The mismeasures of Gould

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by J. Philippe Rushton

Mr. Rushton is professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in London. This article is adapted from his review in the refereed academic journal Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 23, pp. 169-180.

"[Steven Jay] Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists."

YEP, that's the Steven Jay Gould -- Harvard paleontologist, best-selling science popularizer, Natural History magazine columnist, and media superstar -- in the opinion of John Maynard Smith, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory. Smith's skepticism about Gould is pervasive among his peers. Daniel Dennett's brilliant 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, was largely devoted to dispelling Gouldian misinformation. John Alcock, author of standard animal-behavior textbooks, recently described Gould as "consistently employing the same limited set of debating techniques and stylistic devices . . . while simply ignoring evidence to the contrary."

This civil war among evolutionists has now burst into the open. Gould struck back, with his trademark deceptive elegance, in The New York Review of Books (June 12, June 26, August 14), house organ of the New York intelligentsia that has long been his real constituency.

The point at issue between the evolutionists and Gould seems arcane. Does evolution proceed gradually or through "punctuated equilibrium" -- immobility interrupted by transforming upheaval? Gould's preference for the latter reflects his left-wing politics -- for evolutionary upheavals, read social revolutions. Yet it may also be traced to his refusal to admit that systematic differences, probably evolutionary in origin, exist among human beings.

That same refusal regularly distorts Gould's 1981 The Mismeasure of Man, now reissued in a "revised and expanded" edition (Norton, $13.95). The Mismeasure of Man (which in its first version sold 250,000 copies, was translated into ten languages, and became required reading for undergraduate and even graduate classes) dealt with questions that are delicate, controversial, and (to the scientific layman) even discomfiting: IQ, brain size, sex, and race. It did so by unscrupulously mishandling the evidence. The new version -- described by the publisher as "an acclaimed classic that refutes the conclusions of The Bell Curve" -- is expanded but hardly revised. It regurgitates character assassinations of deceased scientists, misrepresents their work despite published refutation, and studiously withholds 15 years of new research that contradicts every major scientific argument Gould puts forth.

Perhaps the single most devastating development for Gould: new research on brain size. Was he asleep throughout the 1990s --called, with good reason, "The Decade of the Brain"?

Gould originally charged nineteenth-century scientists with "juggling" and "finagling" brain-size data in order to place Northern Europeans at the apex of civilization. Implausibly, he argued that Paul Broca, Francis Galton, and Samuel George Morton, all "finagled" in the same direction and by similar magnitudes using different methods. Gould asks us to believe that Broca "leaned" on his autopsy scales when measuring wet brains by just enough to produce the same differences that Morton caused by "over-packing" empty skulls and that Galton caused with his "extra loose" grip on calipers while measuring heads! Yet even before Mismeasure's first edition, new research was confirming the work of nineteenth-century pioneers. Gould neglected to mention that Leigh Van Valen had already established a positive correlation between brain size and intelligence in 1974.

Subsequently, of course, discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (0.44) between brain size and intelligence. And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Study, as reported by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter measured at birth significantly predicts head perim-eter at 7 years -- and head perimeter at both ages predicts IQ. Recent studies also show that head size and IQ vary with social class. It is now clear that the nineteenth-century pioneers were right.

The first of the MRI studies were published in the late 1980s/early 1990s in leading, mainstream refereed journals like Intelligence and the American Journal of Psychiatry. My colleagues and I routinely sent Gould copies and asked him what he thought. He never replied. Now he has chosen to withhold all these data from his readers.

Indeed, in the 1996 edition he deletes the very section of his own 1981 book that discussed the brain-size/IQ relation. In 1981, he had pooh-poohed Arthur Jensen's report (in Bias in Mental Testing) of a 0.30 correlation between brain-size and IQ -- but he omits this dismissal, without explanation, from the revised version. I can only infer that when Gould read Jensen's review of his book (which he mentions), he realized that Jensen's correlation was based on Van Valen's 1974 review and so could no longer be dismissed as "just Jensen." And, given the weight of the new evidence, simply repeating this section verbatim would have destroyed his entire thesis. He therefore left it out.