 | GetTextbooks.com Compare Prices & Save up to 90% | | |
|
| Login | Sign up | Settings | New! iPhone App | My Wish List | My iBundle |
 | | The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN-10: 9780393314250 ISBN-10: 0-393-31425-1 ISBN-13: 9780393314250 ISBN-13: 978-0-393-31425-0 Paperback 1996-06-17 W.W. Norton & Co. Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. Yet the idea of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined. In this edition, Stephen Jay Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes." . | ||
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 | ||
Reviews | ||
The oppressive nature of intellegence testing unveiled An oldie but goodie. Pop anthropolgy icon S.J.Gould examines how the pseudoscience of intelligence testing was conceived, and has almost always been practiced as, a tool of social oppression. From early phrenology to modern standardized testing, IQ and aptitude testing has provided a scientific-appearing justification for racist and social class-based injustices. | ||
wonderful introduction for laymen to the nature of science The original book is a lovely, short introduction to the nature of science. It shows how scientific data are collected and analyzed with the goal of supporting or rejecting scientific hypotheses. The best part is that Gould catches all of us in wishful thinking -- in being so certain of our conclusions in advance that we unintentionally taint our data to match. Far from being value-free, science is, like every other human endeavour, a biased activity despite the genuine attempts to make it objective and cool-headed. From basic training in statistics for the non-mathematical, to an elegant and highly approachable writing style, Gould walks us through some shocking errors in science in the past, showing us that science can only approach the truth but never attain it. The more recent stuff, attacking The Bell Curve, which hadn't been written when Gould first came out with this book, is fine for those especially interested in the topic, but don't miss the clear, cogent, novice-friendly exposition of how scientific errors are made and how careful analysis represents one method of correcting them. Absolutely wonderful! | ||
Debunking a bad science: a single number cannot define the mind Jerry Pournelle has stated that Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" wasn't science. In a way, I have to agree with Pournelle because the book doesn't do what science does, viz state a hypothesis and present data and arguments to support it. Rather, it debunks an entire field of study, namely IQ testing. Gould starts by reaching back a couple of hundred years to show early attempts to objectively define and determine intelligence, for example by the shape or volume of the skull. Gould shows conclusively that early studies were hopelessly biased to show whites were superior to non-whites and men to women. Sometimes the academics didn't realize their bias and honestly believed they were being objective, other times they were guilty of fraud by selecting specific test subjects to support their thesis. Gould argues that today's program of intelligence testing is as misguided as craniometry was then. He argues against biological determinism and against the abstraction of intelligence as a single number, as a single thing. Does it make any sense when speaking of Newton, Mozart, or Darwin that one is more intelligent than the other? But that is what IQ tests do: they line up people along a single dimension. Vincent Poirier, Tokyo | ||
Required to read Not worth reading for leisure. This was a required read for an Evolutionary Biology Readings course, and this was the least useful of all of them. It feels like the author is yelling at you throughout the book. Gould seems extremely biased. It is worthwhile to read if you need alternate views on intelligence testing or the bell curve, but the mathematics the author puts such emphasis on seems to just criticize. Take a statistics course, it is much more useful than this book and much more worth the money. Gould must have some sort of vendetta that his never-ending introduction puts you in an angry state about science before you get to the actual science in the book. | ||
An excellent critique of psychometrics While it is true that this book does not address the current state of psychological testing, its critique of the field overall through an examination of its origin is invaluable. | ||