<i>The Mismeasure of Man</i>: A Ringing Answer to the “Biology as Destiny” Argument

I first read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) in the early 1980s as part of the research I was undertaking for my first book, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Doctors and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1994). Gould's book came with me to the British Library with its wonderful traditional layout—green leather chairs, expansive desks, and a system where you could call up books for the staff to collect from its inner depths and bring to your desk. To research information for this project, I spent many hours there in an atmosphere steeped in tradition, one that you can no longer capture in the now remodeled and modernized library.Reading Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, his arguments about age-old blinkered views of biology focused on gender, race, and heredity underscored my growing interest in medical shibboleths about female physical activity and the historical influence of late nineteenth-century medical beliefs and values on the perceived benefits of physical activity and sport for women across their lifespan. One did not have to look hard in centuries or even decades past to see how medically defined notions of optimal female health had justified the practice of viewing female physiological functions as requiring prescribed and/or delimited levels of physical activity and restricted sporting opportunities. Indeed, as Gould reiterates, and as I have come to understand in my own work, the history of biological determinism is a critique that is timeless and always timely since the same bad arguments recur every few years. “Most current skirmishes,” Gould points out, “follow the journalist's old maxim: yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage.”1 It is unsurprising that this call for the need to study the historical origin of great themes that are still with us by combining the scientist's skill with the historian's concern became the driving force of much of my future research and colored my teaching as well. God dwells in the details, writes Gould, and so does the devil.2In The Eternally Wounded Woman, I recounted how the rebirth of biological determinism in the guise of the science of sociobiology, well-seasoned with scientific sexism, reminded us of the dangers in assigning natural causes to phenomena of social origins, of allowing science to play handmaiden to social values. Sociobiologists, I argued, reinforced stereotypes of woman as lesser than man, passive, dependent, maternal, and physically weak that many social scientists and feminists vigorously tried to displace. I sided with Gould that “‘as long as there are entrenched social and political distinctions between sexes, races and classes there will be forms of science whose main function is to rationalize and legitimize these distinctions.’”3 I have endeavored to demonstrate in a number of ways how this has especially been the case in those professions which use biology to support established professional views concerning men's and women's bodies, and to justify unequal social practices among sex, race, age, disability, body size, and so on.Gould's revised second edition of The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1996, underscored even more strongly his anxiety over the tenacity of biological determinism with the addition of a new discussion about the recurrence of hereditarian interpretations of the IQ stemming from the publication of The Bell Curve (1994) at a time of political retrenchments.4 Calling his critique of The Bell Curve and its supporters a cogent refutation of a bankrupt theory focused upon an area of deepest personal meaning, Gould added a new chapter to his first edition on the role of Sir Cyril Burt, British doyen of mental testers, and his theory of a measurable, genetically fixed and unitary intelligence known as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). From the 1940s on, Burt's well-accepted studies had shown how levels of intelligence could be correlated with occupational levels among large groups of test subjects and that such intelligence levels were transmitted to these subjects’ offspring.Having grown up in England, I was more than familiar with this particular mode of the ranking of human groups. Eleven-year-old students such as myself in the 1950s were very aware of the dire potential consequences of IQ testing through the “11+ Grading exam,” the results of which would direct us either to grammar school, technical school, or the secondary modern, and likely seal the profile of our future education and professional possibilities. Well before Gould's part in the undoing of Cyril Burt, who was later accused of faking patently manufactured data about twins to confirm his views on hereditarian theories of intelligence, students in my elementary school were sent their separate ways to specific types of secondary schools on the basis of their grading exam results. “Of the methods hitherto tried out,” wrote Burt, “the so-called 11+ examination has proved to be by far the most trustworthy.”5 Though I did not know it at the time, Burt also regarded my left-handedness as “the motor disability which interferes most widely with the ordinary tasks of the classroom,” although he eventually concluded that the subject was too complex for resolution.6Throughout my academic career, I have continued to explore how the physical education, kinesiology, and medical professions have conceptualized the body within a biological framework, viewing it as a complex biological machine to be controlled by appropriate scientific regimes and I have underscored many times how professional discourse about health and physical activity is heavily punctuated by the use of biological categories and explanations derived from “scientific sources.” Indeed, Gould's views have stayed with me across decades of my research career as I crafted a series of research programs, books and articles, focused upon historical approaches to aging women's exercise and sport; the staying power of racial stereotypes such as the Jew's foot and his unfitness for sport and army duty; the historical construction of modes of identification and regulation of fat bodies; the problematic ways of understanding disability through the hegemony of normalcy and the active body; the tyranny of posture assessments and the ongoing uses of somatotyping in sport selection. Together with my students, we have chronicled the deep and insidious errors of biological determinism along with the many arguments in their support as they continue to appear at timely moments in the management and education of the moving and sporting body. They may likely remember this passage from Gould's book that I read to them in class: “We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within.”7

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