = 1982 | title = The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons | url = http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html | journal = Contemporary Education Review | volume = 1 | issue = 2| pages = 121–35 }}</ref> | |||
:Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose. | |||
], co-author of '']'' (1994), said that his views about the distribution of ], among the ] and the ]s who compose the U.S. population, were misrepresented in ''The Mismeasure of Man''.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Miele | first1 = Frank | year = 1995 | title = For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls | url = http://www.skeptic.com/archives24.html | journal = Skeptic | volume = 3 | issue = 2 | pages = 34–41 | url-status = bot: unknown | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20041013225203/http://www.skeptic.com/archives24.html | archive-date = 2004-10-13 }}</ref> | |||
However this sampling may only reflect Gould's historical treatment of the subject, and his literary style of incorporating historical thinkers—such as ], ], ], and his profession's hero ]—into his narrative. Percentages aside, Gould argued that he had "focused upon the leading and most influential scientists of their times and have analyzed their major works." (1981, p. 27) | |||
Psychologist ] wrote that ''The Mismeasure of Man'' is a book that presents "a ]'s distorted view of what ]s think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science".<ref>Eysenck, Hans (1998). ''Intelligence: A New Look''. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, .</ref> | |||
===Responses to the second edition (1996)=== | |||
{{seealso|intelligence testing}} | |||
Arthur Jensen and Bernard Davis argued that if the ''g'' factor (]) were replaced with a model that tested several types of intelligence, it would change results less than one might expect. Therefore, according to Jensen and Davis, the results of ]s of ] would continue to correlate with the results of other such standardized tests, and that the intellectual achievement gap between black and white people would remain.<ref name="jensen" /> | |||
], a researcher critical of ] of intelligence, repeated the arguments of ] about the second edition of ''The Mismeasure of Man''. Flynn wrote that "Gould's book evades all of Jensen's best arguments for a genetic component in the black–white IQ gap, by positing that they are dependent on the concept of ''g'' as a general intelligence factor. Therefore, Gould believes that if he can discredit ''g'' no more need be said. This is manifestly false. Jensen's arguments would bite no matter whether blacks suffered from a score deficit on one or ten or one hundred factors."<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite journal | last1 = Flynn | first1 = J. R. | year = 1999 | title = Evidence against Rushton: The Genetic Loading of the Wisc-R Subtests and the Causes of Between-Group IQ Differences | doi = 10.1016/s0191-8869(98)00149-4 | journal = Personality and Individual Differences | volume = 26 | issue = 2| pages = 373–93 }}</ref> Rather than defending Jensen and Rushton, however, Flynn concluded that the ], a nongenetic rise in IQ throughout the 20th century, invalidated their core argument because their methods falsely identified even this change as genetic.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> | |||
==End material== | |||
According to psychologist ], Gould's claim that there is no relation between brain size and IQ is outdated. Furthermore, he reported that Gould refused to correct this in new editions of the book, even though newly available data were brought to his attention by several researchers.<ref>Deary, I. J. (2001). Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .</ref> | |||
<references/> | |||
==See also== | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
* ] | |||
== References == | |||
{{Reflist}} | |||
==External links== | ==External links== | ||
{{wikiquote}} | |||
===Criticism=== | |||
* - by J. Philippe Rushton | |||
* by ] | |||
* (PDF) by ] | |||
* by ] | |||
* by John B. Carroll | |||
===Praise=== | ===Praise=== | ||
* by Richard York and Brett Clark | * by Richard York and Brett Clark | ||
* by Garland Allen, ''Journal of the History of Biology'' | |||
* by John H. Lienhard | |||
* by |
* by Martin A. Silverman and Ilene Silverman, '']'' | ||
* by John H. Lienhard, ], '']''. | |||
* by K. B. Korb | |||
* by Franz Samelson, '']'' | |||
*"Still Mismeasuring Man" ''Skeptic'' Vol. 5 No .1 (1997): 84. | |||
*"The Mismeasure of Man." by Allan Janik ''Ethics'' Vol. 94 No. 1 (Oct. 1983): 153-155. | |||
===Criticism=== | |||
*"Intelligence and Some of Its Testers." Franz Samelson ''Science'' Vol. 215 No. 4533 (February 5, ]): 656-657. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070807225658/http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/carroll-gould.html |date=2007-08-07 }} by ] | |||
* Diane Ravitch ''Commentary'' Vol. 73 No. 2 February 1982. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110701060545/http://www.eugenics.net/papers/jprnr.html |date=2011-07-01 }} by ], '']'' | |||
* by ] | |||
* by ] | |||
* by ], '']'' | |||
==Further reading== | |||
* Goodfield, June (1981). . ''The New York Times Book Review'' (Nov. 1): 11. | |||
* Gould, S. J. (1981). . New York: Norton & Company | |||
* Gould, S. J. (1981). {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150518085953/http://www.arkiv.certec.lth.se/kk/dokument/mismeasureofman.pdf |date=2015-05-18 }} | |||
* Gould, S. J. (1984). . ''Natural History'' '''93''' (Nov.): 26–33. | |||
* Gould, S. J. (1994). {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090615031314/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html |date=2009-06-15 }}. ''The New Yorker'' '''70''' (Nov. 28): 139–49. | |||
* Gould, S. J. (1995). . ''Natural History'' '''104''' (Feb.): 1219. | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Janik | first1 = Allan | year = 1983 | title = The Mismeasure of Man | journal = Ethics | volume = 94 | issue = 1| pages = 153–55 | doi=10.1086/292523| s2cid = 159990126 }} | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Junker | first1 = Thomas | year = 1998 | title = Blumenbach's Racial Geometry | url = http://www.thomas-junker.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/98tjisis.pdf | journal = Isis | volume = 89 | issue = 3| pages = 498–501 | doi=10.1086/384075| s2cid = 144161573 }} | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Kaplan | first1 = J. M. | author-link2 = Massimo Pigliucci | last2 = Pigliucci | first2 = M. | last3 = Banta | first3 = JA | year = 2015 | title = Gould on Morton, Redux | url = http://philpapers.org/archive/KAPGOM.pdf | journal = Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences | volume = 30 | pages = 1–10 }} | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Korb | first1 = K. B. | year = 1994 | title = Stephen Jay Gould on Intelligence | journal = Cognition | volume = 52 | issue = 2| pages = 111–23 | doi=10.1016/0010-0277(94)90064-7| pmid = 7924200 | citeseerx = 10.1.1.22.9513 | s2cid = 10514854 }} | |||
* ] (1982). . ''New Scientist'' 94 (May 13): 437. | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Lewis | first1 = J. E. |display-authors=etal | year = 2011 | title = The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias | journal = PLOS Biol | volume = 9 | issue = 6| page = e1001071 | doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071 | pmid=21666803 | pmc=3110184 | doi-access = free }} | |||
* Nature eds. (2011). . ''Nature'' 474 (23 June): 419. | |||
* Ravitch, Diane (2008). "The Mismeasure of Man". ''Commentary'' '''73''' (June). | |||
* Reich, Eugenie Samuel (2011) {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140730043549/http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/06/did_stephen_jay_gould_fudge_hi.html |date=2014-07-30 }}. ''Nature News Blog'' (June 13) | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Sulloway | first1 = Frank | year = 1997 | title = Still Mismeasuring Man | url = http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/archives/vol05n01.html | journal = Skeptic | volume = 5 | issue = 1| page = 84 }} | |||
* Wade, Nicholas (2011). . ''New York Times'' (13 June 2011): D4. | |||
* {{cite journal | last1 = Weisberg | first1 = Michael | year = 2015 | title = Remeasuring Man | url = https://cbs.asu.edu/sites/default/files/PDFS/remeasuring-man.pdf | journal = Evolution & Development | volume = 16 | issue = 3 | pages = 166–78 | doi = 10.1111/ede.12077 | pmid = 24761929 | s2cid = 10110412 | access-date = 2015-08-23 | archive-date = 2015-11-17 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20151117031309/https://cbs.asu.edu/sites/default/files/PDFS/remeasuring-man.pdf | url-status = dead }} | |||
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Latest revision as of 16:50, 22 December 2024
1981 book by Stephen Jay GouldCover of the first edition | |
Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subjects | Ability testing, Craniometry, Intelligence tests, Personality tests, Racism, Social science |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date | 1981, 1996 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
Pages | 352 |
ISBN | 0-393-01489-4 |
OCLC | 7574615 |
Preceded by | The Panda's Thumb |
Followed by | Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes |
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology".
