Title:
The Mismeasure of Man
Author:
Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher:
W.W.Norton & Company, 1981
ISBN
0-393-01489-4

To begin with, the book was a fascinating history of science gone wrong. It recounts more than 350 years of science misused, abused, and perverted to serve prejudice, racism, and politics, and to make millions of people's lives miserable. The book is no less than a wholesale indictment against the notion of genetic destiny. Gould seems to take it personally.

The book's dedication reads,

To the memory of Grammy and Papa Joe, who came, struggled, and prospered, Mr Goddard notwithstanding.
This dedication, more than anything else, might serve to explain the personal feelings with which Gould invests this book. Gould speaks as an eloquent representative of people who couldn't defend themselves against the highhanded use of bad science.

Gould starts his tale in the days before Darwin, when religious people wondered if the people from Africa were even descendents of Adam. Once Darwin's theory of evolution became known, there were those who sought to prove that the people of Northern Europe were further evolved than other people. Finally, Gould spends a great deal of time on the intelligence testers and their political agenda.

The book doesn't, of course, attempt to disprove the importance of genes in each individual's personality. The purpose of the book is to show how attempts to prove this connection in the past were flawed. Those of us who went to school into the early seventies in the USA will recognize the personality inventories and intelligence tests that Gould mentions. We might not have recognized them as insidious tools of racism at the time, but Gould's story makes their awful past only too clear.

The interesting thing about the book is that Gould, an evolutionary biologist, famous for his work in paleontology, wants to discount any possible role that genes might play in shaping a person. For Gould, environment is the most important factor. The human mind is a malleable and shapeless entity until the environment works on it.

However, when Herrnstein and Murray wrote The Bell Curve, a book that preached genetic determinism with the usual racist bombast, they dismiss Gould's book as "received wisdom", and only quarrel with Gould's definition of "race". As Gould says, at the end of his book when writing about Arthur Jensen's defense of IQ testing, "History often cycles its errors."