The Mismeasure of Man

...For, theory notwithstanding, the abuses of intelligence testing, particularly when politicians have allowed public policy to conform to scientific fashion, are horribly real...

...But then he claims to have shown not just this but the folly of ranking in general...

...To circumvent the Secret Service food-tasters, he carried to a Cabinet meeting hidden in his briefcase a South Georgia delicacy known as rooster-pepper sausage for President Carter...

...THE MISMEASURE OF MAN Stephen Jay Gould / W.W...

...If nothing more, Gould's book is valuable for exposing just how problematic these lists have been...

...Instead, he wound up meeting with Hamilton Jordan, chief congressional lobbyist Frank Moore, Counsel Bob Lipshutz, and sometimes J ody Powell, to pick nominees to recommend to Carter...

...Special interest groups will stoutly resist, he predicts, "because a single-term President would be less vulnerable to the pressure these groups exert than is a President concerned about winning reelection...

...Norton and Co...

...The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes . . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough...

...Along with repeating these familiar criticisms, Gould brings some subtle statistical arguments to bear upon the issue...

...In one instance Carter, against his political inclination, was compelled by his campaign promises of an "independent" Justice Department to allow his attorney general not to prosecute a Houston cop who had been convicted by a Texas jury of maliciously murdering a MexicanAmerican but let off with a five-year sentence...

...And when Bell went before the U.S...

...He announces he will later this year join such worthies as William Simon, Milton Eisenhower, and Cyrus Vance in launching a bipartisan drive to persuade 34 state legislatures to petition for a constitutional convention to write such an amendment...

...The unneeded infusion of radical politics into a history of science leaves the book with some serious logical flaws...

...Bell details his thwarted attempt to kill the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which poured federal dollars into Newark, home of House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino, and to move some Treasury Department law enforcement units to Justice...

...This is whut we're talking about, this li'l fish h e a h . " Thus he succeeded in smuggling humor into an administration that, on the whole, proved intensely humorless and stuffy...

...second, and even worse, he exhibits an almost willful disregard of the fact that people are, despite all utopian fantasizing, unequal...

...Dale Bumpers's proposal to require the government to prove the validity of a regulation in court if a victimized citizen protests...

...It has its share of flaws, in logic and style, and certainly does not prove all that Gould claims, but still it is a compelling history of science and its abuse...

...14.95 Kenneth Martin Stein Stephen J. Gould is a remarkable man: Professor of Geology at Harvard...

...Hispanic-Americans cried for his head on a federal platter, and Carter prodded Bell to review the case personally...

...He explains the technique of factor analysis, used by Spearman and Burr to " r e i f y " intelligence--to claim that a single mental factor explains success in the many different i n t e l l e c t u a l activities...

...He points out two fallacies that have pervaded scientific inquiries into intelligence, the hereditarian fallacy, i.e., the confusion of "heritable" with "inevitable," and that of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 37 reification, of assuming that there really is some one thing for us to call intelligence...

...so sexist a title...

...This procedure was objected to by another Frenchman, Gratiolet, who noted that inasmuch as German brains were, on average, 100 grams heavier than French ones such measures obviously were uncorrelated with intelligence...

...Gould deals with these in two contexts, looking first at the craniometers of the nineteenth century and then at the IQ testers of the twentieth...

...Bell presented the justices with the first genuine corpus delictiever in their history: a tiny snail darter preserved in a test tube...

...When the Potomac press corps bloodhounds scented the plot, Bell called a formal press conference to unveil the secret sausage recipe, which he solemnly explained requires chicken...

...J.C...

...Still, IQ testing has become associated with a long list of abuses, from the outright deception of Sir Cyril Burr in his nowfamous study of identical twins, to the nonstandard nature of Yerkes's "standardized" Army tests, to the downright silliness of the questions by which the testers measured intelligence...

...Whether they have made sense or not, scient i s t s , from Broca through Arthur Jensen, have drawn up rankings of mental ability...

...Bell tried to get the Carter Administration to adopt Bumpers's idea, but in vain...

...is one of my favorites...

...He is also a self-professed radical, the sort of guy who feels compelled to apologize for giving his book Kenneth Martin Stein is a free-lance writer based in New York City and Cambridge...

...You must use the left leg of the Rhode Island Red rooster," he specified...

...Again, he does not explain why...

...Heah it is," he drawled, brandishing his fish like a beaming Huckleberry Finn...

...Bell found this " a n outrageous intrusion" and "such a politicization of the process that I thought of resigning...

...star witness in the recent Arkansas "monkey" trial...

...Gould's thesis is simple: Biological determinists, a nasty lot, have attempted to rank individuals and groups according to a single, innate quantity called intelligence...

...He claims that we ought not to reify intelligence we cannot rank, because while some people will excel at one factor, others will excel at others, and we cannot judge between the two...

...And that's how the nation was saddled with what may prove to be Carter's worst legacy--a Carterized judiciary...

...But don't let this dissuade you from reading Mismeasure, for, as befits a remarkable man, Gould has written a remarkable book...

...and winner of a National Book Critic's Circle award for his latest book, The Mismeasure of Man, a history of attempts to measure human intelligence...

...Science prevailed, however, and Broca and his followers s t a r t e d measuring the brains of everyone from the lowliest criminal to the g r e a t Austrian mathematician Karl Gauss...

...try music song line: "My wife ran off with my best friend, and I sure do miss him...

...It leaves me feeling somewhat like...

...The most important of these is his treatment of ranking...

...When he wants, Gould can write stylishly and logically...

...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982...

...that old coun...

...The real concern of the book, however, is not craniometry but its t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y equivalent, IQ testing...

