The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION (^25)
writing, and have never dabbled—with one small exception as a
personal favor to a dear, older, and revered colleague—in the genre
of textbooks; life is too short.)
My special skill lies in a combination, not a uniqueness. I was able
to bring together two salient and richly interacting components-
each vouchsafed by itself to the competence of many individuals,
but rarely combined in one person's interest. No one before me had
systematically united these two competences at book length and in
general overview of the subject.
Working scientists are generally good at analyzing data. We are
trained to spot fallacies of argument and, especially, to be hypercriti-
cal of supporting data. We scrutinize charts and look at every dot on
a graph. Science moves forward as much by critiquing the conclu-
sions of others as by making novel discoveries. I was trained as a
statistically minded paleontologist, with special expertise in han-
dling large matrices of data on variation in populations and histori-
cal change within lineages. (The mismeasure of man resides in the
same themes—differences among individuals as the analog to varia-
tion in populations, and measured disparities among groups as the
analog to temporal differences in lineages through time.) I there-
fore felt particularly competent to analyze the data, and spot the
fallacies, in arguments about measured differences among human
groups.
But any working scientist could so proceed. We now come to the
great parochialism of my primary profession. Most scientists don't
care a fig about history; my colleagues may not quite follow Henry
Ford's dictum that history is bunk, but they do regard the past as a
mere repository of error—at best a source of moral instruction in
pitfalls along paths to progress. Such an attitude does not create
sympathy for, or interest in, historical figures of our scientific past,
particularly the folks who made major mistakes. Thus, most scien-
tists could, in principle, analyze the original data sets of biological
determinism, but would never be inclined even to contemplate such
an effort.
Professional historians, on the other hand, could rerun the sta-
tistics and criticize the graphs of their subjects. The procedure is
really not all that arcane or difficult. But again we encounter a
trade's parochialism: historians study social contexts. A historian