Everyone Is African by Daniel J. Fairbanks

Author:Daniel J. Fairbanks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880191
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

In 1981, Stephen J. Gould published one of the most significant works of his illustrious career: a book titled The Mismeasure of Man.1 It reviews how scholars from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries attempted to quantify intelligence through verbal and written tests, as well as measurements of physical characteristics such as facial features or brain size. The book reproduces caricature-like drawings from the eighteenth century that depict humans from Africa as resembling gorillas and chimpanzees: oddly exaggerated heads highlight the physical characteristics that purportedly predispose people to criminality, hand-altered photographs distort the facial features of people labeled as feebleminded, and rich convolutions in the brain of a famous mathematician imply that the brain of a genius is physically distinguishable from the less convoluted brain of a person from Papua (indigenous Papuans, at the time, were considered to be savages). Gould's book makes it obvious that these historical drawings were serious attempts to portray physically measurable features as reliable indicators of intellectual superiority or inferiority. Although atrociously humorous to us now, they serve Gould's thesis as examples of how “man” has historically been “mismeasured.” Gould even addresses his choice of the seemingly gender-biased term man for the title by reminding us that nearly all such studies done prior to the mid-twentieth century were conducted by men, and that most of those who conducted them considered the intelligence of women to be inherently inferior to that of men.

By the time Gould published this book, he was already well known as a popular Harvard professor (shortly thereafter named the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology), his specialty evolutionary biology. He was famously outspoken and controversial among scientists for novel interpretations of the fossil record. For most people, however, he will long be remembered as one of the most eloquent science writers and speakers of his day. His popular books on evolution were best sellers, often with clever titles like The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, The Flamingo's Smile, and Bully for Brontosaurus. I own two copies of The Mismeasure of Man. One is the original 1981 hardbound version, and the other is the 1996 paperback revised and expanded edition.2 On the cover of the latter is a prominent statement: “The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.”

This statement refers to the 1994 bestselling book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It is a thick book, more than eight hundred pages, brimming with seemingly abundant statistical detail regarding research on intelligence and its relationship to a wide range of socioeconomic, political, educational, and biological factors—among them, race.3 As the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard, Herrnstein worked not far from Gould. In spite of their physical proximity, the two could hardly have been further apart on the subject of race and human intelligence. Herrnstein had written a 1971 article in Atlantic Monthly titled “IQ,” which addressed the issue of race and intelligence from the point of view that genetic differences between races partially determine between-race differences in average IQ scores.

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