The Mismeasure of Man Read online

  All my grandparents were immigrants to America, and in the group of Eastern European Jews whom Goddard and company would have so severely restricted. I dedicated The Mismeasure of Man to my maternal Hungarian grandparents (the only ones I knew well), both brilliant people with no access to much formal education. My grandmother could speak four languages fluently, but could only write her adopted English phonetically. My father became a leftist, along with so many other idealists, during upheavals of the depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the growth of nazism and fascism. He remained politically active until poor health precluded further stress, and politically committed thereafter. I shall always be gratified to the point of tears that, although he never saw The Mismeasure of Man in final form, he lived just long enough to read the galley proofs and know (shades, I recognize, of Al Jolson singing Kol Nidre as his dying father listened) that his scholar son had not forgotten his roots.

  Some readers may regard this confessional as a sure sign of too much feeling to write a proper work in nonaction. But I am willing to bet that passion must be the central ingredient needed to lift such books above the ordinary, and that most works of nonfiction regarded by our culture as classical or enduring are centered in their author’s deep beliefs. I therefore suspect that most of my colleagues in this enterprise could tell similar stories of autobiographic passion. I would also add that, for all my convictions about social justice, I feel even more passionate about a closer belief central to my personal life and activities: my membership in the “ancient and universal company of scholars” (to cite the wonderfully archaic line used by Harvard’s president in conferring Ph.D.’s at our annual commencement). This tradition represents, along with human kindness, the greatest, most noble, and most enduring feature on the bright side of a mixed panoply defining what we call “human nature.” Since I am better at scholarship than at kindness, I need to cast my fealty with humanity’s goodness in this sphere. May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth.

  My professional reason for writing The Mismeasure of Man was also, in large part, personal. The saddest parochialism in academic life—the depressing contrary to the ideals I mentioned in the last paragraph—lies in the petty sniping that small-minded members of one profession unleash when someone credentialed in another world dares to say anything about activities in the sniper’s parish. Thus has it always been, and thus do we dilute both the small pleasures and fierce joys of scholarship. Some scientists griped at Goethe because a “poet” should not write about empirical nature (Goethe did interesting and enduring work in mineralogy and botany; happily, each sniper tends to be parried by better scientists with generosity of spirit, and Goethe numbered many biologists, especially Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, among his supporters). Others groused when Einstein or Pauling exposed their humanity and wrote about peace.

  The most common, narrow-minded complaint about The Mismeasure of Man goes: Gould is a paleontologist, not a psychologist; he can’t know the subject and his book must be bullshit. I want to offer two specific rebuttals of this nonsense, but would first remind my colleagues that we all might consider giving more than lip service to the ideal of judging a work by its content, not the author’s name or rank.

  For my first specific rebuttal, however, I do want to pull rank. True, I am not a psychologist and I know little about the technicalities of item selection in mental testing or the social use of results in contemporary America. Hence, I carefully said nothing about these subjects (and would not have written the book if I had judged mastery of such material as essential for my intentions). My book, by the way, has been commonly portrayed, even (to my chagrin) often praised, as a general attack upon mental testing. The Mismeasure of Man is no such thing, and I have an agnostic attitude (born largely of ignorance) toward mental testing in general. If my critics doubt this, and read these lines as a smoke screen, just consider my expressed opinion about Binet’s original IQ test—strongly and entirely positive (for Binet rejected the hereditarian interpretation, and only wanted to use the test as a device to identify children in need of special help; and for this humane goal, I have nothing but praise). The Mismeasure of Man is a critique of a specific theory of intelligence often supported by particular interpretation of a certain style of mental testing: the theory of unitary, genetically based, unchangeable intelligence.

  The subject that I did choose for The Mismeasure of Man represents a central area of my professional expertise—in fact, I would go further and say (now turning to my arrogant mode) that I have understood this area better than most professional psychologists who have written on the history of mental testing, because they do not have expertise in this vital subject, and I do. I am an evolutionary biologist by training. Variation is the focal subject of evolutionary biology. In Darwinian theory, evolution occurs (to put the point technically for a moment) by the conversion of variation within populations into differences between populations. That is (and now more simply), individuals differ, and some of this variation has a genetic basis. Natural selection works by differentially preserving the variation that confers better adaptation in changing local environments. As a caricature, for example, hairier elephants will do better as ice sheets advance over Siberia, and woolly mammoths will eventually evolve as selection, acting statistically and not absolutely, preserves more hirsute elephants generation after generation. In other words, variation within a population (some elephants hairier than others at any moment) becomes converted into differences through time (woolly mammoths as descendants of elephants with ordinary amounts of hair).

