A rare book at once of great importance and wonderful to read.... Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology, recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.... A major addition to the scientific literature.
Stephen Jay GouldRelated topics
book case datum great historical misuse once point read study tracing racism stops gould presentsRelated quotes
The importance to economics of the study of institutions is no longer a controversial proposition, thanks in part to the scholarly literature generated by the new institutional economics movement. Institutions are more than organizations – property is an institution, but not an organization – but organizations are an important form of institution and will be the focus of my paper, as it is, to a considerable extent, of the new institutional economics.
Richard Posner
The years since the mid-1970s have been the most frustrating in the history of particle physics. We are paying the price of our own success: theory has advanced so far that further progress will require the study of processes at energies far beyond the reach of existing facilities. In order to break our of this impasse, physicists began in 1982 to develop plans for a scientific project of unprecedented size and cost, known as the Superconducting Super Collider.
Steven Weinberg
I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this book because you are in the mood for a pleasant experience. If this is the case, I advise you to put this book down instantaneously, because of all the books describing the unhappy lives of the Baudelaire orphans, The Miserable Mill might be the unhappiest yet. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are sent to Paltryville to work in a lumber mill, and they find disaster and misfortune lurking behind every log.
Daniel Handler
Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most "modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of "Neo-Darwinism.”.
Stephen Jay Gould
The paper develops a simple macroeconomic framework for the study of exchange rate movements. The purpose is to develop a theory that is suggestive of the observed large fluctuations in exchange rates while at the same time establishing that such exchange rate movements are consistent with rational expectations formation. In developing a formal model we draw on the role of asset markets, capital mobility, and expectations that have been emphasized in recent literature.
Rudiger Dornbusch