The Mismeasure of Man Read online

  I believe in this restriction to great foundational documents from the depth of my scholar’s soul, but I also realize that this decision conferred an enormous practical benefit upon this revised version. The old arguments have staying power, “legs” in modern parlance. We will never quite attain the Christian’s quiet confidence of verbum Dei manet in aeternum, but we will care about Broca, Binet, and Burt so long as scholarship and a fascination with history endure. But I suspect that the world will little note, nor long remember, Jensen, Murray, Herrnstein, Lewontin, and Gould.

  Since I wrote about the great and original arguments, and virtually ignored the modern avatars of 1981, this revision required few changes, and the main text of the current version differs very little from the original book; the novelty in this revision lies in this introduction and in the appended section of essays at the back. The hot topics of 1981 are now legless history; I doubt that Herrnstein and Murray will penetrate the millennium, though the basic form of the argument never goes away and continues to recur every few years—hence the necessity for this book and its focus upon the enduring sources of continual recurrence.

  As I wrote in the Introduction to the first edition:

  I have said little about the current resurgence of biological determinism because its individual claims are usually so ephemeral that their refutation belongs in a magazine article or newspaper story. Who even remembers the hot topics often years ago [from 1981]: Shockley’s proposal; for reimbursing voluntarily sterilized individuals according to their number of IQ points below 100, the great XYY debate, or the attempt to explain urban riots by diseased neurology of rioters. I thought that it would be more valuable and interesting to examine the original sources of the arguments that still surround us. These, at least, display great and enlightening errors.

  3. The third major aspect of framing arises from my own professional competences. I am a working scientist by trade, not a historian. I have immense fascination for history; I read and study the subject intensely, and I have written much, including three books and scores of essays, on predominantly historical subjects. I feel that I have a decent and proper grasp of the logic and empirics of arguments about biological determinism. What I lack, for want of professional training, is the tradesman’s “feel”—the sine qua non of first-class scholarship—for broader political contexts (antecedents and backgrounds), the stage on which biological arguments impact society. In the profession’s jargon, I am fully up to snuff (I would even be arrogant and say “better than most”) on the “internalist” themes of intricacies in arguments and meanings, and in fallacies of supporting data, but woefully underprepared on the “externalist” side of broader historical context, the “fitting” of scientific claims into social settings.

  Consequently, and following the old tactic of extracting virtue from necessity, I explored a different path in treating the history of biological determinism, one that would use my special skills and competences, but not suffer unduly from my inadequacies. I would not have written the book at all—I would not have even contemplated such a project in the first place—if I had not been able to devise a previously uncharted way to treat this important and by no means neglected subject. (I have a personal horror of derivative writing, and have never dabbled—with one small exception as a personal favor to a dear, older, and revered colleague—in the genre of textbooks; life is too short.)

  My special skill lies in a combination, not a uniqueness. I was able to bring together two salient and richly interacting components—each vouchsafed by itself to the competence of many individuals, but rarely combined in one person’s interest. No one before me had systematically united these two competences at book length and in general overview of the subject.

  Working scientists are generally good at analyzing data. We are trained to spot fallacies of argument and, especially, to be hypercritical of supporting data. We scrutinize charts and look at every dot on a graph. Science moves forward as much by critiquing the conclusions of others as by making novel discoveries. I was trained as a statistically minded paleontologist, with special expertise in handling large matrices of data on variation in populations and historical change within lineages. (The mismeasure of man resides in the same themes—differences among individuals as the analog to variation in populations, and measured disparities among groups as the analog to temporal differences in lineages through time.) I therefore felt particularly competent to analyze the data, and spot the fallacies, in arguments about measured differences among human groups.

  But any working scientist could so proceed. We now come to the great parochialism of my primary profession. Most scientists don’t care a fig about history; my colleagues may not quite follow Henry Ford’s dictum that history is bunk, but they do regard the past as a mere repository of error—at best a source of moral instruction in pitfalls along paths to progress. Such an attitude does not create sympathy for, or interest in, historical figures of our scientific past, particularly the folks who made major mistakes. Thus, most scientists could, in principle, analyze the original data sets of biological determinism, but would never be inclined even to contemplate such an effort.

  Professional historians, on the other hand, could rerun the statistics and criticize the graphs of their subjects. The procedure is really not all that arcane or difficult. But again we encounter a trade’s parochialism: historians study social contexts. A historian would want to know how Morton’s conclusion about the inferiority of cranial capacity in American Indians impacted the debates about westward expansion—but would not generally think about sitting down with Morton’s tables of skull measurements and trying to figure out whether Morton had reported his data correctly.

