Rating: 
Summary: None Dare Call It Trash
Review: When I was eleven years old, my mother "accidently" tossed my stamp collection out with the trash. It was one of the best things to happen to me as a boy. I never started another one, and went on to become a scientist.
It was the guy who figured out what killed the dinosaurs, Luis Alvarez, who said "I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're really not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors." He must have had Stephen Jay Gould in mind.
The stamps Gould collects in this work for undergraduates are mostly very old, and can't go anywhere. Nineteenth century suppositions about the connections of physical types to feeblemindedness and criminality, long discredited by modern scientific research, are here resurrected and their errors displayed with all the fondness of a philatelist contemplating an upside down airplane. This stamp collector, though, is not content with just putting them into an album, but seems to want to persuade the reader that airplanes can't fly.
His next stamp depicts the very first IQ test, printed up about a century ago. This one seems to have the wrong number of perforations along its edge, and it is a little bit off-center. The only possible conclusion is that all subsequent IQ tests must be incorrect too...
Actually, the core of Gould's argument is really that the post office can't produce a perfect stamp because they have too much interest in delivering the mail. Moreover, the post office cannot even price its stamps correctly because they belong to an immoral corrupt capitalist system-- the good guys like himself will eventually put it out of business once and for all, one undergraduate at a time.
Rating:
Summary: For the soft-minded
Review: Gould is a very confused person! His ambitious goal was to prove that intelligence is not inherited but a product of environmental factors such as education. The only way one could do such thing is to find a way to measure intelligence and then prove that better education and better environment can increase it. This is where Gould's problem comes in.
He mocks all attempts to measure intelligence. The only clear point that he makes throughout the book is that intelligence can't be measured or even defined clearly.
I agree but just because we can't measure it, doesn't mean that we didn't inherit it from our parents. Measurement and heritability are two different things and they must not be confused. We can't say that the Milky Way Galaxy doesn't exist only because we can't account for every single star, planet, and satellite in it.
Gould points out that average height in a third world country may be lower than average height in the US due to poor nutrition. Then he goes on to say that if people in the third world were as well fed as Americans, their average height may turn out to be higher. Unconsciously, Gould has destroyed his own argument. If two populations receive equal amount of nutrition and yet one of them turns out to have lower average height then what else other than genes could account for the difference?
He points out that IQ test scores could be increased with more education but then he totally dismisses IQ as an indicator of how smart we are. He ends up with no argument against heritability. If we can't measure intelligence then we can't prove that education can increase it, and if we can't prove that education can increase it then we have no argument against heritability.
Why can't we turn chimpanzees into PhDs? Could it be because chimpanzee's genes do not allow them to build sophisticated brains like ours? And if the sophistication of our brain is determined by our genes then the capacity for high intelligence is clearly inherited.
Basketball players are tall not because they practice to be tall but because they inherited a collection of genes, which in the presence of healthy diet can build tall bodies. Others who eat equally healthy may not grow so tall. Jumping up and down on a basketball course won't make them any taller than they already are. I can use many other analogies but I think I proved my point.
The only good thing about this book is that it points out the silliness of trying to prove the intellectual superiority of one race over another. That was the only reason I gave it two stars.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe what you want to hear; but biased, and wrong.
Review: If you want to believe that IQ doesn't mean anything, that "g" doesn't exist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: just give yourself permission to believe it. Don't make things worse by encouraging yourself to believe another huge conspiracy theory, exposing yourself to too much snideness. Learning, by example, to argue as if "persuasion", not objectivity, not a full and balanced account, not logic, and not even the truth, is the only goal or consideration. If, on the other hand, you want to believe that IQ exist, (which is not to say life isn't complicated: As a simple example we could talk about a thing called Physical Strength, and believe it exist, even if someone else points out that there is "arm" strength and "leg" strength and proceeds to quibble and moan about your tests of strength ... not that I want to take this analogy any further), OR what you want is "objectivity", read the Bell Curve. Sincerely,
Mark D. Stump
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