Ideology and irony: Stephen Jay Gould mismeasured "The Mismeasure of Man."

A new study shows that Gould — who purported to show that ideology influenced the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton — was himself the one who got the data wrong.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls... “demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions”...

Dr. Gould, who died in 2002, based his attack on the premise that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence. But there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it.... Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately....

But the Penn team... identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases”....

Does that mean Gould was the ideologue? Did Gould consciously or unconsciously slime Morton? Gould isn't around anymore to explain. He died in 2002, presumably a rich man, having sold many books that said many things readers enjoyed hearing, including the defamation of a man who'd died a century before he was born. But all the skulls remain, to be measured and evaluated by the living.

Ah, but what does John Hawks — our local (UW) blogging paleoanthropologist — have to say? 

Some of Gould's mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.

For example, let's take the story about pushing seed into the skulls. Here is a paragraph from Lewis and colleagues, with direct quotes from Gould:

Gould famously suggested that Morton's measurements may have been subject to bias: “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action”... While Gould offers this as only a “plausible scenario,” and did not remeasure any crania, subsequent authors have generally (and incorrectly) cited Gould as demonstrating that Morton physically mismeasured crania...

In other words, Gould made up the whole thing. It was an utter fabulation. It is disgraceful that later authors have cited this idea as fact.

Truly shocking.

"Sunday's travel theme here in Rome was death."

"OK, for an anthropologist you have to imagine this is more cheerful than it sounds...."

It is not the distance of time that touches me about these people. I study bones that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, distances so vast as to be unimaginable in human terms. Yet the bone persists. The individual is marked in it, and touching her bones creates an immediacy of connection, like traveling through time.

"Last fall anthropology declared itself no longer to be a science."

Is that a fair statement of what happened?



Note that John Hawks is at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (where I am), which made this other segment — "Does academic blogging fit a university’s mission?" — especially interesting to me. According to Hawks, the UW has always been especially savvy about the value of blogging professors. And here's Hawks's blog. (Did you know it's "Darwin Day" here on campus today and also Friday and Saturday? I guess the commitment to science represented by the celebration of Darwin doesn't exclude calling 3 days a "day.")

The amount of Neanderthal DNA we have is the equivalent of one totally Neanderthal great-great-great grandparent.

Observes anthropologist John Hawks (who writes "Neandertal," which I presume is the official academic spelling). Hawks also has a lot more detail, written comprehensibly, so check it out, if you want to understand how the news about Neanderthals was discovered and what it means. Excerpt:

Does this mean that Neandertals belong in our species, Homo sapiens?

Yes.

Interbreeding with fertile offspring in nature. That's the biological species concept.

Now, some paleontologists might still disagree -- maintaining that species are units that can be distinguished morphologically, or by one or more derived features, or any number of other definitions. That's fine with me, as long as they're clear. But understand: It does define all non-Africans today as an interspecific hybrid population.

So maybe they want to rethink that one?

That makes me want to go back to the poll we did on Friday and think about what that means. The 4% of you who were disturbed at the idea of not being fully human can take comfort in the notion that Neanderthals were fully human. (If you are 100% African, you don't have to deal with this issue.) The 21% of us who thought it was thrilling to have some Neanderthal are perhaps less thrilled. But 75% percent of us didn't care one way or the other. Now, there's even more reason for there to not be a difference.