欧宝娱乐

A history of the use of intelligence testing to support racism, sexism, and class boundaries, focusing on two areas: 19th-century craniometry and 20th-century IQ tests. The going gets a little heavy in the final chapters when Gould busts out the math, but it's an eye-opener, using two specific historical examples to make larger points about the way science, though supposedly neutral, can be warped to enforce existing prejudices. (When poor Italian immigrants flooded into America in the early 20th century, research suddenly proliferated "proving" that Italians were a separate, mentally inferior nonwhite race; in Britain, studies focused on supporting the innate rightness of the class system and recommending lesser education for poor children.) Gould's message is ultimately positive: that our mental limits are far less relevant than our mental potential.