Heads & Brains, Large & Small

A STUDY ON RACE RELATIONS at Harvard College, released in May 1980, found that about 20 per cent of all undergraduates believed in the intellectual inferiority of minority students. Yet the study did not simply evince prejudice, because some minorities also expected poorer academic performance by non-whites. The racist attitude appeared even though most polled students had had little ability to measure intelligence; cultural assimilation, not education, accounted for their views. Harvard students reflected an American conviction that other races are inherently less intelligent than the Caucasian.

Discrediting this notion must be done carefully because myths frequently have bases in facts, and intelligence differentiation has long been a subject of research. Most everyone today knows of Arthur R. Jensen, who asserts that Blacks are less intelligent that whites on the basis of IQ scores--a trait he says is largely inherited. And his work is only the latest of many. From early in the 19th century to the present, dozens of scientists have weighed brains, measured skulls, and tested millions, sometimes concluding that the African mind stood about midway between the Caucasian and gorilla in intelligence. Though studies of this kind are frowned upon today, the earlier results have filtered through to our culture and continue to form cultural beliefs today.

Stephen Jay Gould, professor of Geology, studiously undermines the more famous research of this genre in The Mismeasure of Man. He examines past studies of human being's intellitence with the perspicuity expected of a careful scientist, showing where other researchers have erred before. He acquired the data that others had used to reach racist conclusions, recalculated the computations and reveals the mistakes and incorrect assumptions. Gould's reopening of the 19th- and early-20th-century studies could help close an era of racist preconceptions about intelligence.

Skull volume and brain weight provided much of the data for intelligence determining scientists in the 1800s. Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851 having collected more than 1000 skulls, tried to prove that a ranking of races could be established objectively by head size. By measuring the volume, which he assumed was directly correlated to intelligence, he hoped to show that Caucasian naturally should be the brightest of all races. He succeeded in his era; however, as Gould clearly demonstrates, Morton used his preconceived notions about race like any high school lab student, using only the data that fitted his thesis. Morton weighted unfairly the American Indian and African measurements by using many skulls from tribes with unusually small heads and by including women, who have smaller body sizes. After Gould had assembled and analyzed all the data, he found little difference in average cranial capacity.

The book reads surprisingly smoothly, despite its heavy technical content. Gould, who won the 1981 American Book Award for Science for his collection of essays called The Panda's Thumb, gracefully mixes statistics, technical terminology and anecdotes to make for an eminently comprehensible volume.

Nonetheless, there are several problems with Mismeasure. When he departs from his string of examples and analyses and attempts to philosophize or use high-level technical terminology, the book loses its punch. His statistical sections demand too much from a popular audience and bog down the narrative, especially in his discourses on linear algebra. When he sticks to careful analysis of the I.Q. examiners, he is on much more solid ground.

Furthermore, Gould's abstract theorizing--mostly in the introduction and conclusion--detracts from the punch of the book. He writes of the issues of cultural beliefs affecting scientific research and of the simplification of intelligence into a one-dimensional characteristic; he uses intelligence testing, he says, to prove this larger point. However, his scientific jargon and awkward writing style in this part hinder clear presentation of these valid points. The beautiful narrative style evident in the bulk of the book is not evident in his hypothesizing.

Despite these drawbacks, Gould does succeed in communicating that most, if not all, of the man-measuring scientists worked with poor technique and even more distorting preconceptions. The little-known facts--the U.S. army had an average "intelligence" in World War I of a 13.08-year-old--and the previously unpublished material--Louis Agassiz, the great Swiss naturalist and later Harvard professor, was not the only Olympian detachment of his reputation--provide fascinating reading.

The Mismeasure of Man successfully debunks many "scientifically" accurate studies. Yet the public may not become aware of Gould's analysis, because his criticisms do not correspond to what people want to believe--in their own superiority. Students read the Harvard Race Relations report and found nothing new: merely some of the same racist perceptions that have prevailed for centuries. This book, by "truthifying" history, could erode some of these prejudices.