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A MIND IS NOT DESCRIBED BY NUMBERS

Date: November 1, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 11, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By JUNE GOODFIELD; June Goodfield's most recent books are ''An Imagined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery'' andReflections on Science and the Media
Lead:

THE MISMEASURE OF MAN By Stephen Jay Gould. Illustrated. 352 pp. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. $14.95.

WE have to have some reasons for our deep-seated urge to classify and rank people according to their supposed natural gifts or lack of them. Though these reasons are surely complex, one well-documented motive has remained persistently strong: the determination of those on top to remain there by demonstrating the futility of any attempts by those at the bottom to rise.
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What conscious or unconscious human convictions encouraged, Nature apparently, and obligingly, confirmed. The Natural Order itself, as expressed in the Great Chain of Being, surely demonstrated a staged progression of complexity in living organisms, with man at the head. So what could be more natural than to find a similar progression in the human races? ''Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,'' wrote Alexander Pope in his ''Essay on Man'' (1733), and the ''some'' were clearly white European males. Whether expressed in art or anthropology, in poems or hymns or in decisions of politics or medicine, the existing levels within society remained frozen, and the evidence provided by successive sciences allowed us see why this seemingly must be so. Endowed with whatever gifts we had been granted, our status inevitably determined, it was futile even to dream of possibilities.

That there was nothing God-given or natural about this state of affairs occurred only to a few compassionate souls. Fewer still saw the implications. Darwin obviously did, and, in fact, Stephen Jay Gould sets the tone for this brilliant and important book with one poignant sentence from ''Voyage of the Beagle'': ''If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.'' Groups in power not only turned to the apparent facts of nature for ''proof,'' but also made accomplices of the very methods of science. Since science was traditionally thought of as ''objective knowledge, free from social and political taint,'' those who defended the status quo were quick to invoke the prestige of science to sustain their views, just as Marxists would later invoke the certainty of mathematical knowledge as a modelfor the necessity of dialectical materialism. Over the centuries, biological determinism - the ''belief that social and economic differences arise from inherited, inborn distinctions'' - was used to construct a temple where political and social ideologies were worshiped. In ''The Mismeasure of Man,'' his most significant book yet, Mr. Gould grasps the supporting pillars of the temple in a lethal grip of historical scholarship and analysis - and brings the whole edifice crashing down.

He had several pillars to crack, several myths to demolish. For decades, intelligence was assumed to be a single entity rather than a complex and multifaceted set of human capacities. This was one myth. That intelligence could be measured was a second. That numbers can guarantee truth, a third. And fourth was the myth that science ''is an objective enterprise, done properly only when scientists can shuck the constraints of their culture and view the world as it really is.'' Mr. Gould tackles them all in turn.

The core of the book is a historical account of man's attempts to measure intelligence. Measuring heads came first and reached its apogee with craniometry in the 19th century. The bigger your head, the better you were. Since the real world rarely conforms to our expectations - for which Heaven be thanked - anomalies were bound to occur, and Mr. Gould delightfullyh embarrassments as the small-brained men of eminence or the large-brained criminals.

Measuring bodies was next, but it was the American invention of measuring ''an hereditable IQ'' that really took root. In detail, Mr. Gould leads us through the work of Alfred Binet - who at least managed to retain a modicum of self-criticism - and onto that of H.H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman and Robert M. Yerkes, whose ideas provided the basis for the Armyiterates to his students at Harvard, and reports that more than 10 percent ''by the standards of some camps ... would have been fit only for the duties of a buck private.'')

But he does more than document the story in its full chronological and methodological detail, for he has played detective, gone back to the original records, recalculated the sums, laid bare the fallacies and the biases, exposed the frauds. For instance, Goddard studied a family whose progenitor had fathered a ''bad line'' from his illicit union with a ''supposedly feeble-minded tavern wench'' and a ''good line'' from his later marriage to a ''worthy Quakeress.'' Goddard combined the Greek words for beauty (''kallos'') and bad (''kakos'') and gave the family the name of Kallikak. Mr. Gould discovered that Goddard later touched up photographs so that Kallikaks from the ''kakos'' line, who were not blessed with the advantage of living peacefully in his institution, the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, appear diabolical and depraved. Mr. Gould reports on other investigators who manipulated statistics - never very difficult to do - and on those, like Cyril Burt, who fabricated data. Much of this would be hilarious had not the consequences been so tragic. (Yerkes and his colleagues became seriously disturbed when the average mental age of the white American population appeared to be only 13, raising questions about whether democracy could survive if this was a true measure of the intelligence of the average voting man.) But the results of these tests determined many social and political decisions that would tragically affect the course of individual lives.

It takes a master pen to bring history alive, and the chronological unfolding of this tale is told in a somewhat pedestrian manner. Its style stands in obvious contrast to Mr. Gould's earlier writings, though it still shows the flash of humor and the felicitous phrase. But ''The Mismeasure of Man'' demands a great deal from the reader. To understand the conceptual fallacy at the heart of the mathematical technique of factor analysis, which itself is a prerequisite for understanding the history of intelligence testing, requires some very hard work indeed - even though Mr. Gould attempts most valiantly to make his material accessible.

It would be a mistake to regard this book solely as a hatchet job on attempts to apply the principles of biological determinism, for it contains a great deal that is positive and constructive. Mr. Gould's most valuable accomplishments are threefold. He demonstrates the strengths and limits of quantitative measure in the sciences, and especially the human sciences. He shows that while science can never be wholly detached and objective, nevertheless this gloriously human enterprise does provide us both with a method for challenging the status quo and for revealing firm knowledge about the world. And finally, he reaffirms that most things are humanly possible, and that attempts to confine human beings to limited categories are both downright wicked and bound to be self-defeating.