Gould argues that the primary assumption underlying biological determinism is that "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity". Biological determinism is analyzed in discussions of craniometry and psychological testing, the two principal methods used to measure intelligence as a single quantity. According to Gould, these methods possess two deep fallacies. The first fallacy is reification, which is "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities". Examples of reification include the intelligence quotient (IQ) and the general intelligence factor (g factor), which have been the cornerstones of much research into human intelligence. The second fallacy is that of "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale".
The book received many positive reviews in the literary and popular press, while scientific reception was highly polarized. Positive reviews focused on the book's critique of scientific racism, the concept of general intelligence, and biological determinism, while critics accused Gould of historical inaccuracy, unclear reasoning, or political bias. The Mismeasure of Man won the National Book Critics Circle award. Gould's findings about how 19th-century researcher Samuel George Morton measured skull volumes were particularly controversial, inspiring several studies debating his claims.
In 1996, a second edition was released. It included two additional chapters critiquing Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve (1994).
Author
Main article: Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould (/ɡuːld/; 1941 – 2002) was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. He was known by the general public mainly for his 300 popular essays in Natural History magazine, As in The Mismeasure of Man, Gould criticized biological theories of human behavior in "Against Sociobiology" (1975) and "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm" (1979).
Summary
Craniometry
The Mismeasure of Man is a critical analysis of the early works of scientific racism which promoted "the theory of unitary, innate, linearly rankable intelligence"—such as craniometry, the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties. Gould alleged that much of the research was based largely on racial and social prejudices of the researchers rather than their scientific objectivity; that on occasion, researchers such as Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), and Paul Broca (1824–1880), committed the methodological fallacy of allowing their personal a priori expectations to influence their conclusions and analytical reasoning. Gould noted that when Morton switched from using bird seed, which was less reliable, to lead shot to obtain endocranial-volume data, the average skull volumes changed; however, these changes were not uniform across Morton's "racial" groupings. To Gould, it appeared that unconscious bias influenced Morton's initial results. Gould speculated,
Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.
In 1977 Gould conducted his own analysis on some of Morton's endocranial-volume data, and alleged that the original results were based on a priori convictions and a selective use of data. He argued that when biases are accounted for, the original hypothesis—an ascending order of skull volume ranging from Blacks to Mongols to Whites—is unsupported by the data.
Bias and falsification
The Mismeasure of Man presents a historical evaluation of the concepts of the intelligence quotient (IQ) and of the general intelligence factor (g factor), which were and are the measures for intelligence used by psychologists. Gould proposed that most psychological studies have been heavily biased, by the belief that the human behavior of a race of people is best explained by genetic heredity. He cites the Burt Affair, about the oft-cited twin studies, by Cyril Burt (1883–1971), wherein Burt claimed that human intelligence is highly heritable.
IQ, g, statistical correlation, and heritability
As an evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Gould accepted biological variability (the premise of the transmission of intelligence via genetic heredity), but opposed biological determinism, which posits that genes determine a definitive, unalterable social destiny for each man and each woman in life and society. The Mismeasure of Man is an analysis of statistical correlation, the mathematics applied by psychologists to establish the validity of IQ tests, and the heritability of intelligence. For example, to establish the validity of the proposition that IQ is supported by a general intelligence factor (g factor), the answers to several tests of cognitive ability must positively correlate; thus, for the g factor to be a heritable trait, the IQ-test scores of close-relation respondents must correlate more than the IQ-test scores of distant-relation respondents. However, correlation does not imply causation; for example, Gould said that the measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of México, the price of Swiss cheese, my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between galaxies" have a high, positive correlation—yet that correlation does not indicate that Gould's age increased because the Mexican population increased. More specifically, a high, positive correlation between the intelligence quotients of a parent and a child can be presumed either as evidence that IQ is genetically inherited, or that IQ is inherited through social and environmental factors. Moreover, because the data from IQ tests can be applied to arguing the logical validity of either proposition—genetic inheritance and environmental inheritance—the psychometric data have no inherent value.
