{"id":47437,"date":"2019-03-22T03:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T07:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47437"},"modified":"2019-03-20T17:31:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-20T21:31:50","slug":"debunking-stephen-jay-gould","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/22\/debunking-stephen-jay-gould\/","title":{"rendered":"Debunking Stephen Jay Gould"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several years back, I linked to a David Friedman post<\/a> on a study that contradicted a key argument in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man<\/em>. While I’ve read a few of his books, it’s been nearly 15 years since I last read anything by him … by now I only have a vague recollection of what he wrote, but his works were quite popular at the time. Much more recently Russell T. Warne<\/a> looked at different problems in Gould’s work that are much more damaging to his reputation:<\/p>\n

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous 20th century paleontologist, published his most celebrated work, The Mismeasure of Man<\/em>, in 1981. Gould\u2019s thesis is that throughout the history of science, prejudiced scientists studying human beings allowed their social beliefs to color their data collection and analysis. Gould believed that this confirmation bias was particularly powerful when a scientists\u2019 beliefs were socially important to them. […] The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> provides a great deal of evidence that scientists\u2019 pre-existing beliefs color their judgment \u2014 but not in the way he intended. Rather, the book is a perfect example of the sin it purports to expose in others. Gould\u2019s Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals. Ironically, it was this allegiance to ideology over data that made Gould himself a classic examplar of a biased scientist.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> was confined to the recherch\u00e9 world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould\u2019s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases.<\/p>\n

This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton\u2019s data and Gould\u2019s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton\u2019s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton\u2019s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton\u2019s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.<\/p>\n

Though still unresolved, the debate shows that a critical analysis of specific sections of The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> is warranted. After writing an article about Lewis Terman, an important developer of early intelligence tests, I decided that a 23-page section of The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> would be a valuable section of the book to analyze. This section is Gould\u2019s description and analysis of the Army Beta test, one of the tests that Terman helped create. The Army Beta was used in World War I to screen illiterate recruits for military service.<\/p>\n

Having read some of the primary scholarly work about the Army Beta, I knew that some of Gould\u2019s claims were inaccurate. However, I was unprepared for the level of pervasive deception that I encountered when I carefully checked Gould\u2019s claims against the historical record. Moreover, I discovered overwhelming evidence that any pretense of Gould being \u201cobjective\u201d \u2014 even if defined as \u201cfair treatment of data\u201d \u2014 is a farce. In The Mismeasure of Man<\/em>, Gould elevates his biases to the status of uncontestable facts and to great lengths to hide the truth from his readers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years back, I linked to a David Friedman post on a study that contradicted a key argument in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man. While I’ve read a few of his books, it’s been nearly 15 years since I last read anything by him … by now I only have a vague […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,16],"tags":[209,86,347,39,139,99],"class_list":["post-47437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-science","tag-anthropology","tag-criticism","tag-debunking","tag-junkscience","tag-psychology","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cl7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47438,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47437\/revisions\/47438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}