And no science is immune to influences-racist or otherwise-from the culture in which it is embedded, as Gould elsewhere readily acknowledges. Advancing hypotheses prior to experimentation is how all of science proceeds, and is no mark of inferior work. Gould has no difficulty in demonstrating the influence of racism where he goes astray is in his dismissal of such prior work as simply unscientific because the racist conclusions preceded the collection of data. One such argument urges that Gould's predecessors are not to be taken seriously because they are racists and have let their racism influence their scientific practice. What Gould does less well is to carry through his attack on prior attempts to understand natural intelligence scientifically: attempting to muster all possible arguments against such science, he conjures up a variety of impossible arguments as well. Gould is successful, as always, in rendering the relevant scientific debates accessible to general readers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Stephen Jay Gould provides a typically readable history of one of our most vexatious intellectual enterprises: the scientific study of intelligence.
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