Praise Gould claimed the majority of reviews of
The Mismeasure of Man were positive. Gould's colleague
Richard Lewontin, a celebrated evolutionary biologist who held positions at both the University of Chicago and Harvard, wrote a glowing review of Gould's book in
The New York Review of Books, endorsing most aspects of its account, and suggesting that it might have been even more critical of the racist intentions of the scientists he discusses, because scientists "sometimes tell deliberate lies because they believe that small lies can serve big truths." Gould said that the most positive review of the first edition to be written by a psychologist was in the
British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology, which reported that "Gould has performed a valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most important debates in the social sciences, and this book should be required reading for students and practitioners alike." In
The New York Times, journalist
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the critique of
factor analysis "demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning, of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract". The British journal
Saturday Review praised the book as a "fascinating historical study of
scientific racism", and that its arguments "illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case". In the American
Monthly Review magazine, Richard York and the sociologist
Brett Clark praised the book's thematic concentration, saying that "rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims".
Newsweek gave it a positive review for revealing biased science and its abuse. In December 2006,
Discover magazine ranked
The Mismeasure of Man as the 17th-greatest
science book of all time.
Reassessing Morton's skull measurements In a paper published in 1988, John S. Michael reported that Samuel G. Morton's original 19th-century study was conducted with less bias than Gould had described; that "contrary to Gould's interpretation ... Morton's research was conducted with integrity". Nonetheless, Michael's analysis suggested that there were discrepancies in Morton's
craniometric calculations, that his data tables were scientifically unsound, and he "cannot be excused for his errors, or his unfair comparisons of means". Michael later complained that some authors, including
J. Philippe Rushton, selectively "cherry-picked facts" from his research to support their own claims. He lamented, "Some people have turned the Morton-Gould affair into an all or nothing debate in which either one side is right or the other side is right, and I think that is a mistake. Both men made mistakes and proving one wrong does not prove the other one right." In another study, published in 2011, Jason E. Lewis and colleagues re-measured the cranial volumes of the skulls in Morton's collection, and re-examined the respective statistical analyses by Morton and by Gould, concluding that, contrary to Gould's analysis, Morton did not falsify craniometric research results to support his racial and social prejudices, and that the "Caucasians" possessed the greatest average cranial volume in the sample. To the extent that Morton's craniometric measurements were erroneous, the error was away from his personal biases. Ultimately, Lewis and colleagues disagreed with most of Gould's criticisms of Morton, finding that Gould's work was "poorly supported", and that, in their opinion, the confirmation of the results of Morton's original work "weakens the argument of Gould, and others, that biased results are endemic in science". Lewis' study examined 46% of Morton's samples, whereas Gould's earlier study was based solely on a reexamination of Morton's raw data tables. However Lewis' study was subsequently criticized by a number of scholars for misrepresenting Gould's claims, faulted for examining fewer than half of the skulls in Morton's collection, In 2015 this paper was reviewed by Michael Weisberg, who reported that "most of Gould's arguments against Morton are sound. Although Gould made some errors and overstated his case in a number of places, he provided
prima facie evidence, as yet unrefuted, that Morton did indeed mismeasure his skulls in ways that conformed to 19th century racial biases".
Criticism In a review of
The Mismeasure of Man,
Bernard Davis, professor of
microbiology at Harvard Medical School, said that Gould erected a
straw man argument based upon incorrectly defined key terms—specifically
reification—which Gould furthered with a "highly selective" presentation of
statistical data, all motivated more by politics than by science. Gould pushed back against some of Davis' claims in a 1994 revised edition of the book. While Davis characterized the book's reception as negative in the scientific journals, Gould argued that of twenty-four academic book reviews written by experts in psychology, fourteen approved, three were mixed opinions, and seven disapproved of the book. In his review, psychologist
John B. Carroll said that Gould did not understand "the nature and purpose" of
factor analysis. Statistician
David J. Bartholomew, of the
London School of Economics, said that Gould erred in his use of
factor analysis, irrelevantly concentrated upon the fallacy of
reification (abstract as concrete), and ignored the contemporary scientific consensus about the existence of the
psychometric g. Reviewing the book,
Stephen F. Blinkhorn, a senior lecturer in psychology at the
University of Hertfordshire, wrote that
The Mismeasure of Man was "a masterpiece of
propaganda" that selectively juxtaposed data to further a political agenda. Psychologist
Lloyd Humphreys, then editor-in-chief of
The American Journal of Psychology and
Psychological Bulletin, wrote that
The Mismeasure of Man was "science fiction" and "political propaganda", and that Gould had misrepresented the views of
Alfred Binet,
Godfrey Thomson, and
Lewis Terman. In his review, psychologist Franz Samelson wrote that Gould was wrong in asserting that the
psychometric results of the intelligence tests administered to soldier-recruits by the U.S. Army contributed to the legislation of the
Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In their study of the
Congressional Record and committee hearings related to the Immigration Act, Mark Snyderman and
Richard J. Herrnstein reported that "the [intelligence] testing community did not generally view its findings as favoring restrictive immigration policies like those in the 1924 Act, and Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing". Psychologist
David P. Barash wrote that Gould unfairly groups
sociobiology with "racist
eugenics and misguided
Social Darwinism". A 2019 paper argued that Gould was incorrect in his assessment of the Army Beta and that, for the knowledge, technology and test development standards of the time, it was adequate and could measure intelligence, possibly even in the modern day.
Responses by subjects of the book In his review of
The Mismeasure of Man,
Arthur Jensen, a University of California (Berkeley) educational psychologist whom Gould
much criticized in the book, wrote that Gould used
straw man arguments to advance his opinions, misrepresented other scientists, and propounded a political agenda. According to Jensen, the book was "a patent example" of the bias that political
ideology imposes upon science—the very thing that Gould sought to portray in the book. Jensen also criticized Gould for concentrating on long-disproven arguments (noting that 71% of the book's references preceded 1950), rather than addressing "anything currently regarded as important by scientists in the relevant fields", suggesting that drawing conclusions from early human intelligence research is like condemning the contemporary automobile industry based upon the mechanical performance of the
Ford Model T.
Charles Murray, co-author of
The Bell Curve (1994), said that his views about the distribution of
human intelligence, among the
races and the
ethnic groups who compose the U.S. population, were misrepresented in
The Mismeasure of Man. Psychologist
Hans Eysenck wrote that
The Mismeasure of Man is a book that presents "a
paleontologist's distorted view of what
psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science".
Responses to the second edition (1996) Arthur Jensen and Bernard Davis argued that if the
g factor (
general intelligence factor) were replaced with a model that tested several types of intelligence, it would change results less than one might expect. Therefore, according to Jensen and Davis, the results of
standardized tests of
cognitive ability would continue to correlate with the results of other such standardized tests, and that the intellectual achievement gap between black and white people would remain. Rather than defending Jensen and Rushton, however, Flynn concluded that the
Flynn Effect, a nongenetic rise in IQ throughout the 20th century, invalidated their core argument because their methods falsely identified even this change as genetic. ==See also==