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Gould argues that much of this research was based more on prejudice than scientific rigor, demonstrating how in several occasions researchers such as Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and Paul Broca committed the fallacy of using their expected conclusions as part of their reasoning. The first parts of the book are devoted to a critical analysis of early works on a supposed biologically inherited basis for intelligence, such as craniometry, the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties.

1.1 Historical bias in biological sociology.The book's second edition (1996) has been revised and challenges the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, which had generated much controversy. The Mismeasure of Man skeptically investigates "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status." The second fallacy is one of ranking, or our "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale."

According to Gould these methods suffer from "two deep fallacies." The first fallacy is of reification, that is, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities." These entities include IQ (the intelligence quotient) and g (the general intelligence factor), which have been the cornerstone of much intelligence research. The book also attempts to critique the principal theme of biological determinism, that "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity." Gould discusses two prominent techniques used to measure such a quantity, craniometry and psychological testing. The book is a history and critique of the methods and motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology." The Mismeasure of Man is a controversial 1981 book written by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002).