James Baquet

    Sometimes (not often enough) a scientist will be an elegant writer. Darwin was; Einstein, too. Some say that the impact of their ideas on society is as much a result of the way they were communicated as for the ideas themselves.

    Then there are the scientists whose ideas don’t turn the world upside down, but who communicate general science to the masses nevertheless. A current example is Neil DeGrasse Tyson who, like Carl Sagan before him, did a TV series called “Cosmos.”

    But my favorite of all the recent science communicators was the Harvard biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote over 300 essays for the monthly “Natural History” magazine, which were later assembled into books with such provocative titles as “Ever Since Darwin,” “The Panda’s Thumb,” “Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes,” and “The Flamingo’s Smile.”

    But his other books are weightier, and one of them, “The Mismeasure of Man,” made it onto the list of the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.”

    The book addresses a single problem called “biological determinism,” the idea that all human behavior results from genetic — that is, biological — factors, and none of it is determined by social forces. In other words, it comes down squarely on the “nature” side of the old “nature versus nurture” question.

    Gould looks at two aspects of this. The first could be called the historical approach. How has theorists’ cultural bias affected their support of biological determinism in the past? And the second is statistical: Are their measurements accurate, or do they result in a “mismeasure?”

    Gould points out that humans are complex, and that reducing a person’s value to the level of his or her intelligence is to forget all the other factors of the individual — creativity, emotion, personality, etc. He calls this “ranking,” as though all the value of a person is determined by placing him or her on a scale of intelligence.

    Regrettably, Gould died of cancer in 2002, at 60.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. very interesting

    2. more important, heavier

    3. people who have ideas

    4. sadly

    5. the general population, everyday people

    6. solidly, definitely

    7. importance, effect

    8. idea that everything has a definite, identifiable cause

    9. placing on a scale, like from high to low

    10. disrupt (something), change the understanding (of something)