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Summary: Great scientist and humanist
Review: Stephen Jay Gould continues to do solid work tying his love of paleontology and social justice. He understands the history of science quite well. He actually went back and looked carefully at the work of "race scientists" like Morton and went through their calculations carefully documenting their errors. He deserves praise not only for this book but for the Panda's Thumb, Ever Since Darwin and his other work. As someone with ancestry from the American holocausts, with Native American and Afro-American ancestry, and more importantly as a human being, I appreciate Gould's deep humanity. Thanks Dr. Gould! There are other great books with a similiar commitment like Rutgers Psychologist, William Tucker's contribution, The Politics and Science of Racial Research, which doesn't get as much acclaim.
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Summary: Fighting bias with bias
Review: The truth about this book is one that most of it's admirers won't like. Search if you will for it's reviews from those in the scientific community. It has been largely panned. Gould has style no doubt but this is essentially a gleeful beating of several dead horses. Modern researches in the field of psychometrics have little to fear from this book. Gould takes theories that have long since been discredited and from that asserts that the entire field of psychometrics is invalid. One might discredit nearly every scientific field in this way since all sciences begin with many mistakes. The book is merely an ideologically motivated crusade which doesn't attempt to deal honestly with the most current views in the field.
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Summary: Gould Measures Up and Then Some
Review: Gould takes Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve out for a public unmasking (and a much deserved rhetorical flogging), and shows us the racist garbage that most people probably suspected or knew intuitively it was. Then book goes much further; actually, this is a second edition, the first having been written before The Bell Curve. This book is an indictment of the very concept of "Intelligence Quotient" as something ontological and fixed. It is also a debunking of the children and step-children, nieces and nephews of IQ testing. The examples are so many: immigrants at Ellis Island were given IQ tests, and though the tests were non-English dependent, they were very much American culture dependent, and were given to people who might never have held a pencil before. White European men are the standard, and test which demonstrate them to be superior are assumed to be fair tests. Gould recounts in a thoroughly readable, and even enticing style, several slices of history where terrible wrongs were done because IQ was assumed to exist as something quantifiable. The eugenics movement was just one, and it bore forced sterilisation based on supposed measurements of intelligence. Another is the ages old denial of education to women either under the delusion that it was a waste of time, or the crazy medical hypothesis that by using her brain, a woman would cause her uterus to shrink. This is a brilliantly conceived book, thorough, enjoyable and provocative. It is polemic, so if you disagree, you will have to form your own argument, but Gould is forthright that he is not just reciting history, and rather arguing a position in the IQ debate. If you disagree with Gould, and that will put you in a bad mood, don't read this book, because his argument is like the Rock of Gibralter. If you just want to read this end of the debate, this is the only book you need.
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Summary: Blasting away at pseudoscience and inherent bias
Review: Kudos to Mr. Gould for giving the institution of the I.Q. the much needed scrutiny it so long ago needed.I don't think there is much doubt that the dominant society will devise methods to measure what constitutes superiority,and it is no coincidence that the measure of what it means to be the best,smartest,virtuous and useful to the dominant society just happens to be what a handful of people have decided what is the goldstandard of excellence.Any halfway perceptive person realizes that every person has unique abilities,knowledge and methodoligies.Most people are good and "intelligent" at something that cannot be measured with standardized tests.When you get right down to it I.Q. tests are relative to cultural biases only.What passes for intelligence in ultramodern America could be considered totally worthless in the Congo,and vice versa.Whenever humans try to apply one standard for all the world it must necessarily be a falsity,a pseudoscience.Thanks to Mr. Gould for exposing what a bunch of quacks,fakes, charlatans and lackeys once eminent "scientists" really were.Phrenology or Aryan characteristics chart anyone?!
Rating: 
Summary: A Real Axe Grinder
Review: Gould is a very interesting speaker and writer. This work systematically beats the absolute living poop out of the practice of intelligence testing. However, me thinks this brilliant author who is said to have sired a disabled child doth have a very serious axe to grind and may not be giving "equal air time" to the opposing viewpoint. This book reads more like an all out attack than a pro vs. con treatise. Still, the book is worth reading for anyone who contemplates doing a factor analysis and would like to get some broad perspective on the history of same.
