For the prior post entitled "Hammer heads"...
Lest I mistakenly fall into common habit and assume that such nebulous and frothy concepts as "intelligence" can even be precisely defined, let alone measured, allow me to give credit where it is due for so elegantly pointing out just how problematic such efforts proved for even the most enthusiastic experimenters -- especially so for those, perhaps, whose assumptions about race pushed them to distort not only the data itself, but even more crucially the interpretation of data in order to fit preconceived ideas in support of the prevailing social order of the day.
The Mismeasure of Man, one of Stephen Jay Gould's most popular and enduring works, is also one of his most engaging and provocative. Exhaustive in detail and overflowing with historical intrigue, Gould paints a nuanced portrait of some of the recurring motifs that manifest as unconscious bias in pursuit of the statistical support of hypotheses while mounting a subtle and potent critique of how inattention to such effects has been used specifically to advance the doctrine of biological determinism.
"Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence -- so that fair treatment of data and arguments can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one's own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools." (Excerpted from the introduction to the revised edition; see below).
Gould presents a compelling case that various flavors of biological determinism (or the belief, as he puts it, that "the social and economic differences between human groups - primarily races, classes, and sexes - arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society... is an accurate reflection of biology) have been advanced in support of a vast array of regressive social policies throughout history, and I would wager there are relatively few people who would disagree with this no matter their favored position on any particular social policy. "Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power", he writes.
Moreover, even Gould's staunchest critics and ideological opponents surely can't help but admire his relentless attention to detail and the pointedly effective punch his arguments pack. A somewhat ironic, almost bemusingly detatched style in certain places belies what is clearly an intense passion not only for getting things right, but for accurately gauging the limits of statistical methodology itself; something few writers have managed to do at all, let alone with such clarity and insight.
"If", he writes, " -- as I believe I have shown -- quantitative data are as subject to cultural constraint as any other aspect of science, then they have no special claim upon the final truth."
Note he said "quantitative", not "qualitative". This will seem a bold claim to many people, no doubt, but history is replete with examples of supposedly sound, factual, "objective" numerical data being used to justify beliefs that had absolutely no merit and no bearing whatsoever on the truth. Indeed, most people simply take it as given that humans and other animals (or possibly machines) are possessed of a singular, unified quality or property known as "intelligence", or other such as what we might call "meta-properties", whose real, factual existence we are inclined to believe for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that many scientists have at least tacitly taken their existence for granted in their attempts to measure them.
But while the act of measurement may be endowed with some special significance in certain areas of quantum physics, it seems less likely that the same effect can be generalized across the multifarious domains of human experience, or extended to our interpretation of human affairs. The broader lesson is that "data", by itself, hanging in the void, unconnected to any conceptual schema or hypothesis is not only a formal indulgence but a historical anomaly, and that assigning a number to a set of properties brings little to bear on the underlying ontology of the universe. There could scarcely be a better moment to remind ourselves of this as the intellectual currents seem to have inexorably drifted again back towards bio-determinism in one form or another.
As a final note, the 1996 edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton) is to be preferred as it contains a number of responses to his critics, along with a cogent critique of The Bell Curve (1994), the publication of which was apparently the event that prompted Gould to revise and update his own work, the first edition of which was published in 1981.