Gould pointed out that if the genetic heritability of IQ were demonstrable within a given racial or ethnic group, it would not explain the causes of IQ differences among the people of a group, or if said IQ differences can be attributed to the environment. For example, the height of a person is genetically determined, but there exist height differences within a given social group that can be attributed to environmental factors (e.g. the quality of nutrition) and to genetic inheritance. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a colleague of Gould's, is a proponent of this argument in relation to IQ tests. An example of the intellectual confusion about what heritability is and is not, is the statement: "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100 percent because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin", which Gould said is misleading, at best, and false, at worst. First, it is very difficult to conceive of a world wherein every man, woman, and child grew up in the same environment, because their spatial and temporal dispersion upon the planet Earth makes it impossible. Second, were people to grow up in the same environment, not every difference would be genetic in origin because of the randomness of molecular and genetic development. Therefore, heritability is not a measure of phenotypic (physiognomy and physique) differences among racial and ethnic groups, but of differences between genotype and phenotype in a given population.
Furthermore, he dismissed the proposition that an IQ score measures the general intelligence (g factor) of a person, because cognitive ability tests (IQ tests) present different types of questions, and the responses tend to form clusters of intellectual acumen. That is, different questions, and the answers to them, yield different scores—which indicate that an IQ test is a combination method of different examinations of different things. As such, Gould proposed that IQ-test proponents assume the existence of "general intelligence" as a discrete quality within the human mind, and thus they analyze the IQ-test data to produce an IQ number that establishes the definitive general intelligence of each man and of each woman. Hence, Gould dismissed the IQ number as an erroneous artifact of the statistical mathematics applied to the raw IQ-test data, especially because psychometric data can be variously analyzed to produce multiple IQ scores.
Second edition
The revised and expanded second edition (1996) includes two additional chapters, which critique Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve (1994). Gould maintains that their book contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data; it merely refashions earlier arguments for biological determinism, which Gould defines as "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status".
Reception
Praise
The majority of reviews of The Mismeasure of Man were positive, as Gould notes. Richard Lewontin, a celebrated evolutionary biologist who held positions at both the University of Chicago and Harvard, wrote a glowing review of Gould's book in The New York Review of Books, endorsing most aspects of its account, and suggesting that it might have been even more critical of the racist intentions of the scientists he discusses, because scientists "sometimes tell deliberate lies because they believe that small lies can serve big truths." Gould said that the most positive review of the first edition to be written by a psychologist was in the British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology, which reported that "Gould has performed a valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most important debates in the social sciences, and this book should be required reading for students and practitioners alike." In The New York Times, journalist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the critique of factor analysis "demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning, of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract". The British journal Saturday Review praised the book as a "fascinating historical study of scientific racism", and that its arguments "illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case". In the American Monthly Review magazine, Richard York and the sociologist Brett Clark praised the book's thematic concentration, saying that "rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims". Newsweek gave it a positive review for revealing biased science and its abuse. The Atlantic Monthly and Phi Beta Kappa's The Key Reporter also reviewed the book favorably.
Awards
The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man won the non-fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle; the Outstanding Book Award for 1983 from the American Educational Research Association; the Italian translation was awarded the Iglesias prize in 1991; and in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it as the 24th-best English-language non-fiction book of the 20th century. In December 2006, Discover magazine ranked The Mismeasure of Man as the 17th-greatest science book of all time.
Reassessing Morton's skull measurements
In a paper published in 1988, John S. Michael reported that Samuel G. Morton's original 19th-century study was conducted with less bias than Gould had described; that "contrary to Gould's interpretation ... Morton's research was conducted with integrity". Nonetheless, Michael's analysis suggested that there were discrepancies in Morton's craniometric calculations, that his data tables were scientifically unsound, and he "cannot be excused for his errors, or his unfair comparisons of means". Michael later complained that some authors, including J. Philippe Rushton, selectively "cherry-picked facts" from his research to support their own claims. He lamented, "Some people have turned the Morton-Gould affair into an all or nothing debate in which either one side is right or the other side is right, and I think that is a mistake. Both men made mistakes and proving one wrong does not prove the other one right."
