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THE MISMEASURE of MAN Revised and Expanded

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THE MISMEASURE of MAN Revised and Expanded BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD IN NORTON PAPERBACK EVER SINCE DARWIN Reflections in Natural History THE PANDA'S THUMB More Reflections in Natural History THE MISMEASURE OF MAN Revised and Expanded HEN'S TEETH AND HORSE'S TOES Further Reflections in Natural History THE FLAMINGO'S SMILE Reflections in Natural History AN URCHIN IN THE STORM Essays about Books and Ideas ILLUMINATIONS A Bestiary (with R. W. Purcell) WONDERFUL LIFE The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS Reflections in Natural History FINDERS, KEEPERS Treasures amd Oddities of Natural History Collectors from Peter the Great to Louis Agassiz (with R. W. Purcell) THE MISMEASURE OF MAN To the memory of Grammy and Papa Joe, who came, struggled, and prospered, Mr. Goddard notwithstanding. Contents Acknowledgments 15 Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition: Thoughts at Age Fifteen 19 The frame of The Mismeasure of Man, 19 Why revise The Mismeasure of Man after fifteen years?, 26 Reasons, history and revision of The Mismeasure of Man, 36 2. American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks andlndians as Separate, Inferior Species Cfolj 62 A shared context of culture, 63 Preevolutionary styles of scientific racism: monogenism and polygenism, 71 Louis Agassiz—America's theorist of polygeny, 74 Samuel George Morton—empiricist of polygeny, 82 The case of Indian inferiority: Crania Americana The case of the Egyptian catacombs: Crania Aegyptiaca The case of the shifting black mean The final tabulation of 1849 IO CONTENTS Conclusions The American school and slavery, 101 3. Measuring Heads: Paul Br oca and the Heyday ofCraniology / -4f^"yi The allure of numbers, 105 Introduction Francis Galton—apostle of quantification A curtain-raiser with a moral: numbers do not guarantee truth Masters of craniometry: Paul Broca and his school, 114 The great circle route Selecting characters Averting anomalies BIG-BRAINED GERMANS SMALL-BRAINED MEN OF EMINENCE LARGE-BRAINED CRIMINALS FLAWS IN A PATTERN OF INCREASE THROUGH TIME Front and back THE CRANIAL INDEX THE CASE OF THE FORAMEN MAGNUM Women's brains Postscript, 140 4. Measuring Bodies: Two Case Studies on the Apishness of Undesirables j^C^ The ape in all of us: recapitulation, 142 The ape in some of us: criminal anthropology, 151 Atavism and criminality Animals and savages as born criminals The stigmata: anatomical, physiological, and social Lombroso's retreat The influence of criminal anthropology Coda Epilogue, 173 CONTENTS II 5. The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention ij6 Alfred Binet and the original purposes of the Binet scale, 176 Binet flirts with craniometry Binet's scale and the birth of IQ The dismantling of Binet's intentions in America H. H. Goddard and the menace of the feeble-minded, 18& Intelligence as a Mendelian gene GODDARD IDENTIFIES THE MORON A UNILINEAR SCALE OF INTELLIGENCE BREAKING THE SCALE INTO MENDELIAN COMPARTMENTS THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING (BUT NOT BREEDING) OF MORONS Preventing the immigration and propagation of morons Goddard recants Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQ, 204 Mass testing and the Stanford-Binet Terman's technocracy of innateness Fossil IQ's of past geniuses Terman on group differences Terman recants R. M. Yerkes and the Army Mental Tests: IQ comes of age, 222 Psychology's great leap forward Results of the army tests A critique of the Army Mental Tests THE CONTENT OF THE TESTS INADEQUATE CONDITIONS DUBIOUS AND PERVERSE PROCEEDINGS: A PERSONAL TESTIMONY FINAGLING THE SUMMARY STATISTICS: THE PROBLEM OF ZERO VALUES FINAGLING THE SUMMARY STATISTICS: GETTING AROUND OBVIOUS CORRELATIONS WITH ENVIRONMENT Political impact of the army data CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE AN AVERAGE MENTAL AGE OF THIRTEEN? CONTENTS THE ARMY TESTS AND AGITATION TO RESTRICT IMMIGRATION I BRIGHAM'S MONOGRAPH ON AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE THE TRIUMPH OF RESTRICTION ON IMMIGRATION BRIGHAM RECANTS The Real Error of Cyril Burt: Factor Analysis and the Reification of Intelligence 2 64 The case of Sir Cyril Burt, 264 Correlation, cause, and factor analysis, 269 Correlation and cause Correlation in more than two dimensions Factor analysis and its goals The error of reification Rotation and the nonnecessity of principal components Charles Spearman and general intelligence, 286 The two-factor theory The method of tetrad differences Spearman's g and the great instauration of psychology Spearman's g and the theoretical justification of IQ Spearman's reification of g Spearman on the inheritance of g Cyril Burt and the hereditarian synthesis, 303 The source of Burt's uncompromising hereditarianism BURT'S INITIAL "PROOF" OF INNATENESS LATER ARGUMENTS BURT'S BLINDNESS BURT'S POLITICAL USE OF INNATENESS Burt's extension of Spearman's theory Burt on the reification of factors Burt and the political uses of g L. L. Thurstone and the vectors of mind, 326 Thurstone's critique and reconstruction The egalitarian interpretation of PMA's Spearman and Burt react CONTENTS 13 Oblique axes and second-order g Thurstone on the uses of factor analysis Epilogue: Arthur Jensen and the resurrection of Spearman's g, 347 A final thought, 350 7. A Positive Conclusion 357 Debunking as positive science, 351 Learning by debunking, 352 Biology and human nature, 354 Epilogue 365 Critique of The Bell Curve 367 The Bell Curvv. 367 Disingenuoumess of content Disingenuousness^of argument Disingenuousness ofprogram Ghosts of Bell Curves pasX 379 Three Centuries' Perspectives on Race and Racism \. 391 Age-old fallacies of thinking and stinking^ 391 Racial geometry, 401 The moral state of Tahiti—and of Darwin, Bibliography 425 Index 433 Acknowledgments GENES MAY BE SELFISH in a limited metaphorical sense, but there can be no gene for selfishness when I have so many friends and col• leagues willing to offer their aid. I thank Ashley Montagu, not only for his specific suggestions, but also for leading the fight against scientific racism for so many years without becoming cynical about human possibilities. Several colleagues who have written, or are writing, their own books on biological determinism willingly shared their information and even let me use their own findings, some• times before they could publish them themselves: G. Allen, A. Chase, S. Chorover, L. Kamin, R. Lewontin. Others heard of my efforts and, without solicitation, sent material and suggestions that enriched the book greatly: M. Leitenberg, S. Selden. L. Mesz- oly prepared the original illustrations in Chapter 6. Perhaps Kro- potkin was right after all; I shall remain with the hopeful. A note on references: In place of conventional footnotes, I have used the system of references universally found in scientific litera• ture—name of author and year of publication, cited in parentneses after the relevant passage of text. (Items are then listed by author and by year for any one author in the bibliography.) I know that many readers may be disconcerted at first; the text will seem clut• tered to many. Yet, I am confident that everyone will begin to "read through" the citations after a few pages of experience, and will then discover that they do not interrupt the flow of prose. To me, the advantages of this system far outweigh any aesthetic deficit— no more flipping back and forth from text to end-notes (no pub• lisher will set them all at the bottom of the page any more), only to find that a tantalizing little number yields no juicy tidbit of subsid- i6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iary information, but only a dry bibliographic citation;* immediate access to the two essential bits of information for any historical inquiry—who and when. I believe that this system of referencing is one of the few potential contributions that scientists, normally not a very literate lot, might supply to other fields of written scholar• ship. A note on title: I hope that an apparently sexist title will be taken in the intended spirit—not only as a play on Protagoras' famous aphorism, but also as a commentary on the procedures of biological determinists discussed in the book. They did, indeed, study "man" (that is, white European males), regarding this group as a standard and everybody else as something to be measured unfavorably against it. That they mismeasured "man" underscores the double fallacy. *The relatively small number of truly informational footnotes can then be placed at the bottom of the page, where they belong. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition Thoughts at Age Fifteen The frame of The Mismeasure of Man The original title for The Mismeasure of Man would have honored my hero Charles Darwin for the wonderfully incisive statement that he made about biological determinism to climax his denunciation of slavery in the Voyage of the Beagle. I wanted to call this book Great Is Our Sin—from Darwin's line, cited as an epigraph on my title page: "If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." I did not follow my initial inclination—and I am sure that I made the right decision—because I knew damned well that my work would then be misshelved to oblivion in the religion section of many bookstores (as my volume of evolutionary essays, The Flamingo's Smile, ended up in the ornithology division of a great Boston institu• tion that shall remain nameless). Things can always be worse. I once, in an equally prestigious Boston emporium, found a copy of that 1960s undergraduate manifesto The Student as Nigger on a shelf marked "Race Relations." My friend Harry Kemelman, author of the marvelous mystery series featuring theological sleuth David Small, told me that his first entry in the series—Friday the Rabbi. .— once appeared in a list of children's titles as "Freddy the Rabbit. ." But tables do turn occasionally.
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