REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 49
vided a comprehensive and fair (if sharp) commentary by critiquing
both the illogic of The Bell Curve's quadripartite general argument,
and the inadequacies of the book's empirical claims (largely exposed
by showing how the authors buried conclusively contrary data in an
appendix while celebrating their potential support in the main text).
I felt grateful that this review was the first major comment to appear
based on a complete reading and critique of the book's actual text
(others had written cogent commentaries on The Bell Curve's politics,
but had disclaimed on the text, pleading inability to comprehend
the mathematics!). The second represents my attempts to provide a
more philosophical context for The Bell Curve's fallacy by consider-
ing its consonance with other arguments from the history of biode-
terminism. This essay, published in Natural History in February
1995, repeats some material from The Mismeasure of Man in the
section on Binet and the origin of the IQ test—but I left the redun-
dancy alone since I thought that this different context for citing
Binet might strike readers as interesting. The first section on Gobi-
neau, the granddaddy of modern scientific racism, represents mate-
rial that I probably should have originally placed, but did not, in The
Mismeasure of Man.
The second group includes three historical essays on key figures
from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries respec-
tively. We first meet Sir Thomas Browne and his seventeenth-cen-
tury refutation of the canard "that Jews stink." But I valued
Browne's argument primarily for following the cogent form that
has opposed biodeterminism ever since—so his old refutation has
enduring worth. This essay ends with a summary of the startling
revision that modern genetic and evolutionary data about human
origins must impose upon our notion of races and their meaning.
The second essay analyzes the founding document of modern
racial classification, the fivefold system devised in the late eighteenth
century by the genially liberal German anthropologist Blumenbach.
I use this essay to show how theory and unconscious presupposition
always influence our analysis and organization of presumably objec-
tive data. Blumenbach meant well, but ended up affirming racial
hierarchy by way of geometry and aesthetics, not by any overt vi-
ciousness. If you ever wondered why white folks are named Cauca-
sians in honor of a small region in Russia, you will find the answer
in this essay and in Blumenbach's definitions. The last article sum-