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The Mismeasure of Man |  | Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 4465
Media: Paperback
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0393314251
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN: 9780393314250
ASIN: 0393314251
Publication Date: June 17, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it," and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition of the IQ industry, should be required reading. Gould's brilliant, funny, engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow tests. How did scientists decide that intelligence was unipolar and quantifiable, and why did the standard keep changing over time? Gould's answer is clear and simple: power maintains itself. European men of the 19th century, even before Darwin, saw themselves as the pinnacle of creation and sought to prove this assertion through hard measurement. When one measure was found to place members of some "inferior" group such as women or Southeast Asians over the supposedly rightful champions, it would be discarded and replaced with a new, more comfortable measure. The 20th-century obsession with numbers led to the institutionalization of IQ testing and subsequent assignment to work (and rewards) commensurate with the score, shown by Gould to be not simply misguided--for surely intelligence is multifactorial--but also regressive, creating a feedback loop rewarding the rich and powerful. The revised edition includes a scathing critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, taking them to task for rehashing old arguments to exploit a new political wave of uncaring and belt tightening. It might not make you any smarter, but The Mismeasure of Man will certainly make you think. --Rob Lightner
Product Description
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.
Yet the idea of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined. In this edition, Stephen Jay Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 99
 Very Interesting Read, But... July 23, 2010
L. Lin
Stephen Jay Gould was among the greatest minds in the world and will be remembered as such (if with a tinge of controversy). The Mismeasure of Man portrays a vivid history of now disproven scientific theories and their reflection of the society at the time. Some remnants of these theories are still pervasive today and I found it interesting to read about where misconceptions could have originated. In short, Gould illustrates societal prejudices affecting science and its subsequent impact on society throughout the last century or so.
Gould writes clearly and is very focused on making his point. His anecdotes are wry and personal. However, this book is not a peer-reviewed scientific paper, but more of a history lesson with Gould's point of view. Some of his examples have been criticized for misinterpreting the positions of certain scientists and setting up fallacious arguments. Despite this, the majority of his arguments are sound and his portrayal of scientific history accurate. This is a great read for those interested in a bit of the history of psychology.
Three things I took from this book:
The complexity of human societies makes studying humans incredibly difficult and even the most painstaking scientific studies of any sort must be looked at within its context. We must also understand that science act more like guidelines rather than a strict statement of fact.
Our genetics are involved in every part of our being, but do not put us on an unchangeable path to an inevitable fate. It is difficult to argue for biological determinism, especially when such vastly different physical traits (phenotype) can arise from very similar genes (genotype). In addition, a great amount of variability can occur within a single physical trait.
Stephen Jay Gould pissed off quite a few people, specifically psychologists (most of them are long deceased, but a few scientists that he cites or criticizes are still alive).
The oppressive nature of intellegence testing unveiled March 9, 2010
Brian (Tacoma, WA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
An oldie but goodie. Pop anthropolgy icon S.J.Gould examines how the pseudoscience of intelligence testing was conceived, and has almost always been practiced as, a tool of social oppression. From early phrenology to modern standardized testing, IQ and aptitude testing has provided a scientific-appearing justification for racist and social class-based injustices.
wonderful introduction for laymen to the nature of science February 25, 2010
Chris S.
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The original book is a lovely, short introduction to the nature of science. It shows how scientific data are collected and analyzed with the goal of supporting or rejecting scientific hypotheses. The best part is that Gould catches all of us in wishful thinking -- in being so certain of our conclusions in advance that we unintentionally taint our data to match. Far from being value-free, science is, like every other human endeavour, a biased activity despite the genuine attempts to make it objective and cool-headed.
From basic training in statistics for the non-mathematical, to an elegant and highly approachable writing style, Gould walks us through some shocking errors in science in the past, showing us that science can only approach the truth but never attain it.
The more recent stuff, attacking The Bell Curve, which hadn't been written when Gould first came out with this book, is fine for those especially interested in the topic, but don't miss the clear, cogent, novice-friendly exposition of how scientific errors are made and how careful analysis represents one method of correcting them.
Absolutely wonderful!
Debunking a bad science: a single number cannot define the mind September 2, 2009
Vincent Poirier (Tokyo, Japan)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Jerry Pournelle has stated that Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" wasn't science. In a way, I have to agree with Pournelle because the book doesn't do what science does, viz state a hypothesis and present data and arguments to support it. Rather, it debunks an entire field of study, namely IQ testing.
Gould starts by reaching back a couple of hundred years to show early attempts to objectively define and determine intelligence, for example by the shape or volume of the skull. Gould shows conclusively that early studies were hopelessly biased to show whites were superior to non-whites and men to women. Sometimes the academics didn't realize their bias and honestly believed they were being objective, other times they were guilty of fraud by selecting specific test subjects to support their thesis.
Gould argues that today's program of intelligence testing is as misguided as craniometry was then. He argues against biological determinism and against the abstraction of intelligence as a single number, as a single thing. Does it make any sense when speaking of Newton, Mozart, or Darwin that one is more intelligent than the other? But that is what IQ tests do: they line up people along a single dimension.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
 Required to read July 14, 2009
S. Peterson (Minnesota)
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Not worth reading for leisure. This was a required read for an Evolutionary Biology Readings course, and this was the least useful of all of them.
It feels like the author is yelling at you throughout the book. Gould seems extremely biased.
It is worthwhile to read if you need alternate views on intelligence testing or the bell curve, but the mathematics the author puts such emphasis on seems to just criticize.
Take a statistics course, it is much more useful than this book and much more worth the money.
Gould must have some sort of vendetta that his never-ending introduction puts you in an angry state about science before you get to the actual science in the book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 99
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