The Mismeasure of Man
Book description
When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.
And yet the idea of innate limits-of biology as destiny-dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to…
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Why read it?
2 authors picked The Mismeasure of Man as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The late Stephen Gould is as important as anyone in the last fifty years in showing how the idea of biological race has been used to support racism. Gould clearly dismantles this idea in this book. It is both a tour de force of science and scientific history, so well written that one forgets one is reading a scholarly book. Gould takes apart key moments in the history of race science, not just to show where they were biased, but how those biases and blind spots persist into the present. This is the definitive book on why biological race…
From Alan's list on what race is (and is not).
I’ll be honest, I never took tests well. And I wasn’t accepted to my first pick of a high school. That is why I recommend this book. Many times we think that evaluative tests, like the IQ test, determine how intelligent someone is. And that just isn’t true. In this book by Stephen Jay Gould he goes into detail about the issues with ranking criteria on human intelligence and how we just can’t do it in practice.
From Matthew's list on ethical artificial intelligence.
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