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The Mismeasure of Man | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Rating:  94 reviews
Sales Rank: 5718
Media: Paperback
Pages: 444
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0393314251
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN: 9780393314250
ASIN: 0393314251
Publication Date: June 1996
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Amazon.com Review
How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it," and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition of the IQ industry, should be required reading. Gould's brilliant, funny, engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow tests. How did scientists decide that intelligence was unipolar and quantifiable, and why did the standard keep changing over time? Gould's answer is clear and simple: power maintains itself. European men of the 19th century, even before Darwin, saw themselves as the pinnacle of creation and sought to prove this assertion through hard measurement. When one measure was found to place members of some "inferior" group such as women or Southeast Asians over the supposedly rightful champions, it would be discarded and replaced with a new, more comfortable measure. The 20th-century obsession with numbers led to the institutionalization of IQ testing and subsequent assignment to work (and rewards) commensurate with the score, shown by Gould to be not simply misguided--for surely intelligence is multifactorial--but also regressive, creating a feedback loop rewarding the rich and powerful. The revised edition includes a scathing critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, taking them to task for rehashing old arguments to exploit a new political wave of uncaring and belt tightening. It might not make you any smarter, but The Mismeasure of Man will certainly make you think. --Rob Lightner
Product Description
In the current heated discussions of hereditary vs. environmental impacts on IQ, Gould's National Book Critics' Circle Award-winning book deserves a hearing.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 89 more reviews...
 On the mismeasure of Gould December 19, 2008
Mr. O. Buxton (Highgate, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Some critics complain that in The Mismeasure of Man Stephen J. Gould attacks a straw man: craniometry is, after all, no more than fin-du-siecle quackery with which no self-respecting scientist would dream of having truck these says. Likewise, the naive early attempts at to link IQ with heredity that Gould spends so much time recounting have long since been soundly and uncontroversially demolished, so Gould at best is shooting fish in a barrel, and many suspect him of something more mendacious than that. Some suspect a political agenda. The late Stephen Jay Gould, you see, was a *Marxist*, after all.
That particular, ad hominem, charge has mystified me the more I've read of Gould's work. I first encountered Gould in discouraging circumstances where his evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium was subjected to a contumelious lambasting at the hands of (usually) mild-mannered philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his (otherwise) wonderful and thought-provoking book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.
Taken as I was by Dennett's general argument at the time (I'm less swooned by it these days), I thought his vituperative treatment of Gould was out of character - from what I can tell Dennett is a positively genial chap - but otherwise thought nothing of it, other than supposing Gould to be part of the problem and not the solution.
There I surely would have left it, and Stephen J. Gould, were it not for Richard Dawkins' silly entry to the "religious wars" The God Delusion - as good an example as one could ask for of how perfectly thoughtful, sensible and smart scientists tend to make arses of themselves when they stray from their stock material. About the only interesting thing in Dawkins' book was how, again, poor old Steve Gould, now sadly deceased, got another shoeing, this time for his pragmatic attempt to reconcile science and religion in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life.
This time I had the BS radar switched on, found Dawkins' attack to be pretty obviously misguided (Dawkins may be a great biologist but his epistemology would have had him kicked out of PHIL 101) and wound up being more, not less, persuaded by Gould's concept of "non-overlapping magisteria".
In any case, at the very least this Gould chap seemed like the sort of contrarian agitator who was clearly a good sport and an interesting critter, but more to the point it sounded like he had something interesting to say. And so, it transpired, he does. I've since read a number of his books and articles, all of them articulate, beautifully written, witty, erudite and excellent in substance, and never once have I seen any suggestion of Marxist bias (eager followers of my reviews will know I have no particular sympathy with left wing politics).
As regards The Mismeasure of Man such insinuations would be especially ironic, since Gould's very point is to illustrate that well-meaning and well respected scientists are all too prone to be deceived into equating their wilful interpretations as scientific truths. In fact, I suspect Gould would even concede to some bias: that, he would say, is the point.
Against all the odds, there seem to be a few brave souls who hold out hope for a hereditary aspect to intelligence: indeed a couple seem to be active on this site. Gould's only substantive point for them is to say that, whatever we even mean by "intelligence", it is so obviously situational and environment-dependent (this shouldn't be news to anyone who's seen Crocodile Dundee) - in other words *socially constructed* - that seeking to tie it to something like biology - which by its very definition isn't - is on its face a waste of time. Gould the liberal then adds, by way of political commentary, that the harmless if silly conclusion that the two *are* related is liable to be misinterpreted by unscrupulous (or simply unsuspecting) people, particularly if they have a particular social agenda which would find it convenient to establish innate differences between - for which read "innate deficiencies in certain (other)" - racial groups. That isn't a scientific point, it's a political one, and to my (un-Marxist) mind, Gould is perfectly right to make it.
Now a different objection to Gould's enterprise might be that such a point doesn't require 300 pages of careful demolition of unequivocally bunk science to make (unless your correspondent is funded by the Pioneer Foundation, apparently: and for those lucky souls, not even 300 pages of argument will do it). But the methodological point is the one that interests Gould: how the hypothesis conditions the evidence sought but even the interpretation placed upon it. Gould's patient history would function as a case study for Thomas Kuhn's superb essay on the contingency of Scientific knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Gould also sees analogy between the hereditarian's linear view of intelligence with the naive ordering of all creation to accord with a supposed evolutionary progression from bacterium to homo sapiens sapiens. Again, it's not the Marxist but the Paleontologist who patiently explains that evolution doesn't work like that: it is better viewed as an expanding bush that a linear progression.
