the mismeasure of manby stephen jay gould

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay GouldReview by: Matthew ZachariahCanadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer,1984), pp. 343-347Published by: Canadian Society for the Study of EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1494302 .

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Reviews

The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

New York: W. W. Norton and Toronto: GeorgeJ. McLeod Limited, 1981

REVIEWED BY MATTHEW ZACHARIAH, THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

One measure of the significance of this book is that the author - who teaches geology, biology, and the history of science at Harvard University - received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize (general non-fiction) for it. The subject he tackles is biological determinism which, as a theory, has influenced - and still influences - practically every branch of the social sciences. Therefore, although much of the focus of the book is on the profound fallacies imbedded in the misuse of intelligence testing as often practised by psychologists (including educational psychologists), the book's con- tents should be of special interest to historians, sociologists, statisticians, and educationists.

As a comparative sociologist of education (an awkward but reasonably accurate description), I found little here of direct relevance to my work other than Gould's attempt to account for the differences in emphasis between American and British psychologists who investigated the nature of intelligence: "If race is America's primary social problem, then class has been Britain's corresponding concern." The manner in which the social context influences scholarship (particularly in the sciences) is one of the

enduring issues in comparative studies; therefore, the book is of

profound indirect relevance to comparative education. Also, Gould

compelled me to unlearn and rethink many of the conclusions I had

acquired in many courses and through numerous publications. It is

regrettable that discussions of this book's implications for formal education have not yet appeared in many Canadian periodicals.'

The author quotes Charles Darwin on the title page: "If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." Gould discusses the role of institutions in creating myths about justifying the ranking of groups by inborn worth. He recalls an incident from Plato's Republic. Socrates, very conscious that he is telling a lie,

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344 REVIEWS

suggests to Glaucon that the citizens should be told that they were "in reality ... being formed and fed in the womb of the earth." Glaucon chastises Socrates but the great master goes on to elaborate the well- known fabrication that God made some people out of gold, others out of silver, yet others out of brass and iron. He asks Glaucon: "Is there any possibility of making our citizens believe it?" Glaucon replies that the present generation could not be persuaded to believe it but that future generations might be fooled. The basic motif of the book is that the mismeasure of man using the notion of biological determinism in the name of science had "become the primary agent for validating Plato's myth" in the past two centuries.

Gould's major conclusions are listed below: (1) "Scientific racists and sexists often confine their label of inferiority to a single disadvantaged group" but often extend, when the occasion presents itself, their conclusion to the race or gender or class which was not included in their object of study. (2) "Prior prejudice, not copious numerical documentation, dictates conclusions."

(3) "Numbers and graphs do not gain authority from increasing precision of measurement [or] sample size." (4) The conclusions of scientific racists and sexists are not just "the playthings of academicians" but become part of widely held beliefs and thus affect policy formulation and practice. For instance, the British 1 + examination was based on a hierarchical theory of intelligence proposed by Spearman, Burt et al.

Gould's documentation makes considerable use of two sociological concepts, although he refers to them as fallacies: reification and ranking. Reification is the tendency to consider a concept as an entity with an

independent existence. Spearman's g - for general intelligence - is perhaps the best example. Ranking is "our propensity for ordering com-

plex variation as a gradual ascending scale." Gould's account of how Arthur Jensen resurrected Spearman's g and treated evolution as "a march up the ladder to realms of more and more g" would be an apt example. ("As a paleontologist, I am astounded. Evolution forms a copiously branching bush, not a unilinear progressive sequence," con- tinues Gould in two sentences that reveal his striking ability to write with style, precision and a sense of engagement.)

The author devotes the major portion of the book to re-analyzing "classical data sets in craniometry and intelligence testing" and probing the reasons for the errors, omissions, misrepresentations, and misinter- pretations he discovered in the process of recalculating the sums. He focussed on quantitative data, Gould says, because of the almost mystical status that numbers enjoy in science as the ultimate test of objectivity. The relevant works of Louis Agassiz, Samuel George Morton, Paul Broca,



REVIEWS

Alfred Binet, H. H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, R. M. Yerkes, Charles

Spearman, Cyril Burt, L. L. Thurstone, and Arthur Jensen are discussed in The Mismeasure of Man.

What did Gould find? It would take too long to discuss all of Gould's conclusions. Here are four samples. Morton, the highly respected American polygenist, had calculated the capacity of skills of people of different races and had come to a "hard" conclusion about the superiority of whites and the inferiority of native Indians and blacks. When Gould

employed more acceptable statistical procedures - such as restoring "the Hindu skulls" to the caucasian sample - he found "no difference worth mentioning." For Paul Broca, professor of clinical surgery in the faculty of medicine in Paris, "Conclusions came first [which] were the shared assumptions of most successful white males during his time - themselves on top by the good fortune of nature, and women, blacks and poor people below." Broca's selective use of data confirmed for him that cranial

capacity constituted a reliable and valid criterion for ranking people. H. H. Goddard in his much quoted volume - published in 1912 - on the good and evil branches of the Kallikak family, had included crudely retouched photographs of the members of "the depraved branch" to make them appear sinister and stupid. Gould, of course, mentions the fakery of Cyril Burt which is "now more than a twice-told tale," but, he brilliantly argues that the real error of Burt was in factoring a highly ambiguous reified concept, namely Spearman's g. " ... Burt's hereditarian argument had no foundation in his empirical work (either honest or fraudulent), and ... it represented an a priori bias imposed upon the studies that supposedly proved it. It also acted, through Burt's zealous pursuit of his idee fixe, as a distorter of judgement and finally as an incitement to fraud."

That quote represents a recurring theme in The Mismeasure of Man. Gould documents and discusses finagling, fraud, and fudging by leading academicians and theoreticians. He points to errors in statistical procedures and inferences: attributing differences discovered within, say, two specified groups to explain differences between those groups; assuming that correlation somehow implies cause; ignoring biases produced by unequal sizes among subsamples, and mistaking reduction for explana- tion. Yet, Gould persuasively argues, even the discredited Cyril Burt notwithstanding, that "conscious fraud is probably rare in science ... " He makes a statement which would hold true for this century also:

... white leaders of Western nations did not question the propriety of racial ranking during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this context, the pervasive assent given by scientists to conventional ranking arose from shared social belief, not from objective data gathered to test an open question. Yet, in a curious case of reversed causality, these pronouncements were read as independent support for the political [preconceptions].

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The Mismeasure of Man stimulates the reader to note irony in history as in the case of Binet; his aim was to help poor performers in school, yet eventually I.Q. tests were almost universally used to label and to limit pupils. When this paleontologist suggests that the ladder of progress as a model for organizing life is one of the oldest cultural prejudices of Western thought, he compels us to re-evaluate one of our most cherished notions.

Humour, often unintended, enlivens Gould's treatment of a grave subject. In its early years, mental testing received a bad name because of absurd results. For instance, it was reported in 1915 that His Worship the Mayor of Chicago turned out to be a moron on one version of the Binet scales. In one of the complete-a-picture exercises of the Beta tests, a hapless Sicilian recruit was marked wrong for adding a crucifix (which adorned the exterior of houses in his native land) to a picture of a house which, according to the testers, needed a chimney. Gould's characteriza- tion of many who work in organismic biology, psychology, and sociology as suffering from "physics envy" is a naughty turn of a well-known Freudian phrase. ("They have strived to practice their science according to their clouded vision of physics - to search for simplifying laws and basic particles.") And, finally, this: "If I had any desire to lead a life of indolent ease, I would wish to be an identical twin, separated at birth from my brother and raised in a different social class. We could hire ourselves out to a host of social scientists and practically name our fee."

Gould concludes The Mismeasure of Man with the assertion that the hallmark of human evolution is flexibility. He names the salient feature of human evolution as neoteny. ("Rates of development slow down and

juvenile stages of ancestors become the adult features of descendents"). If he is right, says Gould, then "we are, in a more than metaphorical sense, permanent children." I do not have the specialized knowledge with which to agree or disagree. By sheer coincidence, the book I read right after finishing Gould was Ariel Dorfman's The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar and Other Innocent Heroes Do to our Minds (New York: Pantheon, 1983). One of Dorfman's principal theses is that the comic books we read as children and publications like The Reader's Digest and most TV sitcoms, soap operas, etc. infantilize the adult reader. I wondered, perhaps unfairly, whether it was Gould's social context which unconsciously led him to the conclusion about neoteny.