...Upholding a Virginia law that sought to sterilize Carrie Buck, who had scored 12 on a StanfordBinet IQ test, Holmes wrote: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...

...It is testimony to the eloquence of Gould's argument that his thesis, so obviously flawed, remains powerful...

...Who was Christy Mathewson...

...author of two well-received books of essays on evolution, Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb...

...He writes that "tests of the IQ type were helpful in the proper diagnosis of my own learningdisabled son . . . . The misuse .of mental t e s t s is not inherent in the idea of testing itself...

...For the occasion Bell, decked out in his formal morning coat, smuggled in some genuine evidence to show the High Court, which as an appellate court had never before looked at evidence other than dirty movies...

...Gould's book then, for all of the author's obvious political sympathies, presents an essentially conservative message: Scientists should be slow to accept new "facts" presented by new "sciences" and public officials should be slower still to accept these "facts" as a basis for public policy...

...Neither Buck nor many of the other 7,500 sterilized in Virginia under the law Holmes upheld (these sterilizations continued until 1972) would be considered feeble-minded by today's standards...

...Supreme Court to argue a case, as attorneys general traditionally must, he chose the famous Tennessee Snail Darter case...

...Gould fails to recognize that, distasteful though it may be, people are ranked and must be ranked according to their abilities, and that intelligence, call it that or anything else, is one of the most important of such abilities...

...Gould describes one writer who postulates the existence of 120 such factors...

...This, he argues, is an "irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious" task...

...I t was and is a safeguard against Washington's getting out of hand...

...Furthermore, there is no reason to use a factor analysis that searches preferentially for general factors over ones which look for "rotated factor axes," i.e., which ascribe test results to many innate abilities rather than just one...

...He moves from a discourse on a scientific error to a d i s s e r t a t i o n on the " b l i n d i n g dogmas of class bias...

...I hope you made the right decision...

...The Immigration Restriction Act, passed in 1924 on the basis of Yerkes Army IQ tests, trapped up to six million in Hitler's Reich...

...He lost cootrol of the judicial nominating process to the White House staffpolitical strategists, as he realized when Carter returned a list of prospects with a longhand instruction to Bell to submit someone other than the nominee he had recommended...

...Indeed, craniometry was once accepted as cold scientific fact, and was the leading intellectual fashion of its time...

...Bell's experience with the Carter Administration's passion for poll standings and reelection leads him to propose that the President serve a single six-year term...

...To help cure the regulatory mess, Bell endorses Sen...

...Supreme Court in place of Sandra Day O'Connor...

...Even as intelligent a man as Oliver Wendell Holmes would conclude one of his most famous decisions (Buck v. Bell, 1926) with what Gould justly termed "one of the most famous and chilling statements of our century...

...tory law...

...Gould presents a persuasive case that we ought not even a t t e m p t to rank races or the sexes according to innate intelligence...

...recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for genius...

...Carter reacted with this cold handwritten note: "The Rodriguez case was/is very embarrassing to me...

...The state legislatures, with the approval of the people, can bring the central governmentunder control...

...There will always be those who excel at everything as well as those who do not, and some ranking remains possible...

...Bell has a perpetual twinkle in his eye, as if he seems always aware of Henry Fielding's declaration, "Life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous...

...He shows, however, that it is possible to find some such general factor just as a statistical result, without any implication of causality...

...This argument, though fanciful, is absurd...

...Bell, while horrified by the crassness of the killing, agreed with subordinates that federal prosecution would be unfair and unwise under the particular circumstances...

...renowned paleontologist...

...Gauss, moreover, was not the only leading thinker of the age to donate his brain to science in death as well as life...

...The "regulatee" would thus be presumed innocent, and the regulator guilty, in a simple shift of the burden of evidence as it now exists in regula...

...But they also reflect a conflict between the political instincts of Jimmy Carter and the idealism of Griffin Bell...

...It is a fascinating history of science that Gould p r e s e n t s , but, more than that, it is a pertinent reminder of the limits of science, and of the costs we impose on others when we ignore these limits...

...We must guess the Carter political aides did not want to offend Capitol Hill barons whose power depends on overseeing these domains...

...G r i f f i n Bell may be remembered as the Great Smuggler of the Carter Administration...

...Had Jimmy Carter bested Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Griffin Bell almost certainly today would be sitting with his twinkling eye on the U.S...

...Mismeasure is not without some problems of its own...

...Standardized testing, to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst way of achieving such a ranking--except for all others...

...Bell's complaints about me antagonistic White House "power centers" in part reflect the conflict between President and Cabinet inherent in the parochial tendencies of the departments...

...In making this a s s e r t i o n he commits his own two fallacies: First, he fails to distinguish between arguments based upon the statistical behavior of large groups and those relating to the individual...

...Even were we to accept IQ tests as valid, Gould argues, to rank individuals on a unilinear scale of intelligence still makes no sense...

...Bell also lost on a more basic matter...

...He is also capable of ending clear, concise, and logical passages with the most jarringly inappropriate (and politically naive) comments, whether on America's "jingoistic nationalism of WWI," or our "persistent, indigenous racism...

...Analogously, whether or not some single, general entity which we might call " a t h l e t i c a b i l i t y " exists, we can, do, and have every right to judge one person a b e t t e r athlete than another...

...The provision for a Constitutional Convention was probably the wisest single move of the Founding Fat h e r s , " says Bell...

...The c r a n i o m e t e r s , led by the famous French scientist Paul Broca, contended that a p e r s o n ' s intelligence could be estimated just by measuring the dimensions of his brain...

...Gould objects not to intelligence testing per se, but to some of its applications...