The Mismeasure of Man

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: graduate student
Review: Gould's book was well written and easily comprehensible. A number of excellent points were discussed. However, I was disappointed by his total refutation of the Bell Curve. The degree that "g" measures this abstract controversial, concept of intelligence is the the degree that the conclusions in The Bell Curve are correct. If "g" does not exist or is not a valid measurement of intelligence, the foundation of the Bell Curve will be destroyed. But I have met people with 90 IQ's and other with 140+; there seems to be a difference in their ability to grasp concepts and figure out problems. If 100 people with 140+ IQ's and 100 people with < 90 IQ's were pited against one another to solve a complex problem, I believe the 140+ would win most of the time. Dr. Gould is professor at Harvard; how much exposure does he really have with low IQ individuals?

Bernstein and Murray avidly admit that IQ tests do err (testing error). And "g" may not be the best measure of intelligence, but IQ does seem to have some merit. Unfortunately, people are placing far, far too much importance on a simple number. "g" is just a rough (very blunt) estimate of intelligence. Ranking of people is impossible because the testing error as well as other factors that create too much mismeasurment AND the potential invalidity of IQ or "g." People should not pigeon-hole individuals with superior IQ's as "cognitively superior" or those with low IQ's as "cognitively inferior"--other factors besides IQ should be considered! But again, IQ does have some merit--the debate is how much.

Yes, disadvantaged classes and races is an issue with IQ (group differences). The Bell Curve is not primarily about that. Read the Bell Curve; the main theme is that people have different cognitive abilities. However, Hernstein and Murray briefly discuss potential group differences, but the author reminds the reader of the overlap between groups and more important within group variance. Hernstein and Murray warn that people should not be judged by what group they belong to. In addition, other factors may explain group differences, which Gould explicates--in my opinion, Hernstein and Murray do not discuss the group differences adequately. But I still agree with The Bell Curve that certain people are more intelligent than other individuals (I disagree with the group differences). Read both "The Mismeasurement of Man" and "The Bell Curve" Both of them have great arguments for both sides.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent review of the errors of standardized testing
Review: Gould's Mismeasure of Man is a wonderful book on the history of the concept of testable intelligence and the limits of standardized testing. I taught standardized tests for graduate school, law school, medical school, dental school and an array of undergraduate enterance exams. I have also taught variations on IQ tests. Mr. Gould confirms what I have learned first-hand: no test, no matter how long or well-designed, can quantify human potential objectively. He makes eloquent arguments, several of which are based in mathematics. Although I am not qualified to make a statement on the quality of his statements in psychology, I have a degree in mathematics and I can say honestly that within his mathematical arguments his reasoning is sound. An extraordinary book for anyone who is curious about the testing industry and standardized tests in general, and an absolute must-read for anyone facing a standardized test sometime soon.

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

Rating:
Summary: compelling and eye-opening
Review: mr. gould certainly has his flaws, but this book is extensively researched, well-written, and full of excellent logic and analysis. i especially appreciated his essay (added to later editions of the book) about 'the bell curve'. plus ça change...

Rating:
Summary: For the soft-minded
Review: Noticing that a book was on the market that rehashed the same, tired old 1960's idocy that there is "no difference" between races (subspecies) of homo sapiens, my ever-so-PC liberal arts college gobbled up copies of this book and distributed them as required reading for evolutionary psychology classes. Overall, this book was a big waste of time and contributed NOTHING to what is otherwise a fine field of study. Simple, regressive logic such as "just because some 19th century racists drew exaggerated pictures of blacks to make them look like apes" this means there are no differences between subspecies of human beings that evolved in isolated environments over 100,000's of years. Pure nonsense and totally worthless; not "scholarly" at all but rather an amateur foray into "science" for the feminist/ultra-left crowds.

