The Mismeasure of Man

The Mismeasure of Man is Gould's survey and critique of the claim that human intelligence is a single, fixed and measurable quantity by which individuals and groups can be ranked. Gould argues that this claim rests on what he calls biological determinism, the position that shared human behaviour is innate and controlled chiefly by biology, and he examines the two traditions that have most often been used to support it, the nineteenth century measurement of skulls and the twentieth century testing of mental ability. He identifies two fallacies running through both. The first he calls reification, the tendency to convert an abstract concept into a thing, so that a score standing for general intelligence, or the common factor that emerges when many test results are analysed together, comes to be treated as a single real entity located in the head. The second is the urge to arrange that supposed entity in one linear ranking of human worth. Reworking the original data of several classic studies, Gould argues that investigators' expectations shaped how measurements were taken, summarised and interpreted, and that the conclusions reported tracked the social assumptions of their time. His wider thesis is that science is a social activity carried out by people who cannot fully step outside the beliefs of their era.

Written from the wikipedia article on the book.

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• Stephen Jay Gould