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The Mismeasure of Man
by Stephen Jay Gould

Racism rears its ugly head in many forms. One of them is the 'theory' that intelligence is racially determined and that it is useless to attempt to educate the 'lower races' (usually identified with blacks) since they are genetically incapable of higher education.

In this book by Gould, he sets out to show the long and sordid history of biologically determined intelligence and to point out the faults in the theories and facts used to back it up. The book I read is a revised edition and includes an appendix consisting of essays that refute the arguments in the book, The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray as well as Gould's additional thoughts on the idea of innate or genetically determined intelligence.

He starts off in pre-Darwin days (i.e., before evolution by natural selection was known) and shows how black slaves in America were treated. The blacks are labeled by various terms like 'lazy', 'unable to show pain', 'lacking courage', or 'lack of sexual control'. Gould illustrates his points with obviously altered drawings that implied that blacks were kin to gorillas or monkeys (protruding lips, backward sloping foreheads, etc.).

Others used Craniometry (measurement of the volume of skulls) to show that the brains of blacks are smaller than those of whites. Gould throws doubts on the measurements by showing how some people (unconsciously) make smaller measurements for black skulls and, even more surprising, never correct the measurements for physical factors like sex (women's skulls are smaller than men's), physical build and age. So long as black skulls have smaller volume than white skulls, that is all that matters to those making the measurements.

Gould then goes on to the period after Darwin proposed his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and shows how it was perverted and altered to suit whatever theory that suited racists. Two of them is the misuse of IQ tests to attempt to categorise races and the idea of an innate intelligence that can be measured.

One surprising fact in the book, to me, was the explanation of the original use of the IQ test. It was never meant to be a general test of intelligence; it was meant as a way to find out which areas that disadvantaged children were having problems with. But, as Gould shows, some people used the IQ test as a way to 'test' the general intelligence of a population, 'discover' that most people are near the 'moron' level and cry out for limits on immigration to prevent 'lower intelligence' people from entering the United States, 'dilluting' the intelligence of Americans even more.

The second one, innate intelligence, arose because it was believed that any intelligence test measure, in one way or another, the 'innate' intelligence of people. Once again, blacks and other races were 'found' to have lower innate intelligence compared to whites.

The catalogue of ways used to 'grade' races into higher and lower 'grades' are many and Gould only deals with a few in this book. Yet, it is enough to show that as long as racism exists, people will attempt to find ways of separating 'us' from 'them'.

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The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

The Mismeasure of Man
by Stephen Jay Gould