Stephen Jay Gould

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, ranking them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as evidenced by the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively...

The world's most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision. With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould first describes the content and discusses the history and origins of the three core commitments of classical Darwinism: that...