The Mismeasure of Man

  Binet explicitly denied that his test—later called an intelligence quotient (or IQ) when the German psychologist W. Stern scored the results by dividing “mental age” (as ascertained on the test) by chronological age—could be measuring an internal biological property worthy of the name “general intelligence.” First of all, Binet believed that the complex and multifarious property called intelligence could not, in principle, be captured by a single number capable of ranking children in a linear hierarchy. He wrote in 1905:

  The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.

  Moreover, Binet feared that if teachers read the IQ number as an inflexible inborn quality, rather than (as he intended) a guide for identifying students in need of help, they would use the scores as a cynical excuse for expunging, rather than aiding, troublesome students. Binet wrote of such teachers: “They seem to reason in the following way: ‘Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ and without the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school.” Binet also feared the powerful bias that has since been labeled “self-fulfilling prophecy” or the Pygmalion effect: if teachers are told that a student is inherently uneducable based on misinterpretation of low IQ scores, they will treat the student as unable, thereby encouraging poor performance by their inadequate nurture, rather than the student’s inherent nature. Invoking the case then racking France, Binet wrote:

  It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did who, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting signs of a traitor or a spy.

  Binet felt that this test could best be used to identify mild forms of retardation or learning disability. Yet even for such specific and serious difficulties, Binet firmly rejected the idea that his test could identify causes of educational problems, particularly their potential basis in biological inheritance. He only wished to identify children with special needs, so that help could be provided:

  Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.… We shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital [retardation].… We do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.

  Binet avoided any claim about inborn biological limits because he knew that an innatist interpretation (which the test scores didn’t warrant in any case) would perversely destroy his aim of helping children with educational problems. Binet upbraided teachers who used an assessment of irremediable stupidity to avoid the special effort that difficult students require: “They have neither sympathy nor respect for [these students], and their intemperate language leads them to say such things in their presence as ‘This is a child who will never amount to anything … he is not intelligent at all.’ How often have I heard these imprudent words.” In an eloquent passage, Binet then vented his anger against teachers who claim that a student can “never” succeed as a result of inferior biology:

  Never! What a momentous word. Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral support to these deplorable verdicts by affirming that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded upon nothing.

  Finally, Binet took pleasure in the successes of teachers who did use his tests to identify students and provide needed help. He defended remedial programs and insisted that gains so recorded must be read as genuine increases in intelligence:

  It is in this practical sense, the only one accessible to us., that we say that the intelligence of these children has been increased. We have increased what constitutes the intelligence of a pupil: the capacity to learn and to assimilate instruction.

  How tragic and how ironic! If IQ tests had been consistently used as Binet intended, their results would have been entirely beneficent (in this sense, as I stated, I do not oppose mental testing on principle, but only certain versions and philosophies). But the very innatist and antimeliorist spin that Binet had foreseen and decried did become the dominant interpretation, and Binet’s intentions were overturned and inverted. And this reversal—the establishment of the hereditarian theory of IQ—occurred in America, not in élitist Europe. The major importers of Binet’s method promoted the biodeterminist version that Binet had opposed—and the results continue to ring falsely in our time as The Bell Curve.

  Consider the two leading initial promoters of Binet’s scale in America. Psychologist H. H. Goddard, who translated Binet’s articles into English and agitated for the general use of his test, adopted both the hard-line hereditarian view and the argument for intelligence as a single entity:

  Stated in its boldest form, our thesis is that the chief determiner of human conduct is a unitary mental process which we call intelligence: that this process is conditioned by a nervous mechanism which is inborn: that the degree of efficiency to be attained by that nervous mechanism and the consequent grade of intellectual or mental level for each individual is determined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with the union of the germ cells: that it is but little affected by any later influences except such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism.

  Lewis M. Terman, who codified IQ for America as the Stanford-Binet test, held the same opinion, first on intelligence as a unitary quantity: “Is intellectual ability a bank account, on which we can draw for any desired purpose, or is it rather a bundle of separate drafts, each drawn for a specific purpose and inconvertible?” Terman opted for the general bank account. He also stated his hereditarian conviction: “The study has strengthened my impression of the relatively greater importance of endowment over training as a determinant of an individual’s intellectual rank among his fellows.”

  But Binet had supplied all the right arguments in opposition—and his words, even today, can serve as a primer for the scientifically accurate and ethically principled refutation of Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve, the living legacy of America’s distinctive contribution to mental testing: the hereditarian interpretation. Intelligence, Binet told us, cannot be abstracted as a single number. IQ is a helpful device for identifying children in need of aid, not a dictate of inevitable biology. Such aid can be effective, for the human mind is, above all, flexible. We are not all equal in endowment, and we do not enter the world as blank slates, but most deficiencies can be mediated to a considerable degree, and the palling effect of biological determinism defines its greatest tragedy—for if we give up (because we accept the doctrine of immutable inborn limits), but could have helped, then we have committed the most grievous error of chaining the human spirit.

