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Engines of Our Ingenuity

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The Mismeasure of Man Digital History ID 4488
By 1840 scientists had learned to measure things -- as if numbers alone could lead to understanding. Stephen Jay Gould takes us on a terrifying trip through 19th-century attempts to reduce the human mind to numbers. He begins with two ideas rampant in the mid-1800s. One was the absolute conviction of white supremacy. The other was a mania for ordering and ranking.
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