One With A Lot Of Water example essay topic

If you had a glass of water and wanted to know how much water was in that glass, you would most likely transfer it into some kind of measuring device, like a graduated cylinder or something that measured volume. What if they had not invented anything like a graduated cylinder yet and you still wanted to know how much water was in that glass? So you decided to just take three glasses of water that had noticeably different amounts in them. Then the one with the least amount of water you call "not enough", the one with a lot of water you called "too much" and the one in the middle you called "just right".

You told everyone about your discovery and they said, "that's easy enough for me let's use it". You went on your merry way, thinking you were right, or were you? Stephen Jay Gould presents and argues with the claim "that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth" (Gould pg. 20). When in fact that is what it was designed to do. I believe that one day a scientist designed intelligence. They shaped and formed in to what is now defined in Webster as: the capacity of knowledge; information or news, especially that which is secret or important.

What the definition is stating is that intelligence is how much you know and how important it is. Scientist like Herrnstein and Murray would turn it around and say that this capacity of knowledge that some people have is possibly genetic in some way to what your background is. For example whether you are African American, Caucasian, Indian or Asian. The ending result after all the shaping and forming, is this thing we call intelligence, which is a limiting reactant that is used on the less fortunate. Herrnstein and Murray looks at intelligence and smiles. They see it as an effective way to measure people and their knowledge.

They try to justify it and say", If difference in mental abilities are inherited, and if success requires those abilities, and if earning and prestige depend on success, then social standing will be based to some extent on inherited difference among people". (I.Q., 1). This is saying that your social stance in society depends on what you inherit from your family, this includes the amount of "intelligence" you have. Herrnstein and Murray believe that the Caucasian race was the foundation on which everyone else would be measured. Caucasians were the measuring device, the glasses for the water that supposedly told the amount. In the end after measuring everyone on this false measuring scale, the people of African descent came out on the bottom. .".. their long book contained nothing new, though the authors spun out the old arguments over eight hundred pages filled with copious charts and graphs that bamboozled people into confusing both novelty and profundity with their fear of incomprehension". (Gould pg. 31).

Herrnstein and Murray tried to confirm that there was a innate inferiority and a superiority of races. They tells us a lot of way that intelligence is measurable and gives us a lot of information, but they fail to acknowledge and explain why some black females scored high on the IQ test. They come from the same background as black males and they are considered descendants of the African race. I believe they need to ask themselves why they think this happened. As Jonathan Marks, author of What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, was looking at intelligence, he found a connection between apes and humans. It was not the 98% that we were alike that sparked the interest but the 2% that made us different contributed a lot in how we acted "intellectually".

If that 2% in humans had a lot to do with our intellectual capabilities then "intelligence" really is not that big. If there is a gene or DNA that could determine intelligence, it would take us centuries to find it. "Consequently, not only can we not establish that abilities are different, we have no reliable way even to measure such a innate property in the first place. What we have is performance-on test or just life -which is measurable, but which is the results of many things, only one of which is unmeasurable innate ability". (What it means, 92). This is what all the studying and scientific research has come to.

I state the claim that intelligence is not a word because it does not have a meaning. I believe that if we do not know what intelligence is then how can we measure it? So when someone asks the question, what is intelligence? I would answer, it is nothing because it can not be explained, therefore it does not have a meaning. Officials in high rankings and even the general public use it as a way to categorize people. I also wonder, if you don't know what it is and can not measure it, then how can you say if something is intellectual or not, or if someone is intelligent or not?

You can't, but as far as we know, we can say if they are using the false system of conveniency. Intelligence can not be measured and is just a word we all use on a daily basis that tells us about a person and what they are capable of doing. Although intelligence categorizes people, it is not always the best way of going about putting people into categories because it really doesn't have a set measurement. As the water was falsely measured, so is intelligence. There is no real "graduated cylinder" that accurately tells us some ones mental capacity. That is what this is all about.

What is fast and easy can be used under any circumstance. "We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within". (Gould pg. 50).

That is all that matters; what lies within..