Book Report: The Mismeasure of Man

The Mismeasure of Man

Introduction

Stephen Jay Gould is recognized as one of the most renowned researcher in the field of Paleontology and evolution sciences. He worked on numerous theories and literature related to the scientific study of the prehistoric life, evolutionary processes, and the development of scientific knowledge over the time. He studied from the Antioch College, the University of Leeds, and the Columbia University. After the completion of degree, he started teaching and research work at the Harvard University in 1967 and remained part of the faculty till his death. The two most important theories proposed by him were punctuated equilibrium and the non overlapping magisteria. He wrote a number of scholarly articles, dissertation, and books. Some of the most famous books were 'The Third Chimpanzee', 'The Pandas Thumb', Ever Since Darwin', and 'The Mismeasure of Man'.

Discussion

'The Mismeasure of Man' is a book written and published by Stephen Jay Gould in the year 1981. This book, like majority of other works, challenges the trivial concepts of biological determinism. It discusses about the concepts developed in the past centuries that genetic inheritance had an important part in the determination of the intellectual capability of a person. This implicitly meant that only some specific group of genes can have high intellectual quotient. Biological determinism also proposes that the socio-economic differences are also because of the genes and inheritance dissimilarity. Gould tried to prove that the some of the concepts in the biological determinism are based on biases of the researchers.

Book Review

The Mismeasure of man stresses on the main theme of the biological determinism which observes that the intelligence is the single quantity that can be used to verify the value of a person or a group. This concept was developed in the biological determinism on the basis of craniometry and psychological testing. Gould tried to disprove the concepts on the basis of scientific weaknesses of the studies on the biological determinism, and the influence of the political environment on the research work. The reason why he suggested these two flaws was that he believed in the subjectivity of science because it is a social phenomenon. Gould further mentions in the book that scientist can only gain the perspective reality from factual reality of science because he is also part of the society. This also emphasizes that even Gould believed that ideally science has an objective reality present in itself.

The book continues with the criticism on the concept of the biological determinism. The author claims that the concept has two major fallacies. The fallacy of reification relates to common tendency of converting abstract concepts into a real thing like intelligence has been judged by the quotient. The second fallacy is about the common human behavior of ranking in which complex variations at kept at an ascending scale. Thus, the worthiness of a person is judged by the number of his place on the scale. Gould suggested that these two fallacies have affected the research carried out to ...