The Mismeasure of Man



The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (ISBN 0393039722) is a controversial book critiquing what he saw as "scientific racism," starting with ideas such as craniometry and the eugenics movement and concluding with more recent developments in the study of race and intelligence.

The book, originally written in 1981, describes Gould's objections to:

"'[...] the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups&mdash;races, classes, or sexes&mdash;are innately inferior and deserve their status' (pp. 24-25)."

Gould's revised and expanded text is touted as "refuting" arguments purportedly made in another controversial book, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Murray denies making the main point which Gould "rebuts".

Arthur Jensen, like Murray, denies making many points which Gould attributes to him. Hans Eysenck called the book "a paleontologist’s distorted view of what psychologists think."

Historical bias in biological sociology
The first parts of the book are devoted to a scathing analysis of early works on a supposed biologically inherited basis for intelligence, such as research on craniometry (the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties). Gould argues that much of this research was based more on prejudice than scientific rigor, demonstrating how in several occasions researchers such as Samuel Morton, Louis Agassiz, Paul Broca used their expected conclusions as part of their reasoning (a clear logical error). A powerful passage of the book is a complete re-working of original data for one of these studies, showing blatant biases and manipulations in the derivation of the original results (mostly by selection of data). When these biases are accounted for, the original hypothesis (an ordering in skull size ranging from Blacks through Mongols to Whites) is not supported in any way by the data.

Claims of bias and falsification
The following parts concentrate more on historical evaluation of the concept of IQ and of the g factor - a supposed measure of overall intelligence. In the first edition, Gould criticizes many of the studies Herrnstein and Murray were to draw on. Gould mainly argues that most race-related psychological studies have been heavily biased by the belief that human behavior is best explained by heredity. He criticizes studies of the relationship between race and intelligence on several grounds. He claims that an oft-cited twin study by Cyril Burt on the genetic heritability of intelligence presents falsified data, although current scientific consensus attributes Burt's errors to carelessness rather than deception.

Analysis of statistical correlations
Most of his arguments have to do with the value of statistical correlations. Many arguments around IQ center on the issue of correlation&mdash;the claim that the test measures General intelligence factor requires that the kinds of answers to various questions will correlate highly; the claim that g is inherited requires that the scores of respondents who are closely related will correlate significantly higher than results of those distantly related. First, he points out that correlation is not the same as cause. As he puts it, measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of Mexico, the price of Swiss cheese, my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between galaxies" will have a high positive correlation&mdash;but that does not mean that Stephen Jay Gould's age goes up because the population of Mexico goes up. Second, and more specifically, a high positive correlation between parent and child IQ can be taken as either evidence that IQ is genetically inherited or that IQ is inherited through social and environmental factors. Since the same data can be used to argue either side of the case, the data in and of itself is not useful.

Furthermore, Gould argues that even if it were demonstrated that IQ is highly genetically heritable within a group, this tells nothing about the causes of IQ differences between groups or whether those differences can be changed by environment. Gould gives the example of height, which is known to be determined mostly through genes within socioeconomic groups, but group differences in height may be due to nutrition as well as genes. Richard Lewontin, a colleague of Gould's, is well-known for emphasizing this argument as it pertains to IQ testing.

According to Gould, a good example of the confusion of heritability is found in the statement of international scholars published in the Wall Street Journal (see web-link above): "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100% because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin." He says that this claim is at best misleading and at worst, false. First, it is very hard to conceive of a world in which everyone grows up in the exact same environment; the very fact that people are spatially and temporally dispersed means that no one can be in exactly the same environment (a simple example will illustrate how complex social environments are: a husband and wife may share a house, but they do not live in identical environments because each is married to a different person). Second, even if people grew up in exactly the same environment, not all differences would be genetic in origin. This is because embryonic development involves chance molecular events and random cellular movements that alter the effects of genes.

Gould argues that heritability is not a measure of phenotypic differences between groups, but rather differences between genotype and phenotype within a population. Even within a group, if all members of the group grow up in exactly the same environment, it does not mean that heritability is 100%. All Americans (or New Yorkers, or upper-class New Yorkers – one may define the population in question as narrowly as one likes) may eat exactly the same food, but their adult height will still be a result of both genetics and nutrition. In short, heritability is almost never 100%, and heritability tells us nothing about genetic differences between groups. This is true for height, which has a high degree of heritability; it is all the more true for intelligence. This is true for other reasons besides ones involving "heritability", as Gould goes on to discuss.

Gould's most profound criticism is his rejection of the very thing that IQ is meant to measure, "general intelligence" (or g). IQ tests, he points out, ask many different kinds of questions. Responses to different kinds of questions tend to form clusters. In other words, different kinds of questions can be given different scores – which suggests that an IQ test is really a combination of a number of different tests that test a number of different things. Gould claims that proponents of IQ tests assume that there is such a thing as general intelligence, and analyze the data so as to produce one number, which they then claim is a measure of general intelligence. Gould argues that this one number (and therefore, the implication that there is a real thing called "general intelligence" that this number measures) is in fact an artifact of the statistical operations psychologists apply to the raw data. He argues that one can analyze the same data more effectively and end up with a number of different scores (but valid, meaning they measure something) rather than one score.

Finally, Gould points out that he is not opposed to the notion of "biological variability" which is the premise that heredity influences intelligence. He does criticize the notion of "biological determinism" which is the idea that genes determine destiny and there is nothing we can or should do about this.

Criticisms
In an interview in The Skeptic, Murray claimed that Gould misrepresented his views.

Arthur Jensen, a prominent educational psychologist, in a paper titled The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons. makes this observation


 * "Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and offers a course at Harvard entitled, "Biology as a Social Weapon." Apparently the course covers much the same content as does the present book. Having had some personal cause for interest in ideologically motivated attacks on biologically oriented behavioral scientists, I first took notice of Gould when he played a prominent role in a group called Science for the People and in that group's attack on the theories of Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson, a leader in the development of sociobiology..."

Jensen also makes a complaint similar to Murray's when charging Gould with misrepresentations


 * "In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message."

Jensen also indicates that Gould relies on information that is outdated while ignoring present research and information that does not support his conclusions.


 * "...Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose."

J. Philippe Rushton, head of the Pioneer Fund that has funded research into race and intelligence, accused Gould of "scholarly malfeasance" for, in his view, misrepresenting or ignoring relevant scientific research.

For instance, Gould has been accused of beating a dead horse since the methods criticized in his book (even in its revised edition) had long been abandoned. Rushton also charges that Gould fails to mention new discoveries made from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which show a 0.4 correlation between brain-size and IQ.

A review by John B. Carroll of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has pointed out that while the book generally received positive reviews in the popular press, it was generally rejected by the scientific community for misrepresenting the state of research in the area.

Carroll indicates


 * "The biologist Bernard Davis (1983; see also Gould, 1984; Davis, 1984) called attention to the fact that reviews in the popular and literary press, such as The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, were almost universally effusive in their approbation, whereas most reviews in scientific journals, such as Science (Samelson, 1982), Nature, and Science '82, tended to be critical on a number of counts. Davis cited Jensen's (1982) review in Contemporary Education Review as "the most extensive scientific analysis," but mentioned, as an exception, a generally laudatory review by Morrison that appeared in Scientific American because that joumal's editorial staff had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice" (Davis, 1983, p. 45)."

According to Chris Brand, The Mismeasure of Man is a "masterpiece of deception."

Hans Eysenck, who at the time of his death was the most frequently cited living psychologist, wrote


 * S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is a paleontologist’s distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science. Gould is one of a number of politically motivated scientists who have consistently misled the public about what psychologists are doing in the field of intelligence, what they have discovered and what conclusions they have come to. Gould simply refuses to mention unquestionable facts that do not fit into his politically correct version; he shamelessly attacks the reputations of eminent scientists of whom he disapproves, on completely nonfactual grounds, and he misrepresents the views of scientists.

Finally, many of Gould's positions conflict with conclusions reached by the American Psychological Association, whose Board of Scientific Affairs has published a report finding that IQ scores do have high predictive validity for certain individual differences. 

Critiques of The Mismeasure of Man

 * The Mismeasures of Gould
 * The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons by Arthur Jensen
 * Race, Intelligence, and the Brain: The errors and omissions of the 'revised' edition of S. J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1996) (PDF) by J. Philippe Rushton
 * Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ and the press by Bernard Davis
 * Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) by John B. Carroll, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Positive reviews of The Mismeasure of Man

 * Review on sciencebookguide.com
 * Engines of Our Ingenuity #429 by John H. Lienhard
 * Review of The Mismeasure of Man by Karen Murphy.
 * Steven Jay Gould on Intelligence by KB Korb.
 * "Still Mismeasuring Man." Skeptic. 5.1 (1997): 84.
 * Janik, Allan. "The Mismeasure of Man." Ethics. 94.1 (October 1983): 153-155.
 * Samelson, Franz. "Intelligence and Some of Its Testers." Science. 215.4533 (5 February 1982): 656-657.
 * The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould: Things That Are Not by Sean Scheiderer.
 * The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould reviewed by Diane Ravitch. Commentary, Vol. 73 February 1982 No. 2.