SOURCE: Lewontin, R. C. “The Inferiority Complex.” New York Review of Books 28, no. 6 (22 October 1981): 12-16.

In the following review of The Mismeasure of Man, Lewontin contextualizes Gould's arguments about faulty data collection, IQ testing, and the flawed thinking behind biological determinism.

The first meeting of Oliver Twist and young Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, on the road to London was a confrontation between two stereotypes of nineteenth-century literature. The Dodger was a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy … with rather bow legs and little sharp ugly eyes.” Nor was he much on English grammar and pronunciation. “I've got to be in London tonight,” he tells Oliver, “and I know a 'spectable old genelman lives there, wot'll give you lodgings for nothink. …” He was just what we might have expected of a ten-year-old street-wise orphan with no education and no loving family, brought up among the dregs of the Victorian Lumpenproletariat...