In John Jay Gould's book "The Mismeasure of man," his wars was with the IQ industry, the idea that there is a single measurable thing called intelligence, with the usual outcome that this 'intelligence' shows important genetic differences across races and classes. In 1981 Gould wrote the book The Mismeasure of Man which utterly destroyed, with humor and precise detail, the nonsense around IQ testing and the associated arguments about intelligence, race and class. Three major concepts that I thought were important in this book was Gould's idea of classifying and ranking, the idea of science being untruthful, and Ghould's idea of factor analysis.
             First an foremost I'm going to mention two of Ghould's basic assumptions: (a) that the "urge to classify and rank people is strong" and somehow wrong, and (b) that scientists cannot be objective, because their findings reflect their surrounding culture and "the unconscious and very personal prejudices of the scientists themselves." Regarding the first assumption, why it is wrong to attempt to classify and rank people is never made completely clear by Gould. Classification is definitely a basic technique in all of science, including Gould's paleobiology. One can hardly make progress in science without determining the attributes of the things being studied; in many cases, assigning attributes to things "ranks" them, for example, by length, weight, mass, frequency, and so on. In psychology and social science, we can assign attributes to people with respect to age, social status, tolerance, and so on, to a whole host of entities that can be "measured." Measurement is one of the basic techniques of science. It may become obnoxious, in some circumstances, when the measurements are assigned "values" of greater or lesser "worthiness" in terms of ethics, social justice, or social/emotional attitudes. This is what Gould appears to mean when he objects to "ranking." How...