The Mismeasure of Man

Rating:
Summary: A good book, but
Review: Although the book is interesting in its content and writing style, the book remains historical in content. If we live by the presumption that our worlds are as only we can "perceive" them, the selfish gene, inbox thinking... and that women have been tormented for generations by men's self preservation(e.g. women being unintelligent, unavailability of schooling, work...), this books history and analysis of intelligence through time and culture only seems to be obvious. Perhaps I would have preferred a discussion and refutal of cognitive concepts along with the history lesson and cultural norms. This of course seen from a high school drop out point of view. I could imagine as a graduate student I would be excited to assimilate the content of the book with what I would have learned in school, but disappointed none-the-less.

Rating:
Summary: Gould is Gold
Review: To put it bluntly: This book is fantastic. Gould makes incredibly cogent arguments as to the fallacies in logic made by IQ testers and those that tried to brand criminals with race or apperances.

He is very verbose, but the beautiful language, and multipel tangents, just add to the reader's knowledge, and impress on the read the author's immense authority of the subject at hand.

Admittedly, Gould loses the general reader in the chapter on Factor Analysis, but the rest of the book is quite accessible to the layman.

If you want to know why the Bell Curve blows, and why conservatives are so wrong, read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Shows how an articulate person can make rubbish convincing
Review: This book is a perfect example of how anything can be made to sound convincing by a writer that is good enough. Gould uses a lot of smoke and mirrors to obscure his essentially political argument and present it as scientifically valid when it plainly isn't, whatever so many of the readers here represented may think.

The techniques of IQ testing that he criticizes have not been used for many years. He is recycling old material. There are many, many studies that show there are real, and therefore measurable, differences in people's intellectual capacity - and why would that be controversial? You meet smart and dumb people every day. Modern IQ tesing is not perfect but it is improving, it is at least based on scientific method and it can prove its results - something that Gould cannot.

Gould's book is reassuring to people who want to have their own preconceptions confirmed, but it's certainly not good science.

Rating:
Summary: Lasting gift to intelligent dialogue about "intelligence"
Review: Gould's book is so good that to give it a bad review borders on intellectual fraud.
He succinctly lays out the arguments against Hernstein and Murray's psuedo-scholarship in their covertly racist book The Bell Curve along with casting a shadow over all "intelligence" testing in general. The dirty truth about standardized testing is that there's a high correlation between student's scores and their parent's income. The wealthier the household a child grows up in the higher the scores they'll receive on standardized tests. This has been true for the Law School Admissions Test for decades. It's these kinds of nuggets of wisdom one takes away from Gould's masterpeice.
The most gratifying aspect of the book is the manner in which he frames it within the socio-political realities of the day. For instance, in regards to the recent popularity of Hernstein's argument (I single out Hernstein as he's the godfather of the field, Murray being more of an opportunistic tag along), Gould reminds the reader that it wouldn't have garnered so much respectful mainstream attention if it weren't for the regressive social policies Gingrich and other semi-fascist politicians were attempting to dress up and pass as law.
More than just a popular science book on intelligence testing, The Mismeasure of Man covers a vast array of historical and sociological ground. Gould peppers the book with stunning examples of tests that were shoved into the faces of freshly arrived immigrants to Ellis Island at the turn of the century and gives a brief over view of the historical attempts at testing the intelligence of different races and ethnicities, the crudity of these examples makes the book a classic by itself.
It's a genuine tragedy that our society recently lost this treasure. It's one less aresenal in combating spurious scholarship in all its protean guises.

Rating:
Summary: Clearly outlines the errors in the interpretations of IQ
Review: I tend to be very skeptical of writers of "popular" science. And indeed initially I found Gould, a paleontologist who persisted in writing about everything under the sun, including IQ-testing, a dubious scholar. But that was before I actually read any of his works. This book is the primary reason I now rate Gould so highly. ...

Gould starts out by describing the origins in America of assigning a number to a person which totally captures his/her worth as a human for the purpose of ranking, in particular to rank the races. The first such endeavour was craniometry, i.e. measuring skulls, brains, etc. He describes in detail the errors in data collection and more importantly the errors in *interpretation* and most importantly the errors in the *formulation of questions*. By the last, I mean that if you only ask questions that will support your theory, but disregard questions that could shatter your theory, is it any surprise to learn that the resulting data "shows" you are correct?

Gould then goes on to describe how the same nonsense happens in more modern versions of the same endeavour, in particular the hereditary theory of IQ. Yet again we find that modern researchers (like Murray and Herrnstein, authors of _The_Bell_Curve_), commit the same fallacies of formulating questions they assume the answers to, interpreting their data incorrectly, and even disregarding contrary data! [For specifics on Murray and Herrnstein, look in the review of their book at the end of Gould's book]

Gould repeatedly through the book raises the following questions: What makes some researchers think that there is an intelligence that can be measured by a single number? And why would someone start with such a shaky premise? And why is it that questioning this premise is heresy in some circles?

The answer to the first question is "Spearman's g". To put it succintly, "g", short for general intelligence, is a factor that first appeared in analyses by Spearman. As Gould shows, "g" is only a mathematical construct that results from a certain set of mathematical tools. Use a different set of tools and "g" can vanish. Spearman naively assumed "g" corresponded to a real "thing" centered in special parts of the brain, instead of realizing it for what it was: a result of the particular mathematical analysis chosen by him! To argue that "g" has any meaning, one must supply evidence independent of the correlation data; this Spearman failed to do, and his followers have all failed also. Preposterous as the story of "g" is, even more preposterous is that this meager "evidence" is the only evidence that IQ-testers have of the existence of intelligence as a real entity, testable and recordable as a single number.

For more details and answers to the other questions, read the book!

