Until COVID, I did not read audio books. Now, I read them all the time. (Yes, listening to an audio book is reading; I learn as much from listening as from reading print. I use audiobooks for different purposes, sometimes listening to a book before buying a print copy, or listening to books I’ve already read.
I’ve realized my relationship with audiobooks connects directly to the topic of intelligence. This is a theme explored in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, a book I listen to every summer. Intelligence, Gould argues, is not a single thing. Reading, I have found, it not a single thing. Books are created (usually) with authors crafting text on paper (or electronic versions). Once the ideas are thus captured, we interact with the text by reading (making sense of the words visually) or by listening (making sense of the words aurally). Different experiences with different meanings constructed.
It seems generative AI can affect us in similar ways. We can interact with text in different ways when using AI. Text that seems unapproachable can be made approachable using AI. I continue to be a fan of Stephen Jay Gould, I read his works when I was a young mane, and continue to read and listen. I appreciate his style of writing, but many find it to be difficult. I have heard the same criticism of many literary classics; what exactly is Shakespeare saying anyways?
With AI, we get a different perceptive on a work. In the same way, we get a different perspective on a book when we listen compared to when we read. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould tells us that intelligence is not what we think it is. He tells is the long and complicated story of the idea and the myth of measuring it. I am leaving this summer’s interaction with the book more convinced than ever that intelligence is the result of interacting with ideas so that we can use them elsewhere. In schools, the ideas we interact with are largely texts. The more student engage with texts, the more they will learn from them. Today, we have AI which can facilitate that learning. We do need to model for students how to do it, and we cannot do that if we reject all AI.
I had NotebookLM create a summary of The Mismeasure of Man. I maintain reading this synopsis helps us understand the ideas contained in the book. I further maintain these ideas are worth knowing, and we are more capable of responding to the myths of intelligence if we understand it. I would prefer folks interact with this summary than not at all with the book. I believe the same of most other books.
The more important thing to acknowledge is that just as intelligence can’t be summarized by a single measure, neither can learning in schools
Now here is the summary of The Mismeasure of Man generated by NotebookLM. It is worth reading whether or not you read (or listen to) the book.
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is fundamentally a critique of biological determinism, which is the belief that shared behavioral norms and socioeconomic differences among human groups, such as races, classes, and sexes, stem from inherited, inborn distinctions. The book specifically focuses on the most prominent and fallacious form of quantified argument about mentality: the theory of a measurable, genetically fixed, and unitary intelligence. This is the broader context for understanding Gould’s discussion of The Hereditarian Theory of IQ.
Core Tenets and Historical Shift: Historically, this theory asserted that human worth could be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity. The nineteenth century primarily focused on craniometry, which involved physical measurements of skulls (both exterior dimensions and interior braincase volume, often filled with mustard seed or lead shot). The twentieth century shifted to the “more direct” method of intelligence testing to measure the “interior stuff in brains”. Gould argues that intelligence testing became for the twentieth century what craniometry was for the nineteenth, assuming intelligence is a single, innate, heritable, and measurable entity.
Alfred Binet’s Original Intentions vs. American Perversion: A crucial aspect of Gould’s critique lies in the dismantling of Alfred Binet’s original intentions. Binet, a French psychologist, created his scale for the limited, humane purpose of identifying children who needed special educational assistance. He explicitly rejected any hereditarian interpretation of his results and strongly believed in educational remediation, protesting against the “brutal pessimism” of those who claimed an individual’s intelligence was a fixed, unchangeable quantity. Binet himself had previously experimented with craniometry but found the differences too small to be significant.
However, American psychologists, specifically the pioneers of hereditarianism, “perverted Binet’s intention and invented the hereditarian theory of IQ”. They reified Binet’s scores, treating them as measures of an entity called “intelligence,” and assumed this intelligence was largely inherited and fixed.
Pioneers of American Hereditarianism: Gould identifies three key American figures responsible for promoting and mass-marketing the hereditarian theory of IQ:
• H.H. Goddard: He brought Binet’s scale to America and reified its scores as innate intelligence. Goddard was an “unsubtle hereditarian” who identified intelligence as a single, inborn, and inherited entity, believing it determined human conduct and was little affected by later influences. He even attempted to trace pedigrees of mental defectives. Although he later recanted his extreme views on the incurability and need for segregation of the “feeble-minded,” he did not abandon his belief in the heritability of “moronity”.
• Lewis M. Terman: He developed the Stanford-Binet scale and envisioned a “rational society” where professions would be allocated based on IQ scores. Terman’s work stressed conformity and downgraded original responses in his tests. He controversially calculated “fossil IQ’s” of historical geniuses, assigning Francis Galton an IQ above 200, while Darwin received only 135 and Copernicus a mere 100-110, an incident Gould calls a “ludicrous incident in the history of mental testing”. Terman committed the hereditarian fallacies by reifying average test scores as a single “general intelligence” and confusing environmental differences with innate properties. Despite poor correlations between social status and IQ, he argued for the greater importance of “endowment over training” in determining intellectual rank.
• R.M. Yerkes: He persuaded the army to administer mental tests to 1.75 million men during World War I, which Gould describes as establishing “supposedly objective data that vindicated hereditarian claims”. These tests, which Yerkes claimed measured “native intellectual ability,” were criticized for being heavily influenced by familiarity with American culture and education rather than innate intelligence. The results from these army tests were used to advocate for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, based on claims of “race deterioration” due to poor genes among Southern and Eastern European immigrants.
Spearman’s ‘g’ and Factor Analysis: A significant theoretical justification for the hereditarian IQ theory came from Charles Spearman’s concept of ‘g’ (general factor of intelligence) and the mathematical technique of factor analysis. Spearman’s ‘g’ posited that intelligence is a single, measurable entity. Although Spearman himself often criticized the “gallimaufry of tests” that constituted IQ, he eventually linked ‘g’ as the theoretical rationale for IQ scores. He further argued that while specific abilities could be influenced by environment, “general ability is almost wholly governed by heredity”. Gould emphasizes that this marriage of IQ testing and factor analysis, based on the assumption that ‘g’ measures an innate, unchangeable “thing” in the human brain, provided the primary theoretical justification for hereditarian IQ theories. Gould criticizes The Bell Curve for barely mentioning the factor analytic argument, despite basing its entire thesis on the reality of ‘g’.
Gould’s Overarching Critique: Gould asserts that The Mismeasure of Man is a “logical, empirical, and historical argument” against the theory of intelligence as a unitary, rankable, genetically based, and minimally alterable entity. He contends that the hereditarian theory of IQ relies on several false premises:
- Intelligence can be depicted as a single number.
- It can rank people in linear order.
- It is genetically based.
- It is effectively immutable.
If any of these premises are false, the entire argument collapses. Gould emphasizes that the core error is the reification of intelligence as a single, measurable entity. He also critiques the confusion of within-group and between-group heredity, arguing that hereditarian theories illogically extend findings on individual heritability to group differences, often attributing cultural differences to innate properties.
Ultimately, Gould states that The Mismeasure of Man was written as a rebuttal to works like The Bell Curve, which he sees as presenting nothing new but rather recycling the “bankrupt theory” of inherited, unitary intelligence. He aims to expose the “hidden fallacies” and “conceptual errors” that underpin these theories, stressing that the human mind is “above all, flexible,” and that accepting immutable inborn limits is a “grievous error”.