22 THE MISMEASURE OF MANThe Mismeasure of Man. Phrenologists celebrated the theory of richly
multiple and independent intelligences. Their view led to Thur-
stone and Guilford earlier in our century, and to Howard Gardner
and others today—in other words, to the theory of multiple intelli-
gences: the major challenge to Jensen in the last generation, to
Herrnstein and Murray today, and to the entire tradition of rank-
able, unitary intelligence marking the mismeasure of man. By read-
ing each bump on the skull as a measure of "domesticity," or
"amativeness," or "sublimity," or "causality," the phrenologists di-
vided mental functioning into a rich congeries of largely indepen-
dent attributes. With such a view, no single number could possibly
express general human worth, and the entire concept of IQ as a
unitary biological property becomes nonsense. I do confess to a
warm spot in my heart for the phrenologists (do hearts have bumps
of greater heat?), for they were philosophically on the right track—
while they were absolutely just as wrong as the mismeasurers of this
book in their particular theory of cranial bumps. (History often
heaps irony upon irony. Cranial bumps may be nonsense, but un-
derlying cortical localization of highly specific mental processing is
a reality of ever-increasing fascination in modern neurological re-
search.)
In any case, phrenology, as a false version of the probably correct
theory of multiple intelligences, would form a major chapter in a
book on cranial mismeasurement in general, but falls outside the
subject of this volume on the history of fallacies in the theory of
unitary, innate, linearly rankable intelligence. If I exclude phrenol-
ogy on the grounds of "right subject, different theory," I also omit
an ocean of material for the related, if opposite, reason of "wrong
subject, same theory"—in other words, all claims for unilinear in-
nate rankings based on biological arguments other than the quanti-
fication of intelligence. I therefore, for example, include no explicit
chapter on the eugenics movement (though I treat the subject in its
intersection with IQ) because most arguments relied on the putative
possession of particular genes for innately determined traits, not on
measurements of the insides or outsides of heads.
- 1 focused upon the "great" arguments and errors of historical
originators, not on transient and ephemeral modern usages. Five
years from now, who will remember (who would even care to recall)