The greatest lesson of this book is that in many ways, intelligence research has not moved beyond craniometry. The same kinds of mistakes are still made by researchers. It seems that these errors and (un)conscious manipulations of data are particularly prone in scientific fields that are connected very closely with social policy and politics. The biggest surprise about all of this is that it should be a surprise at all!

Another lesson, minor but still important, is how the use of numerical data and mathematics can obfuscate the otherwise very obvious errors in reasoning to mathematically-illiterate people. This kind of "math intimidation" is a particularly popular way of proving one's point. The only way to combat this is to make oneself math literate, so that one can see through the smokescreens. John Allen Paulos' _Innumeracy_ is a good start to this goal (after having read _The_Mismeasure_of_Man_ of course!).

Rating:
Summary: Old wine
Review: I'd just like to note that this ground has been covered and recovered. See Science and Politics of IQ
by Leon J. Kamin for an earlier treatment of these issues.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read!
Review: Not to go over the top, this book is extraordinarily well-written, intelligent, impassioned, and amusing. It challenges some of our most deeply engrained assumptions about intelligence. Totally recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Who will test the testmakers?
Review: This book relates in exquisite detail the history of intelligence testing in the US and, in its early stages, in France. Bluntly, the enterprise of intelligence testing, whether by crude measurement of skull volume or in the supposedly more sophisticated form of testing by psychological instrument, was historically driven by a racist agenda -- which Gould is extremely persuasive in uncovering. From systematic bias in "error" to outright departure from the empirical method, Gould uncovers it all for the world to see, in his eminently readable style.

Gould also makes clear that the intelligence-testing psychological instruments in use today, however free modern practitioners may be of racial bias, are directly derived from instruments designed either for racist purposes or for the strict purpose of identifying developmental pathology (rather than the measure of normal intelligence). Thus, while the famous "IQ test" can truly be said to be measuring some statistical regularities in human performance, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that what is being measured is what we think of as "intelligence" -- or even anything particularly well-correlated with it.

Left for the reader to ponder for him- or herself is whether the central question of intelligence testing can even be intelligibly posed, or whether the whole enterprise is best relegated to the same slag-pile as phlogiston research and the search for the philosopher's stone [*sorcerer's* stone to American readers ;) ].

The 1993 revised and expanded edition contains Gould's rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Rating:
Summary: Caution in Science, Well Defined
Review: The Mismeasure of Man is more than a historical account of the inaccuracies of intelligence testing; it is an epic illustration of the pitfalls of an uncritical scientific approach. The thrust of the recounting is that scientists must not delude themselves into believing that they are objective measurers of a well-defined world. Political and social biases are inherent parts of our humanity, and as such are unavoidable influences on how we interpret data. Gould thus suggests that the only way to compensate for our biases is to acknowledge them. Otherwise we are fated to repeat past errors: designing experiments to fit preconceived conclusions rather than setting forth disprovable hypotheses.

The history of intelligence testing is riddled with these mistakes. The most striking is the capacity for scientists to explain away data that does not fit their original notion. For example, when skull size failed to show a positive correlation with the traditional white-asian-black intellectual heirarchy, different measurement procedures were used, unrelated races were grouped together, and gender effects were ignored. All in an effort to (often subconsciously) restore the comfortable position of white superiority.

The most fulfilling aspect of the book is how far Gould has researched the environments and lives of those who played a role in this drama. Although some passages may be construed as ad hominem attacks, the vast majority of the information is necessary to understand -- and, in some cases, sympathize with -- otherwise seemingly cold, evil, or ignorant scientists. In the end, Gould redeems many of these figures while also castigating their behavior, so that we may learn from their mistakes. Indeed, this book gives a clear understanding of how statistics, prejudice, and self-delusion can alter the course of research.

Rating:
Summary: Gould Is a Fraud
Review: Every science began with a series of false starts. Gould concentrates on the false starts in the study of intelligence and behavior to discredit modern studies, which is the same as discrediting astronomy with the fact that until the fifteenth century every astronomer thought that the earth is the center of the universe.
When Gould does treat modern students of intelligence, he constantly and blatantly misrepresents their work. His most serious misrepresentation is his contention that intelligence tests have always shown the superiority of the test-makers' race and class. In fact, on every intelligence test that has been devised, the children of poor, uneducated Jews and Orientals have done better than the children of rich, well-educated white Gentiles. A striking example is Henry Goddard, whom Gould and other enemies of intelligence tests accuse of having used them to prove that southern and eastern Europeans are mentally defective and should be kept out of the United States. Gould, who is Jewish, dedicates The Mismeasure of Man "To the memory of Grammy and Papa Joe, who came, struggled, and prospered, Mr. Goddard notwithstanding". In fact, Goddard desperately tried to help Jews get into the United States from Nazi-dominated Europe and wrote in an introduction to a Master's degree thesis that he supervised entitled "The Intelligence of Jews Compared with Non-Jews" that it proved that Jews are more intelligent than Gentiles.
Gould supports his views with a few old studies, like that of the IQs of the children of black American soldiers stationed in Germany and white German women, a study that is so obviously flawed that no serious student of this subject has ever taken it seriously. He ignores the many carefully conducted studies of adopted children and identical twins raised from infancy by different families that have unanimously found that family, school and neighborhood have no influence on IQ or academic performance.
Gould pretends to demolish the procedure of factor analysis by means of a remarkably detailed account of antiquated methods of factor analysis, which no one has used for half a century.
Every review of The Mismeasure of Man by an expert in a scholarly journal has pointed out these and many other gross distortions. Gould must have known that they would. That did not bother him. He knew he could rely on the ignorance and bias of the popular press to praise his book unreservedly and to echo his lies uncritically.
I will email to anyone who is interested a 16-page analysis of The Mismeasure of Man in which I substantiate the criticisms I make in this review. ([e-mail])