"Earlier this year Glenn Beck, the US Fox News commentator, called President Barack Obama "a racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture". The subtext of the statement seemed to be that it is justified to be fearful and suspicious of people of another race if they hate and fear you. Or possibly it was just a more than usually sanctimonious form of racism. But for me it was also the spur to take a closer look at a book that charts the way American and European scientists have handled the debate about race, culture, intelligence and economic and political success. That book is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which seemed ground-breaking when it first appeared in 1981. It still seemed pretty good when Gould revised and expanded it in 1996, two years after two academic researchers published The Bell Curve, a book claiming to show that some hereditary lineages are innately less intelligent than others, leaving readers to draw the implication that money spent on educating them might be wasted. You can guess which lineages the authors might have included in this subset." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet