REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 23
the rapiers of rhetoric, or the tendentious arguments of our current
and largely derivative gladiators; but we can (and must) never forget
the brilliance of Darwin and the truly great and informative errors
made by his last generation of creationist opponents, Agassiz and
Sedgwick? The foundation stones are forever; most current skir-
mishes follow the journalist's old maxim: yesterday's paper wraps
today's garbage.
The Mismeasure of Man, as a second essential feature of its frame,
restricted attention to the origins, and to the enduring founders, of
the theory of unitary, linearly rankable, innate intelligence. This
decision permitted a neat division of the book into two halves, repre-
senting the chronologically sequential centerpieces for this theory
during the past two hundred years of its prominence. The nine-
teenth century focused on physical measurement of skulls, either
the outside (by ruler and calipers, and by constructing various indi-
ces and ratios for the shapes and sizes of heads) or the inside (by
mustard seed or lead shot, to fill the cranium and measure the vol-
ume of the braincase). The twentieth century moved to the puta-
tively more direct method of measuring the content of brains by
intelligence testing. In short, from measuring the physical proper-
ties of skulls to measuring the interior stuff in brains.
I believe in this restriction to great foundational documents
from the depth of my scholar's soul, but I also realize that this deci-
sion conferred an enormous practical benefit upon this revised ver-
sion. The old arguments have staying power, "legs" in modern
parlance. We will never quite attain the Christian's quiet confidence
of verbum Dei manet in aeternum, but we will care about Broca, Binet,
and Burt so long as scholarship and a fascination with history en-
dure. But I suspect that the world will little note, nor long remem-
ber, Jensen, Murray, Herrnstein, Lewontin, and Gould.
Since I wrote about the great and original arguments, and virtu-
ally ignored the modern avatars of 1981, this revision required few
changes, and the main text of the current version differs very little
from the original book; the novelty in this revision lies in this intro-
duction and in the appended section of essays at the back. The hot
topics of 1981 are now legless history; I doubt that Herrnstein and
Murray will penetrate the millennium, though the basic form of the
argument never goes away and continues to recur every few years—