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The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality

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Harry and Elaine Mensh's The IQ Mythology is an intellectual tragedy. It is a tragedy because a book that has a valuable argument is supported with tendentious and unprincipled use of evidence. The Menshes seek to argue that the debate about IQ between hereditarians and environmentalists has largely been shaped by the presuppositions of the former, and that if critics of tests are to be successful they must abandon the idea that environment is the primary cause behind scores on IQ tests and argue resolutely that such scores are meaningless.

This is an interesting argument, and the Menshes read the rhetoric of testers in response to environmentalist criticisms in extremely suggestive ways. However, in building their case against the environmentalists, they spend a good deal of time attacking Stephen Jay Gould's classic The Mismeasure of Man. Here their evidence becomes totally unreliable. For example, the Menshes argue that Gould supports the idea that intelligence is measurable based on the following sentence: "What craniometry was for the nineteenth century, intelligence testing has become for the twentieth, when it assumes that intelligence (or at least a dominant part of it) is a single, innate, heritable, and measurable thing." Now, any standard reading of this sentence would see that measurable occurs in the list of things that testers should not assume that IQ. However, for the Menshes, this is not the case. This, unfortunately, casts doubt on the rest of their readings.