The Failure Man Gould Analysis

Science is not the answer for everything in the world, however it does play a role in our beliefs. Science has helped us believe many factors of our world today, but what about the questions that cannot be answered by science? So in these cases what do we fall too; religion, culture, society, etc.? We used to fall back on religion for our answers, now it is science, however, we are slowing going to change it to something else besides science. This is known as a paradigm shift. In the excerpt from The Mismeasure Man, Gould states two of his main arguments and fallacies, which include reification and ranking. Gould refers to reification as converting a concept into an entity, and ranking as our tendency for organizing complex variation on a progressive, steady, escalating scale. …show more content…
We take an idea and mold it into something else. Can we honestly measure how smart a person is? What are the determining features that indicate whether or not one is smart? Humans express their intelligence in different ways, so there cannot be a test or anything to show how smart someone is. One of data points that he mentions for ranking is to rank races by the sizes of their brain. The size of our brain should not determine our status or “rank”. We are born with different sizes of the brain; however, it is not race related. Also, Gould claims that the rise in biological determinism has a correlation with politics. I do not believe in the idea of biological determinism for the reason being that there are many factors that influence human behavior. These factors include the media, religion, society, and our culture. We are born with genes, a brain, and other biological attributes, but none of these factor determine our human