In another study, published in 2011, Jason E. Lewis and colleagues re-measured the cranial volumes of the skulls in Morton's collection, and re-examined the respective statistical analyses by Morton and by Gould, concluding that, contrary to Gould's analysis, Morton did not falsify craniometric research results to support his racial and social prejudices, and that the "Caucasians" possessed the greatest average cranial volume in the sample. To the extent that Morton's craniometric measurements were erroneous, the error was away from his personal biases. Ultimately, Lewis and colleagues disagreed with most of Gould's criticisms of Morton, finding that Gould's work was "poorly supported", and that, in their opinion, the confirmation of the results of Morton's original work "weakens the argument of Gould, and others, that biased results are endemic in science". Despite this criticism, the authors acknowledged that they admired Gould's staunch opposition to racism. Lewis' study examined 46% of Morton's samples, whereas Gould's earlier study was based solely on a reexamination of Morton's raw data tables. However Lewis' study was subsequently criticized by a number of scholars for misrepresenting Gould's claims, bias, faulted for examining fewer than half of the skulls in Morton's collection, for failing to correct measurements for age, gender or stature, and for its claim that any meaningful conclusions could be drawn from Morton's data.
In 2015 this paper was reviewed by Michael Weisberg, who reported that "most of Gould's arguments against Morton are sound. Although Gould made some errors and overstated his case in a number of places, he provided prima facie evidence, as yet unrefuted, that Morton did indeed mismeasure his skulls in ways that conformed to 19th century racial biases". Biologists and philosophers Jonathan Kaplan, Massimo Pigliucci, and Joshua Alexander Banta also published a critique of the group's paper, arguing that many of its claims were misleading and the re-measurements were "completely irrelevant to an evaluation of Gould's published analysis". They also maintain that the "methods deployed by Morton and Gould were both inappropriate" and that "Gould's statistical analysis of Morton's data is in many ways no better than Morton's own".
A 2018 paper argued that Morton's interpretation of the data was biased but that the data itself was accurate. The paper argued that Morton's measurements were similar to those of a contemporary craniologist, Friedrich Tiedemann, who had interpreted the data differently to argue strongly against any conception of racial hierarchy.
Criticism
In a review of The Mismeasure of Man, Bernard Davis, professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School, said that Gould erected a straw man argument based upon incorrectly defined key terms—specifically reification—which Gould furthered with a "highly selective" presentation of statistical data, all motivated more by politics than by science. Davis said that Philip Morrison's laudatory book review of The Mismeasure of Man in Scientific American was written and published because the editors of the journal had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice". Davis also criticized the popular-press and the literary-journal book reviews of The Mismeasure of Man as generally approbatory; whereas, he said that most scientific-journal book reviews were generally critical. Davis accused Gould of having misrepresented a study by Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957) about the intelligence of Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants to the U.S., wherein Gould reported Goddard's qualifying those people as "feeble-minded"; whereas, in the initial sentence of the study, Goddard said the study subjects were atypical members of their ethnic groups, who had been selected because of their suspected sub-normal intelligence. Davis also argued that Goddard had proposed that the low IQs of the sub-normally intelligent men and women who took the cognitive-ability test likely derived from their social environments rather than from their respective genetic inheritances, and concluded that "we may be confident that their children will be of average intelligence, and, if rightly brought up, will be good citizens". Gould pushed back against some of Davis' claims in a 1994 revised edition of the book. While Davis characterized the book's reception as negative in the scientific journals, Gould argued that of twenty-four academic book reviews written by experts in psychology, fourteen approved, three were mixed opinions, and seven disapproved of the book.
In his review, psychologist John B. Carroll said that Gould did not understand "the nature and purpose" of factor analysis. Statistician David J. Bartholomew, of the London School of Economics, said that Gould erred in his use of factor analysis, irrelevantly concentrated upon the fallacy of reification (abstract as concrete), and ignored the contemporary scientific consensus about the existence of the psychometric g.
