All of which might have contributed to distortions of the truth

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 119.   Gould was one of my science/polymath heroes years ago.  I was saddened to discover more about some of his behaviors.  

The idea that every scientist has an ideological perspective that affects their research brings us back full circle to the case of Samuel Morton and his skull measurements, and the criticism of his biases by Stephen Jay Gould. In 2011, the anthropologist Jason Lewis and his colleagues went back not just to Morton’s numbers, as Gould had, but to the actual skulls from his collection at the University of Pennsylvania, remeasuring about half of them with modern techniques. Lewis and his team agreed that Morton’s ranking of the different groups of people was obviously racist, and confirmed that he did indeed make measurement mistakes. However, they contended, the errors weren’t systematic in the way Gould had argued: instead, the mismeasurements were present across many of the skulls and didn’t seem to favour one racial group over another. They could also have been due to an assistant who Morton mentions as having made errors, rather than to Gould’s ‘plausible scenario’ about Morton stuffing more seeds into the White peoples’ skulls.

Furthermore, Lewis and his team argued that Morton simply hadn’t manipulated the sample groupings (omitting to mention groups from non-White races with high average skull sizes) in the “way Gould had charged. In fact, Lewis and colleagues alleged that Gould made his own mistakes, splitting up Morton’s sample in ways that suited his preferred beliefs about the equality of the skull sizes. In the foreword to his book, The Mismeasure of Man, Gould had freely admitted to having a strong commitment to social justice and liberal politics. The Lewis paper concluded that ‘ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results’.

Those were fighting words. Could it really be true that a legendary analysis by as well-respected a figure as Gould could be so wrong? Not everyone thought that Lewis and colleagues’ case was a slam-dunk. The philosopher Michael Weisberg, while accepting that the new skull measurements were correct and agreeing that Gould had fumbled some of his analyses, argued that the main thrust of Gould’s argument was still valid. The idea that an assistant might have innocently made some errors was just speculation, after all; the evidence was still consistent with Morton (or perhaps the assistant) being biased against giving non-Whites larger skull sizes. And after the mistakes were corrected, there was still very little difference in the skull sizes by race, which was the main thrust of Gould’s critique. A final twist (for now) came in 2018, when some additional skull measurements made by Morton himself were rediscovered. When these new data were taken into account, the idea that the discrepancy between Morton’s seed-based and shot-based measurements was larger for disfavoured racial groups, which formed a large part of Gould’s case for Morton’s bias, no longer held water.

Of course, in terms of answering any substantive scientific question, this whole debate over dusty skulls is moot. Even if we were to grant Morton his dubious association between skull size and ‘mental and moral faculties’ between the groups, his collection isn’t a representative sample of skulls from across the world; thus, very little – perhaps nothing – can be concluded from it about any general differences between groups. The back-and-forth does, however, have a clear moral for addressing bias in science: the watchers must also be watched and the debunkers debunked. And even then, it’s worth checking whether those who debunked the debunkers got their facts straight. As we now recognise, everyone is subject to their own biases; in the Morton saga alone we’ve seen examples of what we might call ‘racism bias’, ‘egalitarianism bias’ and ‘wanting to prove a famous historical scientist wrong bias’, all of which might have contributed to distortions of the truth.