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Summary: Consider the source
Review: Gould effectively exposes and obliterates the assumptions underlying the neo-racist Bell Curve. His approach is careful and straightforward, and -- like all his writing -- lucid and enjoyable. If you need further evidence of the significance of this book, note that the only negative reviews posted here are by folks whose reviews are, shall be say, less than erudite in their approach. (Don't ask me why Amazon chooses to post reviews that dismiss Gould as another "Jew of the leftist school", but at least it tells you what buttons Gould manages to push!). The composite rating of four stars should be higher, since the average has been brought down by the abnormally low votes of those who likely haven't even read the book, but are threatened by its theme.
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Summary: An Important Tome Against Racism and Bias in Science
Review: Stephen Jay Gould's gifts as a splendid historian of science, biologist, statistician and writer are ably demonstrated in his revised edition of "The Mismeasure of Man". Like a great vintage wine, this classic work in the history of science has aged well; Gould's additional essays, most notably his devastatingly effective critique of "The Bell Curve", have only enhanced this fine book's virtues. "The Mismeasure of Man" opens with an excellent survey of questionable science done to support racist views of 19th Century American and European anthropologists. It proceeds with the origins of IQ testing and how it inevitably led to biased testing against those not of Northern European heritage in the United States as well as in Europe. Most noteworthy is Gould's extensive coverage of scientific fraud in pscyhology and the development of psychometrics (statistics used in psychological testing). Indeed, his account of the origins and development of the sophisticated multivariate statistical method known as factor analysis is the finest I have read. All of this is told in vivid, often humorous, prose which ranks among Gould's finest writing. "The Mismeasure of Man" is essential reading not only for social scientists, biologists, and historians of science, but also for the scientifically literate public.
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Summary: Time to read this again.
Review: This book exposes the absurdly biased studies of scientists attempting to prove that white people are the superior race. Most of it focuses the 19th and early 20th century, but it also has a good critique of "The Bell Curve" and the concept of g. I think that every scientist should read this book.
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Summary: Gould plinks down the IQ-paradigm house of cards
Review: Once one accepts the concept of Reification, it becomes obvious that one cannot construct a reality from mere metrics and numbers, regardless of the mathematical tools used. If one does, the "reality" obtained is in fact just opinion based on personal esthetics, bias, prejudice, or sociopolitical agenda. Gould demonstrates this time and again in reviewing a century of racist and classist-tainted research. IQ will forever lie outside true science because numbers boiled down from test scores will never be convincingly tied to any tangible, objective, repeatable reality. Correlation matrices, factorial analyses and bell curves are beside the point, Gould maintains, since the basic concept of IQ is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. IQ's practical use is always to establish or reaffirm hierarchies, to winnow and discriminate. Binet's original goal for the IQ was to merely identify clearly subnormal school children so they could be helped. Once it was out of his hands, however, other, less lofty uses were found for the metric. Gould shows convincingly that IQ testing was seized upon as a eugenics-based rationale to restrict US immigration from Eastern Europe beginning in the 1930's. Up to 6 million people, including many Jews and other undesirables, may have been denied entry into the US as a result. Go figure. This reified acceptance of IQ's validity is alive and well today. Books like The Bell Curve and other hereditarian racist-by-definition works sell like hotcakes, yet are merely rehashings of the same old stuff. Many private schools use IQ testing to exclude undesirables (as if their five-figure tuitions weren't exclusionary enough!). Reading Gould's book will open one's eyes to the nasty, flawed basis and uses of all IQ testing, past, present and future.
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Summary: The Mismeasurements of Gould
Review: Stephen Gould is an excellent writer and has a great command of language. His books are generally considered well written and are consistently given excellent reviews by the publishing "Establishment"--in other words, the New York Review of Books. Although Gould excels in his writing, he is severely deficient in logic and science. The theme of his book is that the science of racial mental ability is flawed due to prejudices and mistakes of scientists of the past. He devotes a large portion of his book to describing the flawed science of 19th century scientists who tried to prove racial supierority of whites over other races and whose science was flawed due to these prejudices. ....
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