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 negative reviews criticised Gould's scientific arguments, historical accuracy, and 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
Stephen Jay Gould (; 1941 – 2002) was a professor at Harvard, teaching paleontology, evolutionary biology, and the history of science. An active and prodigious author, Gould's work was frequently cited by colleagues, being both influential and sometimes polarizing. He was also among the best selling authors of popular science, with a broad global readership. As in The Mismeasure of Man, throughout his writings Gould regularly criticized biologically determined explanations for human behavior, as seen in his "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.
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