  Why must we follow the fallacious and dichotomous model of pitting a supposedly fixed and inborn biology against the flexibility of training—or nature vs. nurture in the mellifluous pairing of words that so fixes this false opposition in the public mind? Biology is not inevitable destiny; education is not an assault upon biological limits. Rather, our extensive capacity for educational improvement records a genetic uniqueness vouchsafed only to humans among animals.

  I was both heartened and distressed by a recent report in Newsweek (October 24, 1994) on a Bronx high school committed to high expectations for disadvantaged students. Newsweek reports:

  These 300 black and Latino students provide the basis for a strong retort to “The Bell Curve.” Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argue that IQ is largely genetic and that low IQ means scant success in society. Therefore, they contend, neither effective schools nor a healthier environment
can do much to alter a person’s destiny. Yet, at Hostos, reading scores nearly doubled over two years. The dropout rate is low, and attendance is high. About 70 percent of the class of 1989 graduated on time, double the city’s average.

  Wonderful news, and a fine boost to Binet’s original intentions. But I must object to the headline for this report: “In Defiance of Darwin,” and to the initial statement: “Today, at 149th Street and the Grand Concourse, a public high school for at-risk children defies Darwin on a daily basis.”

  Why is Darwin the enemy and impediment? Perhaps Newsweek only intended the metaphorical meaning of Darwinism (also a serious misconception) as struggle in a tough world, with most combatants weeded out. But I think that the Newsweek editors used “Darwin” as a stand-in for a blinkered view of “biology”—in telling us that this school refutes the idea of fixed genetic limits. Biology is not the enemy of human flexibility, but the source and potentiator (while genetic determinism represents a false theory of biology). Darwinism is not a statement about fixed differences, but the central theory for a discipline—evolutionary biology—that has discovered the sources of human unity in minimal genetic distances among our races and in the geological yesterday of our common origin.

  Three Centuries’ Perspectives on Race and Racism

  Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking

  We shudder at the thought of repeating the initial sins of our species. Thus, Hamlet’s uncle bewails his act of fratricide by recalling Cain’s slaying of Abel:

  O! my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

  It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t;

  A brother’s murder!

  Such metaphors of unsavory odor are especially powerful because our sense of smell lies so deep in our evolutionary construction, yet remains (perhaps for this reason) so undervalued and often unmentioned in our culture. A later seventeenth-century English writer recognized this potency and particularly warned his readers against using olfactory metaphors because common people will take them literally:

  Metaphorical expression did often proceed into a literal construction; but was fraudulent.… How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphorical expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow in their literals.

  This quotation comes from a chapter in the 1646 work of Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents [sic], and Commonly Presumed Truths. Browne, a physician from Norwich, is better known for his wonderful and still widely read work of 1642, the part autobiographical, part philosophical, and part whimsical Religio Medici, or “Religion of a Doctor.” The Pseudodoxia Epidemica (his Latinized title for a plethora of false truths) is the granddaddy of a most honorable genre still vigorously pursued—exposés of common errors and popular ignorance, particularly the false beliefs most likely to cause social harm.

  I cited Browne’s statement from the one chapter (among more than a hundred) sure to send shudders down the spine of modern readers—his debunking of the common belief “that Jews stink.” Browne, although almost maximally philo-Semitic by the standards of his century, was not free of all prejudicial feelings against Jews. He attributed the origin of the canard about Jewish malodor—hence, my earlier quotation—to a falsely literal reading of a metaphor legitimately applied (or so he thought) to the descendants of people who had advocated the crucifixion of Jesus. Browne wrote: “Now the ground that begat or propagated this assertion, might be the distasteful averseness of the Christian from the Jew, upon the villainy of that fact, which made them abominable and stink in the nostrils of all men.” (Modern apostles of political correctness should ponder the noninclusiveness of Browne’s “all men” in this context.)

  As a rationale for debunking a compendium of common errors, Browne correctly notes that false beliefs arise from incorrect theories about nature and therefore serve as active impediments to knowledge, not just as laughable signs of primitivity: “To purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, we must forget and part with much we know.” Moreover, Browne notes, truth is hard to ascertain and ignorance is far more common than accuracy. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Browne uses “America” as a metaphor for domains of uncharted ignorance, and he bewails our failure to use good tools of reason as guides through this terra incognita: “We find no open tract… in this labyrinth; but are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth.”

  The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne’s peregrination through the maze of human ignorance, contains 113 chapters gathered into seven books on such general topics as mineral and vegetable bodies, animals, humans, Bible tales, and geographical and historical myths. Browne debunks quite an array of common opinions, including claims that elephants have no joints, that the legs of badgers are shorter on one side than the other, and that ostriches can digest iron.

  As an example of his style of argument, consider Book 3, Chapter 4: “That a bever [sic] to escape the hunter, bites off his testicles or stones”—a harsh tactic that, according to legend, either distracts the pursuer or persuades him to settle for a meal smaller than an entire body. Browne labels this belief as “a tenet very ancient; and hath had thereby advantages of propagation.… The Egyptians also failed in the ground of their hieroglyphick, when they expressed the punishment of adultery by the bever depriving himself of his testicles, which was amongst them the penalty of such incontinency.”

  Browne prided himself on using a mixture of reason and observation to achieve his debunking. He begins by trying to identify the source of error—in this case a false etymological inference from the beaver’s Latin name, Castor, which does not share the same root with “castration” (as the legend had assumed) but derives ultimately from a Sanskrit world for “musk”; and an incorrect interpretation of purposeful mutilation from the internal position, and therefore near invisibility, of the beaver’s testicles. He then cites the factual evidence of intact males, and the reasoned argument that a beaver couldn’t even reach his own testicles if he wanted to bite them off (and thus, cleverly, the source of common error—the external invisibility of the testicles—becomes the proof of falsity!).

  The testicles properly so called, are of a lesser magnitude, and seated inwardly upon the loins: and therefore it were not only a fruitless attempt, but impossible act, to eunuchate or castrate themselves: and might be an hazardous practice of art, if at all attempted by others.

  Book 7, Chapter 2 debunks the legend “that a man hath one rib less than a woman”—“a common conceit derived from the history of Genesis, wherein it stands delivered, that Eve was framed out of a rib of Adam.” (I regret to report that this bit of nonsense still commands some support. I recently appeared on a nationally televised call-in show for high school students and one young woman, a creationist, cited this “well-known fact” as proof of the Bible’s inerrancy and evolution’s falsity.) Again, Browne opts for a mixture of logic and observation in stating: “this will not consist with reason or inspection.” A simple count on skeletons (Browne was a physician by trade) affirms equality of number between sexes. Moreover, reason provides no argument for assuming that Adam’s single loss would be propagated to future members of his sex:

  Although we concede there wanted one rib in the sceleton of Adam, yet were it repugnant unto reason and common observation, that his posterity should want the same [in the old meaning of “want” as “lack”]. For we observe that mutilations are not transmitted from father unto son; the blind begetting such as can see, men with one eye children with two, and cripples mutilate in their own persons do come out perfect in their generations.

  Book 4, Chapter 10—“That Jews Stink”—is one of the longest, and clearly held special importance for Dr. Browne. His arguments are more elaborate, but he follows the same procedure used to dispel less noxious myths—citation of contravening facts interlaced with more general support from logic and reason.

  Browne begins with a statement of the fallacy: “That Jews s
tink naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savor, is a received opinion.” Browne then allows that species may have distinctive odors, and that individual men surely do: “Aristotle says no animal smells sweet save the pard. We confess that beside the smell of the species, there may be individual odors, and every man may have a proper and peculiar savor; which although not perceptible unto man, who hath this sense but weak, is yet sensible unto dogs, who hereby can single out their masters in the dark.”

  In principle, then, discrete groups of humans might carry distinctive odors, but reason and observation permit no such attribution to Jews as a group: “That an unsavory odor is gentilitous or national unto the Jews, if rightly understood, we cannot well concede, nor will the information of Reason or Sense induce it.”

  On factual grounds, direct experience has provided no evidence for this noxious legend: “This offensive odor is no way discoverable in their Synagogues where many are, and by reason of their number could not be concealed: nor is the same discernible in commerce or conversation with such as are cleanly in apparel, and decent in their houses.” The “test case” of Jewish converts to Christianity proves the point, for even the worst bigots do not accuse such people of smelling bad: “Unto converted Jews who are of the same seed, no man imputeth this unsavory odor; as though aromatized by their conversion, they lost their scent with their religion, and smelt no longer.” If people of Jewish lineage could be identified by smell, the Inquisition would greatly benefit from a surefire guide for identifying insincere converts: “There are at present many thousand Jews in Spain … and some dispensed withal even to the degree of Priesthood; it is a matter very considerable, and could they be smelled out, would much advantage, not only the Church of Christ, but also the Coffers of Princes.”