  Now consider the subjects of this mix: genetically based variation within populations, and development of differences between populations—and what do you have? Voila: the subject of the The Mismeasure of Man. My book is about the measurement of supposedly genetically based variation in intelligence among members of a population (the aim of IQ testers assessing all the kids in a classroom, or of nineteenth-century craniometricians measuring the heads of all the workers in a factory, or weighing the brains of their dead academic colleagues). My book is also about the putative reasons for measured differences between groups (racial in white vs. black, or class-based in rich vs. poor, for example). If I know the technical basis of any subject, I understand this material best (and many psychologists don’t because they have not had training in a profession like evolutionary biology that regards the measurement of genetically based variation as central to its being).

  For my second specific rebuttal, I entered paleontology in the mid 1960s, at an interesting time in the profession’s history, when traditions of subjective and idiosyncratic description were beginning to yield to calls for more quantitative, generalized, and theoretically based approaches to fossil organisms. (I am, by the way, no longer so beguiled by the lure of quantification, but I was so trained and was once a true believer.) We young Turks of this movement all developed expertise in two areas, then most unfamiliar (if not anathema) to practicing paleontologists: statistics and computers.

  I was therefore trained in the statistical analysis of genetically based variation within and between populations—again, the key subject of The Mismeasure of Man (for Homo sapiens is a variable biological species, no different in this regard from all the other organisms I had studied). I think, in other words, that I approached the mismeasure of man with requisite and unconventional expertise from an appropriate profession that has not often enough promoted its special say about a subject so close to its center.

  In writing numerous essays on the lives of scientists, I have found that books on general topics or full systems usually originate in tiny puzzles or little troubling issues, not usually from an abstract or overarching desire to know the nature of totality. Thus, the seventeenth-century scriptural geologist Thomas Burnet built up to a general theory of the earth because he wanted to know the source of water
for Noah’s flood. The eighteenth-century geologist James Hutton developed an equally comprehensive system from an initial niggling paradox: if God made soil for human agriculture, but soil derives from erosion of rocks; and if the erosion of rocks will ultimately destroy the land and put the entire earth under water, then how could God choose a means of our eventual destruction as a method for making the soil that sustains us? (Hutton answered by inferring the existence of internal forces that raise mountains from the deep, thus developing a cyclical theory of erosion and repair—an ancient world with no vestige of a beginning, or prospect of an end.)

  The Mismeasure of Man also began with a tiny insight that stunned me with a frisson of recognition. Our young Turk generation of paleontologists linked statistics and computers by learning the technique of multivariate analysis—that is, the simultaneous statistical consideration of relationships among many measured properties of organisms (length of bones, perhaps, for fossil species, performance on numerous mental tests for humans in the mismeasure of man). These techniques are not all conceptually difficult; many had been partly developed or envisioned earlier in the century. But practical utility requires immensely long computations that only became possible with the development of computers.

  I was trained primarily in the granddaddy of multivariate techniques (still vigorously in vogue and eminently useful): factor analysis. I had learned this procedure as an abstract mathematical theory and had applied factor analysis to the study of growth and evolution in various fossil organisms (for example, my Ph.D. thesis, published in 1969, on Bermudian land snails; and one of my first papers, published in 1967, on growth and form in pelycosaurian reptiles—those peculiar creatures with sails on their backs, always included in sets of plastic dinosaurs, but really ancestors of mammals and not dinosaurs at all).

  Factor analysis allows one to find common axes influencing sets of independently measured variables. For example, as an animal grows, most bones get longer—so general increase in size acts as a common factor behind the positive correlations measured for the length of bones in a series of organisms varying from small to large within a species. This example is trivial. In a more complex case, subject to numerous interpretations, we generally measure positive correlations among mental tests given to the same person—that is, in general and with many exceptions, people who do well on one kind of test tend to do well on others. Factor analysis might detect a general axis that can, in a mathematical sense, capture a common element in this joint variation among tests.

  I had spent a year learning the intricacies of factor analysis. I was then historically naïve, and never dreamed that such a valuable abstraction, which I had applied only to fossils with minimal political import, might have arisen in a social context to tout a particular theory of mental functioning with definite political meaning. Then one day I was reading, quite aimlessly and only for leisure, an article about the history of mental testing, and I realized that Spearman’s g—the central claim of the unitary theory of intelligence, and the only justification that such a notion has ever had (The Bell Curve is fundamentally a long defense of g, explicitly so stated)—was nothing more than the first principal component of a factor analysis of mental tests. Moreover, I learned that Spearman had invented the technique of factor analysis specifically to study the underlying basis of positive correlation among tests. I also knew that principal components of factor analyses are mathematical abstractions, not empirical realities—and that every matrix subject to factor analysis can be represented just as well by other components with different meanings, depending on the style of factor analysis applied in a particular case. Since the chosen style is largely a matter of researcher’s preference, one cannot claim that principal components have empirical reality (unless the argument can be backed up with hard data of another sort; the mathematical evidence alone will never suffice, because we can always generate alternative axes with entirely different meanings).

