I am not asserting that he is tendentious. I'm writing that his public outreach work is a necessary part of being a scientist, as it helps improve public understanding of valid and invalid knowledge, and helps hold its improper use to account. You're trying to split the difference regarding your original claims, but you're just plain wrong.
I never took back a word of my original claims though I did respond to your further claims in response, always backing them up with quotes and citations.
Below you or any other future readers may find a guide to the many faults in The Mismeasure of Man, all of which misunderstandings, distortions and deliberate omissions tended certain ways which supported Gould’s politics, though not the truth.
Stephen Jay Gould’s Analysis of the Army Beta Test in The Mismeasure of Man: Distortions and Misconceptions Regarding a Pioneering Mental Test
> 5.1 Gould’s Judgments of the Army Beta
Among the many topics of negative analysis in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man [1] is the Army Beta test. Although not the most prominent section of Gould’s text, his 23-page passage on the Army Beta is typical of his style in the book. Throughout the book, Gould criticized early scientists who studied individual and group differences of being misled by preconceived notions based on their social beliefs—instead of the data. Yet, Gould himself was motivated to write The Mismeasure of Man by his strong political and social beliefs, which guided him to present his text describing the early intelligence scientists as blinded by their prejudices [4,7,12,50]. Given Gould’s pervasively incorrect statements in The Mismeasure of Man about the Army Beta, factor analysis [3], the place of intelligence testing in the immigration debates of the 1920s [5,9,10], the biological basis for intelligence [4,8,9], and the questions regarding Gould’s analysis of Morton’s work [11–14], we wonder whether there is any section of The Mismeasure of Man that is factually accurate.
Like other sections of The Mismeasure of Man, when Gould wrote about the Army Beta, he omitted relevant information that contradicted his preconceived beliefs and misinterpreted data in order to portray the study of individual human differences as ideological pseudoscience. Contrary to Gould’s claims, the Army Beta’s content, instructions, and time limits were all appropriate for a group-administered intelligence test a hundred years ago. We believe we have also demonstrated that the Army Beta very likely measured intelligence, given the results of multiple confirmatory factor analyses and the positive correlations with external criteria (both during World War I and in modern times).
I never claimed you took back any of your own claims. But you did misrepresent mine. Your quotes and citations do not support your argument in any way, and are therefore irrelevant.
I did not read the entire article you just posted, but it is worth noting that it misrepresents Mismeasure of Man as clinical research itself, rather than a historical and theoretical critique which it is, and holds improper standards against it (which is very funny because that's exactly what they claim Gould is guilty of!). Historical research is certainly biased, and that's okay. Historical research depends on omission as a crucial feature, otherwise how would you write a book about a focused topic? The two kinds of work have different kinds of data and follow different argumentation strategies, yet the authors of this paper expect otherwise. This is unreasonable and demonstrates a clear lack of understanding regarding what history is, and I have a hard time taking them seriously as a result.
