THE MISMEASURE OF MAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Stephen Jay Gould | 448 pages | 17 Jun 1996 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393314250 | English | New York, United States The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould He does, however, essentially state that IQ is meaningless because it reifies intelligence, and that there's nothing innately different about one human's brain or another's, in a sort of "Harrison Bergeron" vision of equality. Pinker pretty much shows this to be false, but finds a way to celebrate our differences. To me, the problem with IQ is not that it measures nothing, in theory, although some people just don't test well, and I exclude them from judgment. My beef is that IQ is just so linear and one-dimensional. Who decided that skill in math and grammar was the sole indicator of intelligence? What about athletic ability? Artistic ability? Ability to categorize? Or to ask the big questions? What about people with great "people skills," or an aptitude for mechanics? Educators will be familiar with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and I subscribe to it wholeheartedly. Darwin himself was of average intelligence, but excelled at research Gardner's "naturalist" intelligence. And I believe that each of us is capable of whatever we wish to accomplish—there are pilots and painters without arms, and I almost cringe before throwing out the token "Beethoven was deaf" nugget. Genes are not destiny, and work can overcome them. That said, smart people know their limits and they don't wax poetic about how they don't exist and we're all equal in every way. I know that I am not good at math, that is, I was not born with an innate ability to comprehend mathematics intuitively. I could certainly apply myself and learn math, but why bother? And this brings us to the part of the book that made me give it one star—"The Real Error of Cyril Burt," consisting of eighty-six pages of advanced math. This is a fatal error for a pop-sci book. Sample: The original measures may be represented as vectors of unit length, radiating from a common point. If two measures are highly correlated, their vectors lie close to each other. The cosine of the angle between any two vectors records the correlation coefficient between them Not exactly quantum mechanics, to be sure, but enough to kill my interest, and lose the point. If Gould needs a lot of math to tell me something very loose and unsure, and Pinker needs no math to tell me something completely concrete, well, Occam and his famed blade point to the latter. This is the second Gould I've read, and it was the second to involve a disclaimer about a glut of details to come in the introduction. When you're used to Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan , with their grand, sweeping,and poetic generalizations about life, the universe, and everything, these details are not only shelter to the devil—they are the devil. Believe it or not, I recommend this book. The first four chapters and the epilogue—the story of a sterilized woman with Down's syndrome, which broke my heart—are pretty good. But bad editing is its downfall. When I count three spelling errors, I send the thing back to my mental publishers. View 1 comment. Mar 01, Sean DeLauder rated it it was amazing. Before a proper summation can be given, one first has to understand the Why of The Mismeasure of Man. The Why being hundreds of years of conservative, white-folk-do-well-because-they're-smartest ideology supported by "science", and the more recent belief in the existence of an inherited IQ number by which all humans can be ranked, culminating in The Bell Curve , by Herrnstein and Murray It is a book that asserts poor people are, in short, intellectually inferior to the non-poor, and thus Before a proper summation can be given, one first has to understand the Why of The Mismeasure of Man. It is a book that asserts poor people are, in short, intellectually inferior to the non-poor, and thus can never rise above their status barring some fluke to achieve the success that wealthier people enjoy. The book was roundly criticized as sloppy, statistically inaccurate, and pandering to a conservative audience that wanted to believe the poor were not worth the money spent on them, with Gould as one of its loudest critics. In sum, Gould's book is an admonishment of ideology behind The Bell Curve Gould published The Mismeasure of Man years earlier, then re published when The Bell Curve was released and the willingness of social scientists to shape their findings to fit their narrative over the past centuries of anthropological research. In essence, they found what they set out to find support for white, Europeans being more intelligent than others , in spite of clear evidence to the contrary--thus the title of the book. For those with a mathematical bent, the latter portion of the book explains the error of Herrnstein and Murray's calculations, and the continuing trend of partiality toward specific data that proved their hypothesis while ignoring data that might disprove it. The latter part of this trend is what Gould finds disheartening and enraging at the same time. It is symptomatic of Bad Science. That being when scientists find an abundance of evidence that points in a different direction from what they expected, yet cling to their preconceived expectations anyway, and search for a way to manipulate their data to confirm the existing bias. Imagine if Newton had at first insisted his laws of motion were based upon the energy inherent in apples, and never allowed his findings to alter his opinion. In the far future these notions of gender- and race-based intellectuality will be long behind us and we will look back in incredulity. But if not for Gould, this book, and others like him, we might never take those steps forward. If you take anything from the book, or at least the idea of the book if you choose not to read it in its entirety, it should be 1 always approach an idea with some degree of skepticism, and 2 consider the possibility of an agenda behind a proposal--even when offered by something so noble and ideal as the scientific community. Sep 26, Mehrsa rated it it was amazing. Gould is a good person and an excellent thinker. This is a call to scientists to examine their own biases and it is a demolishment of centuries of racist genetic testing. It's also such a pleasure to read someone who is a sound thinker and can write logically. I know some of his debunkings i. Morton have since been debunked, but that does nothing to diminish the importance of this work. Also, he notes that racist "science" tends to proceed from movements demanding equality. And so it is that Gould is a good person and an excellent thinker. And so it is that the likes of Murray joined by a bunch of other people are once again advancing the guard of IQ determinism. I could really use an updated Mismeasurement of Man right about now View 2 comments. This book is a political document, not a popular science book. Unfortunately, the book is an example of dishonest cherry picking of findings and selective omission of studies that would ruin the story Gould tries to construct. Ironically, Gould commits the same "crime" he accuses the racist scientists of: selective bias. There is no scientific honesty in this book, and as a consequence, Gould gives ammo to those he tries to discredit and disarm. Irony once again. Maybe this topic should be left un This book is a political document, not a popular science book. Maybe this topic should be left untouched, as there is great potention for harm associated with it. That is my own personal conclusion after pursuing the primary literature on the topics raised by Gould. Shelves: sciences. Some of us, the cooperative ones, got quite good at it and had our choice of colleges. We were, we were told, intelligent--or, correlatively, "not living up to potential". Beyond the satisfaction of thinking myself smart, however, was an unease. It wasn't just that I wasn't particularly good at much of anything except tests, it was because of the segregation of students from one another beginning in elementary school and continuting, with ever greater degrees of discrimination, through junior and senior high schools. I couldn't buy it. A lot of the kids I was being separated from seemed smarter than me by any number of practical estimations. Gould's book is a history and critique of intelligence testing. It began in France, simply as a means of identifying areas of relative academic standing. Its purpose was benign: find the kids lagging in, say, numeration and pay enough attention to them to bring them up to speed. It became, primarily under the North Americans, a ontological measure of inherent capacity. Much of Gould's exposition hinges on the uses and abuses of factoral analysis, a mathematical tool he himself employed in his own academic training. His explanation of the method and of its history of abuse by intelligence measurers is clear and telling. Some of Gould's critique is based on a review, conducted by his students, of the data originally gathered and manipulated by early intelligence theorists. Errors are found, lots of them-- virtually all tendentious. Would that the means existed for such reviews of many of the foundational discoveries of science! May 12, Geoffrey Miller rated it it was ok.