40 THE MISMEASURE OF MANThus has it always been, and thus do we dilute both the small plea-
sures and fierce joys of scholarship. Some scientists griped at Goethe
because a "poet" should not write about empirical nature (Goethe
did interesting and enduring work in mineralogy and botany; hap-
pily, each sniper tends to be parried by better scientists with generos-
ity of spirit, and Goethe numbered many biologists, especially
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, among his supporters). Others
groused when Einstein or Pauling exposed their humanity and
wrote about peace.
The most common, narrow-minded complaint about The Mis-
measure of Man goes: Gould is a paleontologist, not a psychologist;
he can't know the subject and his book must be bullshit. I want to
offer two specific rebuttals of this nonsense, but would first remind
my colleagues that we all might consider giving more than lip service
to the ideal of judging a work by its content, not the author's name
or rank.
For my first specific rebuttal, however, I do want to pull rank.
True, I am not a psychologist and I know little about the technicali-
ties of item selection in mental testing or the social use of results in
contemporary America. Hence, I carefully said nothing about these
subjects (and would not have written the book if I had judged mas-
tery of such material as essential for my intentions). My book, by the
way, has been commonly portrayed, even (to my chagrin) often
praised, as a general attack upon mental testing. The Mismeasure of
Man is no such thing, and I have an agnostic attitude (born largely
of ignorance) toward mental testing in general. If my critics doubt
this, and read these lines as a smoke screen, just consider my ex-
pressed opinion about Binet's original IQ test—strongly and en-
tirely positive (for Binet rejected the hereditarian interpretation,
and only wanted to use the test as a device to identify children in
need of special help; and for this humane goal, I have nothing but
praise). The Mismeasure of Man is a critique of a specific theory of
intelligence often supported by particular interpretation of a certain
style of mental testing: the theory of unitary, genetically based, un-
changeable intelligence.
The subject that I did choose for The Mismeasure of Man repre-
sents a central area of my professional expertise—in fact, I would
go further and say (now turning to my arrogant mode) that I have
understood this area better than most professional psychologists