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 The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this [second] edition Dr. Gould traces the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays, in a separate section at the end, on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the claim of this book to be 'a major contribution toward deflating pseudobiological 'explanations' of our present social woes.'

Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 …

He confronts a basic tool of the measurers-the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearman…

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…

I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis-I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The express…

'Race is a fact of life and is not a problem unless people make it out to be so.' (2003)

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifical…