Analysis Of The Mismeasure Of Man By Stephen Jay Gould

“The Mismeasure of Man,” by Stephen Jay Gould discuss how overtime scientist tried to measure a human being worth by using biology to determine this worth. Scientist would measure various things on the human body to determine this worth with example like how much your head weights to how far apart someone toes would be from another toes. The ultimate goal of all of these experiment was to determined what race was superior to all of the other races. With the scientist being mostly European their experiment would become very subject in finding out why and how white people were far superior to everyone else and in some case how Nordic people were better then everyone south of them. Over year everyone of the way they test intelligence was proving wrong and a new way was discover. It was not until Alfred Binet, H.H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, and lastly R.M Yerkes. These people used a new way to test intelligent that didn’t involve measure human body parts, but they would actually give people written and or oral tests. Alfred Binet(1857-1911) the father of the IQ test. He was student of Broca’s school of thought in that a measure of skull determined someone intelligent. In the end Binet would abandoned this way of thinking and would attempt to new way to measure intelligences. Binet would now look at measuring intelligences in …show more content…
Each time one of these scientist found a new way to test someone intelligence, they would come back a few years later apologizing and say my conclusion was wrong. The only person that did the experiment right and with only good intention was Binet, the man wanted to help school children. Goddard was looking for a way to prove that whites are better, Terman took that to next level, and poor old Yerkers just wanted people to take psychology serious. All these man had different reasons in trying to find out how to test intelligence. The end result of all these scientist testing is