Reviewing the book, Stephen F. Blinkhorn, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, wrote that The Mismeasure of Man was "a masterpiece of propaganda" that selectively juxtaposed data to further a political agenda. Psychologist Lloyd Humphreys, then editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Psychology and Psychological Bulletin, wrote that The Mismeasure of Man was "science fiction" and "political propaganda", and that Gould had misrepresented the views of Alfred Binet, Godfrey Thomson, and Lewis Terman.
In his review, psychologist Franz Samelson wrote that Gould was wrong in asserting that the psychometric results of the intelligence tests administered to soldier-recruits by the U.S. Army contributed to the legislation of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In their study of the Congressional Record and committee hearings related to the Immigration Act, Mark Snyderman and Richard J. Herrnstein reported 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". Psychologist David P. Barash wrote that Gould unfairly groups sociobiology with "racist eugenics and misguided Social Darwinism".
A 2019 paper argued that the Gould was incorrect in his assessment of the Army Beta and that, for the knowledge, technology and test development standards of the time, it was adequate and could measure intelligence, possibly even in the modern day.
Responses by subjects of the book
In his review of The Mismeasure of Man, Arthur Jensen, a University of California (Berkeley) educational psychologist whom Gould much criticized in the book, wrote that Gould used straw man arguments to advance his opinions, misrepresented other scientists, and propounded a political agenda. According to Jensen, the book was "a patent example" of the bias that political ideology imposes upon science—the very thing that Gould sought to portray in the book. Jensen also criticized Gould for concentrating on long-disproven arguments (noting that 71% of the book's references preceded 1950), rather than addressing "anything currently regarded as important by scientists in the relevant fields", suggesting that drawing conclusions from early human intelligence research is like condemning the contemporary automobile industry based upon the mechanical performance of the Ford Model T.
Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve (1994), said that his views about the distribution of human intelligence, among the races and the ethnic groups who compose the U.S. population, were misrepresented in The Mismeasure of Man.
Psychologist Hans Eysenck wrote that The Mismeasure of Man is a book that presents "a paleontologist's distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science".
Responses to the second edition (1996)
Arthur Jensen and Bernard Davis argued that if the g factor (general intelligence factor) were replaced with a model that tested several types of intelligence, it would change results less than one might expect. Therefore, according to Jensen and Davis, the results of standardized tests of cognitive ability would continue to correlate with the results of other such standardized tests, and that the intellectual achievement gap between black and white people would remain.
James R. Flynn, a researcher critical of racial theories of intelligence, repeated the arguments of Arthur Jensen about the second edition of The Mismeasure of Man. Flynn wrote that "Gould's book evades all of Jensen's best arguments for a genetic component in the black–white IQ gap, by positing that they are dependent on the concept of g as a general intelligence factor. Therefore, Gould believes that if he can discredit g no more need be said. This is manifestly false. Jensen's arguments would bite no matter whether blacks suffered from a score deficit on one or ten or one hundred factors." Rather than defending Jensen and Rushton, however, Flynn concluded that the Flynn Effect, a nongenetic rise in IQ throughout the 20th century, invalidated their core argument because their methods falsely identified even this change as genetic.
According to psychologist Ian Deary, Gould's claim that there is no relation between brain size and IQ is outdated. Furthermore, he reported that Gould refused to correct this in new editions of the book, even though newly available data were brought to his attention by several researchers.
See also
References
- Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man, p. 20; 1996, p. 52.
- ^ Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man, p. 24. 1996, p. 56.
- ^ Davis, Bernard (1983). "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press". The Public Interest. 74 (2): 41–59. PMID 11632811.
- Shermer, Michael (2002), "This View of Science" (PDF), Social Studies of Science, 32 (4): 489–525, doi:10.1177/0306312702032004001, PMID 12503565, S2CID 220879229.
- Tattersall I. "Remembering Stephen Jay Gould". Retrieved June 7, 2013.
- Allen, Elizabeth, et al. (1975). "Against 'Sociobiology'". New York Review of Books 22 (Nov. 13): 182, 184–186.
