The New Yorker & Me: Stephen Jay Gould's Brilliant "Curveball"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Stephen Jay Gould's Brilliant "Curveball"

Stephen Jay Gould (Portrait by Andrea Ventura)

I just finished reading Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s "Force of Nature," a profile of psychology professor Kathryn Paige Harden, who works in the field of behavior genetics. Harden thinks that in predicting life outcomes, we should pay more attention to our genes. I agree. But I have a question? What does Harden mean by “intelligence”? Does she talk in terms of “high IQ” and “low IQ,” and, if so, what does she mean? I like the idea of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, in his classic Frames of Mind (1983), identifies seven: linguistic, personal, spatial, musical, bodily, logical, and artistic. A kid may struggle at school but excel at the hockey rink. What is his or her IQ? Charles A. Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) espouses a single, general measure of mental ability. Here’s what Stephen Jay Gould, writing in The New Yorker, had to say about that:

However, if Herrnstein and Murray are wrong about IQ as an immutable thing in the head, with humans graded in a single scale of general capacity, leaving large numbers of custodial incompetents at the bottom, then the model that generates their gloomy vision collapses, and the wonderful variousness of human abilities, properly nurtured, reemerges. We must fight the doctrine of The Bell Curve both because it is wrong and because it will, if activated, cut off all possibility of proper nurturance for everyone’s intelligence. ["Curveball," November 28, 1994]

Gould demolished The Bell Curve. I wish he were here to assess Harden’s new theory.