, intended for a general audience as well as an academic one.
One of the two blatant fallacies that Gould debunks is reification (from the Latin "res," or thing). In the past, intelligence has been thought of as a unitary thing, rather than as the abstract concept it actually is. Because we want to objectify experience, we have reified intelligence in spite of evidence to the contrary.
The second fallacy is one of ranking, or, as Gould explains, "our propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale" (24). Gould sees this propensity as characteristic of Western thought.
The element common to both fallacies is the single number, assigned to each person in an attempt to rank them in a "single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups races, classes, or sexes are innately inferior and deserve their status ... in short, the Mismeasure of Man" (25).
One of the earliest attempts to classify people by intelligence was craniology, or the "science" of measuring heads. Such a system attempted "to relegate the dark skinned s
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