- Gould, S. J.; Lewontin, Richard (1979). "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme". Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 205 (1161): 581–98. Bibcode:1979RSPSB.205..581G. doi:10.1098/rspb.1979.0086. PMID 42062. S2CID 2129408. for background see Gould's "The Pattern of Life's History" Archived 2015-04-14 at the Wayback Machine in John Brockman The Third Culture Archived 2016-01-30 at the Wayback Machine. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1996, pp. 52–64. ISBN 0-684-82344-6.
- ^ Kaplan, Jonathan Michael; Pigliucci, Massimo; Banta, Joshua Alexander (2015). "Gould on Morton, Redux: What can the debate reveal about the limits of data?" (PDF). Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 30: 1–10.
- Gould, SJ (1981). Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton & Company, p. 97.
- Gottfredson, Linda (1994). "Mainstream Science on Intelligence." Wall Street Journal 13 December, p. A18.
- Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man pp. 24–25. 1996, p. 21.
- Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man: Revised edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 44-5.
- Lewontin, Richard C. "The Inferiority Complex". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2018-11-13.
- Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man: Revised edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. p. 45.
- Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (1981). "Books of the Times".
- Saturday Review (October 1981 p. 74).
- York, R., and B. Clark (2006). "Debunking as Positive Science". Monthly Review 57 (Feb.):315.
- American Library (1998). 100 "Best Nonfiction". July 20. Gould was one of the judges..
- Discover Editors (2006). "25 Greatest Science Books of All Time". Discover 27 (Dec. 8).
- Michael, J. S. (1988). "A New Look at Morton's Craniological Research". Current Anthropology. 29 (2): 349–54. doi:10.1086/203646. S2CID 144528631.
- Michael, J. S. (2013) "Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel George Morton: A Personal Commentary" michael1988.com.
- Lewis, Jason E.; Degusta, David; Meyer, Marc R.; Monge, Janet M.; Mann, Alan E.; Holloway, Ralph L. (2011), "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias", PLOS Biol, 9 (6): e1001071+, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071, PMC 3110184, PMID 21666803
- Kaplan et al. (2015) note that, "Gould did not 'bother' to re-measure the skulls, because Gould explicitly stated that, once Morton developed a method that made the unconscious 'fudging' of the results difficult, the results became reliable."
- ^ Horgan, John (2011). "Defending Stephen Jay Gould's Crusade against Biological Determinism" Scientific American Cross-Check (24 June 2011).
- Editorial (2011). "Mismeasure for mismeasure." Nature 474 (June 23): 419.
- ^ Weisberg, Michael (2015). "Remeasuring man" (PDF). Evolution & Development. 16 (3): 166–78. doi:10.1111/ede.12077. PMID 24761929. S2CID 10110412. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-17. Retrieved 2015-08-23.
- Mitchell, Paul Wolff. "The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton's cranial race science." PLoS biology 16, no. 10 (2018): e2007008.
- Davis, Bernard (1983). "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press". The Public Interest. 74 (2): 45. PMID 11632811.
- Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). The mismeasure of man (Rev. and expanded ed.). New York: Norton. p. 45. ISBN 0-393-03972-2. OCLC 33276490.
- Carroll, J. (1995). "Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould's the mismeasure of man (1981): A retrospective review". Intelligence. 21 (2): 121–34. doi:10.1016/0160-2896(95)90022-5.
- Bartholomew, David J. (2004). Measuring Intelligence: Facts and Fallacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 73, 145–46. ISBN 9780521544788.
- Blinkhorn, Steve (1982). "What Skulduggery?"] Nature 296 (April 8): 506.
- Humphreys, L. (1983). "Review of The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould". American Journal of Psychology. 96 (3): 407–15. doi:10.2307/1422323. JSTOR 1422323.
- Samelson, F. (1982). "Intelligence and Some of its Testers". Science 215 (Feb. 5): 656–657.
- Snyderman, M.; Herrnstein, R. J. (1983). "Intelligence Tests and the Immigration Act of 1924". American Psychologist. 38 (9): 986–95. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.38.9.986.
- Barash, David P. (1988). The Hare and the Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books. p. 329. ISBN 978-0-14-008748-2.
