The book’s implicit warning is not against intelligence testing, but against “experts” armed with statistics who want to remake society according to their findings. The Mismeasure of Man, as Gould points out repeatedly, is not a cautionary tale of bad hereditarians against good environmentalists it is, rather, a fascinating story of the use and misuse of knowledge in the service of social theory. Gould’s purpose is to debunk biological determinism, and most especially, to discredit the idea that intelligence can be represented as a single entity, a number, which can be used to rank individuals and groups. The potential misuse of Gould’s arguments ironically emphasizes one of his major themes, which is the appropriation of allegedly scientific ideas to meet the requirements of a particular political climate and to reinforce fashionable dogma.
At a time when the National Education Association and Ralph Nader, among others, are allied in a campaign to ban standardized tests, a history which portrays the racism of the forefathers of testing offers a useful weapon in the ideological battle. Since mental tests of all varieties have been under attack for more than a decade, it is scarcely surprising that Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man has been received in some quarters as a devastating critique of testing.
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