In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould’s opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould’s representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While ant author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould’s paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message. Through hyperbole and caricature he converts real issues into straw persons, which can be easily disproved.

Gould’s book, on the other hand, is so repetitiously cluttered by doctrinaire disparagement that it can hardly provide any real enlightenment regarding mental measurement. Although Gould’s book will be warmly embraced (along with Leon Kamin’s, 1974, The Science and Politics of IQ) by the dwindling band of genetic egalitarians and neo- Lysenkoists, it is hard to see that this book makes any scientific contribution or serves to inform the general public in any responsible way about the truly important issues in mental testing today.

This is almost entirely critical of the idea of intelligence testing, especially the notion of general intelligence. It’s an odd book, because it has sold very well despite having quite a lot of technical information, about the history of intelligence testing and the statistics involved in mental measurement: it is superbly written. Note that the sections on brain size are out of date and he has refused to correct this despite being sent newly available published data by researchers. People in my research field have severely criticized his account of the statistics of mental measurement. A flawed book, but a great read.

In 1981 the Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould wrote an elegant, amusing, and scathing review of this line of research, as part of a more general, and equally scathing, analysis of virtually all aspects of research on intelligence. He concluded that there was no reliable evidence relating brain size to intelligence. He also claimed that attempts to show group differences in brain size were motivated by racial prejudice. Gould had previously achieved considerable public credibility as a commentator on science, so his views were widely accepted in spite of negative reviews of his work in the technical literature.

Sources

• Ritchie, S. (2015). Intelligence: All that matters. Hodder & Stoughton.

• Hunt, E. (2010). Human intelligence. Cambridge University Press.