I finished The Mismeasure of Man last night. Good book, if a bit dense in places.
The book covered a lot of ground, but was focused mostly on studies putting forward the wrong-headed ideas that, a) There is a single quality measuring intelligence, b) Humans can be ranked hierarchically based on this measure, and c) There is a hereditary link for this measurement. He starts by discussing men like Morton, who measured the volumes of skulls in order to determine that white men were smarter than others because they had larger brains. I phrase it that way because, in almost all of these cases, that was the goal of these researches — not to really determine a general measure of intelligence, but specifically to rank themselves at the top of it. In Morton’s case, he did all kinds of statistical tricks to skew his results — using lead shot to measure some skulls, which tended to give results of a larger volume, and mustard seed on others; or throwing away outlier data, but only those outliers which went against his expected outcome.
Of course the author doesn’t expect this debunking of physical measurements of intelligence to be news to his readership, but it does provide a very nice counterpoint to the next section of the book, which is about IQ testing. Now he isn’t too forceful about it, but it clear from what he’s describing that these IQ proponents are misguided in almost exactly the same way. Their techniques and arguments are more technical and, in some ways, more compelling, but they’re essentially saying the same thing — “We’ve found a way to measure how good a person is, so we can say that this person is better than that person and this group is better than that group, and by the way, our group is best.” The second half of the book very pretty deep into some statistical stuff, which I found pretty interesting, but I think people without at least some background in math or statistics would have some problems with it. It’s is refreshing to read a pop sci book that doesn’t gloss over important technical details.
My book now is the second in Stephen Leigh’s Dinosaur series, Dinosaur Planet. It’s ok.