The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

German anatomist Emil Huschke argued that Black people and white women were biologically undeveloped like white male children, “living representatives of an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males” (144).

He finagled his results in order to confirm his prejudice: excluding small white skulls to raise the mean size of his own group. American naturalist Samuel Morton believed that white people had the largest brains and that this was evidence of superior intellect. Many of Gould's essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life and Full House.ġ9th century physicians used the sheen of science to justify racism.

He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two compatible, complementary fields, or 'magisteria,' whose authority does not overlap. In evolutionary theory, he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He contributed to evolutionary developmental biology. Gould helped develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which evolutionary stability is marked by instances of rapid change. Most of Gould's empirical research was on land snails. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Kamin of Princeton University has said, 'a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes.Stephen Jay Gould was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general.

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. And yet the idea of innate limits-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 by Stephen Jay Gould. 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. The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould