Review of Stephen Jay Gould’s 1996 revised and expanded publication of “The mismeasure of man” New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1981) In “Thoughts at Age Fifteen”, the sub-title to the new Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition of “The Mismeasure of Man”, Stephen Jay Gould (1996) calls himself a “working scientist by trade” (p. 24), then “a statistically minded paleontologist” (p. 25) and finally “an evolutionary biologist by training” (p. 41). The author of thirteen books, Mr. Gould currently teaches geology, the history of science and biology at Harvard University. His strong interest in intelligence initially arose from his desire to bring science and its discoveries to the attention of the nonscientist. In considering the mainstream arguments made about “the theory of a measurable, genetically fixed, and unitary intelligence”, Dr. Gould (1996, p. 21) became concerned about how the social sciences, especially psychology, were misused in the development of the concept of intelligence, in particular, the whole nature of intelligence testing itself. Over the past 19 years, Gould has well responded to such misuses with two timely publications. First of all, in 1981 he produced “The Mismeasure of Man” mainly to argue against the social and political results of those misapplications, more specifically, in response to Arthur R. Jensen’s (1969) article “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?” Likewise, in 1996, Gould generated the revised version of “The Mismeasure of Man” as a response to Richard L. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s (1994) book “The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life” (Gould, 1996). Throughout the four hundred twenty-four pages of the 1996 version, Gould “argues that early researchers (perhaps unconsciously) biased their measurements of intelligence based on race and points to shortcomings of those trying to substantiate “g” (Yam, 1998, p. 7). Gould uses his 1996 version to reiterate, once again, his two central themes. First and most simply stated for this note, he argues that the psychological construct “intelligence” has not been shown to be any physical object or real thing (see pp. 27, 48, 56, 185, 189). Instead, he suggests that intelligence is one’s ability to face problems in an unprogrammed or creative manner. Throughout the book, he argue that intelligence is what he calls “the ground of culture,” not a biological entity. In short, he views intelligence as the product of cultural evolution … distinct from biological evolution. However, Gould feels that because of the efforts of a group of American psychologists during the war years, the concept of intelligence has been endowed, as just outlined, to the position of a real object. To cite his precise wording, Gould says that now intelligence has been become “reified, or made real”. More simply worded, Gould “sees” reification as a real thing, as something each person possesses that is, unitary, genetically fixed, measurable and constant (for a more detailed account of Gould’s basic premises, the reader is asked to see Carroll, 1985, especially pp. 123-125). Gould’s second major point is that using an abstract concept such as intelligence to quantify and rank people’s worth is an exceedingly dangerous enterprise. He points out that this way of ranking is a fallacy because the task of ranking people implies quantification, or measurement resulting in one single number for each person — the IQ (intellectual quotient) score. Further, “Gould shows how this sort of ranking can lead (and, as he shows clearly, has led) to the erroneous conclusion that oppressed and disadvantaged groups — races, classes, sexes — are found to be innately inferior and deserving of their reduced status, with all of this based on the measurement of something that exists only as an abstract concept at best” (Miller, 1993, p. 8). To sum up all of the aforementioned, Gould considers the use of psychological testing to rank ones’ worth on the basis of the single IQ or general “g” score THE major misuse of science in this century. References Carroll, John, B. (1995). Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ (1981): A retrospective review. Intelligence, 21, 121-134. Herrnstein, Richard. J, & Murray, Charles (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press. Jensen, Arthur R. (1969). How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review, 39(1), 1-123. Miller, Lynda (1993). What we call smart: A new narrative for intelligence and learning. San Diego, California: Singular Publishing Group. Yam, Philip (1998, Winter). Intelligence considered, [Special Issue]. Scientific American, 9(4), 6-11.The history of IQ testing is littered with bad science, and, worse, with bad intentions. In “The Mismeasure of Man” Gould does a masterful job of surveying both, and of showing how much damage IQ testing and the ideas behind it can, and have, done. The most interesting part of the book is the historical detail Gould provides about