REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 21
see who liked to mouth off without reading the book first—like Mr.
Dole criticizing the violence in movies he has never seen, and would
not even deign to watch. [I don't, of course, mind criticism of the
title based on disagreement with my stated rationale.] In any case,
my title allowed my colleague Carol Tavris to parody my parody as
a name for her marvelous book The Mismeasure of Woman—and I am
at least mightily glad for that.*)
The Mismeasure of Man resides in a threefold frame, a set of limi-
tations that allowed me to contain one of the largest of all intellectual
subjects within a coherent and reasonable comprehensive narrative
and analysis.
- I restricted my treatment of biological determinism to the
most historically prominent (and revealingly fallacious) form of
quantified argument about mentality: the theory of a measurable,
genetically fixed, and unitary intelligence. As I wrote in the Intro-
duction to link the pseudoscientific claim with its social utility:
This book, then, is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its
location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individ-
ual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of
worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—
races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status. In
short, this book is about the Mismeasure of Man.
This part of the frame also explains what I left out. I have, for
example, often been asked why I omitted so influential a movement
as phrenology in my account of quantified theories for mental func-
tioning. But phrenology is philosophically contrary to the subject of
*A linguist friend did correctly anticipate the one curious problem that my title
would entail. For some reason (and I have done this myself, so I am not casting
blame but expressing puzzlement), people tend to mispronounce the first word as
"mishmeasure"—leading to unwanted levity and embarrassment in introductions
before talks, or in radio interviews. Apparently, or so my friend explained, we antic-
ipate the zh sound to come in "measure"—and we unconsciously try to match the
first part of the word to the later sound, therefore saying "mish" instead of "mis." I
find this error fascinating. After all, we make the mistake in anticipation of a sound
as yet unsaid, thus indicating (or so I suppose) how our brain monitors language
before the fact of expression. Isn't the form of the error also remarkable? Are we
driven to prefer these alliterative, pleasantly repeated combinations of sounds?
Does this consonance occur merely for ease of articulation, or is something deeper
about cerebral patterning thus revealed? What do such phenomena have to say
about the origin and form of poetry? What about the nature and organization of
our mental functioning?