I must note one reservation. Reification and ranking are pervasive aspects of the abstract processes essential to intellectual pursuits. It is a bit too easy to condemn them as fallacies. The harder task is to establish acceptable ground rules by which reification and ranking can become useful - if limited - tools for worthwhile scholarship.

Gould's views about neoteny or of reification and ranking do not seriously compromise his contribution. That contribution, for instance, enabled me to read more critically recent claims that a new theory "may

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finally resolve the conflict" about the nature-nurture debate. (David Frum, Saturday Night, September 1983, p. 1 1-12). Gould presents one of his basic beliefs in the following quote:

We live in a more subtle century, but the basic arguments never seem to change. The crudities of the cranial index have given way to the complexity of intelligence testing. The signs of innate criminality are no longer sought in stigmata of gross anatomy but in twentieth century criteria: genes and fine structure of the brain ... Human populations are highly variable for all behaviors; the simple fact that some do and some don't provides no evidence for a specific pathology ... Shall we concentrate upon an unfounded speculation for the violence of some ... or shall we try to eliminate the oppression that builds ghettos and saps the spirit of their unemployed in the first place?

Let us add a postscript. Elimination of oppression requires natural and social scientists to work together.

NOTES

For three substantial American reviews see Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker, April 12, 1982, Diane Ravitch in Commentary, February, 1982, and Walt Haney in Harvard Educational Review, 1982, 52(2).

Education and Anthropology: Other Cultures and the Teacher

by F. Musgrove

Chichester: John Wiley, 1982. 193 pages.

REVIEWED BY KOGOLA MOODLEY, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

An initial perusal of this book fills the critical student of multicultural education with great hope. It promises to address shared concerns, such as the uncritical celebration of ethnicity, by taking a dynamic comparative view of culture, a broader view of cross-cultural research to grasp how children learn effectively under varied conditions. It suggests a type of multicultural curriculum appropriate to a new and constantly changing cultural reality.To this end, an impressive array of research is drawn from the entire spectrum of the social sciences.

Contrary to the idealist strain in sociology and philosophy, which emphasizes the inwardness of experience and its inaccessibility to the outsider, Musgrove sees comparisons between modern and traditional societies as being not ony possible, but profitable. Increasing awareness of teachers about the cross-cultural influences on the development of thinking and rationality is the aim of the book.

He begins by examining the "noble savage" image in Western educa-

finally resolve the conflict" about the nature-nurture debate. (David Frum, Saturday Night, September 1983, p. 1 1-12). Gould presents one of his basic beliefs in the following quote:

We live in a more subtle century, but the basic arguments never seem to change. The crudities of the cranial index have given way to the complexity of intelligence testing. The signs of innate criminality are no longer sought in stigmata of gross anatomy but in twentieth century criteria: genes and fine structure of the brain ... Human populations are highly variable for all behaviors; the simple fact that some do and some don't provides no evidence for a specific pathology ... Shall we concentrate upon an unfounded speculation for the violence of some ... or shall we try to eliminate the oppression that builds ghettos and saps the spirit of their unemployed in the first place?

Let us add a postscript. Elimination of oppression requires natural and social scientists to work together.

NOTES

For three substantial American reviews see Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker, April 12, 1982, Diane Ravitch in Commentary, February, 1982, and Walt Haney in Harvard Educational Review, 1982, 52(2).

Education and Anthropology: Other Cultures and the Teacher

by F. Musgrove

Chichester: John Wiley, 1982. 193 pages.

REVIEWED BY KOGOLA MOODLEY, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

An initial perusal of this book fills the critical student of multicultural education with great hope. It promises to address shared concerns, such as the uncritical celebration of ethnicity, by taking a dynamic comparative view of culture, a broader view of cross-cultural research to grasp how children learn effectively under varied conditions. It suggests a type of multicultural curriculum appropriate to a new and constantly changing cultural reality.To this end, an impressive array of research is drawn from the entire spectrum of the social sciences.

Contrary to the idealist strain in sociology and philosophy, which emphasizes the inwardness of experience and its inaccessibility to the outsider, Musgrove sees comparisons between modern and traditional societies as being not ony possible, but profitable. Increasing awareness of teachers about the cross-cultural influences on the development of thinking and rationality is the aim of the book.

He begins by examining the "noble savage" image in Western educa-

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