To be sure, in the early parts of this book there is a level of detail that seems superfluous, but the later aspects, and particular Gould's insight into statistical correlation and factor analysis are fascinating and well explained for a layman, and the handsomeness of his turn of phrase and the constancy of his erudition - scientists tend to be poorly read outside their fields, but this was most certainly not the case of the late professor Gould - make this a fascinating and enjoyable work by a profoundly wise and sadly missed thorn in the establishment's side.
They don't make them like this anymore, alas.
Olly Buxton
Highly informative and useful November 25, 2008
not4prophet (North Carolina)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In our day and age, you can't swing a chimpanzee without hitting some pseudo-intellectual spouting theories about the evolutionary origin of human mental abilities. There are many ways to respond to such nonsense. Stephen Jay Gould thinks that the best one is to learn history. The same ideas that we hear now have been advanced many times before, only in slightly different forms. While previous theories now look ludicrous to us, it's worth remembering how they dominated scientific thinking at the time. Gould takes us on a tour, showing where the bad theories came from and how they were eventually defeated.
Craniometry was all the rage in the mid 1800's, when scientists were certain that intelligence could be measured by skull sizes. Whites had the the biggest skulls, blacks had the smallest, and tada! Out came scientific proof to justify social prejudices. While other historians have looked at the background of the studies, only Gould has actually worked through the data. He finds quite a bit of fakery going on. 19th century scientists would omit some data and magnify others in order to make their point.
Starting in the 20th century, society switched to intelligence tests as a means to evaluate individuals and groups. While these have become ubiquitous over the past hundred years, few people know the history behind them. Binet, the French inventor of IQ tests, explicitly rejected the idea that they numerically measured intelligence, but his warnings were ignored. When the tests were adopted in America, they were used to justify racist policies and immigration restrictions, yet that all occurred merely on the say-so of the test designers. As usual, there was statistical hanky-panky going on behind the scenes.
Beyond that, however, lurks the question of whether measuring "intelligence" at all is legitimate. We take it for granted that every human being has a fixed level of intelligence, which determines their ability to complete any mental task. But is this really true? Gould shows us the various statistical techniques used to analyze data from intelligence tests. The major one, factor analysis, is guaranteed to produce a strong correlation between mental tasks, regardless of whether such a correlation is justified. Alternate approaches to statistics could have provided better data, but that isn't what some of the leading experts really wanted.
"The Mismeasure of Man" is at once a thorough and hard-hitting book, and also a surprisingly clear one. The final chapters on statistics do a wonderful job of making the concepts clear, even to beginners. This is a book that should be used in introductory statistics classes, and in any seminar on the philosophy of science. By showing how unspoken prejudices can underlie seeming rock-solid data, Gould teaches us to look with skepticism on anyone who claims to have the human mind all figured out.
 Dishonest November 20, 2008
The Boo
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Gould is a talented writer but not a scientifically impartial one. This book has more factual errors per page than any book I've ever read.
 Misrepresents the literature November 1, 2008
Bob Sanchez (Australia)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
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, Bernard D. (1983). Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press. The Public Interest, 74, 41-59).
Overall, Gould provides an interesting history, but he ignores or misrepresents a considerable amount of the literature. Gould's research on the history of craniometry is interesting and possibly valuable for historians of science. His account of the history of mental testing, however, seems biased, and crafted in such a way as to prejudice the general public and even some scientists against almost any research concerning human cognitive abilities.
Gould spends a lot of time attacking old testing methods while studiously avoiding more sophisticated tests that strongly predict academic performance (and that the army still uses). For instance, East Asians (eg Japanese & Chinese tend to do very well on the non-verbal section of the tests, which is consistent with their above average performance in math/science subjects - see Dan Seligman's "A Question of Intelligence").
Gould also says "Thurstone dispersed g as an illusion" but this is horrendously misleading (see John Carroll's review Intelligence 21, 121-134 (1995), (also, Jensen Contemporary Education Review Summer 1982, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 121- 135.)
David J. Bartholomew, from London School of Economics, who has writtena textbook on factor analysis, also explains in "Measuring Intelligence: Facts and Fallacies" where Gould goes wrong in this area.
Gould also makes some misleading comments about the early performance of Jewish migrants on psychometric tests. Goddard never found that Jews as a group did poorly, and there is no evidence the tests were used in passing the 1924 Immigration Act (see, Franz Samelson (1975, 1982), Snyderman & Herrnstein 1983).
Gould states that Morton "doctored" his collection of results on cranial size, but J. S. Michael (1988) remeasured a random sample of the Morton collection he found that very few errors had been made, and that these were not in the direction that Gould had asserted.
He attacks Cyril Burt for fabricating his twin studies, but books since Gould's first edition came out have vindicated Burt (Joynson (1988) and the other by Ronald Fletcher (1991). Further, twin studies since show average heritability from these studies of 75%, almost the same as Burts supposedly 'faked' heritability of 77%.
So, I guess my message is take Gould's book with a large grain of salt!
Mismeasure of Man September 3, 2008
Jill Burkert
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a great book and I use it as a textbook in my classes at the university. It is really a refute of the Bell Curve and Gould does a great job in presenting the historical facts that make us question the pervasive uses of IQ testing.
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