The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)

by Gould, Stephen Jay

• ISBN13: 9780393314250
• ISBN10: 0393314251
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780393340402
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780393039726, 9780393300567, 9780393310672
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-06-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• More Book Details

Summary

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."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	15	(4)
Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition: Thoughts at Age Fifteen	19	(1)
The frame of The Mismeasure of Man	19	(7)
Why revise The Mismeasure of Man after fifteen years?	26	(10)
Reasons, history and revision of The Mismeasure of Man	36	(15)
Introduction	51	(11)
American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species	62	(43)
A shared context of culture	63	(8)
Preevolutionary styles of scientific racism: monogenism and polygenism	71	(3)
America's theorist of polygeny	74	(8)
Louis Agassiz
empiricist of polygeny	82	(19)
Samuel George Morton
The American school and slavery	101	(4)
Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology	105	(37)
The allure of numbers	105	(9)
Masters of craniometry: Paul Broca and his school	114	(26)
Postscript	140	(2)
Measuring Bodies: Two Case Studies on the Apishness of Undesirables	142	(34)
The ape in all of us: recapitulation	142	(9)
The ape in some of us: criminal anthropology	151	(22)
Epilogue	173	(3)
The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention	176	(88)
Alfred Binet and the original purposes of the Binet scale	176	(12)
H.H. Goddard and the menace of the feeble-minded	188	(16)
Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQ	204	(18)
R. M. Yerkes and the Army Mental Tests: IQ comes of age	222	(42)
The Real Error of Cyril Burt: Factor Analysis and the Reification of Intelligence	264	(87)
The case of Sir Cyril Burt	264	(5)
Correlation, cause, and factor analysis	269	(17)
Charles Spearman and general intelligence	286	(17)
Cyril Burt and the hereditarian synthesis	303	(23)
L. L. Thurstone and the vectors of mind	326	(21)
Epilogue: Arthur Jensen and the resurrection of Spearman's g	347	(3)
A final thought	350	(1)
A Positive Conclusion	351	(14)
Debunking as positive science	351	(1)
Learning by debunking	352	(2)
Biology and human nature	354	(11)
Epilogue	365	(2)
Critique of The Bell Curve	367	(24)
The Bell Curve	367	(12)
Ghosts of Bell Curves past	379	(12)
Three Centuries' Perspectives on Race and Racism	391	(34)
Age-old fallacies of thinking and stinking	391	(10)
Racial geometry	401	(12)
The moral state of Tahiti---and of Darwin	413	(12)
Bibliography	425	(8)
Index	433