  There can only be a few such moments—the eurekas, the scales dropping from the eyes—in a scholar’s life. My precious abstraction, the technique powering my own research at the time, had not been developed to analyze fossils, or to pursue the idealized pleasure of mathematics. Spearman had invented factor analysis to push a certain interpretation of mental tests—one that has plagued our century with its biodeterminist implications. (I am confident about the order of causality because Spearman had been defending the theory of unitary intelligence for years with other nonmultivariate techniques before he invented factor analysis. Thus we know that he developed factor analysis to support the theory—and that the theory did not arise subsequently from thoughts inspired by the first results of factor analysis.) A frisson of mixed fascination and a bit of anger passed up and down my spine, as much of my previous idealization of science collapsed (ultimately to be replaced by a far more humane and sensible view). Factor analysis had been invented for a social use contrary to my beliefs and values.

  I felt personally offended, and this book, though not written until some ten years later, ultimately arose from this insight and feeling of violation. I felt compelled to write The Mismeasure of Man. My favorite research tool had arisen for an alien social use. Furthermore, and in another irony, the harmful hereditarian version of IQ had not developed in Europe, where Binet had invented the test for benevolent purposes, but in my own country of America, honored for egalitarian traditions. I am a patriot at heart. I had to write the book to make correction and ask for understanding.

  2. History and revision

  I published The Mismeasure of Man in 1981; the book has certainly had an active and fascinating history ever since. I was proud when Mismeasure won the National Book Critics Circle award in nonfiction, for this prize is the professional’s accolade, given by those who do the reviewing. The reviews themselves followed an interesting pattern—uniformly warm in the serious popular press, predictably various in technical journals of psychology and the social sciences. Most of the leading mental testers in the hereditarian tradition wrote major reviews, and one might well guess their thrust. Arthur Jensen, for example, did not like the book. But most other professional psychologists wrote with praise, often copious and unstinting.

  The nadir certainly arrived (with a bit of humor in the absurdity) in the Fall 1983 issue of an archconservative journal, The Public Interest, when my dyspepsic colleague Bernard D. Davis published a ridiculous personal attack on me and the book under the title “Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press.” His thesis may be easily summarized: Gould’s book got terrific reviews in the popular press, but all academic writers panned it unmercifully. Therefore the book is politically motivated crap, and Gould himself isn’t much better in anything he does, including punctuated equilibrium and all his evolutionary ideas.

  Lovely stuff. I firmly believe in not answering unfair negative reviews, for nothing can so disorient an attacker as silence. But this was a bit too much, so I canvassed among friends. Both Noam Chomsky and Salvador Luria, great scholars and humanists, said essentially the same thing: never reply unless your attacker has floated a demonstrably false argument, which, if unanswered, might develop a “life of its own.” I felt that Davis’s diatribe fell into this category and therefore responded in the Spring 1984 issue of the same journal (my only publication in journals of that ilk).

  As I explained and documented, Mr. Davis had only read a few reviews, probably in publications that he liked, or that had been sent to him by colleagues sharing his political persuasions. I, thanks to my publisher’s prodigious clipping service, had all the reviews. I picked out all twenty-four written by academic experts in psychology and found fourteen positive, three mixed, and seven negative (nearly all of these by hereditarian mental testers—what else would one expect?). I was particularly pleased that Cyril Burt’s old periodical The British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, had written one of the most positive accounts: “Gould has performed a valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most impor
tant debates in the social sciences, and this book should be required reading for students and practitioners alike.”

  The book has sold strongly ever since publication and has now surpassed 250,000 copies, plus translations into ten languages. I have been particularly gratified by the warm and challenging correspondence that has continually come my way (and at least amused by some of the hate mail, including a few threats from neo-Nazis and anti-Semites). I am particularly glad, in retrospect, that I chose to write in a way that surely precluded maximal éclat at publication (as a breezier style with more references to immediate issues would have accomplished), but that gave the book staying power (a focus on founding arguments, analyzed by consulting original sources in their original languages).

  The Mismeasure of Man is not easy reading, but I intended the book for all serious people with interest in the subject. I followed the two cardinal rules that I use in writing my essays. First, do not waffle on about generalities (as I fear I have done a bit in this introduction—sins of my middle age, no doubt!). Focus on those small, but fascinating, details that can pique people’s interest and illustrate generalities far better than overt and tendentious discussion. This strategy provides a better book for readers, but also makes the composition so much more fun for me. I got to read all the original sources; I had all the pleasure of poking into Broca’s data and finding the holes and unconscious prejudices, of reconstructing Yerkes’s test to army recruits, of hefting a skull filled with lead shot. How much more rewarding than easy reliance on secondary sources, and copying a few conventional thoughts from other commentators.

  Second, simplify writing by eliminating jargon, of course, but do not adulterate concepts; no compromises, no dumbing down. Popularization is part of a great humanistic tradition in serious scholarship, not an exercise in dumbing down for pleasure or profit. I therefore did not shy from difficult, even mathematical material. Since I’ve been holding back for fifteen years, permit me a few paragraphs for pure bragging and saying what has pleased me most about the book.