The Failure Of Man Stephen Jay Gould

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould examines some of the ways Americans have attempted to classify its citizens in regards to their intelligence. Most importantly, it focuses on the many ways that prejudices have influenced the way we choose to view certain groups of people. There have been many different attempts to try and assign intellectual values to different groups of people. Often times, these attempts are supposedly based on scientific principles and research which are often manipulated to help reinforce the researcher’s previous beliefs and prejudices. The first method discussed by Gould is the practice of Craniometry, where scientists measured the size of an individual’s brain and believed that the bigger their brain was,