Stephen Jay Gould (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. Penguin
London, pp. 446
‘Art is limitation. The essence
of every picture is the frame’.
G.K.
Chesterton
Stephen Gould is a rare species
in the literary world- a scientist with a flair for essay-writing! Through his monthly
column in the Natural History
magazine, Gould crossed disciplinary boundaries from evolutionary theory to science
history and used diverse tools such as statistics and common sense to drive
home his arguments. To a student of biology, he is known for his punctuated equilibrium
theory among other things and to the philosopher, for his argument that science
and religion were two distinct domains with non-overlapping authorities. It is
to the non-specialist, that Gould was at his delightful best, exposing the
dangers of applying faulty logic and ‘evidence’ from science to justify social
projects of domination and discrimination.
Ranking
Intelligence
In this book, Gould examines one
specific form of quantifying claim about ranking human beings as an
illustration of the larger malady. He discusses the belief that intelligence
can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number and graded in a linear scale
to denote the intrinsic and unalterable worth of a person. He examines this
question from three vantage points- that of the philosophical error of the
assumption, social impact of its implementation and the epistemological underpinning
of ‘nature versus nurture’ that it evokes.
Characteristic to his method, he
goes about dismantling this argument by systematically tracing its historical
antecedents. He revisits each scholar as he sets about his experiments and
draws his inferences, walking with them through their intellectual journey and
exposing where the fault-lines of their logic lay. He takes us back to the time of feverishly
measuring cranium and bodies of corpses in the hope of measuring intelligence and
later, tinkering with genes and environment with the faith that the truth about
our abilities can be abstracted and distilled in a meaningful way. He
demonstrates how even the best intended scholars can be blinded to their own
fallacies in methods and measurement and how our implicit beliefs often colour
our inferences. By doing this exercise with exacting rigour and immense patience,
he shows us how, women, people of colour and people with differential abilities
come out on their own, liberated from the burden of historical accusations of
intellectual inferiority that was unfair, untruthful and dangerous.
This book is a study in history
as much as it is in statistics. The parts of the book where Gould marshals
evidence from research methodology (especially on factor analysis) is so lucid
that I cannot but recommend it to students beginning their research work using
statistical methods. I believe that the greatest contribution of the book is the
perspective it gives us regarding what scientific enquiry is all about. Like
the message in Chesterton’s quote in the beginning of this essay, science like
art, is limited by its frame of reference. It is in acknowledging the limits of
enquiry that we can hope to be truthful about our inference.
