Introduction to the Revised

and Expanded Edition

Thoughts at Age Fifteen

The frame of The Mismeasure of Man

The original title for The Mismeasure of Man would have honored
my hero Charles Darwin for the wonderfully incisive statement that
he made about biological determinism to climax his denunciation of
slavery in the Voyage of the Beagle. I wanted to call this book Great Is
Our Sin—from Darwin's line, cited as an epigraph on my title page:
"If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but
by our institutions, great is our sin."
I did not follow my initial inclination—and I am sure that I
made the right decision—because I knew damned well that my work
would then be misshelved to oblivion in the religion section of many
bookstores (as my volume of evolutionary essays, The Flamingo's
Smile, ended up in the ornithology division of a great Boston institu-
tion that shall remain nameless). Things can always be worse. I once,
in an equally prestigious Boston emporium, found a copy of that
1960s undergraduate manifesto The Student as Nigger on a shelf
marked "Race Relations." My friend Harry Kemelman, author of
the marvelous mystery series featuring theological sleuth David
Small, told me that his first entry in the series—Friday the Rabbi.. .—
once appeared in a list of children's titles as "Freddy the Rabbit... ."
But tables do turn occasionally. My buddy Alan Dershowitz told
me that a woman successfully acquired his Chutzpah by telling the