each of the scientists he discusses. Take Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminal anthropology, which is the idea that criminals have distinctive and identifiable body and facial characteristics. This idea seems silly to most of us now, but Gould drives the point home by citing some of Lombroso’s daftest ideas–for example, that prostitutes have prehensile big toes (there’s even a picture to show this!) or his claim that animals have criminal types too, citing an ant “driven by rage to kill and dismember an aphid”. And although Lombroso was criticized at the time, he was enormously influential. The twentieth century figures in this story typically made more complex mistakes in science, but Gould, merely by repeating their own work, demolishes their credibility. H.H.Goddard, who tested early American immigrants, found 87% of Russian immigrants (and similar numbers from other nations) to be feeble-minded, a result so ludicrous even Goddard couldn’t believe it. He fiddled with the data and got the number down below 50%, ultimately explaining this number by saying that only the poorest of each nation were emigrating to America. Gould takes the time with each failure of science to show just where the foolishness lies. After Lombroso and Goddard he reviews the work of Terman, Yerkes, Burt, Spearman and Thurstone; the question of “g”, general intelligence, is raised and dismissed, and many more ridiculous stories appear. Towards the end he goes into some detail on the question of factor analysis; the flaw here is not trivial to explain, and this is technically the hardest part of the book to follow. However, by this time the pattern of self-delusion is so clear that the reader takes little persuading. It’s been said for years that what IQ tests measure is how good you are at IQ tests. Gould makes the case for this utterly convincing. This is a profound book, written by someone who understands how science should work, and also how it really does work, all too often, in the real world.THE MISMEASURE OF MAN is a truly great book, exposing the prejudice and bigotry that has often passed under the name of “science.” It is eminently readable for a book that deals with numbers and statistics, which he keeps to a bare minimum that is consistent with exposing the mistakes made by bigoted “scientists.” Gould has managed to take a complicated subject and render it intelligible without ‘dumbing it down.’ This is one of those rare books that everyone should read, as it deals with a subject that influences all of our lives and exposes some of the foolishness that commonly passes for “accepted knowledge.” To object, as some have done, that Stephen Jay Gould is not a psychologist, is a facile objection, an argumentum ad hominem, attacking the person rather than saying anything about the reasoning that Gould presents. Undoubtedly, this is because his reasoning is quite good, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a serious objection to any major point in his book. To object, as some have done, that The Mismeasure of Man is political correctness passing for science, is simply name calling (another argumentum ad hominem). If this were really true, then it would be possible to expose his supposedly faulty reasoning, but that is something they fail to do. To have a conclusion which may be consistent with “political correctness” does NOT prove that it is simply political correctness passing for science, because some ideas that are “politically correct” may very well be true. For example, it is “politically correct” to say that a woman may have the highest IQ score ever achieved, and it turns out that this is apparently true. (Marylin Vos Savant is reported to have the highest IQ; see the Guiness Book of World Records, or just look for her column in the Parade section of a typical Sunday paper in the U.S.) Indeed, this objection, without any supporting evidence, amounts to a claim that “all ‘politically correct’ ideas are false,” which is really exposing the prejudice of those who make such an objection. To object, as some have done, that Gould has “betrayed Darwin,” shows a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He never intended for it to be applied in a manner that is now inappropriately called “social Darwinism.” It is the application of his theory of natural selection to a different domain, not a theory that he advocated in his Origin of the Species. To object, as some have done, that Gould focusses more on old theories rather than current ones, is also misguided, though not so grossly flawed as the argumentum ad hominems already mentioned. Gould examines the foundations of the current theories of IQ to show that they are based on prejudice and bigotry rather than true scientific principles. This is NOT the same as modern chemistry growing out of alchemy or astronomy growing out of astrology, for these modern sciences involve a rejection of the superstitious principles of alchemy and astrology. But there is no rejection of the basic ideas regarding IQs among most current psychologists. To see that the concept of IQs are a gross misrepresentation of that nebulous concept called “intelligence,” it suffices to consider the fact that using a single number to represent all of the complex processes of thought must inevitably involve bias regarding which mental processes are most important. Consider, for example, how many of the test questions will be for testing mathematical reasoning (just one part of an IQ score). The number of these relative to the number for the other aspects of intelligence involves a decision based on the preferences or bias of those who originated the system, not a scientific principle. How much of one’s intelligence is mathematical reasoning? How much should it be? This last question is the decisive one for how many questions about it there will be on an IQ test, but is a normative question, not one of science at all. IQ scores are inherently biased, and as such, are not a part of science at all.Reviewer: scheiderer.17@osu.edu (see more about me) from Sean R. Scheiderer at the Ohio State University in ColumbusGould’s title plays off Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things.” This Sophist encouraged his students to utilize whichever methods yielded desired results, but admonished them to always remember that “truth” found this way is relative, a product of a created system, and not an objective verity. Gould shows that many unwitting modern disciples of Protagoras’ school retained the method but forgot the underlying madness. The Mismeasure of Man is an investigation of attempts to reify human “intelligence” in order to determine worthiness (mental and otherwise) by establishing a ranking based on a single derived factor and presenting the resultant scalar reckoning as biological and incontrovertible. This quantifiable difference has allowed scientific establishmentarianism that justifies (and perpetuates) racism, sexism, and classism as inevitable and natural. Gould surveys the last three centuries and exposes the faulty logic of reductive systems for the evaluation of human mind (and spirit): craniometry, craniology, recapitulation, criminal anthropology, and modern I.Q. testing. Gould knows that many readers (and non-readers) will attack him for writing outside his proper domain, and he counters this by insisting that he is not writing a book about psychology per se, but about the general error of reification in the sciences. As young up-and-coming evolutionary biologist, Gould received extensive training in statistics, especially factor analysis. It is with statistical expertise that he exposes the logical (not mathematical) weaknesses of using factor analysis and other quantitative methods to distill a person’s intelligence to a single quantity. Gould shows how this reification is ultimately an embodiment of a priori assumptions after they have been processed through a circular argument, usually obfuscated (instead of supported) by numbers and mathematics in the name of objective quantification. Gould spent an entire month reworking Broca’s data. Gould found in Broca an unparalleled collector of raw figures, but also uncovered “advocacy masquerading as objectivity.” Gould’s historical survey of intelligence testing in the twentieth century demonstrates too well how science can become a powerful technological tool (weapon) of the state. At the beginning of this century, Binet designed his scale to be used as an instrument to help identify those (relatively few) students in need of special education and not as an absolute measure of intelligence or anything else inherent or irredeemable. Goddard (the American who christened the term “moron”) adopted Binet’s methods but not his ideology, proffering Binet’s I.Q. as an intrinsic and permanent entity by which eugenics could and should (and would) be directed. Gould himself uncovers Goddard’s manipulative retouching of photographs of research subjects to suggest their stupidity or vileness (these disturbing photos are reprinted in this book). R. M. Yerkes conducted an enormous study of 1.7 million U.S. Army draftees, a boon to the statistical prowess of a fledgling science, but his method and data analysis were patently absurd as confessed in an 800-page description published by Yerkes. Gould feels sure that those who touted the conclusions of this tome never took the time to read it. Gould includes samples from Yerkes’ intelligence tests as well as the instructions given to the illiterate recruits, often hilarious sometimes disconcerting (Gould also administered the tests to Harvard undergrads). Gould thus traces the evolution of an inheritable, fixed, and quantifiable “intelligence” emerging in America, culminating in negative and positive eugenics (Buck v. Bell (1924)), becoming subtler (insidious) after the horrors of the holocaust became known, but always lurking submerged. Gould suggests that Spearman and other reductionists working in a so-called soft science suffer from “physics envy” as they long for universal laws and basic particles (Gould does realize that physicists themselves no longer find such comforts). “With g as a quantified, fundamental particle, psychology [would be able to] take its rightful place among the real sciences.” In the most challenging and instructive part of the book, Gould dissects factor analysis, a tool of data sorting that simplifies a complex system and thereby helps in the identification of possible underlying causes of correlation amongst variables. Gould acknowledges the great worth of this tool to all sciences, but warns against a great danger: reification. Researchers and non-professionals alike tend to treat mathematical abstracts (Spearman’s g (”general intelligence”) here, “averages” in Gould’s Full House) as if they are real things. Gould traces this proclivity back to seminal practices of western philosophy and the thrill of flushing out the Platonic essence hidden within the evidence. Once factor analysis has delivered a value to a researcher, it may not only be accepted as a real thing, but the most real thing. Gould illustrates (literally) that while the ordering principal of factor analysis is useful, its starting point is arbitrary, as demonstrated by the different but equally mathematically valid approaches which each yield separate results. Gould argues that each approach to the analysis was dictated by a priori assumptions, and the result, meant to prove these assumptions, ends up actually resting on them. This circular reasoning thereby becomes impossible to disprove on its own terms, and Gould must expose the fundamental flaw at its roots: the reification of a result begotten from an arbitrary initiation. Even though this book was written more than a decade prior to The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), it is considered the definitive answer to that now infamous tome (Gould does include a great new introduction and a specific critique of The Bell Curve in the revised edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996)). Gould explains that the hereditarian viewpoint resurfaces whenever the economic and political climate is favorable, but that the biological determinist argument never really changes substantially. Gould’s book should serve as a timeless reminder of the limitations not of biology, but of reductionist science. Let us heed Protagoras’ words and recognize that whenever man is the measurer and/or the measured, he is also the measure. Not only can Protagoras’ aphorism lead to a more honest science, it will also result in a more humanitarian science. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.Gould continues his pioneering work of humanizing science, January 11, 1999 Reviewer: Mark Rice (Mark.Rice@nl.origin-it.com) from Eindhoven, The NetherlandsMost reviews of this book will focus on the question of Gould’s treatment of biological determinism as one of this century’s greatest follies. My own opinion is that those focusing on this issue are missing the point. While I do think that the eugenics movement is certainly one of the sadder chapters in our history, I found this particular issue, while beautifully developed and addressed, to be but an example of a larger, more fundamental question. What I see as the main thesis of this book is this: Scientists are people, human. They are prone to the same passions, desires, hopes, dreams, motivations, fears, ambitions, mistakes and biases as the rest of us. That is what makes the mistakes made 80-100 years ago (indeed 50 years ago, last year, yesterday) so relevant. The scientists of the last century were as brilliant as those today, but they viewed the world much differently. Biological determinism was a certainty, a constant. They simply assumed it was so and interpreted all data in this light. Given this premise, of course they would reach the conclusions that seem so horribly biased today. The real message of this book, (to me at least) is this wonderful (and frightening) idea that even today, all scientific “truths” need to be examined and re-examined and re-examined. We can never be sure of what we are seeing as we view all data through a societal lens. To a layman such as myself, often frustrated by the pretentiousness and aloofness of scientists (as well as the jargon-filled literature) this knowledge is one of great liberation. It makes science much less certain, but so much more enjoyable! It brings the scientist down from the priest’s alter to the congregation. This is Gould’s great gift he gives to readers in all his books, but most of all in this one. This book is simply one of the greatest books written about scientific thought. For anyone who wishes to understand how “great mistakes” are made in science, this is a must read! –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.Of intelligence, genetics, and environments (again), April 8, 1998 Reviewer: Massimo Pigliucci (pigliucci@utk.edu) (see more about me) from Knoxville, Tennessee, USASteven 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. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.