  I therefore found my special niche, for I could analyze the data with some statistical expertise and attention to detail—and I do love to study the historical origin of great themes that still surround us. I could, in short, combine the scientist’s skill with the historian’s concern. The Mismeasure of Man therefore focuses upon the analysis of great data sets in the history of biological determinism. This book is a chronicle of deep and instructive fallacies (not silly and superficial errors) in the origin and defense of the theory of unitary, linearly ranked, innate, and minimally alterable intelligence.

  The Mismeasure of Man is therefore unabashedly “internalist” in treating measured intelligence. I reanalyze the data of history’s great claims—in a way, I hope, more akin to forensic adventure (a subject of general fascination) than of catalogues as dry as dust. We will explore Morton’s switch from mustard seed to lead shot in the measurement of cranial capacity; Broca’s meticulous statistics in the odd light of his unconscious social prejudices; Goddard’s altered photographs of the imbecile line of Kallikaks in the New Jersey pine barrens; Yerkes’s supposed test of innate intelligence (but actual index of familiarity with American culture) given to all army recruits in World War I (and also, by yours truly, to classes of Harvard undergraduates); Cyril Burt’s great, crucial, and genuine error (not his insignificant and later overt fraud) in the mathematical justification of intelligence as a single factor.

  Two famous and contradictory quotations capture the interest and potential importance of this endeavor, this third aspect of my frame for the mismeasure of man. God dwells in the details; so does the devil.

  Why revise The Mismeasure of Man after fifteen years?

  I regard the critique of biological determinism as both timeless and timely. The need for analysis is timeless because the errors of biological determinism are so deep and insidious, and because the argument appeals to the worst manifestations of our common nature. The depth records the link of biological determinism to some of the oldest issues and errors of our philosophical traditions—including reductionism, or the desire to explain partly random, large-scale, and irreducibly complex phenomena by deterministic behavior of smallest constituent parts (physical objects by atoms in motion, mental functioning by inherited amount of a central stuff); reification, or
the propensity to convert an abstract concept (like intelligence) into a hard entity (like an amount of quantifiable brain stuff); dichotomization, or our desire to parse complex and continuous reality into divisions by two (smart and stupid, black and white); and hierarchy, or our inclination to order items by ranking them in a linear series of increasing worth (grades of innate intelligence in this case, then often broken into a twofold division by our urges to dichotomize, as in normal vs. feeble-minded, to use the favored terminology of early days in IQ testing).

  When we join our tendencies to commit these general errors with the sociopolitical reality of a xenophobia that so often (and so sadly) regulates our attitude to “others” judged inferior, we grasp the potency of biological determinism as a social weapon—for “others” will be thereby demeaned, and their lower socioeconomic status validated as a scientific consequence of their innate ineptitude rather than society’s unfair choices. May I therefore repeat Darwin’s great line: “If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

  But critiques of biological determinism are also timely at certain moments (including the present) because—and you may now choose your favorite image, from heads of the Lernaean Hydra if your tastes be classical, to bad pennies or returning cats if you prefer familiar proverbs, to crabgrass on suburban lawns if you favor vernacular modernity—the same bad arguments recur every few years with a predictable and depressing regularity. No sooner do we debunk one version than the next chapter of the same bad text emerges to ephemeral prominence.

  No mystery attends the reason for these recurrences. They are not manifestations of some underlying cyclicity, obeying a natural law that might be captured in a mathematical formula as convenient as IQ; nor do these episodes represent any hot item of new data or some previously unconsidered novel twist in argument, for the theory of unitary, rankable, innate, and effectively unchangeable intelligence never alters very much in each sequential formulation. Each surge to popularity works with the same fallacious logic and flawed information.

  The reasons for recurrence are sociopolitical, and not far to seek: resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked?

  Why struggle and spend to raise the unboostable IQ of races or social classes at the bottom of the economic ladder; better simply to accept nature’s unfortunate dictates and save a passel of federal funds; (we can then more easily sustain tax breaks for the wealthy!)? Why bother yourself about underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in your honored and remunerative bailiwick if such absence records the diminished ability or general immorality, biologically imposed, of most members in the rejected group, and not the legacy or current reality of social prejudice? (The groups so stigmatized may be races, classes, sexes, behavioral propensities, religions, or national origins. Biological determinism is a general theory, and particular bearers of current disparagement act as surrogates for all others subject to similar prejudice at different times and places. In this sense, calls for solidarity among demeaned groups should not be dismissed as mere political rhetoric, but rather applauded as proper reactions to common reasons for mistreatment.)

  Please note that I am discussing the cyclical surge to popularity of innatist arguments for unitary, rankable intelligence, not the episodic formulation of such claims. The general argument is always present, always available, always published, always exploitable. Episodes of intense public attention therefore record swings in the pendulum of political preferences toward the right position for exploiting this hoary old fallacy with a seriousness based on naïve hope or cynical recognition of evident utility. Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity.