- Warne, Russell T.; Burton, Jared Z.; Gibbons, Aisa; Melendez, Daniel A. (2019). "Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of the Army Beta test in The Mismeasure of Man: Distortions and misconceptions regarding a pioneering mental test". Journal of Intelligence. 7 (1): 6. doi:10.3390/jintelligence7010006. PMC 6526409. PMID 31162385.
- ^ Jensen, Arthur (1982). "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons". Contemporary Education Review. 1 (2): 121–35.
- Miele, Frank (1995). "For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls". Skeptic. 3 (2): 34–41. Archived from the original on 2004-10-13.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - Eysenck, Hans (1998). Intelligence: A New Look. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, p. 3.
- ^ Flynn, J. R. (1999). "Evidence against Rushton: The Genetic Loading of the Wisc-R Subtests and the Causes of Between-Group IQ Differences". Personality and Individual Differences. 26 (2): 373–93. doi:10.1016/s0191-8869(98)00149-4.
- Deary, I. J. (2001). Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 125.
External links
Praise
- "Debunking as Positive Science" by Richard York and Brett Clark
- "The Roots of Biological Determinism" by Garland Allen, Journal of the History of Biology
- "The Mismeasure of Man" by Martin A. Silverman and Ilene Silverman, Psychoanalytic Quarterly
- "The Mismeasure of Man" by John H. Lienhard, NPR, The Engines of Our Ingenuity.
- "Intelligence and Some of its Testers" by Franz Samelson, Science
Criticism
- "Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man" Archived 2007-08-07 at the Wayback Machine by John B. Carroll
- "The Mismeasures of Gould" Archived 2011-07-01 at the Wayback Machine by J. Philippe Rushton, National Review
- "Race, Intelligence, and the Brain" by J. Philippe Rushton
- "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" by Arthur Jensen
- "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press" by Bernard Davis, The Public Interest
Further reading
- Goodfield, June (1981). "A mind is not described in numbers". The New York Times Book Review (Nov. 1): 11.
- Gould, S. J. (1981). Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton & Company
- Gould, S. J. (1981). "The Real Error of Cyril Burt" Archived 2015-05-18 at the Wayback Machine
- Gould, S. J. (1984). "Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History". Natural History 93 (Nov.): 26–33.
- Gould, S. J. (1994). "Curveball: Review of The Bell Curve" Archived 2009-06-15 at the Wayback Machine. The New Yorker 70 (Nov. 28): 139–49.
- Gould, S. J. (1995). "Ghosts of Bell Curves Past". Natural History 104 (Feb.): 1219.
- Janik, Allan (1983). "The Mismeasure of Man". Ethics. 94 (1): 153–55. doi:10.1086/292523. S2CID 159990126.
- Junker, Thomas (1998). "Blumenbach's Racial Geometry" (PDF). Isis. 89 (3): 498–501. doi:10.1086/384075. S2CID 144161573.
- Kaplan, J. M.; Pigliucci, M.; Banta, JA (2015). "Gould on Morton, Redux" (PDF). Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 30: 1–10.
- Korb, K. B. (1994). "Stephen Jay Gould on Intelligence". Cognition. 52 (2): 111–23. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.22.9513. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90064-7. PMID 7924200. S2CID 10514854.
- Leach, Sir Edmund (1982). "Review: The Mismeasure of Man". New Scientist 94 (May 13): 437.
- Lewis, J. E.; et al. (2011). "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias". PLOS Biol. 9 (6): e1001071. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071. PMC 3110184. PMID 21666803.
- Nature eds. (2011). "Mismeasure for Mismeasure". Nature 474 (23 June): 419.
- Ravitch, Diane (2008). "The Mismeasure of Man". Commentary 73 (June).
- Reich, Eugenie Samuel (2011) "Stephen Jay Gould accused of fudging numbers" Archived 2014-07-30 at the Wayback Machine. Nature News Blog (June 13)
- Sulloway, Frank (1997). "Still Mismeasuring Man". Skeptic. 5 (1): 84.
- Wade, Nicholas (2011). "Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim". New York Times (13 June 2011): D4.
- Weisberg, Michael (2015). "Remeasuring Man" (PDF). Evolution & Development. 16 (3): 166–78. doi:10.1111/ede.12077. PMID 24761929. S2CID 10110412. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-17. Retrieved 2015-08-23.
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