Fill a Skull with Pepper Seeds or Lead Shot?
October 6, 2018 9:20 PM   Subscribe

The so-called "father of scientific racism" Samuel Morton has been fact-checked. Newly discovered handwritten documentation sheds new light on an ongoing scientific controversy regarding a famous collection of nearly 1,000 skulls amassed by a 19th-century Philadelphia physician. Dubbed the "American Golgotha," the collection is the work of Samuel Morton, who used them to compare the brain size of different racial groups in the 1830s and 1840s.
posted by MovableBookLady (9 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: It seems like a single article, or perhaps this one in particular, is not doing a very good job of making the actual meaning of the finding clearer; if this worth discussing, it might be better if we start with a post that has more sources and/or makes a more explicit statement. -- taz



 
The new study isn't discussed much and it comes down to a paragraph like this:
The difference arises from the two approaches each man took when analyzing the data. Tiedemann presented his data as a range in each racial category. All those ranges overlapped with each other far too significantly to make any reasonable scientific pronouncement about race. Morton, on the other hand, took an average of the measurements of the groups. Intriguingly, when Mitchell applied Morton's method to Tiedemann's data, taking the averages, he wound up with the same conclusions as Morton.
Without knowing more it sounds like leaves open the current scientific racism/sexism line, where it's about which distribution has more at the high end because it's about exceptional individuals therefore a tiny difference in average will be very important all else being equal (barfing as I write this). Of course this is separate from the fact that cranial capacity not meaning fuck all.
posted by fleacircus at 11:11 PM on October 6, 2018 [3 favorites]


Yeah, it's not clear but:

It's pretty easy to justify your prejudices if you simply take the means and order them largest to smallest.

Or, if you're a legitimate scientist*, you might start with a null hypothesis (e.g. that races are not different in terms of cranial capacity), assume (or determine empirically) that cranial capacity is normally distributed within "races" and analyze the means using a t-test (or whatever) to see if there's a statistical difference between "races". If you have a tiny sample and you know next to nothing about the age/race/sex of the skulls (per the article), you will not find anything meaningful.

Naturally, the "current racism/sexism line" is always open, because that's not just where people end up, it's where they start.

* I am not one of these -- at least not in a relevant field.
posted by klanawa at 11:34 PM on October 6, 2018 [3 favorites]


I thoroughly recommend Gould's "Mismeasure of a Man".

Fun fact, I'm putting together a seminar paper on this. So far, it's looking like I'm retreading Edwin Black's research, but the idea is basically to create an organization chart/ money model of scientific racism, as it compares to later and modern fascist/right wing media networks. So at some point this month I'm going to be looking at hundreds of title pages and publisher prints from the archives at U. NC et al.

So far: the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Harrimans were the patrons and enablers of monsters like Davenport.

But as I said, the deeper question is who were the funders and patrons of Morton, Galton, and Gobineau.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:17 AM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


Also, cranial capacity/brain size doesn't indicate anything about intelligence.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:24 AM on October 7, 2018 [8 favorites]


I thoroughly recommend Gould's "Mismeasure of a Man"

You need to be aware that Gould’s own research on this looks pretty shaky.

If you ask me it’s a fundamentally stupid debate which is probably better not revived.
posted by Segundus at 3:27 AM on October 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


It doesn't have anything to do with pepper seeds or lead shot. It has everything to do with faulty assumptions from the get-go. But you have to reach the second-to-last paragraph to see it written out, emphasis mine:
According to Eric Michael Johnson, an evolutionary anthropologist and historian of science based in Vancouver, BC, Gould was also correct in his original 1978 critique that skull size is irrelevant to determining intelligence or any kind of racial characteristics. Morton knew nothing about the bodies those skulls originally belonged to. "He didn't even know the sex of the skulls in most cases, and so would often arbitrarily assign a sex based on the size of the skull," Johnson says. "He could have gathered an average of these racial groups and put them into basic categories of small, medium, or large and then adjusted the skull averages within that framework. He would have found that it didn't fit this clear hierarchy that he believed in."
There is no way to determine race from a human skull. The whole thing is a sham. This is an article about what even they know to be a sham, and they take fucking seventeen paragraphs before stating the fucking obvious, but even they don't say you can't determine race from a skull.

Post flagged, we do not need "academic" discussions of obvious - flaming bright obvious - shams and racism.
posted by fraula at 3:53 AM on October 7, 2018 [4 favorites]




This feels like a not-so-clever extended attempt to legitimize this type of research without sounding like a Nazi.
posted by Brocktoon at 5:36 AM on October 7, 2018


I think that's exactly the opposite of what's going on? From the abstract of his open-access paper:

Analysis of Morton’s lost data and the records of his studies does not support Gould’s arguments about Morton’s biased data collection. However, historical contextualization of Morton with his scientific peers, especially German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann, suggests that, while Morton’s data may have been unbiased, his cranial race science was not. Tiedemann and Morton independently produced similar data about human brain size in different racial groups but analyzed and interpreted their nearly equivalent results in dramatically different ways: Tiedemann using them to argue for equality and the abolition of slavery, and Morton using them to entrench racial divisions and hierarchy. These differences draw attention to the epistemic limitations of data and the pervasive role of bias within the broader historical, social, and cultural context of science.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:02 AM on October 7, 2018 [3 favorites]


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