DNA, IQ, racism and science
Reading “The mismeasure of man”
In memory of Stephen Jay Gould
Jon Hareide Aarbakke, Tvedestrand, Norway - 2025
Contents
Who was Stephen Jay Gould?
What is his message? (science as human endeavour)
Specific axes to grind: abuse of IQ, racism, scientific justifications for racism
The origins of “IQ”
The craniologists and brain weighers
The Bell Curve (1995)
Some observations
Stephen Jay Gould
From Wikipedia
1941-2002, Queens, New York, Jewish mother, secular upbringing. Activist during student days:
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference
Gould was anti-racist
Evolutionary biologist, paleontologist
Age 5 saw the T-rex in the American Museum of Natural History, NY
Racism
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/23/when-cleopatra-was-alive-she-wasnt-categorised-by-colour-of-her-skin
Does the term race even make sense?
Cleopatra
“The mismeasure of man” 1981
Revised edition 1996 with critique of The Bell Curve.
Other titles by Gould:
Weighing brains
“In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races… other things being equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain” (Broca, 1861)
In general: big scull -> big brain
(but does “big” mean “better”)
Crania Aegyptiaca 1844 (Morton)
Crania Americana 1839 (Morton)
Auracanian Indian…
Craniology 1850s, 1985, 2011, 2015
Morton had a collection of about 900 skulls from many parts of the world
Measured the cranial capacity = volume of brain, first with seed, then with lead shot (blykuler)
Then calculated averages
White men “won”
Craniology 1981 and 2011
Gould (1981) regrouped Morton’s findings and achieved very different results. Gould’s regrouping was apparently along logical lines, like sex, and the variation Morton had found vanished.
Gould claims Morton was unconsciously biased when he grouped and selected measurements (in order to get the result he wanted) - but Morton did publish all his source data, allowing Gould to make new calculations
2011: Lewis et al, from same University as Morton, re-measured 380 skulls and found the sizes had been measured well - hence no bias on Morton’s part… but that’s not what Gould claimed!
Craniology 2015
Kaplan et al state (2015):
Looking at faces (Lombroso, Montessori (of Montessori school fame)..)
Can you spot the German murderers?
Group E
IQ - Intelligence quotient
Origin: Alfred Binet (France) 1903-1904 (Binet-Simon scale)
Child’s age/measured-age-ability:
Perform like an 11-year old, biological age 10 -> 110 IQ score
But only while the child is growing
Purpose: assist the children that are at risk of falling behind
And that’s it!
Not a number that says anything else about this human being
Binet was forthright about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; therefore, intelligence was not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds.[6] Given Binet's stance that intelligence testing was subject to variability and was not generalizable, it is important to look at the metamorphosis that mental testing took on as it made its way to the U.S
(Wikipedia)
IQ test questions ca 1900
Terman: “An Indian (!) who had come to town for the first time in his life saw a white man riding along the street. As the white man rode by, the Indian said - “The white man is lazy; he walks sitting down” - what was the white man riding on that caused the Indian to say, “he walks sitting down”?
Binet: “My neigbo(u)r has been having queer visitors. First a doctor came to his house, then a lawyer, then a minister. What do you think happened here?”�(this was one of the harder test questions)
DIY IQ test
Forming the basis for e.g. US Army IQ tests
Walter Lippman debating Terman
“Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted. .. If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgement on the child’s capacity, that they reveal “scientifically” his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk without warning in the Sargasso Sea.”
IQ
From a scale developed to assess children and thus be able to best help them
to a number supposed to say something about who we are
Re-ification (res, thing in Latin): to make into a thing
“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse or mysterious”
�JOHN STUART MILL
The Bell Curve: IQ 1995
1995 book by Herrnstein, Murray
Argues that intelligence is biologically determined and condemns certain groups, at group level, to staying indefinitely as an underclass in societies:�“Those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this separation is a source of social division within the United States”
The book argues that there are differences in IQ between “races”
Gould vociferously attacks the conclusion and the scientific soundness of the book - and he’s not the only one
Observations (USA)
Miscegenation - how long did it take to strike the anti-miscegenation laws off the law books?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
Reconstruction and what followed