Product Description
In the current heated discussions of hereditary vs. environmental impacts on IQ, Gould's National Book Critics' Circle Award-winning book deserves a hearing.

Amazon.com Review
How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it," and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition of the IQ industry, should be required reading. Gould's brilliant, funny, engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow tests. How did scientists decide that intelligence was unipolar and quantifiable, and why did the standard keep changing over time? Gould's answer is clear and simple: power maintains itself. European men of the 19th century, even before Darwin, saw themselves as the pinnacle of creation and sought to prove this assertion through hard measurement. When one measure was found to place members of some "inferior" group such as women or Southeast Asians over the supposedly rightful champions, it would be discarded and replaced with a new, more comfortable measure. The 20th-century obsession with numbers led to the institutionalization of IQ testing and subsequent assignment to work (and rewards) commensurate with the score, shown by Gould to be not simply misguided--for surely intelligence is multifactorial--but also regressive, creating a feedback loop rewarding the rich and powerful. The revised edition includes a scathing critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, taking them to task for rehashing old arguments to exploit a new political wave of uncaring and belt tightening. It might not make you any smarter, but The Mismeasure of Man will certainly make you think. --Rob Lightner

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 90 reviews)

Mismeasure of Man

This is a great book and I use it as a textbook in my classes at the university. It is really a refute of the Bell Curve and Gould does a great job in presenting the historical facts that make us question the pervasive uses of IQ testing.
September 03, 2008

Cogent Analysis on the Misuses of Intelligence Testing

Regarding Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man," it seems to me that a recurring theme can be found in many of the negative reviews. The theme is a variation of the claim: "Gould allows his ideology to get in the way of his analysis." Putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not that particular criticism has any basis in fact, I find it remarkable that the progenitors of such a claim do not (will not?) consider the possibility that the scientists, scholars and social scientists who hold views antithetical to those of Gould's--e.g. intelligence is largely genetic and heritable; the gap in I.Q. test scores between whites and blacks is due to innate genetic differences--may be guilty of committing the same malfeasance for which Gould is being accused.

Moreover, one has to wonder if the prime reason for all the strong negative criticism is not necessarily a general disagreement with the printed facts, but rather a personal, visceral rejection of the perceived incompatibility between the conclusions Gould recovers, on the one hand, and the chosen ideology of the critical reviewers themselves, on the other.

Given the plausibility of such a scenario, I believe a healthy dose of introspection and sincerity is in order, lest one proceeds to "cast the first stone."
January 23, 2008

The Mismeasure of Man

This book is supposed to be an accurate refutation of "the Bell Curve", but there is truth to the arguments in both books. The only question is to what degree do nurture and nature effect human intelligence?
January 05, 2008

One of the most important books I own

Are there entire populations of people who are born with an innate, quantifiable intelligence greater than others? Can intelligence even be quantified? According to Gould, science has not yet arrived at a meaningful and scientifically legitimate understanding of this concept of intelligence, nor a way to measure it, nor any proof that certain races are naturally smarter than others.

I would expect an eminent evolutionist to spend his time making a case for how biological diversity lends itself to multiple levels of mental ability through natural selection. But instead Gould puts on a turtleneck and tweed and plays historian--quite well, too! His scientific background gives him the credibility to explore this topic like no historian could.

Gould walks through the history of science's attempt to quantify human intelligence and demonstrates how and why each method eventually failed. But of course this type of science exists today in various types of IQ tests, bell curves, all of which are used to not only measure this thing we call intelligence, but also by some to argue that some groups are naturally superior to others. Gould analyzes the history, methods and underlying theories behind these contemporary incarnations.

The book is readable, well illustrated, well documented, and has a lot of solid historical analysis.
January 01, 2008

Necessary Book During the Current Testing and Accountability Crisis

This is a necessary book during the current climate of high-stakes testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind stipulates that test results should be publicly reported for each subgroup (i.e., African American, Hispanic, White, etc). What is not being discussed though is how the current test results might be influenced by the culturally and linguistically biased nature of the tests. Gould's books serves as a reminder of the historical misuse of culturally and linguistically biased tests, and how the tests have historically been used to "prove" the inferiority of African Americans, immigrants, etc. The current mandate that "subgroup" test results are to be publicly reported reeks of the era of using the measurement of skulls as "proof" of African American intellectual inferiority (as delineated in Gould's book).
December 29, 2007

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book)
by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History
by Stephen Jay Gould

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
by Stephen Jay Gould

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
by James D. Watson