The Man Who Loved Truth and Dinosaurs

The paleontologist, author, and unpretentious Harvard professor, Stephen Jay Gould, died of lung cancer in May 2002 at age 60.  Gould was a winner of the “MacArthur” genius award; he was also memorialized as a cartoon character in the slyly subversive television show, “The Simpsons.”

 This was actually the second time Professor Gould had battled cancer. I saw him speak at a conference in Boston in 1983, and at that time he was also suffering from cancer. Although he looked emaciated in 1983 (and I was surprised that he had decided to participate in the conference), he either beat what he had then, or kept that first insurgence of cancer at bay for almost 20 more years.

 Professor Gould was hardly your typical Harvard professor:  he went to college at earthy Antioch College (in Ohio), a school best known for
its mandatory work-study schedule (you alternate work and study for
five years) and its very progressive and politically liberal student body.  Gould reportedly developed his skills in writing at Antioch – but I imagine that no one there imagined that Gould would pull off such feats as writing 300 consecutive monthly essays for the journal, Natural History.  And as a professor, Gould was eager to write a number of wonderful books for the general public, as well as innumerable articles and columns for non-technical publications.  He felt strongly that science should not be dumbed down for the public.

 In fact, Professor Gould was “discovered” by the media as an academic eager to speak to the public in 1977, when someone at The New York Times noticed that Gould had two major books being published almost simultaneously:  one was a major technical work for academic consumption (Ontogeny and Phylogeny), and the other was a book of essays written for the non-academic public (Ever Since Darwin). In addition to a review of these two books in its Sunday Book Review section on November 20, 1977, The Times did a feature profile on Gould himself. Gould later said that the Times piece forged his reputation as a scientist who actually liked to write for non-scientists. Why this should seem so extraordinary is difficult to imagine in 2002, when books on science are gobbled up by the public.  But in 1977, it seems, the joy of writing for non-scientists was probably something an academic would have been reluctant to admit.  Except Stephen Jay Gould – lover of evolutionary theory, baseball, snails, and dinosaurs.

 Although almost all of his books for the public (and for his discipline) were well-received, one of his most incisive and powerful books – in my opinion – was The Mismeasure of Man,  published in 1983 and re-issued in 1996. In this book, Gould effectively and assuredly dismembered society's most cherished ideals about both the concept of "intelligence" – and exposed the follies of some of the scientists (including other Harvard professors) who have been most influential in defining what we knew (or thought we knew) about intelligence.

 Among the many things one learns in The Mismeasure of Man is
that the idea of human intelligence was subject to all kinds of ridiculous theories – at least until relatively recently. The arrival of more pluralistic theories of intelligence – Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, and Robert Sternberg’s theories of “thinking styles” and of “triarchic” intelligence – may seem like just another point on the learning curve as we expand our understanding of intelligence.  But in many ways, Gardner and his peers are in a different stratum than the well-meaning scientists who concocted so many dumb ideas about intelligence.

 To appreciate and enjoy the To give some examples of what Gould set out so clearly in The Mismeasure of Man. Someone at all familiar with IQ tests might recall that the earliest American IQ test was the Stanford-Binet test. The Stanford-Binet is named both for Alfred Binet, the French educator who wrote tests to help identify poorly performing students in the French school system, and for the Americanization of Binet's work at Stanford University by Professor Lewis Terman, a psychology researcher who is also known for his longitudinal study of children with high IQs (the “Termites,” as they were know colloquially).

 But Gould documents and discusses at length that the first
American IQ tests had a fraudulent pedigree from the start. One learns in his book that Alfred Binet was director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne. Although he had experimented with intelligence testing at his lab, he wrote his most famous test(s) so that he could help students in the French school system who were “underachieving” or for other reasons not performing well in school.

 He had a commission from the French minister of education to identify
and help these students. The test was intended only to identify these
problematic students. He never intended the test to be used to sort
normal children or adults into categories of “intelligence”! The
test was only intended to identify and diagnose school children who
needed substantial extra help.

 To quote Gould, “As to the causes of poor performance, Binet refused to speculate.” ... “The children identified by Binet's test were to be helped, not labeled. Binet had definite pedagogical suggestions, and many were implemented.” [p. 152]. In fact, Binet recommended some reforms that sound like good educational practice today: using small classrooms of 15-20 students; and helping students to “learn how to learn.”

