The Mismeasure of Man

“The Mismeasure of Man,” by Stephen Jay Gould discuss how overtime scientist tried to measure a human being worth by using biology to determine this worth. Scientist would measure various things on the human body to determine this worth with example like how much your head weights to how far apart someone toes would be from another toes. The ultimate goal of all of these experiment was to determined what race was superior to all of the other races. With the scientist being mostly European their experiment would become very subject in finding out why and how white people were far superior to everyone else and in some case how Nordic people were better then everyone south of them. Over year everyone of the way they test intelligence was proving wrong and a new way was discover. It was not until Alfred Binet, H.H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, and lastly R.M Yerkes. These people used a new way to test intelligent that didn’t involve measure human body parts, but they would actually give people written and or oral tests. Alfred Binet(1857-1911) the father of the IQ test. He was student of Broca’s school of thought in that a measure of skull determined someone intelligent. In the end Binet would abandoned this way of thinking and would attempt to new way to measure intelligences. Binet would now look at measuring intelligences in…

The use of crime data is important to criminal justice agencies for various reasons. Some of which include the prevention and prediction of crimes. The data is collected and stored in “crime categories on which local and federal authorities maintain data, ordered by their increasing degree of harm to the general public” (Chen et.al 2004, para 6). It is important but it also has its drawbacks. If for example, a person commits multiple crimes, only the most serious is counted into the data.…

Science is not the answer for everything in the world, however it does play a role in our beliefs. Science has helped us believe many factors of our world today, but what about the questions that cannot be answered by science? So in these cases what do we fall too; religion, culture, society, etc.? We used to fall back on religion for our answers, now it is science, however, we are slowing going to change it to something else besides science. This is known as a paradigm shift. In the excerpt…

Carol Tavris, the author of “In Groups We Shrink”, received her PhD from the University of Michigan in social psychology and has since then published many articles and books; Tavris’ works include articles for Vogue, G.Q., and Harper’s, as well as a handful of novels including The Mismeasure of Women. Using her knowledge of human emotions and sexuality, Tavris also taught in the psychology department at UCLA as well as the New School for Social Research. Printed in the Los Angeles Times in the…

This is understandable, considering the extensive focus that Stephen Jay Gould gave to debunking historical American studies of racial inferiority and linking them back to later works of biological determinism such as The Bell Curve (1994) in three revised editions of The Mismeasure of Man (from 1981), in itself partly a work of scientific history. In particular, the American “culture war” debates over the neo-Darwinian validity of eugenic thought have been focused upon. This is demonstrated…

This book portrays how flamingos feed with their heads upside down, insects eat their mates, the diversity of land snails, nuclear winter, and mass extinctions. Gould also wrote on the misuse of intelligence testing. He stated that human intelligence has a spot in the brain that can be measured by a standard number score. However, he also said labeling groups as inferior or superior intelligence based on those measurements would be a misuse of scientific data and the scientific process. Gould…

was that the outward appearance of people were indication of their inner qualities such as intellect and moral behavior. Today, it is widely known that there is no connection between learned behavior and the natural physical form of the human body. The fourth element was the belief that all physical attributes and behavior of the various social groups were capable of being transferred to subsequent generations in their specific rank order. Lastly, it was believed that each race was a distinct…

I was not a perfect test taker and knew that I had a high probability of failing. Each test was a huge stress and I had to retake many of them since I could not pass it because of many external causes. These tests do not account for the fact that many students could be going through something that could affect their test scores. During these times the teacher would only focus on teaching the test than teaching the material which added for me more pressure. When these tests are being made they…

robbing them of their rights and dehumanizing them. It caused African slaves to experience “social death” in which they underwent the loss of their identities, and loss of their humanity. It symbolized the slaves’ loss of freedom and power as well as their total dependency on their master’s will. All of these can be traced back to settler colonialism because as the colonizers gained more land, the demand for cheap and exploitable labor increased in order to support the growing plantation…