40 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen Jay GouldThe Mismeasure Of Man
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Positive Conclusion”
In Chapter 7, Gould provides his rationale for writing this book. One view of science sees the development of knowledge as a movement towards truth, and by the act of debunking false claims; “rotten apples” are removed from the “barrel of accumulating knowledge” (351). However, Gould also notes that science advances “primarily by replacement, not by addition” (352). To debunk a social prejudice, science must provide thorough arguments to “drive out fallacious ideas” (352).
Biologists have confirmed that there is little overall genetic difference between human races; however, human uniqueness lies in its transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Cultural evolution is rapid, but also “readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes” (355). Biological determinism cannot account for cultural evolution in the same way that sociobiology identifies “adaptive behaviors” influenced by the natural selection of genetic variation (356).
As a result, Gould notes the importance of using judicious analogies and inference, and the necessity of moving beyond categories to focus on biological potentialities, rather than biological limits.
Epilogue Summary
In his Epilogue, Gould cites the 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, a Virginia state sterilization law. In 1980, Gould read a newspaper headline related to the 1927 law: “Over 7,500 sterilized in Virginia.” As Gould recounts, despite her family’s court case and her own sterilization, Carrie Buck was never informed of the true nature of her operation, and only discovered the reason for her childless and “lifelong sadness” in 1995 (366).
Chapter 7-Epilogue Analysis
In Chapter 7, Gould introduces his conclusion by clarifying that a scientific debunking is not a linear line of progress from social prejudice to social enlightenment. Rather, science “advances primarily by replacement, not by addition,” and debunking old “rotten apples” is necessitated if “better ones can be added” (352). In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould has presented an argument rejecting the rationale behind hereditary intelligence, and maintains that the uniqueness of human societies lies in our ability to transmit cultural evolution from generation to generation. Gould concludes by restating his belief that while biological determinism is “fundamentally a theory about limits,” human flexibility is the primary “hallmark of human evolution” (362, 363).
In the Epilogue, the case of Buck v. Bell is presented in order to encapsulate and summarize the effect of institutionalized policies based on a theory of human limits, and how these policies play out in the actual theater of life. In the case of Doris Buck, a life of imposed limits condemned her to childlessness. This was a choice imposed upon her by institutional forces that took away her rights and never informed her of the loss.
