The Mismeasure of Man

Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard professor of paleontology, writes a history and critique of biological determinism, the belief that social and economic differences between human groups, chiefly races, classes and sexes, come from inborn distinctions. He examines craniometry and psychological testing, the two main ways intelligence has been measured as a single quantity, and argues that both rest on two fallacies: reification, which turns abstractions such as IQ into things, and ranking, which forces complex variation onto one rising scale. His reanalysis of Samuel George Morton's skull measurements proved especially controversial. The book won the National Book Critics Circle award, and a second edition added a critique of The Bell Curve.

Neil deGrasse Tyson named it the one book he would recommend that everyone in modern society read.