 According to Gould, “Binet insisted upon three cardinal principles
for his tests: “1. The scores are a practical device. They do
not define anything innate or permanent. 2. ... [The test] is not
a device for ranking normal children. [and] 3. ... Low scores
shall not be used to mark children as innately incapable.” [p. 155]

 Gould continues, “If Binet's principles had been followed, and his
tests consistently used as he intended, we would have been spared a
major misuse of science in our century.” [p. 155]

 As Gould then explained, it was American psychologists who
enshrined the concept of “hereditary intelligence” – people like Lewis
Terman at Stanford, and more notoriously, H.H. Goddard, who was the
director of research at the “Vineland [New Jersey] Training School for
Feeble Minded Girls and Boys.” Dr. Goddard was the person responsible
for inventing a new word that would remain in the muddy riverbed of American culture as a derogatory name for mentally diminished persons: “moron” – from the Greek word for foolish. More important, Goddard was, Gould said, “the first popularizer of the Binet scale in America. He translated Binet's articles into English, applied his tests and agitated for
their general use.” [p. 159]

 To quote Gould again on the stark differences in Goddard’s motivations: “Binet refused to define his scores as ‘intelligence’ and wished to identify in order to help. Goddard regarded the scores as measures of a single, innate entity. He [Goddard] wished to identify to in order to recognize limits, segregate and curtail breeding to prevent further deterioration of an endangered American stock, threatened by immigration from without and by prolific reproduction of its feeble-minded within.” [p. 159]

 I should mention, as a footnote, that by 1928 (and perhaps too
late), Goddard recanted to some extent by asserting that the persons so insultingly named “moron” could be helped after all to develop their intelligence. As he then confessed, “I think I have gone over to the enemy.” [p. 174]

 Lewis Terman, at Stanford University, was responsible for another perversion of the Binet test originally designed to help poorly performing
students. Terman altered the Binet questions slightly and extended
the scale so that it also covered adults at the other end of the
performance range: those who were deemed to be, innately, “superior
adults.”

 Moreover, Terman's version of the Binet test became the “gold
standard” for intelligence testing when testing became a "multimillion
dollar industry" in the 1920s, as Gould puts it. In 1923, a “National
Intelligence Test” was advertised for sale, and Terman is listed as
one of the authors.

 Interestingly, Terman also recanted changed his scientific point of view near the end of his life, suggesting that intelligence was a function as well of a child's home and social environment. He also publicly noted that “intelligence” involved both genetic and environmental influences, and that the two could not be separated out from one another by statistical techniques
of his day.

 Nevertheless, Terman's work on testing led to the first mass intelligence
sorting in American society  – the Army's Alpha and Beta tests – which were used in World War I. The man behind the Army's efforts was a hereditarian-minded Harvard professor, Robert Yerkes – an ambitious man to say the least. Gould quotes Yerkes as boasting after the end of World War I that
mental testing “helped to win the war.” [p. 194]

 Gould reports that Yerkes “brought together all the major hereditarians of American psychometrics to write the army mental tests.”  But, suggests Gould, Yerkes did not so much win the war as win a the battle for mass testing in American society.  A Yerkes monograph from 1921 describes       “ ‘the steady stream of requests from commercial concerns, educational institutions, and individuals for the use of army methods of psychological examining or for the adaptation of such methods to special needs.’ ”  As Gould ruefully reports:  “Binet’s purpose could now be circumvented because a technology had been developed for testing all pupils.  Test could now rank and stream everybody; the era of mass testing had begun.” [p. 195]
 
 To read The Mismeasure of Man is to realize how ambition, greed
and many other nonscientific motives pushed American society into mass
testing and the sorting of all students – at least for several decades –
according to allegedly innate capabilities, culminating in tests we
are all too familiar with today:  the SAT, LSAT, MCAT and GMAT.

 Stephen Jay Gould set out all of the above for the average reader,
with a scholarly rigor and lucidity that should make us all squirm.   American psychologists transformed the beneficence of Frenchman Alfred Binet into something much uglier:  a 20th century penchant for the testing of an intangible mental concept about which consensus is still lacking.  In hindsight, this seems not only ridiculous but also dangerous for a society supposedly committed to ideals of egalitarian democracy and economic equality.

 Professor Gould was a good friend since childhood of another
master popularizer of science, Carl Sagan (who became an academic celebrity for his PBS series, Cosmos). In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould wrote as much about the folly of science as about its cosmic mysteries. Stephen Jay Gould's death is a tragedy not just for aficionados of pandas, fossils, and snails, but for all of us.