Egalitarian "anti-racists" love to refer people to Gould's Mismeasure of Man as if it is some sort of blanket refutation of The Bell Curve, The Blank Slate, Sociobiology, and other works making mincemeat of "Nurture over Nature" advocates - invariably Marxist "cultural anthropologists" or some other breed of delusional half-wit.
Excellent review shredding Gould's egalitarian Marxist hack-work: http://www.eugenics.net/papers/rushton.html
Abstract
The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man appeared in 1981 and was quickly praised in the popular press as a definitive refutation of 100 years of scientific work on race, brain-size and intelligence. It sold 125,000 copies, was translated into 10 languages, and became required reading for undergraduate and even graduate classes in anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
The second edition is not truly revised, but rather only expanded, as the author claims the book needed no updating as any new research would only be plagued with the same philosophical errors revealed in the first edition. Thus it continues a political polemic, whose author engages in character assassination of long deceased scientists whose work he misrepresents despite published refutations, while studiously witholding from his readers fifteen years of new research that contradicts every major scientific argument he puts forth. Specific attention in this review are given to the following topics: (1) the relationship between brain size and IQ, (2) the importance of the scientific contributions of Sir Francis Galton, S. G. Morton, H. H. Goddard, and Sir Cyril Burt, (3) the role of early IQ testers in determining U.S. immigration policy, (4) The Bell Curve controversy and the reality of g, (5) race/sex/social class differences in brain size and IQ, (6) Cesare Lombroso and the genetic basis of criminal behavior, (7) between-group heritabilities, inter-racial adoption studies, and IQ (8) why evolutionary theory predicts group differences, and (9) the extent to which Gould's political ideology has affected his scientific work.
"May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devils mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth" (p. 39). So swears one Stephen Jay Gould, justifiably worried that his activist background may have tarnished his reputation for scholarship. Critical examination of the new edition of The Mismeasure of Man shows that, indeed, Gould's resort to character assassination and misrepresentation of evidence have caught up with him.
Hailed in the popular media as the definitive deconstruction of the 'myth' that science is an objective enterprise, the original The Mismeasure of Man was in fact an ad hominem attack on eminent scholars, past and present, who have scientifically studied race, intelligence, and brain size. Despite the masses of empirical research using state-of-the-art technology published in highly prestigious journals that refute the obscurantist arguments Gould first served up in 1981, all the chapters of the initial edition have now been unapologetically regurgitated. Gould's failure not only to conduct any empirical research of his own but to even acknowledge the existence of any and all contradictory data speaks for itself. Revealed political truth may abhor revision but science thrives on it. Scientist that he is, Gould may yet regret agreeing to produce this 'revision'.
Rather than being appropriately revised, the original edition of The Mismeasure of Man has merely been expanded. Gould includes a 30-page preface on why he wrote the original and why the renewed interest in race, behavior, and evolution, required that he 'revise' it after 15 years, although he also maintains (p. 35) that his 1981 arguments needed no modification. Gould's 1996 book also contains five end chapters including essays on J. F. Blumenbach, the 19th century German anthropologist who developed the first scientific system of racial hierarchy, and Gould's own previously published reviews of Herrnstein and Murrays (1994) The Bell Curve.
After carefully reading the book, I charge Gould with several counts of scholarly malfeasance. First, he omits mention of remarkable new discoveries made from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which show that brain-size and IQ correlate about 0.40. These results are as replicable as one will find in the social and behavioral sciences and utterly destroy many of Gould's arguments. Second, despite published refutations, Gould repeats verbatim his defamations of character against long deceased individuals. Third, Gould fails to respond to the numerous empirical studies that show a consistent pattern of race differences in IQ, brain size, crime, and other factors that have appeared since his first edition went to press.
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