  Twentieth-century America has experienced three major episodes, each so correlated. The first constitutes one of the saddest ironies of American history, and sets the longest chapter in The Mismeasure of Man. We like to think of America as a land with generally egalitarian traditions, a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We recognize, au contraire, that many European nations, with their long histories of monarchy, feudal order, and social stratification, have been less committed to ideals of social justice or equality of opportunity. Since the IQ test originated in France, we might naturally assume that the false hereditarian interpretation, so commonly and so harmfully imposed upon the tests, arose in Europe. Ironically, this reasonable assumption is entirely false. As documented in Chapter 6, Alfred Binet, the French inventor, not only avoided a hereditarian interpretation of his test, but explicitly (and fervently) warned against such a reading as a perversion of his desire to use the tests for identifying children who needed special help. (Binet argued that an innatist interpretation would only stigmatize children as unteachable, thus producing a result opposite to his intent—a fear entirely and tragically justified by later history.)

  The hereditarian interpretation of IQ arose in America, largely through prosetylization of the three psychologists—H. H. Goddard, L. M. Terman, and R. M. Yerkes—who translated and popularized the tests in this country. If we ask how such a perversion could occur in our land of liberty and justice for all, we must remember that the years just following World War I, the time of peak activity for these scientists, featured a narrow, parochial, jingoistic, isolationist “nativist” (WASP, not Indian), rally-round-the-flag, tinhorn patriotism unmatched by any other period during our century, even in the heyday of McCarthyism during the early 1950s. This was the age of restriction upon immigration, the spread of Jewish quotas, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the height of lynchings in the Southern states. Interestingly, most of the men who built biodeterminism in the 1920s recanted their own conclusions during the liberal swing of the 1930s, when Ph.D.’s walked depression breadlines and poverty could no longer be explained by innate stupidity.

  The two most recent episodes also correlate with political swings. The first inspired me to write The Mismeasure of Man as a positive reaction with an alternative vision (not, I trust, as a negativistic diatribe); the second has prompted me to publish this revised version.

  Arthur Jensen launched the first of these recent episodes in 1969 with a notoriously fallacious article on the supposed innateness of group differences in IQ (with emphasis on disparity between whites and blacks in America). His chilling opening line belied all his later claims that he had only published as a disinterested scholar, and not as a man with a social agenda. He began with an explicit attack upon the federal Head Start program: “Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.” My colleague Richard Herrnstein fired a second major salvo in 1971, with an article in the Atlantic Monthly that became the outline and epitome of The Bell Curve, published with Charles Murray in 1994, and the immediate prod for this revised version of The Mismeasure of Man.

  As I stated above, articles on this subject by people of notoriety appear every month in prominent places. In analyzing why Jensen’s piece became such a cause célèbre, rather than one more ignored manifesto within a well-known genre, we must turn to social context. Since Jensen’s article contained no novel argument, we must seek the newly fertile soil that allowed such an old and ever-present seed to germinate. As I also stated above, I am no social pundit, and my view on this issue may be naïve. But I well remember these politically active times of my youth. I recall the growth of opposition to the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 (and the fear inspired by attendant urban riots), the
stepping down of Lyndon Johnson, inside and outside strife at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention of 1968, and the resulting election of Richard Nixon as president—with the onset of a conservative reaction that always engenders renewed attention for the false and old, but now again useful, arguments of biological determinism. I wrote The Mismeasure of Man at the apogee of this reaction, starting in the mid-1970s. The first edition appeared in 1981, and the book has been vigorously in print ever since.

  I had no plans for a revised version. I am not a modest person, though I do try to keep my arrogance to myself (not always successfully, I suppose). But I felt no need for an update because I had made what I still regard as a wise decision when I first wrote the book (and surely not because I view this flawed, but proud, child of mine as unimprovable!). The Mismeasure of Man required no update over the first fifteen years because I had focused on the foundation documents of biological determinism, and not on “current” usages so quickly superannuated. I had stressed the deep philosophical errors that do not change rather than the immediate (and superficial) manifestations that become obsolete year by year.

  The third major episode then kicked off in 1994, with publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Again, their long book contained nothing new, though the authors spun out the old arguments over eight hundred pages filled with copious charts and graphs that bamboozle people into confusing both novelty and profundity with their fear of incomprehension. (In fact, The Bell Curve is eminently understandable. The argument is old, uncomplicated, and familiar; the mathematics, though labored through several hundred pages by iterating example after example, represents one study, appropriately simple in concept, and easy enough to comprehend. Moreover, for all my severe criticism of the authors’ content, I will happily grant that they write well and clearly.) When I met Charles Murray in debate at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, I could only think to begin with a favorite line from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost: “He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”