Today’s New York Times, contains, of all things, an editorial, “Bias and the beholder,” about Steve Gould’s ham-handed analysis of Samuel Morton’s skull-volume data. Yes, it sure does look like Gould screwed up, and we don’t know the reasons, but why on earth would the Times publish an editorial about it? The editorial, in fact, gives no opinion: it simply recounts what happened and then concludes:
The team expressed admiration for Dr. Gould’s body of work in staunch opposition to racism, but, in this case, it accused him of various errors and manipulations that supported his own hypothesis. “Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,” the team said. We wish Dr. Gould were here to defend himself. Right now it looks as though he proved his point, just not as he intended.
What’s the point? Apparently to show that Gould was just as biased as he considered Morton to be. But what about the larger point—that all this controversy was itself resolved by scientific analysis? The Times editorial leaves one with the idea that scientists distort their data because of personal biases, but the ultimate lesson is that it all comes out in the wash, because science is self-correcting. This is a story about the virtues of the scientific ethos, not just about one man’s biases.
There is no Science, just Scientists?
Following your argument : Science is right -> yay to science, Science is wrong -> but we know it by science (how else would we?) -> yay to science. It’s no less true, and maybe useful to remind to the public, but it’s a trivial point. Learning about sciencist possible bias is more interesting to me.
I’m sure it’s more interesting to the typical NYT reader as well, or at least, the editors think so.
“Science works, bitches!” is old news, a comfortable background assumption, fuddy-duddy.
“Scientists mess up too!” pokes a finger at the supposed Establishment, gives a frisson of rebellious excitement. The reader doesn’t have to think much and gets the kicks of sticking it to the Man.
That the larger, important story is that the whole process can be counted upon to route around and/or correct bias – the way theology, postmodernism, politics, etc., do not – doesn’t matter. It’s not sexy. It takes a bit of thinking and won’t make you feel good about being too lazy to bother.
It may not be HuffPo, but you cannot work up high expectations of the New York Times.
There’s also the aspect of seeing someone hoist on his own petard. Gould was pretty self-righteous about someone else’s “errors and manipulations” and yet he was the one apparently guilty of those sins.
Honestly, that’s a much more compelling story than “yay, science” even to many of us who like science.
Here’s a question: a lot of us who teach about science and society use Mismeasure in our classes. Assuming the charges against Gould stand up, what would you do in the future? Drop it? Assign it along with the recent criticism? Should the publisher (Norton, I think) append a correction to any future editions, or drop it altogether (as some publishers have done in the wake of scandals over plagiarism and other kinds of scholarly misconduct)?
I think I will probably keep using it, although I’ll also assign the criticism. The larger points Gould makes are still valuable, and the book is an incredible tool for getting discussion started, especially among undergraduates who haven’t thought much about these issues before. But I’m very interested to see what others think.
Is Mismeasure actually the only such convenient source demonstrating the point? Couldn’t similar points be made by discussing, for example, the role of population geneticists in the eugenics movement? Against the backdrop of WWII, that is pretty compelling stuff. When I was a grad student, there was a course co-taught by a bio professor and a bio grad student on Race and Human Evolution that didn’t assign Mismeasure as far as I remember, though we did do a lot of reading about very related topics. But then again, most of the reading was primary literature, so perhaps we read Gould’s paper on the issue. That was in 2002, so I don’t really recall anymore.
Come to think of it, even now Mismeasure is still a good lesson, as long it isn’t the only example of cultural bias and racism tainting science. The back and forth it shows is quite nice and serves as a useful reminder that noble intentions may also lead to biases.
Yes, there are some very good books, like Daniel Kelves’s In the Name of Eugenics that can serve as well. But I especially like the fact that Mismeasure focuses specifically on the anthropology of race. I also like the fact that Gould writes *as* as scientist, concerned about the ethics of science (as opposed to as a historian or philosopher looking in from outside). I forgive the book some of its idiosyncracies because of this, because it reinforces the point that scientists are people, too. Some of Lewontin’s popular writing does the same job, though.
But the lesson here is the confirmation that Gould did not write it as a scientist. He wrote it as an ideologue and a rhetorical polemicist.
I’m jumping in with a long comment on another possible case of S. J. Gould faking an ad hominem to disparage ideas and persons offensive to his world view. The Morton affair may be the tip of an iceberg.
In 1977 Gould devoted the first half of his well received tome ‘Ontogeny and Phylogeny’ to erecting a depreciative caricature of German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. Gould depicted Haeckel as a Lamarckian extremist who viewed embryonic development as a frozen series of recapitulated adult ancestors rising upwards through inferior forms to the pinnacle of European culture. He additionally implied that Haeckel’s bad science was fruit of racism, and marched out Daniel Gasman’s thesis, recently debunked by U. Chicago historian Robert J. Richards, that Haeckel’s supposedly racist-inspired biology somehow fed National Socialism (p.77). The error of Lamarckism, according to Gould (p. 186), invalidated recapitulation, and the concept became untenable as T.H. Morgan consolidated Mendelian genetics in the early 1900s.
However, little of Gould’s central argument is supported by evidence. Haeckel seems to have never used the word ‘adult’ to refer to recapitulation and was much impressed how natural selection shaped embryonic adaptations. For Haeckel, adult evolution was based mainly on random variation arising late in ontogeny; Darwin showed this to be the case in his 1850s study on pigeon hatchlings. It is strange that although Haeckel repeatedly claimed that natural selection to be ‘the’ central causal factor of evolutionary change, Gould leaves out all mention of this. Instead Gould promoted T. H. Morgan, an unrelenting critic of Darwinian adaptationism (see, for example, his “Evolution and Adaptation”, 1903) who advocated discontinuous evolution, product of occult properties of mutations, reminiscent of punctuated equilibria.
Haeckel made the following statement both refuting the Gould’s key accusation of Lamarckism and defending the central role of natural selection in shaping ontogeny (‘The Origin of Man’, 1905, vol. 2, p. 498-9):
“The earlier embryonic forms have had to adapt themselves to new circumstances, and so have been modified. The struggle for existence [i.e., “natural selection”] has had just as profound an influence on the [adaptive evolution of] freely moving and still immature young forms as on the adult forms. Hence in the embryology of the higher animals, especially, palingenesis [sequence of ancestral traits] is much restricted by cenogenesis [subsequent larval and embryonic modifications]; it is to-day, as a rule, only a faded and much altered picture of the original evolution of the animal’s ancestors. We can only draw conclusions from the embryonic forms to the stem-history with the greatest caution and discrimination.” This is what Haeckel meant by his catchphrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
Ernst Haeckel was a selectionist and only rarely invoked classical Lamarckian arguments. Contrary to Gould’s thesis, modern Mendelian genetics is entirely consistent with Haeckel’s view of terminal addition, although both he and T.H. Morgan dearly wanted it otherwise. For Haeckel, traits fixed by natural selection in adults (terminal addition) were retained in sequence unless selection [or disuse] erased or altered their expression over evolutionary time. To what degree this may be true is unresolved. Haeckel’s science does not conform to Gasman’s and Gould’s caricature of him as a proto-Nazi.
Mr. Benson might wish to learn that Robert Richards’erroneous and misleading biography of Haeckel, ‘The Tragic Sense of Life’ is mostly based on fabricated sources as I have pointed out in a review of the book posted on eskeptic.com, 10 June 2009.My conclusion that Haeckel was a proto-Nazi was hardly a caricature of the man but was I believe a completely correct analysis of Haeckel’s ideas and science.
daniel gasman
It probably will not all come out in the wash. Science quite possibly will never correct all incorrect things that come about in scientific research.