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. 

September 17, 2012 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)

The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating, off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe someday The New Yorker will do a longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)

Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus, natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing. Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing it.]
 

Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,” I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)

Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)