Word: gould
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stephen Jay Gould, professor of Geology, studiously undermines the more famous research of this genre in The Mismeasure of Man. He examines past studies of human being's intellitence with the perspicuity expected of a careful scientist, showing where other researchers have erred before. He acquired the data that others had used to reach racist conclusions, recalculated the computations and reveals the mistakes and incorrect assumptions. Gould's reopening of the 19th- and early-20th-century studies could help close an era of racist preconceptions about intelligence...
...skulls, tried to prove that a ranking of races could be established objectively by head size. By measuring the volume, which he assumed was directly correlated to intelligence, he hoped to show that Caucasian naturally should be the brightest of all races. He succeeded in his era; however, as Gould clearly demonstrates, Morton used his preconceived notions about race like any high school lab student, using only the data that fitted his thesis. Morton weighted unfairly the American Indian and African measurements by using many skulls from tribes with unusually small heads and by including women, who have smaller body...
...Keyes (the larcenous pianist). But the villains never got the best of Dick Tracy, the hatchet-jawed, hawk-nosed dean of comic-strip detectives. Last week, Tracy, his snap-brim hat and two-way radio intact, celebrated his 50th year as a cartoon hawkshaw. So did his creator, Chester Gould, 80. Gould, now in affluent retirement in Woodstock, Ill., first dubbed his hero "Plainclothes Tracy," The moniker soon changed and later, so did Tracy. After an 18-year courtship, he finally wed his blond sweetie Tess Trueheart, and, says Gould: "I left Tracy a little more handsome than...
...Gould has managed to slide between the twin dangers of, on one hand, limiting his audience merely to the specialists in his field, and on the other, losing his scholarly respectability by pandering to a low common denominator. He has done this, friends say, by making a conscious effort to reach out from his work--and by not taking everything entirely seriously. His lecture on the evolution of Mickey Mouse is almost a legend for its integration of the fanciful and the scientific. Likewise, the title of his popular undergraduate course injects a welcome note of tongue-in-cheek into...
...MacArthur grant will give Gould the opportunity to continue his scientific work with a new freedom. He has been at work for several years on what he calls, the "big book," a major reevaluation of the structure of evolutionary theory. Unlike most previous works on evolution, which tended to look at the evolution of individual species and then extrapolate conclusions, Gould's book will attempt to look more directly at the larger picture. The MacArthur money, he says, will allow him to take the spring semester off for the nextfive years to concentrate exclusively on his research. A certain...