Rating:
Summary: Of intelligence, genetics, and environments (again)
Review: Steven J. Gould is most famous among the general public for his collections of essays from his long Natural History series, "This View of Life". But the best of Gould's writing is perhaps to be found in his single-theme books. And The Mismeasure of Man is arguably the finest among them. The volume is about the long history of the search for scientific justification of racism, and the many faux pas that science has committed when it comes to the study of human intelligence. The 1996 edition of the classic 1981 book also contains some interesting addenda: "Critique of the Bell Curve", and "Three Centuries' Perspective on Race and Racism" (as well as a new introduction), just in case you were not convinced by the arguments lined out in the main text. The Mismeasure can conceptually be divided in two parts: the first deals with the misapplication of measurements of the human body (cranial capacity and facial features), the second one is concerned with the mind (IQ and generalized intelligence). In both cases, Gould follows the same approach that has been so successful in some of his technical opuses, such as Ontogeny and Phylogeny: he tracks the history of a discipline or scientific question, highlights the contributions and discusses the motives of the major players, while simultaneously plunging into the technical aspects of the science behind the problem. So, for example, in order to find out why measuring the cranial capacity of the human head does not tell you much about intelligence, we are introduced to biologists of the caliper of Louis Agassiz (Gould currently holds his chair at Harvard), Samuel George Morton, Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin), and - of course - Paul Broca, the father of craniometry. It is indeed fascinating to find out that theories of the origin of human races actually preceded Charles Darwin and evolutionary thinking, with the "polygenic" school apparently providing solid basis for racism: if the term "human" comprises different species, it is only natural that we rank them according to their biological worth (needless to say, the "objective" ranking invariably ended up putting the author's race - and gender - in pole position, and somewhat ahead of everybody else). The supporters of the opposing theory of "monogenism" were by no means kinder to other races, though. Their argument was that there was only one Adam, and that every human race descended from him, and degenerated to a greater or lesser extent (again, you guess who degenerated more and who the least). Regardless of the premise, all we needed to know according to craniometrists was the size of the brain (as estimated by the internal volume of the cranium) and we will know how intelligent (and thereby "worthy") any individual or race really is. Now, one could object that there is indeed a good correlation between cranial capacity and what we intuitively think of as intelligence among animals. After all, biology textbooks report diagrams showing that carnivores have larger brains than herbivores, regardless of body size. And the accompanying explanation makes sense: carnivores need larger brains because they have to process more information and more quickly, they have to face a larger variety of situations, and be able to make a larger number of vital decisions. In other words, they need to be smarter. Gould acknowledges this, but quickly - and correctly - points out that variation across species does not have to have the same cause and meaning as variation within species. He illustrates this with an array of definitely intelligent people whose brain sizes covered almost the whole gamut displayed by non-pathological individuals. However, this is indeed one of the troublesome aspects of this book and, I dare say, of Gould's writing in general. He dismisses contrary evidence or arguments so fast that one gets the impression of seeing a magician performing a trick. One cannot avoid the feeling of having being duped by the quickness of the magician's movement, instead of having observed a genuine phenomenon. In this particular instance, I can vouch for Gould as a biologist, but I'm not so sure that the general public is willing to trust him on his word. After having dismissed both craniometry and the aberrant work of Cesare Lombroso on the anthropological stigmata of criminals, Gould moves on to his main target: IQ and intelligence testing. IQ testing was originally introduced by the French psychologist Alfred Binet with the intention of spotting children who were falling behind in the curriculum, so that teachers could pay particular attention to them. Alas, such a noble intent soon fell victim to the human tendency of ranking everything, and led to an astounding series of "scientific" enterprises characterized by deep racist overtones. H.H. Goddard saw the feeble-minded (the technical term being "moron") as a menace to society; we should care for him, but we should not allow him to reproduce. One of the ghastly consequences of the eugenic movement in the US was the enactment of immigration restriction laws based on perceived racial inferiority, and the actual forced sterilization of individuals deemed genetically inferior: for a few years the United States teetered on the brink of the same precipice over which Nazi Germany readily dove around the same time. One of the chief obstacles to the use of IQ scores is that there are several ways to devise an IQ test, and the results of different tests are not always congruent when performed on the same subjects. But if we have to use a battery of tests, and then somehow weigh their discrepancies, we lose one major attraction of IQ testing: the ability of ranking human beings on a simple, uni-linear scale of worth. Charles Spearman and Cyril Burt set out to accomplish the feat of reducing multiple-tests complexity once again to a single magical number. Burt was a disciple of Spearman (himself one of the founding fathers of modern statistics) and later claimed to have made contributions to the theory of factor analysis which where in fact Spearman's. Gould plunges into one of the best explanations I have ever come across of the multivariate statistical technique of factor analysis, fundamental to both Spearman's and Burt's work. This allows the reader to gain some understanding of a very important tool in modern biostatistics (one that Gould himself uses for his own technical research), while at the same time being able to follow Gould in highlighting the fundamental problems which Spearman and Burt incurred. Simply put, factor analysis is a statistical technique based on the rotation of orthogonal axes in multivariate (i.e., multidimensional) space. This reduces a complex data set (say, made of the results of ten different IQ tests) to a manageable number of linear combinations of the original variables. This smaller set of dimensions identifies the principal "factors" which explain the correlation structure in the original data. Spearman's suggestion was that all IQ tests have one principal factor in common. That is, the scores on each test are correlated to each other, because they all reflect one underlying quantity, which Spearman named "g", or general intelligence. Spearman therefore provided one of the two pillars of the eugenic movement: there seemed indeed to be one way to rank individuals by their intelligence with the use of one number: this was the score on the g-factor, instead of the score on any of the available IQ tests. Burt's major achievement was a supposed confirmation of the second fundamental piece of the puzzle eugenic puzzle: his studies of genetically identical twins suggested a high heritability (incorrectly read as a high level of genetic determination) of intelligence. So, not only do individuals differ in intelligence, but this is easy to measure and genetically determined. Environment, and with it education and social welfare, cannot alter the innate difference among individuals, genders, and races. QED Well, not really.

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.